The academy's brightest superheroines are burning out. The one man who can save them was filed away years ago as worthless.
Eli Tate washed out of hero training with the most useless result on record, couldn't throw fire, couldn't fly, couldn't dim a lightbulb. So Stormforged Academy handed him a tool belt and forgot him: a containment tech in the service tunnels under a building that turns frightened kids into broadcast gods and quietly works them to death.
But Eli can do one thing nobody's supposed to be able to do anymore. When a hero's power runs hot enough to kill her, he can pull it into his own body and earth it — ground the storm before it burns her down. He's hidden it for fifteen years, because the last time he reached for someone, it went wrong.
Then the golden champion detonates on live television. The instructors freeze. Eli doesn't. He reaches her, holds her, and her power doesn't just stabilize, it changes. The thing that was killing her becomes the thing she finally controls, off her collar, free. And the whole academy just watched a tunnel rat do the impossible.
Now everyone knows what he is. A ground wire — the one power the system spent a generation hunting to extinction, because a hero he frees doesn't need a leash, a handler, or the academy at all.
The administration wants to assign him. The government wants to regulate him. A cell of burned-out heroes wants to steal him. And three women are done waiting to be saved:
Liora Sloane — Daybreak, the radiant champion whose white-and-gold armor can't hide the tremor in her hands. She chose Eli over the institution that was letting her die.
Wren Quill — the bioelectric brawler whose own current is eating her alive, and who's never let anyone close enough to ask what it costs her.
CallaTran — the empath they collared and labeled unstable at eighteen, because she could hear the thing screaming under the building that everyone swore wasn't there.
Three floors down, behind a door the academy calls Recovery, thirty women lie in collared sleep. The academy calls it mercy. Eli calls it evidence.
Every bond makes him stronger and the institution more desperate — and every piece of them he carries is one more thing that could get them all killed. He spent his whole life keeping his head down. He's done keeping his head down.
18+ Only Adult Content, Explicit Content
Genre: Fantasy
Eli Tate washed out of hero training with the most useless result on record, couldn't throw fire, couldn't fly, couldn't dim a lightbulb. So Stormforged Academy handed him a tool belt and forgot him: a containment tech in the service tunnels under a building that turns frightened kids into broadcast gods and quietly works them to death.
But Eli can do one thing nobody's supposed to be able to do anymore. When a hero's power runs hot enough to kill her, he can pull it into his own body and earth it — ground the storm before it burns her down. He's hidden it for fifteen years, because the last time he reached for someone, it went wrong.
Then the golden champion detonates on live television. The instructors freeze. Eli doesn't. He reaches her, holds her, and her power doesn't just stabilize, it changes. The thing that was killing her becomes the thing she finally controls, off her collar, free. And the whole academy just watched a tunnel rat do the impossible.
Now everyone knows what he is. A ground wire — the one power the system spent a generation hunting to extinction, because a hero he frees doesn't need a leash, a handler, or the academy at all.
The administration wants to assign him. The government wants to regulate him. A cell of burned-out heroes wants to steal him. And three women are done waiting to be saved:
Liora Sloane — Daybreak, the radiant champion whose white-and-gold armor can't hide the tremor in her hands. She chose Eli over the institution that was letting her die.
Wren Quill — the bioelectric brawler whose own current is eating her alive, and who's never let anyone close enough to ask what it costs her.
CallaTran — the empath they collared and labeled unstable at eighteen, because she could hear the thing screaming under the building that everyone swore wasn't there.
Three floors down, behind a door the academy calls Recovery, thirty women lie in collared sleep. The academy calls it mercy. Eli calls it evidence.
Every bond makes him stronger and the institution more desperate — and every piece of them he carries is one more thing that could get them all killed. He spent his whole life keeping his head down. He's done keeping his head down.
18+ Only Adult Content, Explicit Content
Genre: Fantasy
Used availability for Kade Harmon's Stormforged Academy