Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

Once upon a time, the Tonopah Test Range had been used for nuclear weapons stockpiling and delivery system testing. The harsh, mountainous, rocky badlands between two small mountain ranges surrounded the airfield, the new fortified bunkers and hangars and the old, now abandoned residential area some half a dozen miles to the North. Two roughly round, bowl-shaped expanses of ice equally likely to have been frozen lakes or small glaciers took up two spots some four miles wide each, one pretty close to the airfield's East, the other a dozen miles away to the South. Either accidents or deliberate testing had left pockets of residual radiation in multiple hot spots, possibly hot enough to cause issues to normal people after a decade or so, but irrelevant to supers. The air was cold, crisp, and clear enough to see for dozens of miles even without sensory superpowers.

In short, it was the perfect place for some tryouts for General Rinaker's new villain-stomping cheerleader team, name trademark pending. The good General's exact words about what level of shenanigans were appropriate were "If it doesn't come within a mile of the base and can't be seen over Kawitch Peak you can do whatever". Said peak being over nine thousand feet high, I was feeling pretty good about what was to come.

The boys definitely weren't. Gabby say-my-full-name-and-die the Sword Guy looked rather apprehensive. The sword he was using as his personal transport kept shifting from English long sword, to Egyptian kopesh, to Japanese katana, to those huge cleaver things from that movie with the Orks. It had already caused him to lose his balance twice, only superhuman reflexes saving him from an ignominious face-plant. It also got me asking about ancient sword types, because what the fuck was a Kopesh? A hybrid of axe and sword with the first half of its blade bending to form a rounded minimalist axehead, as it turned out.

Mark of my-powers-are-not-your-business was flying in lazy, haphazard low arcs like a helium balloon with chicken wings, spending half his time complaining about our inefficiently low speed and the rest trying to nail the rest of us with paintballs which shot at whatever he pointed. If those two powers were the entirety of what he could do I was going to wring a few necks then invent a new word called 'Generalcide' just so people could understand which practical jokes were acceptable and which crossed that line that would get me... creative.

Last but not least there was-

"Are we there yet?"

-that. The dread bitch of Tonopah, the boys' bane, wannabe pain in my ass, her royal highness Cindy Barnes and the actual reason we were walking in the first place. See, for all that she looked down on them it turned that both Gabby and Mark had means of rapid travel while she did not. Oh, she could put on a good act, translocating instantly over short distances with her flickering afterimages, but every time our pace went over fifty miles per hour, little miss 'Everywhere' fell behind. It was by no means instant or consistent but every delay pointed towards the same conclusion; she might be untouchable in a given area but shifting that area around had some sort of cost she wasn't used to paying. Unnoticeable for people more or less confined within the same secured area but more and more apparent the further we went. At the same time, how would she keep annoying the boys or 'overhear' all the interesting info if she didn't come with the rest of us?

"Yes, as a matter of fact." I came to a stop, sat in mid-air and examined the open land between the frozen lakes and the small mountain rage. I'd already done so of course, but that way I could surreptitiously observe the interactions between my charges without them getting suspicious.

"But... that's in the middle of nowhere!" Mark said as he landed. "There's nothing here!"

"Exactly. Nothing to break, nothing for people to sue us about, nobody to accidentally blow up unless we go overboard." Throwing a glare at the three teenagers I added. "Do NOT go overboard unless I tell you to. You won't like what happens, I guarantee it." At least two out of three nodded their agreement vigorously, if not sincerely. The third gave me her best innocent look then looked around for trouble.

"Now, the main reason we came out here is some proper power testing, in the time-honored tradition of superheroes everywhere." I took to the air with a thunderclap, adding the sound effect by very briefly breaking the sound barrier. "In case you three aren't fans of comics, or the movies over the past decade or so weren't to your liking, that means we'll spar. Since I'm the newcomer you'll find some reason to get into a fight in me, which will be a thinly veiled excuse to show off our respective powers and for me to establish how badass and cool I am through some absurdly one-sided victory."

"And if we don't want to fight?" Gabby challenged, his summoned sword flickering between a dozen different blade colors.

"Chicken," Cindy added sotto voce.

"Then the comic's writers will have to get creative and engineer a clash anyway," I told him, ignoring the comment from the peanut gallery. Then I gave the boy a smile. A very, very wide one, with lots of teeth. "Veeery creative."

The young Mexican super struggled with himself for a few moments as two titanic forces within him clashed; the urge to keep his head down and avoid any sort of confrontation since experience told him it wouldn't achieve much except to make things worse against every young teenage boy's dreams to beat people with an oversized stick and look awesome doing so. Having stacked the deck in the latter's favor, I wasn't surprised when less than a minute later he spoke up.

"Fuck it, let's do this!" His sword carried him to the air even as it began to grow. "What do I have to lose anyway?"

xxxx

The first thing Gabby did upon joining me in the air was conjure a new sword, a Japanese katana the size of a telephone pole. The blade both extended and thickened, gaining a reach of thirty feet, while the handle largely maintained its size. Despite the incredibly imbalanced shape, the giant sword responded pretty much instantly as if it weighed nothing. A glance of Force Awareness revealed it acted as if it had zero mass when interacting with him, while being far more massive than it should have been towards anything else. Plus there was one more detail that almost had me laughing.

"You realize that being made of a million layers of metal means it has only been folded twenty times, right?"

Apparently that was a sore point because he immediately launched into a flurry of blows so fast I needed Forced Acceleration to even track them. According to the internet and a brief search of both myths and facts about swordsmanship, the best mundane swordsmen could cut a baseball down mid-flight... a baseball launched at over four hundred miles an hour. Gabby was easily twenty times faster than any human and his skill with his conjured weapons was supernatural. Instead of the haphazard barrage of blows and ridiculous posturing seen in the vast majority of movies and anime, a continuous flow of feints, stabs, cuts, lunges and backstrokes came together to intercept my every move.

Our spar devolved into a supersonic aerial furball, one where the air thundered faster and more loudly than any autocannon from brief flickers of supersonic flight and a sword literally cutting lines of plasma through the air due to friction. In the beginning, relying on sheer speed to dodge got me multiple shallow cuts against my costume and the occasional scratch against skin because my flight kept getting intercepted. It was as if the most skilled swordsman on Earth had studied each and every move I was making in detail, then came up with and trained the exactly right counter until it became instinctive. I wasn't sure Gabby understood more than the general shape of what his powers were doing but it proved enough to hold me at bay for a few seconds - a long time given the relative speed of our fight.

Then I picked the pace up a notch, backing my Proximakinetic flight with more and more Forced Acceleration, effectively getting more and more subjective time. At about three times my unboosted air speed the young Mexican swordsman missed for the first time. His form was perfect, his anticipation of a barrel roll had been spot on, his counter done just right to come in mid-maneuver when my back was turned to him... but came an infinitesimal fraction of a second too late. That threw him for a loop and he missed several interceptions in a row, letting me close in and take a swipe he only mostly dodged.

The glancing blow knocked him three hundred feet back before his own flight could stabilize him and left him with an angry, red, fist-shaped welt over his right hip. It would probably heal in a few hours but until then it would serve as a reminder not to be overconfident. After letting him regain his balance and momentum - a real enemy would have capitalized on the opportunity but this was just a spar - I charged in once more. The aerial furball resumed... only this time his counters were no longer perfect. A hair short here, a millisecond late there, they started missing with greater and greater frequency. He tried to compensate, but his ability to simply anticipate my actions was falling behind.

It was a simple fact that any mind, no matter how fast, could only process things so quickly. There was always a delay between perception and reaction, then an even longer one between thought and action. At Gabby's level of speed and reflexes, by the time he acted I had already moved on and no longer were where he thought I was. In a straight line that could be compensated by leading an opponent's actions with your own but in a three-dimensional fight against someone who could and did change trajectories inside your reaction margin no amount of instinctive prediction would help. Not that it was a new idea; both movies and anime had made use of it, though usually in a dumbed-down format that didn't explain anything except the opponent being too fast.

Then I used Proximakinesis, Force Adjustment and Forced Acceleration to kill my own speed instead of dodging, momentarily coming to a dead stop. Half a ton of steel slammed into my right hip at a dozen times the speed of sound while massing many, many times more than it should have... and exploded. Superheated fragments scattered everywhere, cutting into soil and rock and ice all around us but managing no more than a shallow cut two inches long. The scrapes from earlier were already gone; this, too, would vanish soon. The... unconventional block surprised the younger boy and I used the opportunity to charge him again, only for a slightly larger than normal sword to appear in my path.

"Not... again..." Gabby panted, sweat running down his face, his hair a mess and his surplus military uniform reduced to a smoking, hole-filled rug. I turned around him and the sword followed, interposing itself as I flew in a tight circle. So I sped up, going more fully into superspeed like before but unlike Gabby's own actions there didn't seem to be any delay in the sword's maneuvering; it was more an automated construct, not something guided by a living brain. Not that there were no ways to bypass or overcome it. Taking a hit again would have worked, as would have half a dozen other things, but if I brute-forced it neither of us would learn anything. No, the idea was more to put Gabby against a target he could cut loose on safely, then pressure him to do exactly that.

He did not disappoint. More swords appeared all around us in a multitude of colors. Some crackled with lightning, others were seemingly made of fire, a good percentage were made of various metals while some were pure black and didn't seem to be made of anything at all. They came in all shapes and sizes, from tiny daggers the size of my pinky to claymores larger than the katana he'd initially used. The first to appear engaged me immediately, buying time for more and more to manifest.

That none of them attacked with the same superhuman anticipation and countering as Gabby had in the beginning was a bit disappointing but expected; a super's powers rarely extended to what we summoned or created and when they did they came at significant costs. They still came at me with more than human skill combined with the mindless tenacity and lack of self-preservation only expendable drones could have. Anything remotely physical simply bounced against my defenses or shattered beneath my strikes, but those weapons made of more exotic substances proved more effective. Needle-point blades made out of explosives were basically impossibly focused shaped charges that detonated on impact, lightning cleavers delivered their whole enormous charge on impact, and the chemical jelly blades just stuck on. The former felt like getting repeated flu shots by an inept nurse, while the lightning ones stung annoyingly. The jelly ones were just disgusting, weaponized skunk stink turned up to eleven that was also a superglue that just piled on and on and on with each strike.

A spin at Mach seven paired with negating chemical bonds got rid of everything that had piled up without spreading the skunk juice to everything within a mile. Then I decided to take it up another notch by copying a move of famous flying bricks everywhere; twin, invisible forcefields no wider than an inch but a mile long came out of my eyes. Within those fields Force Adjustment effectively nullified electrostatic forces applying to electrons in anything inanimate, rendering all matter I stared at, from rocks, to swords, to the air itself into plasma. Red eyebeams lanced out at every sword in sight in super-speed, obliterating the majority of them with even the briefest exposure. Only those swords made of lightning, fire, or that black material I still couldn't pick anything about with my senses survived intact. Of the three, fire and lightning were having negligible effects except for the absolutely largest swords and while the black ones kept giving me angry red welts they couldn't do anything more.

Gabby saw that his attack plans had fallen apart and tried to summon more swords. Unfortunately for him, he was nearing exhaustion from both the numbers of summoned swords and the pacing of the fight and I decided to call the fight. I momentarily dropped Forcefield Creation, reslotted Force Awareness to my suite of force abilities and reached with my suite of personal enhancement for Chronal Leap. The Mexican boy was halfway through summoning a black sword the length of three city buses in a row when I reappeared behind him and punched him in both kidneys hard enough to briefly shock and disable him. He screamed, wobbled for a moment then dropped out of the air. The impact with the ground hurt nothing more than his pride, but the lack of focus also caused every blade to simply vanish.

"Fight's over," I told him as I landed then walked over the scorched, cratered terrain at normal human speed.

"I... figured..." he struggled to speak between gasps, then lay on the cleanest patch of soil to catch his breath. "Got any more... costumes like... yours? Mine's... toast."

"Sorry, it only works for me." I did not sit back down or made any attempt to relax as the last few scrapes and a rather annoying rash regenerated while my costume fixed itself. For one thing, appearing to have gone through the fight effectively intact would get me more respect. That it happened to be even more true than the kids would think was just a bonus. For another, there were still two more fights to go through and the first one had left me with enough extra energy eager to be spent. "Your power is elemental, right? A sword elemental?"

"I... think so?" Gabby gave me a so-so gesture along with a grunt. He seemed to have trouble getting up. "Specifics are still iffy."

"Oh, I know. Otherwise you wouldn't be experimenting in the middle of the bout." That made him blush, his expression like that of a small boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Plus your focus isn't any better than your stamina was yesterday, your summons don't persist, and your range is maybe a thousand feet? That's less than most enemies can engage you at. Bog standard human enemies at that."

"Hey! Cut him some slack!" Mark chose to interrupt angrily. "We've only had our powers for a few months!"

"That's OK, we can can take it easy. We can do some proper exercises, have more spars to build up your form, maybe get the General to bring in some monsters for you to fight, power up while getting used to things," I told the boy what he wanted to hear and it was true enough. We could do just that. Then I strangled every bit of hesitation and empathy I felt for him and also told him what he didn't want to hear. "It's going to cost you, though. Two hundred and forty-seven."

"What, dollars? Bitch, I'm broke." All of them were, being refugees and all, but being rude about it was part of the problem, not a solution. "And if it's more of these fucking spars you can li-"

"Lives," I cut him off. And if he kept being deliberately disrespectful just to get a rise out of me, I'd send him to stand in a corner like a five-year-old. There were corners on Neptune, right?

"...what?"

"Two hundred and forty-seven lives lost to monsters and villains... every hour we're here, spending valuable time to train you up to prevent such deaths." I glared at the three, finally finding something to be angry about. "This means three since you interrupted less than a minute ago. So think carefully how you spend out time."

"Easy for you to say, you've had your powers for what, half a year? More if you're from Florida? Bet the Army evacuated you, you got lucky to power up from the chaos, then you volunteered to the General's new project." He scowled. "Well, I didn't volunteer. None of us did. The General got us conscripted because we're the strongest his Agents could find in the rest of the US."

And I thought Cindy Barnes would be my biggest headache. I'd thought we had at least some rapport, but Mark was shaping up to be just as big an issue in his own way. Resentment worked like that, often enough. People lashing out at the closest target. Unfortunately, we really didn't have time to get over his issues slowly. I needed to know whether these three kids were strong enough to back me up, whether they could be trained do so, and it needed to be done yesterday. That being impossible, I'd settle for immediately instead...

...or I could give up on them, tackle the immediate problems one at a time, and hope all the other problems such an approach would create wouldn't bring this whole house of cards down before my old friends could return from handling their own problems elsewhere. It was tempting, becoming more so the more they behaved like brats, whatever their reasons. But it wouldn't be the right thing in the end, so I'd try one more time.

"Do not try to bullshit me," I glared at at the very angry, very short-sighted black boy. Wait, were his eyes glowing? "You weren't singing the same song yesterday and the moment the villains that wanted to kidnap you were mentioned you got scared. You could have left this base at any time. All of us could have and, as you said, I am the only one who volunteered to fight the bad guys. Why are you here, Mark?"

He didn't like that, but there was a limit to the amount of crap I was willing to tolerate, no matter his circumstances. From the beginning he'd been the one to hold back the most out of the three, the one trying to play it safe. That he had tolerated the General's heavy-handed approach to recruitment or even bullying from Cindy meant that he had his own reasons for staying around. Me cutting straight to the point would just save us time and more weasel words. That it also made him want to punch my face in? That was just a bonus.

"Fine! You want us to spar?! You want me to use my power so we can all train and be buddies, and take on the big bad villains with the power of friendship?" His eyes shone like twin red suns. "Try this on for size!"

And then he blasted me in the face.