Under the gaze of the entire school, Ethan Mercer walked calmly to the front of the stage.
He took a deep breath. Let the silence stretch. Then spoke.
"Good morning. My name is Ethan Mercer, Class Six, second year."
"Just as Director Thornton said, I had an argument with Ms. Greer during class this morning."
"And for that — I offer my sincerest apology."
From the covered walkway, the school leadership exchanged approving nods. Thornton's satisfied smile could have lit a room. Good boy. Take your medicine and sit back down.
Below the stage, Sophia Langford watched with the faintest curl of mockery on her lips. So the proud, stubborn boy from Millbrook had finally had his spine broken by reality. It only confirmed what she'd known all along — that leaving him had been the right call.
Greer, standing near the edge of the podium, sneered openly. She didn't plan on letting this end with a simple apology. There was still an entire year of school left — more than enough time to make this kid's life a living hell. One public humiliation wouldn't be enough to quench the fire in her chest.
Hundreds of students watched with cold indifference. A poor kid from the countryside, bowing his head to the institution? That was just the natural order of things.
Then Ethan continued, and the natural order cracked down the middle.
"I apologize for my cowardice."
The crowd stirred.
"I apologize for every day I spent tolerating people who don't deserve an ounce of respect."
Murmurs now. Confused looks. This wasn't the script.
"How could I — how could I — have let trash like Patricia Greer and Gerald Thornton walk all over me for two years?"
The murmurs died. The silence that replaced them was deafening.
"You want me to apologize? Fine. Here's my apology to myself: I should have done this a long time ago."
"Greer — ask anyone standing in this courtyard. Everyone knows you've been running private tutoring classes on the side. Charging parents hundreds of marks an hour for lessons you should be giving in the classroom for free."
"Thornton — how many legitimate complaints have you buried over the years to keep your promotion track clean? How much did you spend on gifts for the school board's families? Was it two hundred thousand marks? Three hundred?"
He let each accusation hang in the air like a grenade with the pin pulled.
For two full seconds, Ashford Prep held its breath.
Then the courtyard erupted.
"Holy—"
"Did he just— did Mercer just call out Thornton's bribery in front of the leadership?!"
"He's done. He's absolutely done. But God, what a way to go."
"Forget done — Greer is finished. The private tutoring thing? Leadership can't ignore that now. Not with a thousand witnesses."
"Mercer's got actual guts. I've wanted to say this stuff for years."
And it wasn't just the students. Scattered among the crowd, teachers who'd suffered under Greer's pettiness and Thornton's favoritism exchanged meaningful glances. Some of them were trying very hard not to smile.
Others weren't.
"Well said. Students from regular families like us have taken so much crap from those two. This is payback."
"This kid might get expelled, but he just did what none of us ever had the nerve to do."
Some students, though, shook their heads:
"Temporary satisfaction. He's just blocked Thornton's promotion — you think Thornton's going to let him walk away from this?"
"Walk away? Mercer just nuked his own future at Ashford. It's over for him."
On the podium, Greer's face had turned the color of raw liver.
Her two biggest secrets at Ashford Prep — the stalled promotion and the illegal tutoring — were now public knowledge. Standing under the open sky, in front of every student and teacher in the school, with the leadership watching from twenty feet away.
She didn't need to guess what came next. The teaching position was gone. Best case: a transfer to the administrative office, shuffling paperwork until retirement. Worst case: an investigation, formal censure, and a permanent mark on her record.
Her career at Ashford Prep was over. And a seventeen-year-old orphan had ended it in forty-five seconds.
Thornton wasn't doing much better. He'd watched the school leadership retreat toward the administration building with faces like thunderclouds, and the meaning was unmistakable. The promotion — the one he'd spent eighteen months and over three hundred thousand marks engineering — was dead.
Every dinner he'd hosted. Every gift basket. Every carefully worded favor. Gone. Torched by a kid who had nothing and therefore had nothing to lose.
The brief despair gave way to blinding rage. He wanted this boy to understand — to feel — the consequences of what he'd just done.
"Mercer." His voice shook. His eyes were bloodshot. "Do you have any idea what you've just done to yourself?"
Ethan looked at the man — purple-faced, trembling, veins throbbing in his temple like he was about to burst — and felt nothing but calm.
Because while Thornton had been having a meltdown, Ethan had been watching the Prestige counter climb.
[Prestige: 1,500]
Fifteen hundred points. In under three minutes. The emotional shockwave from a thousand students, dozens of teachers, and a handful of school administrators had generated more Prestige in one speech than he'd accumulated in sixteen years of living.
The number glowed in his mind like a promise.
Time to spend it.
"System," he thought. "Exchange for the Small Nuclear Reactor Technology."
"Prestige deducted. Small Nuclear Reactor Technology has been transmitted to the Host."
The world went white.
Not literally — he was still standing on the podium, still facing Thornton's apoplectic rage and a thousand stunned faces. But inside his skull, it felt like someone had opened a dam.
Information flooded in. Not just the reactor specs — though those were there, every equation, every material property, every assembly sequence rendered in crystal clarity — but everything connected to it. Foundational physics. Quantum mechanics. Thermodynamics. Electromagnetic theory. Concepts that would have taken a decade of university study crammed themselves into his neurons in the space of a heartbeat.
The small nuclear reactor. The energy core of Iron Man's armor — the first piece of black technology to appear in the Earth-Prime memories. A device that could shrink the energy output of a fighter jet's engine at full throttle into a coil the size of a palm.
On Earth-Prime, it was fiction. A movie prop. A glowing circle in an actor's chest.
But the System hadn't given him fiction. It had given him science. Complete, rigorous, buildable science. Given enough materials and equipment, Ethan could now manufacture a working miniature nuclear reactor.
And the physics knowledge that came bundled with it? Every problem that had ever stumped him in class — every equation he'd stared at blankly while Greer sneered — was suddenly, laughably trivial. Like someone had handed him a dictionary after years of trying to read a foreign language by guessing.
The implications were staggering. But there'd be time to process that later.
Right now, a thousand people were watching, and the boy they saw was standing on a stage, facing down a furious administrator, with nothing but a calm smile on his face.
"This guy is unreal," someone whispered below. "Thornton looks like he's about to have an aneurysm, and Mercer's just standing there smiling."
"He doesn't give a damn. This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen."
Near the back of the crowd, Megan Pryce was tugging Sophia's sleeve, practically bouncing.
"Sophia, Ethan is insane! Okay, I finally get why you liked him before. This is—"
For once, Sophia didn't correct her. Didn't snap back with a denial or a dismissive wave. She just stood there, watching the boy on the stage, her lips pressed into a thin, unreadable line.
He was always like this, she thought. I thought two years at this school had ground it out of him. But he's still—
She caught herself. Shook it off.
It didn't matter. After today he'd be expelled, and the distance between them would only grow. This outburst — however impressive — changed nothing. Her decision had been correct.
Around her, the pack of suitors bristled with the specific irritation of boys who sensed their romantic monopoly being threatened.
"Your old classmate is reckless, Sophia. Bad grades and a public meltdown? After he's expelled, a guy like that will be lucky to find work hauling bricks."
"Embarrassing. Sharing a school with someone like that is an insult to the rest of us."
"Good riddance, honestly. He's not from our world. Better for everyone if he's gone sooner."
They spoke with the casual cruelty of people who'd never once questioned whether they belonged. Each word was a brick in the wall between their world and Ethan's — and Sophia, listening, raised her chin and let the wall grow higher.
She was right to leave him. She was.
PLZ Throw Powerstones.