The simulation arena hummed with a low electric pulse, the kind of sound James Carter had learned to trust more than any teacher's voice. It meant the barriers were live. It meant the match was real, or as real as the Academy ever let it get. Overhead, the artificial sky flickered between storm-gray and combat-red, a signal that the inter-academy exhibition had entered its final phase, and somewhere beyond the barrier the stands were packed three rows deep with students who had come to watch someone else's team win.James stood where he always stood — three steps behind the front line, close enough to reach, far enough to see everything.His ability had a name that sounded almost like an apology. Bond Link. Not a weapon. Not a shield. Just a thread of awareness that let him feel the people around him: their fatigue, their fear, the half-second before their bodies gave out. Teachers called it a support ability. Classmates called it "the glue." James had never minded the word. Glue held

Sleep did not come easily after that. James spent the following nights buried in the Academy's restricted archive terminal, cross-referencing every scrap of information he could find about Bond Link's classification history, the glow of the screen the only light in his dorm room until well past two in the morning, while by day he quietly, carefully, began testing the boundaries of what remained of his severed connections.He discovered something unsettling almost immediately: the bond didn't simply vanish when a team dissolved. It thinned. It dimmed. But it lingered, like a wound that had scarred over without ever truly closing, and through that lingering thread James could feel fragments of his former teammates' emotional states from across campus — fear here, tension there, a persistent undercurrent of guilt that told him at least one of them hadn't made peace with what happened, even if none of them had said so to his face.He decided to test something he probably shouldn't have.S

Once James understood what Shared Growth meant, he couldn't stop looking at the Academy differently, every hallway suddenly full of people he'd never really seen before.He started noticing the students everyone else had trained themselves to ignore — the ones who sat alone at lunch, the ones whose abilities drew snickers instead of applause, the ones whose instructors had quietly stopped bothering to correct their mistakes because correcting them felt like wasted effort. James understood that particular kind of invisibility now. He had lived inside it for years, disguised as usefulness instead of failure, but invisibility all the same, just wearing a more flattering coat.He found Noah Reed practicing alone in a soundproofed annex most students didn't know existed, an ability that let him store ambient sound and release it later as a concussive pressure wave — a fascinating concept undermined by wildly inconsistent output, sometimes a whisper, sometimes an explosion, never anything h

Word of James's new team spread slowly at first, the way rumors do among students conditioned not to expect much from anyone the Academy had already written off. Then his team started winning.Not close wins. Not lucky wins. Decisive, methodical victories against opponents who should have overwhelmed them on paper. They beat a mid-tier squad in their first official simulation, then a squad ranked well above their unofficial standing, and by the third week, they had defeated one of the Academy's top-ranked units — the kind of squad that recruited only students with proven elite-tier abilities, the kind of squad James's old captain had dreamed of building.James's name started appearing on leaderboards it had never touched before, printed beside names he used to only watch from a distance.Attention followed, and not all of it felt safe.An instructor pulled him aside after their fourth consecutive victory, her expression carefully neutral in the way that experienced teachers wore when

The revelation sent James back into the Academy's restricted archives with a new, sharper urgency, digging through records that hadn't been accessed in years, cross-referencing ability classifications until his eyes burned and the terminal's cold light became the only thing he could focus on, the rest of the world narrowing down to rows of decades-old text.He found what he was looking for buried in a decommissioned file, tagged with a classification code that hadn't been used in decades, the kind of designation that had clearly been retired rather than simply forgotten. Bond Link had appeared in Academy records before — not under a support classification, not filed alongside coordination or communication abilities the way it had been categorized for James, but under something else entirely.Unknown Class.The file was sparse, heavily redacted, but the fragments that remained painted a picture that made James's chest tighten with a mixture of vindication and dread. A previous ability