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After Ethan and Tyler returned to the classroom, the bell was seconds away.
The teacher for this period walked in briskly, and the room transformed. Conversations died. Postures straightened. Even Dex Harmon's crew in the back row pulled their feet off the desks and adopted something approaching respectful behavior.
Mr. Langley, the homeroom teacher of Class Eleven, was having a terrible week.
Ever since Principal Holloway's nephew had become the most famous person in the Republic, Ninth Middle School had turned into a political zoo. Education Bureau officials. Department of Education representatives. Municipal bureaucrats who'd never set foot in a school in their lives. All of them showing up for "inspections" that consisted entirely of trying to get on the principal's good side in hopes of building a connection to Ethan Mercer.
It made Langley's skin crawl. He was a veteran teacher at the worst school in Ashford City, and he'd survived this long by being honest and stubborn. He knew Frank Holloway's temperament as well as he knew his own — the principal was even more stubborn than he was. If these bureaucrats thought they could schmooze Frank into giving them access to his nephew, they were delusional.
Suppressing his irritation, Langley was about to start his lesson when his eye caught a student not wearing the school uniform.
The frustration spiked. This was Ninth Middle School, yes — the bottom of Ashford City's academic hierarchy. But in Langley's classroom, a student looked like a student. No flash. No nonconformity. No testing boundaries through wardrobe choices.
He was opening his mouth to deliver a reprimand when he actually looked at the kid's face.
Strange. And familiar.
He'd never seen this student at Ninth Middle School before. But the features were triggering a recognition circuit in his brain that he couldn't quite complete.
Where had he seen this face?
In the back row, Dex's crew noticed Langley staring at the new kid.
"The old man's going to tear him apart for the uniform thing."
"Langley's creative with punishment. This should be good."
"Free entertainment."
Then the circuit completed.
The photograph. In the principal's office. On the shelf behind the desk, next to the flag. A teenage boy, smiling, in a frame that Frank Holloway touched every time he walked past it.
This kid looks exactly like…
No. That's impossible. That person should be in a national laboratory right now, conducting research that's shaking the foundations of physics and biology. He wouldn't be sitting in a classroom at the worst high school in Ashford City.
Unless…
Langley thought about Frank Holloway. The man who'd been a soldier. A principal. A guardian who'd raised his nephew with the specific, iron-willed conviction that education came first, fame second, and there were no exceptions.
Unless his uncle dragged him here.
Langley's mouth, which had been open for a reprimand, closed.
"Uh… well. Let's… begin today's lesson."
The class erupted in silent confusion.
What?
Langley had once made Dex Harmon stand in the hallway for an entire class period for an untucked shirt. And now he was ignoring a kid who wasn't wearing the uniform at all?
Dex's face darkened. The message was obvious: the old man considered this new kid above the rules that applied to everyone else. Which meant, in the social calculus of Class Eleven, that the new kid outranked Dex.
That was unacceptable.
-----
Langley taught mathematics, and he taught it well. But for Ethan, whose current knowledge base included the theoretical frameworks for fusion reactor design, Cybertronian mechanical engineering, and cellular-level human biochemistry, tenth-grade math occupied approximately the same cognitive space as breathing.
He didn't listen to the lecture. Instead, he pulled out a stack of scratch paper and began working through the manufacturing calculations for Bumblebee.
The Transformer's structural specifications were enormously complex — orders of magnitude beyond anything in the Level 1 Mall's technology set. The AllSpark's activation protocols alone required a mathematical framework that would have earned a doctorate at any university in the Republic. Ethan worked through the equations in the margins of scratch paper, using the school's math class as background noise.
More than half the period passed.
Langley was wrapping up and decided to review a problem from yesterday's homework — a tricky one that had stumped most of the class.
"Does anyone understand this problem? Feel free to stand up and explain your approach."
Silence.
From the back row, Dex saw his opportunity.
"Teacher, just because we don't know doesn't mean the new student doesn't."
His crew caught the signal and piled on.
"Yeah, I saw Student Yang calculating like crazy since the start of class. A little math problem shouldn't be anything for him."
"Let's hear the genius's answer!"
Cold sweat formed on Langley's forehead.
Asking THIS person to solve a high school math problem?
That's like asking a nuclear physicist to explain how a light switch works.
If I call on him and it gets out that I made Ethan Mercer answer a tenth-grade question, the internet will eat me alive by tomorrow morning.
He was about to deflect when Ethan stood up.
"Teacher, there are specifically five methods for solving this problem."
He began.
The first solution was the standard approach — clean, efficient, the method that any competent student might arrive at with enough effort.
The second was an algebraic shortcut that compressed the problem into three lines.
The third used a geometric interpretation that reframed the entire question.
The fourth applied a technique from number theory that nobody in the room, including Langley, had considered.
The fifth was elegant in a way that made Langley's hands go still on his podium. It solved the problem from first principles, building the answer from foundational axioms as if the question were a theorem to be proven rather than a problem to be solved.
The expressions in the classroom evolved in real time. Disdain became curiosity. Curiosity became surprise. Surprise became the specific, open-mouthed shock of students who'd expected a punchline and gotten a masterclass.
Dex, in the last row, watched the kid he'd assigned water duty deliver five solutions to a problem that had stumped the entire class, and felt the public humiliation land on him instead of his target.
On the podium, Langley was entranced. When an expert reveals their depth, even a fellow practitioner feels the gap. This problem was from the citywide joint examination. Every mathematics teacher in Ashford City, working collectively, had identified three solutions.
Ethan had found five. In the time it took to explain them.
He finished his explanation and sat down. Calm. Unhurried. As if he'd just read aloud from a grocery list.
Langley stood in silence for a full three seconds after the explanation ended.
"Thank you… to this student for the explanation."
His voice was slightly unsteady.
"Class dismissed."
He didn't take his lesson plans. He didn't organize his materials. He walked out of the classroom with the measured speed of a man trying very hard not to run, went directly to his office, drained his entire water bottle in one continuous gulp, looked at the sweat stains on his shirt, and headed straight for the principal's office.
He didn't care what it took. He needed this student transferred out of his class. Today. Not because the kid was a problem. Because teaching a class that contained Ethan Mercer was like performing surgery in front of the surgeon who'd invented the procedure.
No teacher's nerves could survive that.
-----
Back in Class Eleven, Langley's hasty departure triggered a wave of delighted chaos.
"Will! That was INCREDIBLE!"
"You actually scared Langley out of his own classroom!"
"Five solutions? FIVE? I couldn't even find ONE!"
"Teach me, teach me! I've got a test next week!"
Ethan accepted the praise with a smile and a series of modest deflections. The attention was warmer than he'd expected. These were ordinary kids — not prodigies, not elites, not the cream of Ashford City's academic establishment. They were students at the worst school in the city, and they were genuinely impressed, genuinely excited, genuinely happy that someone in their class had done something remarkable.
In the back row, Dex Harmon watched the new kid become the center of the classroom's social gravity and felt the cold fury of a bully whose territory was being invaded.
He'd tried to humiliate Will Yang. Instead, he'd given him a stage.
His hand closed around the leg of an iron stool.
Whoosh.
The stool sailed across the classroom.
Ethan tilted his head.
The serum's enhanced reaction time registered the projectile before it left Dex's hand. The trajectory was obvious. The speed was trivial. Ethan moved his head approximately four centimeters to the left, and the stool passed through the space where his skull had been a fraction of a second earlier.
It hit the wall behind him with a crash that silenced the room.
Every student who'd been chatting froze. Then scattered back to their seats with the speed of people who'd been through this before and knew what the aftermath looked like.
Dex stood in the back row, fists clenched, face dark, radiating the specific menace of a teenager who'd been embarrassed publicly and had exactly one method of reasserting control.
Ethan turned to face him.
His expression had changed. The easygoing transfer student, the willing errand boy, the kid who'd cleaned windows without complaint, was gone. What was left was something quieter and considerably less comfortable to look at.
He hadn't intended to bother with Dex Harmon. The gap between their respective capability levels made conflict absurd. It would have been like getting angry at a mosquito.
But a thrown stool, in a room full of students who could have been hit, from a person who didn't care about collateral damage, crossed a line that had nothing to do with personal insult and everything to do with the safety of the people around him.
Ethan looked at Dex the way a person looks at a problem that has just become worth solving.