I picked us up and flew us past dozens of superfights. I thought maybe seeing the result of the Marco/Logan fight would be a good idea.

We reached the wasteland again, so I brought us lower to avoid the dry lightning. The fight had gotten a lot bigger as people joined one side or the other.

Dania asked for me to let her go from my telekinesis, "I think I can fly on my own."

"I can, too," Grady said, "I think I can."

I let them go and they both fell for a second but then they caught themselves and flew just as effortlessly as I did.

Grady let out a war cry that I didn't expect from her.

Then we struck with full force.

Dania landed and blew a full-force gale into the fight. Grady engaged in close combat with an young man with green skin and leaf hands. Their auras made small explosions every time they made contact.

I landed as well and let Daniela down, too. A sea turtle creature the size of a truck laid its eyes on me and spit water at me. I split the jet of water with my telekinesis and gathered it at my sides. I turned the two water blobs into icicles and catapulted them at it. They hit the shell and shattered. While I was dumbfounded by the obvious, I got hit by another hydro cannon.

Marco and Logan were fist fighting now, circling one another and landing blows on each other. I could see them from the ground where I lay. The turtle slapped its enormous flipper over my body and I was out.

I reemerged in the lobby and I allowed myself to throw a fit.

We stared at the Mega-Statusin and watched the battle continue.

Jozeey finally appeared in the fight—in human form—and the first thing he did was spray the entire area with starstuff. I think he expected everyone to be defeated, but they just floated upwards into the air. The few people who could fly in the reduced gravity took advantage of the moment and began picking off the people with no flight.

Stacey used her lake water to form a whirlpool that disoriented everybody, including her. All of the people flying were caught like flies in the swirling trap. Logan made a sphere of ice around himself to not drown, and Dania drew air from the outside to form a bubble around Grady and herself. I saw Benny and a girl drop out of the vortex and begin to blast each other with prismatic energy. Marco hadn't even been entrapped by the whirlpool, and was actually flying in circles around it. He burst into flame and enveloped the vortex in another vortex of fire.

I don't know if I would have been able to survive that far.

And of course, then Marco flew straight through the vortex into the eye where Logan was now expertly icebending his sphere in midair.

The outer fiery vortex was still going strong, and then he started another one on the inside of Stacey's water vortex. Logan couldn't keep his ice, then Marco struck Logan directly as he fell, disqualifying him. The explosion forced all the water from the vortex outwards and knocked all the people in it to the ground. Stacey tried to regain control of her water as she fell, but she was flailing around too much. Dozens of the people left were disqualified by the impact with the ground. Stacey managed to save herself with a minimal cushion of water but not Grady. Jozeey, whatever he was doing, was impacted by the falling body of another person.

Benny was dueling a a girl far enough away from the watery mess as to not get wet. They were pumping clear auric energy at each other and bolts of electricity crackled where the two energies met. The ground crumbled beneath them and chunks rose into the air.

The Statusin narrated, "Benny Rolandine and Caris Caarm are on the verge of exhausting their energy and spontaneously combusting in three, two, one,"

Both of them went up in varicolored flames and were teleported out.

All of a sudden the only contestants remaining were Marco and Stacey.

Who the hell knows how Stacey made it to the very end and I didn't. I sure don't.

Stacey was on the ground now and she had regained her balance. She was in control of a multitude of watery limbs that whipped and lashed out at Marco. He was copying her windmill movements, except somehow they translated into spirals of flames that shot up into the sky.

They pounded at each other with full force. Then Stacey brought all the water down around herself and froze it into a thick shell.

Marco caught on fire again—I realized that somehow his clothes didn't—and he ran at Stacey's ice dome. He punched it over and over again with fiery fists, with the vortex still around him, and melted a tunnel through it.

The enormous crowd of people who hadn't moved from the telepad roared at the spectacle. I was so into the fight that I hadn't realized how quickly everyone had been defeated. I didn't see any of my friends around me, but all the people who I did see seemed childishly amazed by the action.

As Marco pushed his way through the ice, the camera allowed us to see Stacey attempting some sort of build-up attack. Marco was only a few feet away from her hollow at the core, but she wasn't moving. She stood with her hands in praying position and waited.

The instant his flames reached the hollow of the shell, she struck with a lightning fast round house kick. The ice turned into water again and swept him away.

Of course, he didn't get disqualified. Either way everyone was cheering.

Stacey picked him up in the glob of water and didn't let him out. He struggled to swim with his wings hanging out and a counter with thirty seconds remaining read out how much longer he could hold his breath.

Then Marco pulled off some bullshit I didn't see coming. The he caught on fire again except this time the flames were green. He was in control again.

"And now we see fire magic from Marco, who does not cease to disappoint!" the announcer yelled.

Stacey was out of ideas. She hesitated for a moment and didn't recover in time. Marco was out of the water. In a hovering position he opened his mouth and breathed out a flamethrower attack at her.

She was teleported out and I could hear her screaming once she was on the telepad.

"I don't know her," I said to myself as I tried to make my way through all of the hollering people.

A holographic crown appeared on Marco's head and he glowed in pride. He roared and threw a column of flames into the air.

He was swarmed when he teleported out of the arena and onto the telepad. I couldn't even see him, really.

I hovered to the café and waited as all my friends slowly trickled in. Sabine sat next to me and faintly smiled. Everyone else was rowdy and excited.

I was tired and I wanted to sleep. My pride was hurt.

As if to soothe me, a Statusin appeared with a live stream of Andrelos on it.

"All UM students, please make your way to the Hypertrain. We'll be departing in thirty minutes. I hope you enjoyed this year's events. And congratulations to Marco, he'll be getting the penthouse at the Hotel Carbón in Diamante."

She cut off and in a few moments the flow of the crowd was towards the Hypertrain.

"A hotel?" Grady asked aloud.

"The best in the city." Noah responded, "I've never needed to stay in it, though."

"What's so good about it?" Sabine asked.

"The food, I guess. I don't know, really, what's good about any hotel?"

"The whole building is made out of a carved-out diamond ore, dude," Logan remarked.

"You mainlanders never get over that stuff, do you?" He chuckled, "It's not that impressive, really."

"You'll see," Logan smiled, "Diamante is probably the coolest city in the Empire. Maybe except apart from Mega Metro but that's a whole different thing. They have that whole low gravity going on."

"We should go, then," Stacey said. She held Logan's hand and I could see frost forming around it. They didn't seem to notice.

We joined the crowd and boarded the Hypertrain. We arrived in the Fuji Nation within the hour.

I sat with Benny. He didn't have his hologear on this time so we talked.

"So yeah, I kinda thought I could overpower Caarm, but she clearly is on the same level as me. We did analyses of our energy outputs in our last moments and they were almost identical."

"What was all that stuff going on with the soil and the electricity?"

"Imagine dropping a stone in a pond. All the extra energy has to go somewhere, which in the case of the pond is the waves. In our case the energy goes straight into nature and acts up all weird. I don't know how to explain it. The point is that we both rushed and exhausted our reserves without adding very many efficiency filters. If we were in real combat we would have really died."

He gave me tips on using energy efficiently, but I still needed to learn how to use auric energy in the first place.

A few minutes after we entered Fuji we arrived in Diamante. It's pronounced in Spanish. Apparently a whole lot of Montressor has been influenced by civilizations that have secretly found their way onto the planet. The entire city of Jalpan de Serra, Mexico was teleported from the Gregorian year 2094 to the island of Fuji in the year 100. I had been there before on trips to Mexico. To think I'd be going there two thousand years into its future was weird.

We got off the train at the underground station of the Hotel Carbon. There was already a party going on from the first group of students who had arrived. Marco was somewhere in that crowd and he was being celebrated relentlessly. The whole first floor was reserved for this raucous event and the lights were dimmed for the colorful party lights. Some sort of futuristic techno music blended with opera vocals played loudly

Anyone want to just go to the room and give up on everything? I broadcasted mentally to the group.

"Ha!" Dania laughed.

"Yeah," Stacey nodded her head.

Room cards appeared as little badges on our Statusin screens.

As we made out way to the elevator, I sneaked away.

I could hear my friends thinking confusedly about where I was. They went into the elevator without me, so I left the hotel through the front door against the flow of the people coming in. My legs carried me away as fast as they could.

"Statusin, I've been in this city before. Is there any way to take me to where I visited?"

I was shown a map of the places I've been in the city. I'd been only to the city center, but it gave me walking directions. The plaza I had been to was only three blocks down the street. There was no ground traffic in this part of the city, so I walked down the middle of the street.

The sky was a deep, dark violet color. It was 40 o'clock and the pale moon was slowly inching across the sky.

The map I had used to guide my family through the city did not look at all like this map. This one was the result of two millennia of change and I don't know what I had expected. I stopped in front of the building that was supposed to be the plaza where we had taken pictures.

This residential building was imposingly tall and made of ruby ore. I felt a surge of anger, red like the building. Even here, light-years away form Earth my parents managed to bring me pain.

I yelled and let out a burst of electricity from two pointed fingers. An arc splintered away and shocked me.

I yelled again and held my own burned hand, but then the pain went away as my energy healed the wound over.

There wasn't anything more to do. There wasn't a point in coming here.