Chapter 2: 1.1

The Spark demanded to be used.

Sitting on the comfortable couch in the waiting room, with all the amenities afforded to the rich and powerful, luxuries she had never experienced until getting her powers, surrounded by technicians, attendees, and hang-ons, Jade scoffed at it all. The Spark of Greatness. Such a pretentious name.

The Age of Heroes had come and gone, leaving a half-destroyed world in its wake. Fortresses still endured, against the prediction of countless seers. Diamond Man held on. Corporations had not overtaken the world. The Megacities' shields stood strong, even if the incursions were getting worse and worse if the news were to be believed.

Jade thought it all a conspiracy theory, to keep the normal populace from stirring. Not that she was any greater philosopher pondering the woes of the age. Far from it, she couldn’t care less. Before acquiring her spark, Jade was a paranoid, gibbering mess of a recluse.

The constant fear and paranoia, the never-ending sensation of dread, of her time running out. Of green.

Whatever mental disorder had afflicted her before, the spark had fixed it. Jade could still identify the threads tugging at her mind, the chemicals working in her brain, making her paranoid, but now she could just ignore it.

No doctor ever found out why that happened. Jade was healthy and had no mental disorder, except she did. There was no explanation for the phenomena, but it happened. Doctors and Supers at the Age of Enlightenment could only say it was some sort of — Guess what? — magical curse or interference or some other such. Problem was, Jade could not even deny it. Magic was real, people had power. Not everyone, but the Age of Wonders proved for everyone that some magical fuckery existed. Or, in its current name, the Spark of Greatness.

That magic needed release.

It was a fact of supers, magicals, or supernaturals, whatever one called it, that the magic needed to be used. The more one tried to hold back, the worse it was. When the whole thing started, the government tried to suppress things. Heroes and Villains, superpowered justice. People judged by the powers they had, not how they used them. They didn’t care that some powers led to terrible results and not using them only made things worse.

The current age, at least, was different. Greater minds worked together to promote a different way. Campaigns rewarded supers to describe their power, ask for help, and not be villains.

The most successful of those attempts was the “Spark Championship”. A free-for-all brawler that pitted supers against one another. They could let loose, in a controlled environment. To fame and fortune. To the crowd's delight and sponsors' happy pockets. Was this a perfect solution? Not at all, but it at least gave some the chance of a better life, even if their powers led to summoning eldritch abominations from the void.

Today was the last match for the junior’s league. The Void Sorceress vs Wonder Light. Another pretentious name. Not that Jade minded. Not when it was in her favor. And it would be nice to smash the Wonder Harlot’s face.

Jade had a seething hate for the heroine, and the feeling seemed mutual. The media was quick to pick it up and spin the two as arch-rivals of a generation. It helped that both were undefeated in their years of super shenanigans. The two times they both fought, ended in a draw. The only time they had anything less than a stellar victory.

The holotv on the other side of the room had a recap and presentation of the fighters. Currently detailing the Wonder Bitch. The other woman was a tall, well-built blonde, with defined muscles. At 6.0ft (1.83 m), she stood like an empress above the peasant crowd. Her tanned skin glistened with health and the skin-tight suit in white and gold she wore, left nothing to the imagination, even if the woman showed no hint of skin below her neck. A W symbol in gold with dark borders etched in her chest. The mask covering the upper half of her face did little to hide her heart-shaped face and piercing green eyes and full red lips. On her waist, a red sash completed the ensemble.

Jade smiled, looking at the Tart’s costume. She knew the manufacturer and knew it was of a lower quality compared to her own. Minor victories. Petty as they were, she would take them all. The fabric was just magically reinforced to withstand heat, shock, and impact. Pretty standard fare for the super crowd.

Being the paranoid she was, Jade had invested in the top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art new nanosuit tech. They reported the thing to be indestructible. She had also not skimped in the utility belt with a suit of commodities. She was prepared for any sort of accident that might happen, and with supers involved, that was not even a generation isekai dream, but a real possibility. Better to always be prepared. It didn’t matter that she had used all her money and accrued an enormous debt to pay for everything. After winning this championship, Jade would have all the money she ever wanted and more.

On the other side of the room, the announcer prattled about the Tramp’s oh-so-marvelous-virtues. How she had, at 15 saved an entire neighborhood from disaster, how she had, in her three years of heroics done more than anyone could ever have expected from her. Without warning, Jade stood from the couch in all her 4.9ft (1.49 m) glory. Dressed in her fancy top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art nano bodysuit, all black with purple images etched in the design. Images that one would only see when the light reflected just right.

At once, everyone in the room froze, the air stilled and sweat started pouring off their skin. Some, Jade saw, were trembling and… praying? Well, whatever. Maybe watching that part about the bitch wasn’t the best of ideas, given all the inexplicable hate and the pent-up pressure of her power demanding to be used. It had been far too long since she could let loose. The consequences of being powerful, she lied to herself.

So what if her power was to tear a hole in the void and summon eldritch creatures of tentacles and eyes and their lamprey mouths and teeth and insatiable hunger? That said creatures could if left alone, expand and doom an entire sector in days. That they could break someone’s mind and leave them a wrecking mess of insanity and terror. None of that was her fault. She had not chosen this power. That the first manifestation of it destroyed most of a city and killed countless could also not be blamed on her. She did not know what was happening, and even after trying so hard to send them back, everyone knew the first spark was uncontrollable and dangerous.

Jade closed her black-as-night eyes. And took a deep breath, going over the steps in her mental mantra to get back control over her aura. Mistakes, and she was not so petty as to pretend nothing had happened.

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Matters were worse for all the social persona that portrayed her as a deranged villain, more liable to eat your entrails and use your still beating heart in a dark ritual or whatever. She ruffed at that. She did not know any magic. Her power lent only to breaking the barrier of dimensions and in the most debated example, permitting things from there to cross over.

Jade could do a lot more than that, not that it enthused her PR team about the idea. What detestable villain would help with opening portals between locations for ease of transportation — with the caveat of possible insanity as a result — or sending incursion spawn to another dimension — that could allow even worse things to come to this side by opening the portal.

Jade was immune to the risks of using her power. The creatures treated her as something akin to, what she thought of, their brand of family or kin. The insanity emanated from the creatures washed over her with no effect.

People judged her powers as too risky to be used without supervision. When questioned about it, Jade classified things on a scale of zero to ten. With zero being the small disease-spreading blood-sucking leech thingy and ten being an — oh my god the world is doomed — abomination.

Wrapping the aura around herself, Jade walked to the room’s exit, stopping there briefly to address the terrified people behind her. “I’m sorry for scaring you guys.” Apologies made, she walked on, the incident already put out of her mind.

The walk was a short one, crossing several energy barriers that, when she once questioned, were supposed to stop the fighters from affecting the audience. Later, she had also been told that a few more had to be added just to mitigate the insanity spread by her summons. Jade knew that all of her opponents had to use a diadem or something similar, in most cases, to make them immune to the effects as well. Not that she minded, most of them were terrified of fighting her, and that was advantage enough.

Stepping through the last doorway, her trainer, a lanky man who always smelled of tobacco greeted Jade. He had a datapad in hand and was firing lots of strategies she should use in her fight. She ignored it all. A deep feeling from her chest was building, what she once thought was the magic pressure from the spark now seemed to be something else.

The long-ignored feeling of dread and paranoia jumped at her for a moment, before disappearing entirely into the back of her mind. She now could feel that something was approaching, but she did not know what.

Jade blinked in surprise at being manhandled by her trainer. The guy was yelling by now.

“Wake the fuck up Void! They’re calling for you at the arena. Go, go.” He said pushing her towards the platform that led to the fighting ring proper. Still disoriented by what had just happened, she heard his muttering complaints. “Fucking dumb bitch…”

That… hurt way more than she thought it would. She and Casey, the trainer’s name, were not friends, but she always thought they respected each other. Multiple memories of little details she ignored over the years now popped into her mind, things she had once chalked up to stress when viewed in a different light, painted another picture.

Could she still trust his advice? All those long hours planning and plotting for this one fight. Was this a setup? The man could very well have sold their strategy to the other side. Jade knew the betting was fierce this time around, with all the PR and media coverage.

The roar of the crowd startled her once again. The announcer yelled something about void and darkness, but she could not hear it. From all around, eyes bore into her, the pressure from a hundred thousand voices rooting for her loss. This was not the first time she fought for the crowd’s pleasure, but it was the first time it centered such attention on her.

In the back of her mind, a more rational part of her realized that something was very wrong. The all-encompassing paranoia and dread that had not manifested once since she gained her powers were back with a vengeance, but there was more. Different influences she now felt, because the paranoia pushed from all sides and other threads tugged for control.

One was easy to identify. Something was pushing her to hate and dislike Wonder Light. It was so obvious now. Jade felt bad for not having seen it before. What it was, she had no clue, but once this was done, explanations would be had.

Another, this one more complex and hard to define, led to somewhere else far away. This one, she realized, was the feeling of her time running out she felt her entire life.

The part of her mind thinking such thoughts, might have been using a lot more of her mental capacity because suddenly there was a bang, one all too familiar announcing the start of the match, and then Wonder Light was at her face, eyes burning with hate, a fist already flying.

“Aww shit.” That was all Jade could say before being punched in the face and thrown back like a rag doll.

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