Tension erupts when an assassin from the extremist Revelation Wing group breaks into the Alvar family mansion to kidnap or kill Gideon. With his family away, Gideon activates his mind acceleration, bringing real-world time to a creeping halt. Lacking physical strength, he uses pure logic to improvise a lethal defense. He drags a heavy bag of lawn fertilizer into his grandfather's study, opens a window, and jumps out, using a force rune on his plush toys to cushion his fall. The landing breaks his ankle, but Gideon ignores the pain to complete his trap. He mixes the fertilizer with sugar and flour inside an emptied coffee can, stuffing it with teaspoons and forks to act as shrapnel. When the assassin corners him, Gideon hurls the can and ignites it with a raw heat rune. The explosion blasts the assassin backward. Before she can recover, Gideon uses a force spell to pull her fallen high-tech molecular disruptor gun into his hands. With cold efficiency, he sweeps the yellow laser beam across her limbs, slicing off her arms and legs to neutralize the threat. When the magical police officer named Ed arrives, Gideon casually hands over the illegal weapon, refusing to finish off the screaming assassin only because he was too fascinated by the gun's technology. This violent encounter forces Gideon to realize his comfortable sanctuary is gone, leaving him with an urgent need to learn combat spells to protect himself from future abductions. He begins practicing force fields and electrical currents, knowing the Revelation Wing still holds a grudge against his rogue mother and will stop at nothing to capture him.

Gideon's integration into the magical school system quickly turns into a series of violent clashes and unexpected financial windfalls. A bully named Ralph Hastur, whose family is a powerful weapons manufacturer, corners Gideon and demands his clubroom key. Gideon uses his accelerated mind to analyze Ralph's incoming fist. He deploys a force-field rune on his chin to deflect the blow, shattering Ralph's knuckles, before delivering a knee to the groin and slamming Ralph's head into a floor tile. When Ralph seeks revenge in the school canteen, rushing Gideon with magically enhanced fists, Gideon defends himself with brutal efficiency. He constructs layered force-fields to block Ralph's strikes, stabs his fingers into Ralph's eyeballs, and channels an electrical current through his wet eyes to incapacitate him. To ensure the threat is permanently eliminated, Gideon grabs a dining knife and begins stabbing Ralph's vital organs on the floor. The school director threatens expulsion, but Gideon's cousin Saden and Paul Kleen, the heir of StarDrive Corporation, intervene. Paul has already deleted the security footage to protect Gideon, because Gideon broke into the computer club and optimized StarDrive's gravity-controlled fusion reactor code in under five minutes, increasing its power output by two percent. Recognizing the massive economic value of Gideon's fast mind, Saden ruthlessly negotiates a contract with Paul, securing fifty percent of all profits for Gideon. Paul also discovers Gideon left a fake-meltdown easter egg in the reactor code, highlighting his mischievous nature. This massive deal establishes Gideon as an incredibly wealthy partner of StarDrive, funding his dream of building a custom spaceship while Ralph's family is forced to back down. However, the corporate alliance draws the attention of the magical police, setting the stage for Gideon's eventual deployment into deep space.

At age twenty-two, Gideon commissions his custom-built starship, the Coeus, a modular, tear-shaped vessel designed for maximum gravity-drive efficiency. Determined to eliminate the Revelation Wing once and for all, Gideon takes the Coeus to the Greek node in the asteroid belt. He executes a devastating ambush against their base, using his ship's rail-cannons and plasma batteries to obliterate three sentry ships before deploying an army of custom-built combat drones to board the asteroid station. Inside the base, Gideon corners the extremist leader, Zerces Temeril. Instead of yielding, Zerces reveals a horrifying truth: Gideon is not a normal human, but a genetically engineered abomination created by his mother, Sadina, who combined the DNA of herself, Zerces, Jenny Hast, and Eduard Klein to build the ultimate weapon. Gideon discovers a biological laboratory filled with failed, disfigured clones of himself preserved in incubation tanks. The revelation leaves him emotionally numb. He drags Zerces and the remaining terrorists into an air lock and opens the outer seals, watching their bodies get sucked into the void. His mother's hologram appears to mock his emotional reaction, confirming she designed him to break the information barrier around Earth. Gideon returns to Aether with his ship repaired and upgraded, but his world-view is shattered, forcing him to confront his identity as a manufactured weapon. This realization drives him to accept a military commission in the Solar Defence Force, preparing for an imminent alien threat. He joins forces with his new co-pilot, Cyla Estene, as they jump to Alpha Centauri to intercept the fleeing alien vessels, setting the stage for a massive galactic conflict where his engineered brain will be tested against alien juggernauts.