What Was the Limit of a Power Surge? Keep Going!

Brad's Ideological and Political Studies class soon became one of everyone's favorites.

It wasn't because Brad was always guiding them through brain-twisting questions.

In fact, Brad didn't necessarily feel like holding that kind of deep-thinking class even once a month.

Teenagers absorbed new things far too quickly. He was afraid he might accidentally produce a whole batch of philosophical lunatics.

So Brad put a lot of emphasis on balancing work and play. With Skynet collecting data on the students' reactions in every class, he could always zero in on what interested them fastest.

Whenever everyone was too exhausted from combat class to feel like listening to a lesson, Brad would bring along some fun little gadgets.

Handheld game consoles, for example.

Or projectors.

Even VR.

They were all technological products that wouldn't appear for years, decades, or even several decades.

The patents were already registered anyway. These products would make money for his company in the future, so what was wrong with bringing them out now to give his students a little fun?

He had all sorts of tricks up his sleeve.

Some of those products even drew Hank out of the laboratory he was so thoroughly buried in.

Of course, the guy wasn't interested in games. He was interested in the technology inside them.

Brad used that opportunity to make his way into Hank's laboratory.

There, he saw an aircraft that was still little more than a skeletal framework.

"It's called the Blackbird."

Hank adjusted his glasses, looking immensely proud. His flying machine was far ahead of anything else in the world.

Who could have guessed that Brad was the one person it wasn't ahead of?

"Interesting, but it has plenty of flaws."

"What did you say?"

Hank glared furiously at Brad, who was rifling through the Blackbird's blueprints under the pretext of taking a look.

Brad raised his head, looked at Hank's displeased expression, and shook his head.

"A common problem among brilliant researchers. They always think their own work must be the best. Perfectly normal. I used to have that problem too."

A length of black carbon lead extended from the tip of Brad's mechanical index finger, and he began writing and sketching on the blueprints. Without any additional tools, his lines were straighter than a ruler could make them, his circles rounder than those drawn with a compass.

Before Hank could recover from his surprise, the blueprints were already covered in marks.

"Hey! Get away from that!"

Hank roared and rushed over to shove Brad aside. He looked down at his painstaking work in distress, then froze.

After a long silence, he picked up a pencil and shakily began checking the calculations.

He spent a full half hour checking them.

"Just a handful of strokes improved its performance by more than twenty percent?!"

"My God, how did you do that?"

The blue fur on Hank's face receded. Compared to his attitude moments earlier, he was now the very picture of humility, respect, and a thirst for knowledge.

Brad shrugged. "I do have a few doctorates, you know. I should be fairly close to the forefront of applied engineering worldwide."

"Teacher!"

Hank bowed.

"Please, you must teach me! Teacher!"

From his bowed posture to his attitude, Hank was utterly respectful.

Brad laughed, helped Hank up, and draped an arm around his shoulders. "We'll learn from each other. Learn from each other."

From that day onward, Brad had one more student in every Ideological and Political Studies class.

Hank, already a grown adult, squeezed in among a crowd of elementary- and middle-school-aged mutants every day, listening attentively to Brad's Ideological and Political Studies lessons while anxiously waiting for class to end.

Then he dragged Brad into the laboratory day after day.

Poor Brad. Just because he couldn't resist showing off that one time, he had no time at all to go drinking with Wolverine, Logan, for the next three or four months.

The Blackbird Fighter was completed a year earlier than Hank had originally expected.

Its performance was absolutely phenomenal, too.

And in the process, Brad gained an unexpected benefit.

Hank's experimental data on using technology to replicate mutants' superpowers.

The biggest surprise in that batch of data for Brad was that it actually included analyses of the brain waves of a young Magneto, Erik, and Professor X, Charles.

The moment he obtained the data, Brad copied it, packaged it up, and sent it to the supercomputer installed at his base in Canada for analysis.

While working on the Blackbird with Hank every day, Brad also divided his attention to analyze and study that data alongside Skynet.

A week before the Blackbird's successful debut, Brad developed a peculiar form of Counter-Field Technology and repeatedly refined it. Now he could resist and disrupt the powers of most mutants with psychic abilities.

"Psychic abilities" didn't merely refer to mutant abilities like those of Charles and Jean Grey. It encompassed every ability that required thoughts to interact with external matter or fields.

If Brad suddenly encountered Magneto, Erik, now, at least he wouldn't have every metal component of his prosthetic limbs stripped off in their very first exchange.

Of course, that was another matter if his opponent experienced a sudden power surge.

When Brad browsed footage of the future, he often noticed something that made him distinctly unhappy.

Some superheroes and villains-specifically those with superpowers, the relatively unscientific sorts of beings-shared a certain trait.

They could experience sudden power surges.

This phenomenon usually occurred in critical situations. Whenever their own lives or the people they cared about were threatened, these unscientific beings could always produce a sudden power surge.

They turned seemingly hopeless situations into miraculous comebacks.

This was especially evident in a certain monster created by gamma radiation.

Magneto occasionally experienced power surges too.

That really pissed Brad off. It meant that whenever he had to fight someone like that, no matter how thoroughly he prepared or how many times he calculated the outcome, a single power surge from his opponent could send everything into unknown territory.

"Your abilities are what they are, and your knowledge is what it is. Using superpowers should be like scientific research. Once you've built up enough knowledge, add an occasional spark of inspiration, and you get results."

"How can someone who's barely read any books, whose knowledge is as shallow as the mud in a dried-up pond, spend all day fighting and killing, then suddenly gain a new understanding of their powers just because they get angry, defeat the enemy, and save the day?"

"What the hell are they using to understand their powers?"

As Brad repeatedly reviewed Magneto's life, that question gave him a serious headache.

Magneto, Erik, was essentially manipulating magnetic fields. More precisely, he might be manipulating the electromagnetic force.

But the bastard clearly didn't even know what the electromagnetic force was. He was a slave raised in the NC Concentration Camp, and as an adult, the most he did was read some philosophy and run around the world with Charles.

Yet his powers kept shooting upward while he still barely understood them.

Was this some kind of joke?

Brad really didn't have a good solution to those sudden power surges.

At that point, all he could do was trust that enough brute force would work miracles.

Brad began using Skynet's computing power to research Counter-Field Technology with everything he had.

He used Magneto's existing data as his baseline.

Ten times? Not safe enough! Keep going!

Twenty times? Who could say how these power surges worked? Keep going!

A hundred times? Reason told Brad that if Magneto could really surge that far, he would have ruled the world long ago.

But stop?

I don't dare stop. What if, maybe, possibly, just in case? Keep going!

As long as Skynet had any computing power to spare, Brad refused to stop researching Counter-Field Technology, even continually developing new approaches.

Eventually, everyone at X Academy noticed that whenever Brad wasn't talking to someone, he sat quietly by himself, one eye vacant and the other electronic eye spinning rapidly, with steam rising from his head.