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Chapter 2 - Chapter 2: The Multiversal Nexus Academy

Kenji landed with a thud on grass that felt strangely soft, his stomach lurching. He blinked, expecting to see the dirty alley, but instead, he was somewhere completely new and utterly impossible.

He stood in a vast, open courtyard under a sky that wasn't one sky, but a breathtaking mosaic of dozens of different cosmic views. One patch of the "sky" was a deep, royal purple with two suns setting over a desert landscape. Another showed a swirling green nebula, and a third revealed a giant, ringed planet hanging in a black void. Huge, floating islands with waterfalls cascading off their edges drifted lazily between bizarre, crystalline towers that seemed to be made of solidified light, stretching up forever.

Students in a wide variety of uniforms were walking around, and they were the strangest part. A boy with glowing blue lines etched into his skin dropped a book, then simply waved his hand to make it reverse its fall, floating smoothly back into his grasp. A group of girls were sitting and chatting on thin air as if it were a park bench, their laughter echoing musically. Another student leaned against a tree, but the ground under his feet was slightly crushed into a small crater, as if he weighed a ton.

Kenji noticed that some students, like the boy with the glowing skin, seemed to possess these powers naturally. Others wore stylish, high-tech watches on their wrists. He saw a girl tap her watch; a tiny, shimmering black hole, no bigger than a marble, appeared in her hand. She casually tossed a candy wrapper into it, and it vanished without a trace.

He felt dizzy and small. He was a normal person who had stumbled into a school for gods and superheroes. He didn't belong here. He couldn't understand any of it. He was a stick figure drawing in a world of hyper-realistic art.

"Hey, look at that one," a cheerful voice said nearby. "You seem pretty lost."

Kenji turned to see three students walking toward him. There was a tall boy with spiky red hair and a confident grin, a girl with slightly pointed ears and bright, curious green eyes, and a shorter, serious-looking boy who was studying a floating blue data screen.

"I... I don't know where I am," Kenji stammered, the words feeling small and useless.

The red-haired boy clapped him on the back with a friendly thud. "We can tell. You've got that classic 'I just fell through a hole in reality' look. No power signature, no weird energy... you're a total blank. Name's Rylan, by the way."

The girl with the pointed ears circled him, her expression fascinated. "He's a Null! From a Mundane Reality Core, right? I've only read about those! I'm Elara. It's so cool to meet one in person!"

"A what? A Null?" Kenji asked, his head spinning with the strange terms.

The shorter boy, Leo, glanced up from his screen. "A Mundane Reality Core. A baseline universe. No ambient energy, no timeline deviation, no spatial anomalies. Basically, the universe's version of vanilla," he explained flatly. "It's a massive anomaly that you're here. Someone powerful must have sent you. The energy residue on your clothes is from a high-level Trans-Reality Displacement."

Rylan nodded. "Well, no use standing around looking confused. We need to get you to the Chamber of Aptitude. Every new student has to go there to see what their skills are."

"But I don't have any skills!" Kenji insisted, his voice rising in panic. "I'm just a normal guy!"

Elara smiled warmly. "Nobody who ends up at the Multiversal Nexus Academy is 'normal.' Even being a Null is special in its own way. Come on. Let's find out what you can really do."

Feeling a terrifying mix of dread and a tiny, buried spark of excitement, Kenji followed his new, strange acquaintances. They led him across the impossible courtyard, past students who could fly and walk through walls, toward a giant, black obsidian building where, apparently, his new life was about to be officially decided.

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