Greg Vs Raid 9-12

Kayden's apartment was... beige.

A simple two-bedroom place, large enough and expensive enough that his father wouldn't feel like the alimony was going to waste, but not so big that his ex-stepmother was exactly happy about it after years of living in a mansion. The furniture was aggressively inoffensive, the kind of stuff you buy as a set from a mid-range store because you need to fill a space, not build a home.

After all, it really wasn't a home.

Not yet, anyway. Kayden hadn't lived here a full six months even. No, more than anything, the place smelled faintly of air freshener and resentment layered over each other like competing perfumes.

Ex-stepmother? The correct term was proving elusive. Former stepmother?

It had to be a thing, though, a specific non-clunky title for the woman who had once been married to his father but was no longer. The mother of his half-sister needed something that wouldn’t make him sound ridiculous using it to properly define her place in his life. 

The problem was, he couldn't imagine a scenario in which anyone would ever need to use it in casual conversation. It was a linguistic tool for a social situation that was, by its nature, too awkward to exist in polite society.

If Greg were here, Theo knew his godbrother (another term that felt clunky and inadequate) would probably make some crude, puerile joke to cut through the semantic fog. 'Since she's not your stepmom anymore, that means you could bang her now, right?' Something like that, delivered with that infuriatingly charming grin of his.

Father was right. Something he could easily admit that much, especially for this. Greg would irritate most people to violence.

Unfortunately, Theo wasn't most people.

Granted, he found it a little worrying that he could so perfectly replicate his cousin's vocal pattern and thought processes in his head. Then again, many things in the last month or so had been rather worrying. A little conversational schizophrenia was probably the least of his problems.

Also... I don't think Kayden's my... type?

His eyes narrowed the slightest fraction, actually considering the implications of where exactly that thought led him to. Wait… Yes, all of a sudden, he suddenly found himself disliking exactly how... stereotypical his type was turning out to be.

Of course...

Theodor Anders let out a sigh, the sound quiet in the beige living room.

A soft, happy giggle cut through his thoughts, and the faint sterile tension in the room dissolved like sugar in water.

Bright silver eyes, warm like molten metal, stared down at his little sister from where he sat on the plush, beige couch. Aster was a sunbeam in a bouncy chair, her small chubby hands clapping together in delight. Her eyes, the same shade of gray his used to be, were wide with wonder at absolutely nothing and everything all at once because she was one year old and the entire world was amazing.

Kayden had requested he babysit again. A request he had accepted without hesitation.

He loved spending time with Aster.

She was... simple. Entirely and utterly uncomplicated; a closed system of joy and basic biological needs. Not a problem he needed to solve or a situation he needed to monitor in the slightest.

No, she was just Aster.

Theo wiggled his fingers, drawing on the essence he knew cycled through him constantly. The core of it somewhere near his heart, maybe lower, hard to pin down exactly. 

Which was puzzling on its own, because he could detect and monitor the presence of the substance outside of him just fine. He had to wonder if Greg was more right than he thought when his cousin had said “being cool is of the soul, just like mana.”

Granted, Greg had been joking as he usually was but it… it made sense.

In a matter of seconds, he felt the manifestation take place; motes of pale blue mana, cool and weightless, drifting down from his digits like ethereal glitter.

Each little dust-sized fraction of mana, an amount that would require him at least a few minutes of focused cycling to regain (if he didn’t simply allow it to refill during his nightly slumber) swirled in the air, shining like starlight in microcosm, before dissipating into nothing just inches from her face.

Aster giggled again as she reached out for the fading specks of light, gently warm in the way snow wasn’t, with her tiny starfish hands.

A small, genuine smile spread across his face.

It felt... easy.

"See, Aster?" he murmured, voice soft to the exact register of a one-year-old's barely-there attention span. "That's mana. It's the... the energy that makes everything go. Like... like the batteries in your toys."

Except not at all like batteries. But if he was ever going to do for her what Greg did for him, then he’d have to find metaphors that struck the right tone for her developmental stage. In time, Theodor. In time…

Theo held up his hand, fingers splayed out as he let a small dense ball of the blue energy coalesce in his palm. The air around it shimmered as it thrummed almost inaudibly with a heat haze of magical potential he could do so much with; said potential expanding every single day honestly. "As far as I know, there’s only…” he tilted his head for a second, not thinking but thinking, “seven people in the whole world who actually have this power and from what I can tell, the other six all use it like a club. Like Cousin Greg.”

The chubby teenager nodded his head as Aster clapped her hands together at the name. You like Cousin Greg, don’t you, Aster? 

He was a bit surprised to see it, but it made sense. Greg could be as simple as even the smallest child needed, shutting his brain off the way he did but to an even greater degree until they were staring at an even bigger kid. Theo was sure the other boy didn’t even know he could do it. 

“Cousin Greg…he… just has an ocean of it,” an ocean growing bigger and stronger every time Theo seemed to see him, which made sense given the gamified way his power manifested, “an endless churning sea of raw power, so he just... throws it at a problem until the problem goes away."

Theo closed his hand, and the ball of mana vanished without a sound.

"A tsunami to put out a candle." The Anders boy paused for a moment, considering. "And Axel... Axel has barely a thimbleful. A single drop. Granted, he has far more Will than I doubt I could ever gain any time soon, but that’s really not the point.” Theo shook his head, entirely not jealous that the other boy was so casually stronger and faster and much more physical than he was. 

Not at all.

“No, with mana, even if he had more of it… well, Axel couldn’t really do much with it at all."

Not yet.

Silver eyes dropped down to take in his own hands; soft, unblemished and manicured as they were. Despite all that, they weren't the same as they had been a month ago. 

In every single way, they were stronge, steadier, capable in ways that used to require trembling effort. He knew well enough… well, he could estimate well enough that a regular man on the opposite end of a punch from him would probably equate it to being hit by a small sledgehammer most likely.

Again, he was no Axel whose blows could break bones with simple and clean hits, but it definitely wasn’t anything to sniff at either. Unrelated. "However, when it comes to me… I have a… a pond. Not an ocean, not a thimble.” Theo nodded slowly, processing the reality of it. 

Unlike his cousin or his cousin’s best friend, he couldn’t just rely on his physicals to simply carry him in combat. Not when he wasn’t above an Olympic sprinter in sheer velocity like the both of them were. “So I have to be… smarter."

He was explaining it to a baby, of course; he knew that well enough. Even still, saying it out loud, articulating the principles he'd been developing in the quiet analytical corners of his mind; it helped to solidify it more than anything; verbalizing the code to find the flaws in its logic.

Also Aster doesn't judge. Which is nice.

"It's called Physical Magic, I've been working on it. See, brute-forcing an outcome with raw mana is… inefficient. Wasteful." Theo shook his head slowly, rolling the thought around in his head. "Why spend fifty units of energy to move a rock, when you can spend one unit to negate its kinetic friction and let a gentle push do the rest?"

Theo reached out, fingers hovering over a small wooden block just at his feet, the baby toy in between him and said baby. Come on… A thin, almost invisible shimmer of blue mana enveloped the block. He nudged it with a whisper of his energy, and it slid across the carpeted floor as if it were on a sheet of ice. "Physics."

Simply put, physics managed to do the brunt of the work for him, all the heavy lifting for the spell itself. All Theo had to do was provide the initial catalyst to start the reaction. The spark.

He looked over at Aster, who was currently in the middle of shoving her whole hand in her mouth.

"It's dangerous, of course," Theo continued, smiling as his audience was drooling. "Once I start a fire by amplifying the kinetic energy of the air molecules in a single point until they reach their flash point… the fire doesn't obey me anymore. It's a natural process, and it will behave as such." Which was to say, chaotically. 

He had learned that the hard way, with a scorched patch of concrete in the warehouse and a very unimpressed look from Axel to prove it. "So I have to be precise. I have to know exactly what I'm starting."

Know the variables. Control the input. Accept the chaos of the output.

To organize his techniques, to impose order on the chaos, he had built a framework. A system of commands.

"Incantations," he continued his explanation to his rapt, one-baby audience. "Like… like computer code. Compact programming scripts that define a specific effect."

Theo cleared his throat, the words that came out next different. Sharper. 

German. The language of poets and engineers.

It felt... appropriate.

Annoyingly appropriate, even.

If he had another choice for a language he knew well enough, he wouldn't have chosen it at all. His father's preference bleeding into his own work felt like contamination. 

But German was precise; vocabulary existing easily for concepts English struggled with.

Unfortunately.

"Beschleunigen."

The bouncy chair, which had been gently rocking, suddenly accelerated. Bouncing Aster up and down at a much faster, more exciting pace. She shrieked with delight, chubby arms flailing.

Success.

He didn't need the full incantation for that, not really. It was a simple application of kinetic amplification. Despite that, he still felt the slight familiar drain on his reserves. Like breathing out after holding your breath.

"Verlangsamen." Slowly and carefully, the bouncing of the chair slowed at his comman, returning to its gentle rhythmic motion as Aster made a disappointed noise.

"Rigid as they are… and they are extremely rigid, they are useful," he explained, switching back to English because German made him think of his father. And to be entirely honest, that was absolutely the biggest drawback of this casting method; forcing him to enmesh himself deeper in the false truth of the world his father had brought him up in. "Efficient, though… there’s no denying that much. Even still, being locked into an effect so immediately predetermined that to fix it mid-cast is pointless. No…” Theodor shook his head again, mind already awhirl. “To improvise, to change a parameter mid-cast… it costs me more mana than I can afford, much more than the original cast even took." 

The trade-off was clear as day, as obvious as one of Greg’s sharp-toothed smiles he only noticed half the time. "So I have to refine it."

Silver eyes flicked to the right, dropping directly on the television remote resting on Kayden’s basic coffee table. 

"Anziehen."

The remote twitched for a split second, only to slide its way across the table as if pulled by a rope until it found itself in Theo’s waiting palm.

Trivial.

One lazy hand bobbed up and the remote went skyward, Theo’s eyes lazily tracking the device as it flew. His mouth opened and the command left his lips just before it reached the apex of its arc. "Abstoßen." With no other warning, the thing stopped where it was, hanging for a moment in defiance of God’s primary law; that of gravity. 

Then the thing shot away from him, landing softly on the plush armchair across the room.

"Entzünden," he whispered to himself, silver eyes focused to a pinpoint firmly on the corner of a magazine sitting on the same table. The paper darkened, smoking black for a few good seconds. Then a tiny, clean flame blossomed on its edge.

"Löschen."

Blue energies converged; mana tight on the air directly around the flame, bending it to his will and momentarily displacing the oxygen. The flame vanished with a soft poof.

Oxidation requires oxygen. Remove the oxygen, remove the combustion. Simple chemistry.

"My whole toolkit is based on that principle. Leveraging the existing physics of the environment." Said it out loud because articulation helped cement the theory. "I can redirect kinetic force."

It was how he'd stopped all those projectiles from those mercenaries hunting down Greg. 

The Blaster in particular; Ranger. 

He hadn't blocked the shots at all. More a matter of simply altering the trajectories, a lateral shunt of kinetic energy. The momentum of the bullets remained constant, but their vectors were altered, each and every one of them set to orbit him at a distance. "I can even amplify friction too."

More than that, he could induce controlled vertigo by manipulating the fluid in a person's inner ear. A spell he'd tentatively named Gleichgewichtsstörung.

Equilibrium disruption. Accurate if inelegant.

He could even use it on himself, albeit for an entirely different purpose.

By tricking his own body into perceiving weightlessness, and supplementing that with minor telekinetic bursts for propulsion, he could fly.

It wasn't flight, not at al; more a controlled fall in any direction he chose.

An elegant, if slightly nauseating, solution.

The nausea fades with practice. Mostly.

"There is no creation here. Granted, I could. Using mana to replicate these principles, converting it into flame or water, or whatever else, but the waste of it all. No, not something I can afford," he said to himself, or to Aster, or to the beige apartment that smelled of air freshener and resentment. The pieces of his new reality finally clicking into a coherent whole. "I manipulate. I exploit. It's… a more elegant solution."

It made him versatile.

Dangerous even, as long as he had even the slightest bit of time to strategize or prepare. A single, well-placed Haften was its own trap; after all, who could deny the usefulness of a method to amplify the friction on a patch of ground to the point where feet would be fused to the spot, even if only for a moment? 

And that wasn’t even getting into how a perfectly timed Umlenken could turn an opponent's own projectiles back on them.

But it also left him more vulnerable than he would like, his own system demanding a level of unwavering concentration he couldn't expect from anyone that wasn't him. It lacked the raw, structure-leveling destructive power that Greg could unleash without a second thought. Greg doesn't need to think. He just... does.

And yes, he lacked that raw power but his own manifestations could become catastrophically unstable if the natural forces he unleashed spiraled out of his control.

Fire doesn't care about intent. Physics is indifferent.

His magic wasn't about overwhelming strength. It was about cleverness, efficiency and pinpoint precision. He’d call it a sniper’s level of precision, but that seemed in poor taste considering the events of two weeks ago.

Still, it was a reflection of him as he was now.

Not the bumbling, blubbering boy of before. There was no place for that Theo in this new world of parahuman war and the collapse of generational empires. That Theo would have spoken and struggled at that, well aware of how powerless he was. 

No, it was this version of him that he needed to be, the version that dove fully into that vision Greg had shown him. The version that gave up all of his weaknesses for all this humming, burning potential.

Theo let out another low sigh and looked down at Aster, expecting to see her still wide-eyed with wonder. His most attentive and least judgmental audience member.

She was fast asleep; small chest rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm, head lolled to the side, thin line of drool tracing a path down her chin.

Hm.

He blinked, staring at his baby sister for a long, silent moment as the hum of the refrigerator seemed to get louder. I just delivered an entire lecture on a field so unheard of theoretical would be an insult to it.

The smile that spread across his face was one he doubted anyone outside of Sparky or Greg would ever have the chance to see, slow and dry as it was. "To be fair, that’s the response I expected from… everyone, so…"