He let the footage continue. Sigma kept moving, never staying in one place long enough for Monolith to connect with a strike. The Villain grew visibly frustrated, his attacks becoming wilder, his positioning more reckless.

"On paper, Sigma loses this fight. Her Aspect provides mobility, not offensive capability. She cannot damage Monolith’s transformed tissue through direct impact. She cannot outlast him because his stamina reserves exceed hers by a significant margin." Dravid paused the footage at a specific frame. "So how does she win?"

Silence. The students were watching the frozen image, trying to identify the tactical insight Dravid was pointing toward.

From the back of the room, Cain Revell spoke without raising his hand. "She’s positioning him."

Dravid’s grey eyes found Cain with what might have been approval. "Explain."

"Every teleport puts her on the same side relative to the intersection’s northwest corner. She’s not running away. She’s herding him toward something." Cain leaned forward, his amber eyes narrowing as he studied the frozen frame. "The building on that corner has structural damage near the foundation. You can see the crack pattern in the masonry. She’s maneuvering him into position for a collapse that will immobilize him without requiring her to produce the force directly."

Dravid nodded once and resumed the footage. Exactly as Cain had described, Sigma continued her pattern of displacement until Monolith was standing directly beneath a section of compromised wall.

She then executed a rapid series of teleports that struck the wall at key stress points, each blink-displacement landing against the masonry with just enough force to propagate the existing fractures.

The cascade failure happened exactly as predicted. Two stories of brick and concrete came down on the Villain’s position with the kind of inevitability that only comes from perfect setup.

The footage ended with Monolith buried to the chest in rubble, immobilized but alive. Sigma stood at a safe distance, barely breathing hard. She looked almost bored.

"Sigma resolved this engagement in four minutes and seventeen seconds without taking a single hit or producing offensive output that would register on standard combat metrics." Dravid turned back to face the class. "If you reviewed her file, you would see an Aspect that appears limited. Fifteen-meter range. Three-second cooldown. No secondary effects. Most agencies would classify her as support-tier at best."

He walked to the other side of the platform, his movement so smooth that it almost looked like the platform was rotating beneath him rather than him crossing it. Everything about how Dravid moved communicated efficiency. No wasted motion. No excess energy spent on anything that wasn’t load-bearing to the point he was making.

"She is currently one of the most requested Heroes for high-threat response operations in the Pacific Northwest. Her case resolution rate is ninety-four percent. Her property damage index is among the lowest in the national database." He stopped. "Because she doesn’t fight. She thinks. And then she creates the conditions under which the fight is already over before the opponent realizes it started."

The room was quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when a class full of teenagers with superpowers realizes they’ve been approaching the entire concept wrong.

I felt something shift in my awareness. Dravid’s teaching style was different from Steele’s physical intensity or Radiant’s overwhelming presence. This was quieter. More surgical. He wasn’t trying to inspire us or push us to our limits. He was trying to change how we saw the world.

How we saw power.

The Oracle Feed had been running this entire session, tracking micro-expressions around the room. Half the class was leaning forward now. Their body language had changed. They were paying attention in a way they hadn’t been at the start of the lecture. Dravid’s flat delivery and his grey-eyed stare were working on them the same way they were working on me.

Subject: Cole Dravid. Status: Teaching a class full of future Heroes how to win fights they shouldn’t be able to win. Assessment: You are paying more attention to this lesson than you paid to most of your high school curriculum. Recommendation: Continue doing so. This man is going to be a problem for you in ways you have not yet calculated.

Yeah. I was starting to get that sense.

Dravid set the tablet down on the edge of the platform with a soft click that somehow carried across the entire lecture hall. "This is the fundamental principle I need you to understand before you set foot in a combat scenario where the stakes are real. Power is useful. Intelligence is better. The ability to identify what your opponent needs to function and then remove it from the engagement is the only advantage that scales indefinitely."

He looked around the horseshoe. His grey eyes moved across each student with the same flat precision he applied to everything else.

"Your assignment for this week is to analyze an engagement of your choice from the Hero Network archives. I want a written breakdown of the tactical decisions made by both parties, identification of at least three moments where the engagement could have gone differently, and a proposal for how you would have approached the same situation given your own capabilities." He picked up a tablet from the edge of the platform. "Minimum two thousand words. Maximum five thousand. Due Monday morning before homeroom."

A few groans from around the room. Dravid ignored them completely.

"We have forty minutes remaining. I’m going to demonstrate a positioning exercise that you’ll be practicing in your afternoon practicals for the rest of the week. I need two volunteers who don’t mind looking incompetent in front of their peers."

No hands went up.

Dravid’s lips twitched in what might have been amusement. "Interesting. A room full of Hero candidates and nobody wants to demonstrate courage when the stakes are mild embarrassment."

His grey eyes swept the horseshoe, evaluating each student in turn. They lingered on Cain for a moment, then moved to Dante, then continued around the room until they landed on me.

"Belmont."

Of course.

"Sure." I stood, my chair scraping against the floor. A few heads turned in my direction. Camille’s attention snapped toward me for half a second before she deliberately returned her focus to her tablet. Petra’s emerald gaze tracked my movement as I walked toward the central platform, cataloging data for purposes I couldn’t guess.

"And from 1-A..." Dravid’s attention shifted to the other side of the room. "Thorn."

Camellia stood with a smile that would have been charming if it weren’t for the context. She descended toward the platform with the easy grace of someone who found all of this genuinely enjoyable, her auburn hair catching the light and her pale green eyes bright with interest.

"Hi." She offered me the smile as she reached the platform. "We haven’t met properly. I’m Camellia."

"Lukas."