Chapter 8: Sparks
Training with Park Sua began at 6 AM on a Tuesday, nine days after the Rifts, in a hangar that smelled like jet fuel and concrete dust and the faint, metallic aftertaste of mana discharge that Jake was beginning to recognize the way a sommelier recognized tannins — not by thinking about it but by breathing.
The first thing Sua taught him was how to fail.
“Hit me,” she said.
They were standing in the assessment room — repaired now, the hole in the wall patched with a material that was darker than the surrounding concrete and that the maintenance crew had described, with the specific understatement of people who repaired things that infinity broke, as “upgraded.” The sensors had been replaced with higher-capacity models. The observation window had been reinforced with something that the technicians called layered mana-glass, which was either a real material or a name they’d invented to sound like they understood what they were dealing with.
“Hit you?”
“Mana bolt. Aimed at my center mass. Minimum power.”
“I don’t want to—”
“I’m A-rank fire. I can generate a thermal shield that absorbs energy on contact. Your minimum output — 340 units per second — is well within my defensive range. Hit me.”
Jake raised his hand. Concentrated. The warmth flowed — the now-familiar path from chest to arm to palm. The glow appeared. He fired.
The bolt was clean — a tight, focused beam of blue light that crossed the fifteen feet between them in less than a blink. It hit Sua’s shield — a disc of shimmering red-orange heat that materialized an inch from her chest and that absorbed the bolt the way a sponge absorbed water, the blue light dissipating into the red field and vanishing.
“Good,” Sua said. “Again. Faster.”
He fired again. She absorbed. Again. Absorbed. Again, again, again — a rhythm developing, a call and response, his blue meeting her red, the mana canceling, the air between them thick with the discharged energy of two people channeling forces that, two weeks ago, had not existed.
“Now faster,” Sua said. “And move. Don’t stand still. A still target is a dead target.”
“I’m not a target.”
“Everything is a target. The question is whether you’re a target that moves or a target that doesn’t. The ones that don’t move are the ones that die.” She dropped her shield. Her hands ignited — the full, fist-wreathed fire that Jake had seen during the assessment. “I’m going to attack. You defend and counterattack. Alternate. Shield, bolt, shield, bolt. Rhythm.”
She threw fire. Jake shielded. He fired back. She dodged — the lateral burst, the fire-propelled sidestep that had caught him from behind during the assessment. He tracked her — the warmth in his chest acting as a compass again, pointing toward her mana signature the way it had pointed toward the Rift in Koreatown.
Shield. Bolt. Shield. Bolt. The rhythm was clumsy at first — a half-second delay between defense and offense, a gap that Sua exploited ruthlessly, sending fireballs through the window of his transition with the accuracy of a person who had spent years learning exactly where the openings were.
“Faster,” she said. “The gap between shield and bolt is your death window. Close it.”
He tried. The warmth responded — splitting, dividing, the same simultaneous-channel trick he’d discovered in Koreatown. Shield on the left hand, bolt on the right. Defense and offense running in parallel rather than sequence.
“Better,” Sua said. She was breathing harder now — not from exhaustion but from effort, the increased expenditure of an A-rank maintaining both offense and defense against an opponent whose minimum output exceeded her comfortable range. “Now tell me what you’re doing wrong.”
“What?”
“You’re channeling. You’re defending. You’re attacking. What are you doing wrong?”
Jake thought about it. The rhythm. The bolts. The shields. The warmth flowing and splitting and returning.
“I’m thinking too much.”
“Partially. What else?”
“I’m standing still.”
“You told me you weren’t a target. Targets stand still. What are you?”
“Not a target?”
“Move. Your feet. Your body. You have legs. They work. Use them.”
She attacked again. This time Jake moved — not gracefully, not with the practiced footwork of a martial artist or the trained agility of a soldier, but with the desperate, instinctive, body-first motion of a person who was being shot at by fire and who had belatedly realized that the space between his feet and the ground was a resource he’d been wasting.
He shuffled. Dodged. Stumbled. A fireball grazed his shoulder — not burning, Sua was controlling her output to avoid injury, but hot enough to sting, hot enough to teach. The warmth in his chest spiked at the contact — the defensive burst trying to trigger, the same full-body emission that had cracked the window during the assessment.
“Control it,” Sua said. She had seen the spike — felt it, maybe, the way she felt mana signatures. “Don’t let the burst happen. Channel the defensive response into a targeted shield. Take the burst and compress it.”
Jake tried. The warmth wanted to explode — the instinctive, whole-body response that his system defaulted to when threatened. He fought it. Compressed it. Forced the expanding wave into his left palm, condensing it into a shield that was smaller but denser, a concentrated disc of blue light that hummed with the compressed energy of a reaction that wanted to be omnidirectional but had been made specific.
The shield was different. Not the thin, flat plane he’d been producing — a layered thing, dense, the blue light visible in stacked planes like the pages of a book. It absorbed Sua’s next fireball with a sound that hadn’t been there before — a deep, resonant boom, like a drum struck once, the sound of energy meeting compressed energy and being contained rather than dispersed.
“That,” Sua said. “That is a condensed mana shield. Rank A. You just produced a defensive technique that took me three years to learn with fire.”
“I didn’t know I was doing it.”
“Your instincts are doing it. The mana is reading the situation and generating the appropriate response. But instincts aren’t enough. Instincts are fast but they’re not flexible. They do what worked last time. I need you to do what works this time — and this time and this time and this time might all be different.” She lowered her hands. The fire died. “Break. Water.”
They drank from bottles that someone had left on a table by the door — room-temperature water in plastic bottles with Hunter Association stickers, the kind of water that tasted like nothing and everything simultaneously, the way water always tasted after physical exertion, as if the body’s need transformed the bland into the essential.
“You’re not what I expected,” Sua said.
“What did you expect?”
“I expected arrogance. Most high-output Awakened develop arrogance fast — they realize they can do things no one else can do, and the realization changes them. You’ve been measured at a level that exceeds every other Awakened on the planet and you’re still flinching when I throw fireballs.”
“The fireballs are hot.”
“The fireballs are calibrated to cause discomfort, not injury. You flinch because you’re still thinking like a civilian. A civilian’s body says ‘fire is dangerous, move away from fire.’ An Awakened’s body should say ‘fire is energy, energy is mana, mana is a resource.’ The fire I throw at you is, from your body’s perspective, food.”
“Food?”
“Your mana capacity is infinite. But you’ve been using your own internal supply for every technique — bolt, shield, burst. What if you could absorb external energy and convert it? My fire hits your shield and instead of dissipating, it feeds your reservoir. Not that your reservoir needs feeding, but the principle matters. Against S-rank threats, energy absorption could be the difference between surviving and not.”
Jake looked at his palms. At the idea of his palms — the surfaces that produced blue light and could, potentially, receive red light and transform it. Input and output. Antenna and transmitter.
“Can I do that?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows what you can do. That’s why we’re training. Drink your water.”
They trained for four hours.
By the end of it, Jake could produce shields, bolts, and the condensed defensive technique without conscious thought. He could move — not well, not with the fluid economy that Sua demonstrated, but with enough awareness of his body in space that he was no longer a stationary target. He could split his mana into three simultaneous channels: offense, defense, and the low-level sensory awareness that acted as a compass for nearby mana signatures.
What he could not do was absorb Sua’s fire. Every attempt ended the same way — the fire hit his shield and dissipated, the energy lost to the air rather than captured. The shield was a wall, not a door. It blocked but didn’t intake.
“It’ll come,” Sua said. “Or it won’t. Not every ability develops.”
“You said it could be the difference between surviving and not.”
“I said it could be. I also said I don’t know what you can do. Both things are true.” She toweled off. She was sweating — the exertion of four hours of sustained fire production, even for an A-rank, was significant. Jake was not sweating. He was not tired. The warmth in his chest was exactly where it had been when they started — untouched, undepleted, the ocean that didn’t notice the cup. “Same time tomorrow.”
“Six AM?”
“Six AM.”
“Can we do seven?”
“No.”
“Six-thirty?”
“No.”
“You’re very rigid.”
“I’m A-rank. Rigidity is how I got here. Flexibility is for people who can afford to be flexible. We can’t afford it. The Rifts will open again.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the System is still active. Because the app is still on our phones. Because the ranking system exists, which implies that the ranks will be tested, which implies that higher-rank threats are coming. The E-rank Rift you cleared in Koreatown was the beginning. Not the end.”
She left. Jake sat in the assessment room. The patched wall. The upgraded sensors. The mana-glass window. The evidence of a week of impossibility made routine.
He checked his phone.
MOM: Come eat. Doenjang jjigae tonight.
JAKE: Coming after training.
MOM: Training. My son is training like a soldier. Bring laundry.
He drove to Glendale. The route was becoming automatic — the 405, the 134, Glenoaks, the house, the door that opened before the second knock. The repetition was not boring. It was anchoring. A fixed point in a world that was rotating around a new axis.
Misuk was in the kitchen. The doenjang jjigae was on the stove — the earthenware pot, the one that his father had brought from Korea in 1998, the pot that was older than Jake and that produced, through the specific alchemy of clay and heat and thirty years of seasoning, a flavor that could not be replicated in any other vessel.
Jake sat. He ate. The jjigae was a universe in a bowl — the fermented soybean paste deep and funky, the tofu soft, the zucchini yielding, the red pepper flakes providing the specific, not-quite-painful heat that Korean food used not as aggression but as warmth. As care. As the culinary equivalent of a mother saying “I’m here.”
“How was training?” Misuk asked.
“A woman threw fireballs at me for four hours.”
“Did you dodge?”
“Eventually.”
“Good. Eat more rice.”
He ate more rice. Soyeon was at the table, watching the news on her tablet — the Hunter Association had announced its first official rankings, a list of twenty-two S-rank Awakened worldwide. Jake’s name was not on the list. His classification was still “Unranked (Pending),” which meant either that the Association hadn’t processed his data yet or that they had processed it and didn’t know what to do with it.
“There’s a Korean man on the list,” Soyeon said. “Kim Dowon. S-rank. Light affinity. He’s twenty-six. From Busan.”
“Light?”
“They’re calling it ‘solar manipulation.’ He can generate concentrated light — beams, flashes, sustained emissions. Different from your blue. His is white-gold.”
She showed Jake the screen. The photo was official — a Hunter Association headshot, the kind of formal portrait that government organizations used to make people look authoritative. Kim Dowon was good-looking in the specific way that Korean men in their mid-twenties were good-looking when they had cheekbones like geometry and hair that had been styled by someone who understood that hair was a form of architecture. His expression was confident — not arrogant, but self-assured, the expression of a man who had been told he was S-rank and who had received the information as confirmation rather than surprise.
“He looks like a drama lead,” Soyeon said.
“He looks like a guy who knows he looks like a drama lead.”
“Don’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous. I’m observational.”
“You’re jealous. You’ve been wearing the same hoodie for three days. He’s wearing a tailored jacket. There’s a gap.”
Jake looked at his hoodie. The same hoodie. The Koreatown video hoodie. The hoodie that had, through the alchemy of virality, become iconic — there were already memes, parodies, a Twitter account called @BlueHoodieGuy that had 200K followers and that posted nothing but screenshots of the video with increasingly absurd captions.
“Light affinity,” he said. “S-rank.”
“Jealous.”
“Observational.”
He filed the name. Kim Dowon. S-rank. Light. Busan. The file went into the part of his brain that collected data — names, ranks, abilities, the growing taxonomy of a world that was sorting itself into categories that hadn’t existed two weeks ago.
After dinner, he drove home. Not to the apartment — he’d been spending so much time at his mother’s house and the training facility that the apartment had become, functionally, a storage unit with a refrigerator. He went there to pick up clothes (clean ones, because his mother had done his laundry and the laundry was at the apartment because he’d driven it there on Sunday, a logistical absurdity that meant his clean clothes were always in the wrong location).
The apartment was dark. The B-flat hummed. The leaning chair stood against the wall like a monument to his previous life — the life of clients and CSS and dry ramen and the specific, comfortable, quietly desperate normalcy of a twenty-four-year-old man who had been spectacularly, magnificently average.
He sat on the floor. Opened his laptop. The dark-mode landing page was done. Bradley had approved it. The parallax scroll was done. Bradley had approved it. The invoice was pending — $1,800, the agreed-upon price for a project that had taken three weeks and that had included, free of charge, a testimonials section and a color-scheme pivot and the specific, accumulated cost of being a freelancer who couldn’t say no.
He looked at the invoice. He looked at his hands.
I can dissolve concrete with these hands. I can generate defensive shields that absorb A-rank fire. I can channel infinity. And I’m invoicing $1,800 for a dog-treat website.
The absurdity was not funny. It was clarifying. The gap between what he could do and what he was doing — between the power in his chest and the work on his screen — was not a gap he could sustain. Not because the power demanded use, but because the world demanded it. The Rifts would open again. Sua had said so. The System was still active. The ranking continued. The creatures would return, and when they did, the response would need to be organized, trained, effective.
He closed the laptop. Opened the System app.
TRAINING LOG — DAY 1
Duration: 4 hours
Techniques Practiced: Mana Bolt, Mana Shield, Condensed Shield, Multi-Channel Splitting
New Technique Discovered: Condensed Mana Shield (A-Rank Equivalent)
Mana Expended: NEGLIGIBLE
Mana Remaining: ∞
RECOMMENDATION: Continue training. Explore energy absorption. Develop offensive variety.
LEVEL: 2
XP TO NEXT LEVEL: 350/500
Level 2. Experience points. A progress bar that measured his growth in the same numerical abstraction that video games used, as if the System had been designed by someone who understood that human beings were motivated by numbers and progress bars and the specific, dopamine-releasing satisfaction of watching a bar fill up.
But the bar was almost irrelevant. The number that mattered was not his level or his XP or even his rank. The number that mattered was the one that the System couldn’t calculate — the number that came back infinity every time, the capacity that had no ceiling, the reservoir that had no floor.
What did you do with infinite power and a Level 2 ranking? What did you do with an ocean contained in a teacup, a furnace connected to a birthday candle, a nuclear reactor wired to a desk lamp?
You trained. You learned control. You found a woman who threw fire and a man in a suit who understood what infinity meant and a mother who made doenjang jjigae and you built, one six-AM session at a time, the structure that infinite power required.
Because infinite power without structure was not power. It was catastrophe. And Jake Morgan — who had seen catastrophe, who had killed creatures with it, who had put a hole in a wall with a fraction of it — understood, in the quiet, floor-sitting, laptop-closing moment of a Tuesday night in Koreatown, that his job was not to be powerful.
His job was to be precise.
He went to bed. Set the alarm for 5 AM. The warmth went with him, settling into its resting frequency, the pilot light steady, the furnace warm, the ocean patient.
Tomorrow: 6 AM. Sua. Fire. Shields. Bolts. The slow, essential, un-cinematic work of learning to hold infinity in human hands.
He slept. He did not dream. The warmth dreamed for him — a low, humming, infinite dream that had no beginning and no end, only the middle, only the now, only the constant, patient, burning readiness of a power that was waiting to become something.
Something precise.