Ren was amazed for a second, but a couple of seconds passed and Kai didn't say anything more.
Wait… why isn't he showing anything else?
Ren thought about it for a fraction of a second.
No—wait. Is this… is this actually just his power?
The fire sword itself was visually incredible. It was a lump of fire shaped like a long sword. It didn't produce smoke, so the fire alarm didn't trigger, but that was it. It was basically just a sword made of fire.
Unless there were other hidden properties to it—but that didn't really matter right now.
A fire sword was still a sword, and in case anyone was somehow unaware, guns made melee weapons like swords nearly useless.
Well, technically useless. There are people with swords who are a hundred times more dangerous than gangs with guns, but that's not the point right now.
If this was truly his power, then Ren could already guess the rest.
"Yeah… it's probably what you're thinking," Kai continued. "This is only a fire sword. As a power, it's really weak."
"And that greatly disappointed my parents. To the point where they wanted to disown me—but they couldn't just do that. Especially not for a reason like this. In the eyes of the public, they would appear cruel and addicted to power, like power supremacists who believe empowered individuals are greater than ordinary people."
"So publicly, I'm still a proud child of the Mercer family. But in reality, I'm unofficially disowned. I have no access to anything related to the Mercer family—at least anything that doesn't appear in public, like real money or housing."
"The money I get is only for things I can buy to show off, like clothes. Anything I truly want, I can't buy."
"Outside of that… you should see my apartment furniture. It's just ordinary. Nothing you'd expect someone like me to have. And the only reason I even have it is because it already came with the room."
"that's why I'm in this situation."
"I'm sorry, dude," Ren said. "That must've been really hard. I never suspected the system heroes would act that way."
Kai just looked at him.
"It's okay. Like I said, I still had some good times. And not every hero in the system is bad—but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of them are like my parents."
Ren nodded in response.
But anyways, let's go back to the main topic. What are we gonna do about Gunshot targeting us?" Ren asked.
"It's easy," Kai replied. "We'll look for a way to get them off our tails."
"What do you mean easy?" Ren said, flabbergasted. "Don't you mean we should call the cops? Why do we have to deal with this ourselves?" Ren asked.
"It's because, from what I understand, we're currently on the lowest priority possible," Kai said. "And that's only because we only fought some of their lowest-rank members—guys without powers. As the lowest-ranked targets, they'll only try to harass us once in a while. Anything more than that would be extremely risky for them."
Ren felt a wave of relief at that. So the incident at the library wouldn't actually have killed him—only injured him.
But he didn't interrupt, letting Kai finish his logic.
"So you're basically saying that because we're low-priority targets, we can't call the police?" Ren asked.
"Yes. That's exactly the case," Kai said. "If we start getting the police involved, our priority level will rise. So unless we find another way out of this situation, calling the cops is our last option."
Ren sighed. "I hate that you make good points. So what do we do next?" Ren asked.
"Well, the first thing we need to do is become stronger," Kai said. "Gunshot will still come after us. Becoming stronger will help a lot. So I suggest we join the Hero course. They offer private training rooms, and we can use some of the training classes—like swordsmanship, for me."
Ren thought about it for a second. He didn't think this was how he would end up joining the Hero course, but he saw the logic. And he did agree—becoming stronger would help if the situation went south.
"Well then," Ren leaned forward in his seat and put his hand out for a handshake. "I guess we'll be partners for a while."
With a smile, Kai reached out and shook his hand.
"Oh, by the way, I didn't tell you my name yet," Ren said. "My name is Ren Dover."
Kai chuckled. "Seriously? Yeah, yeah—I've heard all the jokes."
Ren chuckled along with him, and they spent the rest of the day talking. For the first time, instead of awkwardness, they actually started getting comfortable around each other and had a nice conversation.
A week later, Ren was walking down the street, moving confidently without fear.
It had been a week since he and Kai teamed up. They joined the course as planned, and over that week, there was a good amount of progress in training and strengthening their powers.
Ren and Kai decided to keep their powers private. That meant they didn't register what their powers actually were—only the fact that they had powers—and they trained on their own without instructors. Anyone would have called that stupid. Why wouldn't they want training from people who were probably far better and stronger than them?
The problem was that everyone had unique powers. Unless you inherited the same power from your parents—or at least something very similar—training directly under someone else wasn't very useful. At best, you could learn from examples. So unless it was a mentor situation with someone whose power closely matched yours, having someone train you in how to use your power wasn't really effective.
As for Ren's progress, it was pretty straightforward. He focused on strengthening his shade's strength first. Before, he had described his shade as weak, but now it was as strong as an extremely muscular arm. And he could summon two now, which was incredible progress for such a short time.
By the way, he started calling his shadow tendrils shades. Not by choice—Kai kept making fun of the fact that tendrils are basically The same as tentacles.
Other than improving their strength Ren also took other classes in the hero course. One of them was a martial arts class. Normally, people focused only on their powers, and only those whose abilities enhanced their physical bodies—or Half powers that directly Influence there physics abilities in anyway so they use martial arts. But Ren thought it could actually be useful.
During his first real fight, he had used his shade while physically fighting A different opponent at the same time. That made him realize there might be situations where he'd have to fight while his shades were occupied. At least until he found a way to strengthen himself further—because having a weak physique while facing people who could blow up buildings wasn't something he wanted.
He also started going to the gym and lifting weights to build muscle. Apparently, his physical strength somehow enhanced the speed of his growth in his shades' strength as well. Somehow, the two were connected.
He started developing visible muscle, and it showed. In fact, some girls who passed by blushed when they saw him—he was just wearing a T-shirt that revealed his arm muscles. Even though it's currently not much it's still made him look even better.
As for Kai, he began practicing swordsmanship. Apparently, during his childhood training, his parents focused heavily on physical conditioning and theories on power control—so that if he ever awakened his power, he'd already know how to handle it. He had also learned a bit of martial arts.
But swordsmanship had never been included in his training.
So this was the very first days of sword training for him.