Ethan stared at the Prestige counter for a solid minute, running scenarios.
Had news about the reactor leaked? That was the obvious explanation — but it didn't hold up. He'd told exactly one person about the project: Frank. And Frank Holloway would sooner chew off his own arm than run his mouth about something this sensitive.
Besides, if the reactor had leaked, the response wouldn't be Prestige points. It would be men in suits knocking on the factory door — corporate scouts, government officials, maybe military. The kind of attention that came with clipboards and non-disclosure agreements.
But Ethan hadn't seen so much as a stray cat in two weeks.
Something else happened. Something big. Something about me.
He pulled out his phone — ancient, cracked, barely functional — and called Frank.
"Uncle Frank. Quick question. Has anything happened recently that involves me?"
On the other end, Frank's voice was too casual. Aggressively casual. The voice of a man who was very bad at lying and knew it.
"Happened? Nothing's happened. Why would anything have happened? Everything's fine. Focus on your work."
"Uncle Frank—"
"Nothing! Nothing at all! Stop asking questions and go build your reactor!"
The line went dead.
Ethan held the phone away from his ear and looked at it.
Yeah, something definitely happened.
Frank's poker face was legendarily terrible. The harder he tried to sound normal, the more obvious it became that things were anything but. Whatever had gone down, Frank was shielding him from it — probably worried that the distraction would derail the experiment.
Well, if Frank wouldn't talk, there was always the nuclear option.
He called Natalie.
She picked up on the second ring, and the decibel level immediately suggested this had been a mistake.
"Ethan Mercer, you absolute piece of—"
"Hey, Nat, are you in class right—"
"Do you have ANY idea what you've done?! It's not enough that you turned yourself into the biggest joke in the city — you had to drag the rest of us down with you!"
"I can't show my face at school anymore! Every single person knows I'm related to the 'black sheep of Ashford Prep!' My friends won't even sit with me at lunch!"
"And Dad — DAD got called into the Education Bureau because of YOU! They're talking about—"
"Wait. What about Uncle Frank?"
"—they're talking about removing him as principal! Because of YOUR dropout stunt! Are you happy now?! You've ruined EVERYONE'S—"
The rant continued for twenty-seven uninterrupted minutes. Ethan held the phone six inches from his ear and let it wash over him, occasionally making affirming noises to keep the stream flowing.
When his battery finally died — a small mercy from the universe — he set the phone down and pieced together the picture from the fragments Natalie had unleashed between insults.
Thornton. The commendation assembly. A speech broadcast live across the province, painting Ethan as a morally bankrupt delinquent. The media picking it up. The story spreading.
So that's where thirty thousand points came from.
Thornton had turned him into the most talked-about person in Northvale Province — just not in the way anyone intended.
"Thornton, you vindictive old bastard." Ethan leaned back against the workbench and let out a slow breath. "You did all that just to settle a score."
Then a grin spread across his face.
"But you have no idea that every person who read those articles, watched those broadcasts, felt shocked or outraged or disgusted — every single one of them just put points in my account."
He opened the System Mall and scrolled through the catalog with new eyes. Thirty thousand points. That was thirty times the cost of the reactor technology. Enough to start browsing the higher-tier items seriously.
But not yet. The reactor came first. Everything else was built on that foundation.
"Don't worry, Thornton. Ten days. Maybe less. And then I'll send you a gift you'll never forget."
The day after the commendation assembly, the media did what media does best: they fed.
Thornton hadn't named Ethan directly — he was too smart for that. But the reporters were professionals. Within hours of the broadcast, they'd identified the "black sheep" through sources at Ashford Prep, cross-referenced the timeline, and assembled a narrative that was equal parts scandalous and shareable.
The headlines hit like a wave:
"ASHFORD PREP DROPOUT SWINDLES UNCLE OUT OF MILLIONS"
"Problem Student Insults Teachers, Rejects Mentorship, Sells Parents' Home"
"The Black Sheep of Northvale Province: Inside One Student's Spectacular Downfall"
The details were technically accurate and emotionally devastating. Yes, Ethan had confronted his teachers publicly. Yes, he'd rejected Dr. Archer's mentorship. Yes, he'd sold his parents' house and taken three million marks from his uncle.
But stripped of context — stripped of the years of bullying, the stolen homework, the slashed shoes, Greer's targeted harassment, Thornton's corruption — the facts assembled into a portrait of an ungrateful, delusional teenager who'd thrown away every opportunity and dragged his family down with him.
The comment sections were merciless:
"This kid is a textbook narcissist. Contradicts his teachers, rejects mentorship from a nationally recognized physicist, and then cons his own uncle out of his life savings? Lock him up."
"Ashford Prep doesn't produce bad students. If Thornton says there was a problem, there was a problem."
"I heard he publicly insulted Teacher Greer AND Director Thornton. What kind of animal does that?"
"The uncle is the real victim here. Raised someone else's kid for thirteen years and this is how he gets repaid."
A few dissenting voices pushed back:
"Has anyone actually asked WHY the kid snapped? Two years of bullying and teacher harassment might make anyone lose it."
"You're all taking Thornton's word as gospel? The same Thornton who tried to expel the kid for 'bad grades' after he solved a problem three different ways on stage?"
But the dissenters were buried under an avalanche of outrage. The narrative had been set, and nuance doesn't generate clicks.
Gerald Thornton, in his office at Ashford Prep, sipped his tea and watched the coverage roll in.
The cold, satisfied smile on his face was the expression of a man who'd just won a war of attrition.
You blocked my promotion, Mercer. You thought being expelled was the end of it?
I wanted you — and everyone watching — to understand: the consequence of crossing Gerald Thornton is that you never stand up again.
Frank Holloway's situation was deteriorating by the hour.
As Ethan's guardian and the man who'd funded his "swindle," Frank had been dragged into the spotlight by association. The Education Bureau — already uneasy about the optics of a sitting principal bankrolling a disgraced student — began scheduling meetings. Daily meetings. The kind with closed doors and carefully worded suggestions that all pointed in the same direction.
Step down.
Frank refused. He hadn't broken a single rule. His personal finances were his own business. And the idea that he should resign because his nephew had been publicly slandered by a man with a vendetta was so fundamentally unjust that it made his blood boil.
But the Bureau didn't need justice. They needed the story to go away.
After a week of escalating pressure, they found their excuse: Frank had used his position to facilitate Ethan's enrollment at his own school after the Ashford Prep departure. Administrative overreach. Conflict of interest. A technicality so thin you could see through it — but technically valid.
The formal dismissal notice would arrive in seven days.
Frank walked out of the Bureau building, stood on the front steps, and looked up at the director's office window on the fourth floor. Then he spat — a single, decisive act of contempt aimed at twenty years of bureaucratic cowardice.
Just wait. It won't be long. Once my nephew's reactor goes public, every one of you will be lining up to beg me back.
Seven days later, on a Tuesday at noon, the factory doors opened for the first time in over two weeks.
Ethan Mercer stepped into the sunlight and squinted.
The world felt strange. Too bright, too loud, too open after seventeen days of fluorescent lights and humming equipment. He'd lost track of time in there — lost track of everything except equations and wiring and the steady, obsessive rhythm of a man building something that had never existed before.
But it existed now.
Sitting on the workbench behind him, no larger than a human palm, was a coil that emitted a soft, pale blue glow.
The small nuclear reactor. Complete. Functional. Tested.
Marvel technology — fiction on Earth-Prime, science fiction in the movies Tony Stark had built it for — was now real. A working piece of engineering in a world that had never imagined it.
Ethan looked at the little device, and a smile spread across his face. Exhausted, triumphant, and sharp enough to cut glass.
Then his expression cooled, and his eyes went hard.
"Are you ready, Thornton? It's my turn now."
PLZ Throw Powerstones.