Seven Steps to Becoming a Superhero

Rachel struggled to maintain her concentration as she practiced her form on the mat. Unfortunately, she had a million things running through her mind right now. She really, really wanted to hit something.

That wasn’t entirely true.

She wanted to hit Zack. Hard. And a lot.

But she couldn’t do that, not without going to jail, so a punching bag would have to do.

Rachel turned her attention to the punching bag instead. She breathed in and released her tension, laying into the bag with a series of rhythmic punches. After several minutes of this, she felt her heart racing. She remembered how Zack’s touch used to make that happen, no punching bag required, which made her hit the bag even harder.

Her mind replayed last night’s events over and over again. Zack’s asshole behavior rattled her nerves, erasing any relaxation she had found in working over the punching bag. She shouldn’t be surprised. The man ghosted her two years ago without so much as an explanation but . . . something still felt off.

Some things never change.

When he disappeared, at first Rachel became worried. Over time, however, Rachel began to realize Zack didn’t care about them. Perry had found a couple images of Zack online, partying it up across the globe in places like Tijuana and Hong Kong. A couple times Rachel and the others had even gone looking for him.

The pain of those investigations came surging back, causing Rachel to intensify her punches as she slammed her fist into the punching bag, grunting heavily as she did so. The evidence of Zack’s apathy towards their love dulled her heart, but at least she could move on knowing if he cared he would have come back, he would have offered some explanation.

He would have done something.

But last night Zack’s words offered something different. She sensed it with him. Something dark and festering with him. When she mentioned the pain and heartache he had caused Mark Saber, she felt it welling up with his response.

Good, he had said.

Zack deserved to get the drink poured on his head. And probably worse.

But there was something dark inside Zack, inside her high school sweetheart, that wasn’t there before. What had changed him in the two years? Where had her warmhearted, All-American boyfriend gone, and what was this shriveled and cold thing in its place?

“If you keep punching like that, you’ll break your wrist,” Rachel felt a presence behind her.

Rachel smiled. She hadn’t seen or heard from Dirk Saber all day, but she could smell his aftershave. She continued to hammer into the punching bag.

“You spying on me?” she asked.

“Just observing…” Dirk said.

“And what are you…observing?” Rachel asked as she kept her posture straight, punching into the bag with a series of two jabs.

She had such an easy relationship with Dirk Saber. They weren’t together, not like her and Zack were. He was her mentor. When Rachel first came to self-defense class, she could barely throw a punch. Under Dirk’s tutelage, she’d learned to not only defend herself, but use her powers to read her opponents before they could even think about a strike.

She had grown confident and bold thanks to his teaching, and they had grown closer through the process, and shared things to one another.

“You want to talk about it?” Dirk asked.

Rachel continued to hammer away.

“Not particularly,” she said.

She took a break and blew a loose strand of hair from her eyes before reaching for the water bottle. She turned to Dirk.

“What brings you here?” she said.

Dirk crossed his arms. “Well, I don’t know if you are aware, but this is my classroom.”

Rachel grinned. “Really? Because I haven’t seen you lately. I thought maybe you’d gone soft and decided to take up, I don’t know, shop class or something.”

Saber rolled his eyes. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a college level shop class. And if there is, it’s definitely not at Innshadow.”

Dirk meant his eyes. “Seriously? Are you okay? You haven’t left your office…”

Saber uncrossed his arms. “Since your ex-boyfriend turned up at a class and challenged me to a fist-fight?”

Rachel gave a self-conscious sigh. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“Rachel, this isn’t high school anymore. I can take a punch from a hothead. There’s one every semester,” Saber said.

“I know, I’ve seen some of them,” Rachel said. Most of those fights were brutally quick as Saber put the offending student in their place with little or no trouble. But with Zack, it was different. Saber saw something in him. Was it similar to the darkness Rachel sensed in him? The fight had stretched on much longer than Rachel had anticipated, and she hated every minute of it.

“But this one was different,” Rachel said.

“Because it was personal?” Saber countered. Rachel chewed on her lip.

“Something like that,” she replied.

Saber crossed his arms again. He sighed, and while Rachel did her best not read his mind, sometimes her own curiosity got the best of it. Something in Saber made it even harder to resist. Something was rolling off of him…anxiety? Anticipation? Frustration?

All of it made Rachel more curious to know why he had cooped himself up in the office for so long after the fight.

“Look, Rachel, this isn’t my first rodeo, nor is it the first time I’ve had to fight a jealous ex-boyfriend,” Saber said.

“Oh, this happens a lot?” Rachel said. “You get challenged by a jealous ex more than once a week?”

Saber started to think about the implications of what he thought through a comical squint before he broke out into a shiny grin.

“Maybe you should up your dating game, Teach,” Rachel said with a soft shove. Saber pivoted on his feet.

“Noted,” he said. His face turned serious again.

“But this time there are extenuating circumstances,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for some…test results.”

Rachel gave him a questioning look. “What kind of extenuating circumstances? What kind of tests are we talking about there?”

“I can’t really say–” he started to say, but his words were interrupted by a loud clunking sound.

Rachel and Saber turned towards the office, where the sound came from.

“Who's in your office?” Rachel whispered.

“Good question,” Saber replied.

He inched towards the door and pushed it open. A figure in a blue and white costume stood perched in front of the safe Saber kept in his office. Before Saber could react, the figure turned and pointed his clinched gloved hand at Saber, launching a blast of ice, which splattered into the wall.

Saber dodged, but by the time he pivoted back, the supervillain was already crawling out of the window. He raced to the window to see supervillain scaling up the side of the building, while leaving a trail of frozen hand prints in his wake.

Rachel watched as Saber raced up the fire escape. She followed him, but before she was even halfway up the escape, he turned to her.

“Call campus security,” he said. “And don’t follow me.”

Rachel nodded and pulled for her cell phone as she watched Saber move up the stairs. She received a roaming sound, so she found herself ascending up the stairs to get a better signal. She watched as Icer darted across the rooftops, supposedly undeterred.

She turned to see Saber frozen in his tracks. At first she wondered if Icer had hit him with some sort of freeze blast, but instead she saw exactly what glued him to the rooftop.

A dark armored shape stood before him, hovering just above the rooftop.

Knightbrand stood before them.

Zack’s father.

She never could tell how he felt about her. He always seemed so guarded around her. Maybe because she was a psychic. Or maybe because he just didn’t trust her. Zack told her his dad wasn’t the trusting type.

“Need a hand,” Knightbrand said to Saber.

Just then campus security came on the line. Rachel answered, reporting the supervillain incursion.

When she turned around, both Knightbrand and Saber barreled down the rooftops in pursuit of Icer.