The remaining presentations blurred together the way other people’s homework always does when yours is already graded.

Two more groups tried variations on standard breach protocol. Steele took them apart with the patient precision of someone who’d expected exactly this and was using the wreckage as a live tutorial for the rest of the room.

A fourth group, built around Nyx’s obsessive analysis and Maribelle’s surprisingly sharp read on crowd psychology, put together a brief that Steele called "adequate with potential." From Steele, that was a standing ovation.

By three-fifteen, when she dismissed us, the room had the specific exhaustion of twenty teenagers who’d spent forty-five minutes thinking harder than most of them had ever thought about anything that wasn’t their own reflection or their Aspect’s flashiest application.

Felicity intercepted me at the door with the speed of someone who’d been planning her approach vector since the second presentation.

She linked her arm through mine with the casual territoriality she’d perfected over the past week, and I let her, because fighting Felicity on physical contact was like fighting the tide. You could do it. The ocean didn’t care about your feelings, and neither did she.

"That was fun," she said, her blue eyes still bright from the post-exercise high. "We should do crisis planning more often. Like a book club but with hostage scenarios."

"You want to start a tactical analysis social club."

"I want to start a group activity that gives me an excuse to sit close to interesting people and watch them think under pressure. The tactical analysis is just the wrapper."

Caden appeared on my other side with Marco in tow, both of them running on the specific energy of people who’d survived something difficult and now wanted to celebrate by doing absolutely nothing productive.

Caden’s presentation had gone well enough. His group pulled together a serviceable plan that Steele graded as "acceptable," with a side note about Caden’s documented tendency to let his teammates do the heavy lifting while he provided comic relief at critical junctures.

"Lunch round two?" Caden suggested, already steering us toward the Athena Wing. "I need carbs. That class broke something in my brain that only bread can fix."

"Your brain was pre-broken," Marco said. "The class just reorganized the debris."

"Harsh but medically accurate."

We ended up in the cafeteria for a session that stretched past an hour. Caden held court at the table with the natural magnetism of someone who understood that social energy was its own kind of currency and spent it freely.

Marco served as his counterpoint, dry and grounding, the straight man to Caden’s chaos in a partnership so well-rehearsed that their timing looked practiced even when it wasn’t.

Felicity contributed observations about our classmates that were simultaneously generous and devastating, her social intelligence running at a frequency most people registered as warmth without catching the analysis underneath it.

I ate. I talked. I laughed at Caden’s impression of Steele’s disappointed face, which was actually pretty good. I checked my phone when Sloane texted asking about my afternoon and responded with enough detail to satisfy her curiosity without tripping the territorial alarm system that lived permanently in the background of her emotional architecture.

But underneath all of it, my body was restless.

The morning’s conditioning had been insufficient. The positioning exercise with Camellia had been interesting but limited by the no-Aspect restriction. The tactical briefing had exercised my brain without touching my physical capability.

And the Demigod trait hummed beneath my skin like a low electrical current, a steady reminder that the body I occupied could do things that would shatter the carefully constructed fiction of Phantom Touch if anyone saw me operating at actual capacity.

I needed to move. I needed to hit something. I needed the specific release that came from testing the gap between what I showed the world and what I actually was, in a space where no cameras were recording and no classmates were cataloging my performance for later analysis.

Field Zeta called to me the way a cold shower calls to someone running a fever. Not pleasant. Necessary.

At four-thirty, I extracted myself from the group with the practiced ease of someone who’d been making exits from social situations since before his current body had learned to walk.

I told Felicity I needed to study. She gave me a look that said she knew I was lying and chose to let me leave anyway, still running on goodwill from the successful presentation.

Caden waved without looking up from his phone, deep in what appeared to be a text conversation with someone who made him grin in a way that had nothing to do with comedy.

I changed in my room. Dark compression shirt, training shorts, beat-up running shoes that had already survived two months of abuse from a body that kept outgrowing its own capabilities. I considered bringing Joyful Cloud but decided against it.

The staff had already demonstrated its capacity for property damage in spaces not designed to absorb the output, and I didn’t need another wall repair bill on the educational trust’s tab.

Gerald would probably give me a lecture about structural load limits if I showed up at Consolidated Hardware again within the same fiscal quarter.

The walk to Field Zeta took eleven minutes at a pace that wasn’t quite jogging and wasn’t quite walking. That middle speed where my body wanted to open up and accelerate but my brain kept the throttle at a level consistent with someone whose registered Aspect was a mid-tier telekinetic projection system.

Campus had settled into the late-afternoon lull between classes and dinner. Most students were either in their rooms or draped across the common areas with the particular laziness of people who’d survived another day of institutional demands.

I passed through the faculty garden using Percy’s shortcut, turned north past the secondary equipment shed, and followed the unmaintained path through the oak tree line that separated the primary training district from the forgotten space beyond it.

Field Zeta came through the trees the same way it had at four in the morning three days ago. Faded lane markings. Rusted bleachers. The equipment rack with its three sad medicine balls and the tire that had grown an ecosystem of weeds since my last visit.

The grass needed cutting. The fencing along the south perimeter sagged in two places. Nobody maintained this space because nobody used it.

Except tonight, somebody already had.