Alice wasn’t feeling particularly peaceful that day. She was in a foul mood, and the world seemed like an exceptionally hostile place. An apartment renovation was underway directly beneath hers, and the new neighbors were due to move in any day. She had nothing against them, but being jolted awake by a pneumatic hammer was far from pleasant. On top of that, she remembered she was still technically a student, which meant she probably ought to show her face at the university at least once that semester.

  God, how she hated wasting time.

  She started with the worst part. She went to see those fucking idiots with their academic titles for classes that would absolutely never contribute anything to her life. Naturally, her miserable luck clung to her like glue, so some asshole, a freshly minted PhD, decided to strike her from the class list. She didn’t feel like arguing, so she calmly suggested she’d stay after class to explain her absence, but of course, it couldn’t be that simple.

  Instead, she ran into a cowardly pervert with sadistic tendencies who chose to inflate his ego by humiliating her publicly. After five minutes of listening to him rant about how higher education harms women, who were supposedly created solely to bear children, and how Alice must be mentally defective for not obsessing over motherhood, the witch had had enough.

  “I suggest you stop, Doctor,” she said evenly, though inside she was boiling.

  “And why would I do that? Because you’ll run off crying? There’s no shame in admitting you belong to the weaker, inferior sex. You bleed once a month. That fact alone proves your genetic defect, which affects not only trivial matters like physical strength but also echoes through your psyche. Every man knows that a woman is…”

  That was far enough.

  She had asked so nicely.

  A stream of energy burst from Alice’s body and shot at blinding speed straight into the doctor’s brain. The violent concentration of power triggered a rapid spike in temperature. The tissues began to boil.

  “Oh dear,” Alice said with a smile as the irritating motherfucker collapsed into convulsions, screaming wildly and thrashing across the room. “Something seems to be terribly wrong with you, Doctor. Enjoy drooling.”

  She stood, then walked out of the lecture hall as if nothing had happened. No one spared her even a glance. Everyone else was too busy descending into hysteria and attempting what passed for first aid.

  Killing someone felt disturbingly easy. As though human life were utterly worthless.

  The thought amused Alice. It disgusted her, too. After all, her own beating had been banal as well. She still remembered the agony of her arms being torn from their sockets. She still remembered the sound of bones shattering as her face was smashed against the wall again and again. She remembered, most vividly, the relief when she realized the pain would soon end. Death had become deliverance, an escape from human frailty so profound that, in Alice’s opinion, it deserved reverence.

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  No. He didn’t deserve death.

  She was still learning the limits of her abilities, but she wasn’t reckless. The energy stream had been precisely targeted. Its purpose was not to kill, but to permanently disable. Somewhere, a man would spend the rest of his life in diapers, fully aware that he would need to be washed and fed by that “physically and psychologically impaired woman.” She wondered whether he would still try to lecture her, assuming he remained capable of forming even a single coherent sentence.

  Yes.

  Human life was absurdly easy to extinguish when the soul hid inside such a fragile shell.

  She sat in a café a few streets away, gazing through the window at the gray, restless world. She wondered what diagnosis the baffled doctors might invent. “Partial brain poaching” had a nice ring to it. Perhaps they would joke about brain stew. Or perhaps they wouldn’t joke at all, choosing instead to bury the case beneath paperwork and denial. People had a remarkable talent for forgetting what they could not explain.

  She didn’t care.

  As she replayed the insults in her mind, the awareness of what she had done tasted sweeter than chocolate. She felt no guilt. Not the faintest tremor of remorse. Judging by the energies that clung to him, he had committed acts far worse than cruel words. Without him, the world would be marginally better.

  No. She did not feel guilty.

  She had merely allowed herself to become an instrument of karma, and everyone knew karma was a bitch. With a faint smile, she recalled his rolled-back eyes and shattered dignity. The memory didn’t excite her. Quite the opposite. But it did improve her mood. She had won that confrontation decisively. Still, the thought that others might one day wield similar power unsettled her more than she cared to admit.

  “Mind if I join you?” asked a man in his late twenties, slightly balding and already softening around the middle.

  Alice barely glanced at him.

  “Yes,” she replied flatly. “I mind.”

  The man blinked, clearly unprepared for such bluntness. It wasn’t the first time he’d staged this sort of encounter, yet no one had ever dismissed him so openly. Oh, right, Alice thought. I forgot to fabricate some polite little excuse explaining why I don’t feel like entertaining a balding creep who just interrupted my thoughts.

  “But there aren’t any free seats…” he began weakly, gesturing around.

  Alice fixed him with an irritated stare. As their eyes met, a sharp, unpleasant tingling stirred inside her skull.

  Something was wrong.

  She felt it instantly. Yet he didn’t radiate immediate danger. After a moment’s hesitation, she gave a curt nod and allowed him to sit, discreetly releasing a thin thread of probing energy in his direction.

  The feedback unsettled her.

  He appeared harmless enough, but the frequency of the field surrounding him was anything but ordinary. Too many low, murky vibrations for someone who should have been merely pathetic.

  “Thank you so much,” the man wheezed, settling awkwardly into the chair. “I’m terribly sorry. Self-service can be confusing…”

  She stopped listening. Her internal alarm screamed. She lifted the coffee cup, then froze an inch from her lips.

  “What the fuck did you put in my coffee?” she asked coldly.

  “But… what?” The man’s sluggish mind scrambled to catch up.

  “I can’t even drink a coffee in peace,” Alice muttered, setting the cup down.

  He began stammering, outrage and panic colliding into incoherent babble. Alice ignored every word. She simply rose and walked away, leaving the sweaty pervert behind.

  This is true power, she thought.

  To be able to kill…

  …and choose not to. How magnanimous of me.

  She extended a final, invisible pulse of condensed energy toward the man’s groin. Testicular cancer wasn’t a death sentence, after all.