Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

Mark's attack would have looked like a continuous torrent of orange-red energy to normal eyes, not a beam of fire but a continuous linear explosion that blasted apart everything it aimed at. Seeing it under the kind of speeds supers could get to and the enhanced perception many of us had to be able to maneuver at such speeds painted a very different image. While still almost a blur, it was clear that it wasn't a continuous jet but dozens of individual orange-red projectiles that exploded upon impact.

When the first barrage hit me I was pushed back by the force of the explosions - explosions that were curiously shaped and directed even if no mechanism for a shaped charge seemed to exist. Traveling at over ten times the speed of sound, they crossed the distance between me and Mark in under a hundredth of a second and hit with tremendous force. They actually stung, each individual blast powerful enough to turn a tank into bits of slag scattered over a city block, and they were a confusing jumble under my Force Awareness.

I was knocked into the ground, the torrent of fire blasting me half a mile back and carving a trench in the process. More confused than hurt, I tried to make sense of what Mark was shooting me with. At their base they were the shape and size of bullets from an autocannon, thirty, maybe forty millimeters across and massing around a pound. But over that flickered the image of a solid metal cylinder of around fifteen pounds and on top of that was a much more complex arrangement of mass and forces that might have been a hundred-pound missile had it been in realspace but was just a twisty mess the way it merged into the base projectile. Worse still, my senses kept insisting the projectiles were moving at Mach three, Mach eight and Mach one point three at the same time, but they somehow remained connected and slipped through realspace at the combined velocity of all components much as they had the combined mass while also having the individual masses.

Powers made no sense, I reminded myself as I accelerated out of the way of the attack. That was underscored by how the projectiles turned to follow my flight like homing missiles. Because of course they did. Their acceleration didn't come close to mine though, so while they could somewhat maneuver at relatively high speeds there was a limit to how much they could follow. It was a major difference over the close combat attacks Gabby had used, though a more conventional opposition to face despite the warped physics involved.

As for Mark himself, the boy was also wrapped in multiple layers of scrambled physics. His normal body with an enhanced physique commensurate with his powers was less lopsided than Gabby's had been; significantly less strength and toughness, about the same agility, and if what I could tell of his bioelectric field could be relied upon he had a level of enhanced awareness that matched my own. I could not tell the exact nature of his mental powers or senses but from the sheer number of synapses firing up in absurd frequencies, he was handling a massive amount of information. On top of that were jumbled layers of extra mass in configurations far larger and far more complex than the ones in the projectiles he fired, their physics entangled in impossible ways with his realspace body so that their properties would be reflected and combined. Whatever they were - and there were several instances of things looking strangely familiar - they were as far from human anatomy as humans were from the composition of the average rock. Maybe even further in some cases, though simpler and more streamlined in others.

Wanting to test the effects of such an unusual power and much like my fight with Gabby before, I took things up a notch by way of speed. It immediately became clear that while Mark could hit a lot harder than his friend if in conventional means, his flight was rudimentary as far as supers of our level were concerned. He could only fly a bit faster than he could run, maybe six hundred kilometers per hour or so though my senses insisted there were two different objects each moving at about half that speed using entirely incompatible methods of locomotion. Like, Mark seemed to be running as far as his body's physics were concerned except he was not actually moving his legs, while one of his extra... bodies for lack of a better term was held aloft by dynamic lift via giant rotor while being pushed around by... turbofans? ...what?

No, not important for the moment. What was was another extra body layer changing from a mass of high-energy wiring discharging enormous loads of current shifting as I approached, only to be replaced by a much denser, much more uniform mass shadow that could have belonged to a metal cylinder weighing several hundred tons. Similarly, more strange arrays of warped physics that somewhat resembled larger turbofans accelerated his third extra layer, adding another four hundred miles to his speed and a significant boost to his maneuverability. Not that he would be going anywhere like that; he was still barely breaking the speed of sound.

Mark must have realized just that, because the near-continuous barrage became slower, more scattered, but more maneuverable and harder-hitting glowing projectiles that moved like light missiles but hit like thousand-pound bombs. Individually these hurt a lot more than his previous barrage had - almost like slaps to the face - but there were far fewer of them, not the dozens per second he'd blitzed me with. Mistake; he'd just made outmaneuvering them so much easier due to much lower numbers. To show him the error of his ways I gave a burst of speed and was suddenly next to him, a leg kicking into his gut.

The impact forces went crazy. At the same time they struck hundreds of tons of solid steel too thick to easily move or damage, they also hit much lighter targets they should have hurled miles away. And while some layers were incredibly stiff but fragile, others were just solid toughness and his realspace body was both tiny in comparison and greatly flexible. The whole thing was jumbled enough to confuse the laws of Physics; it had certainly confused me. Instead of a decisive blow that would have stunned the boy, momentarily knocked him out of the fight and maybe broken a rib or two, the combined warped physics soaked the attack with only a bruise to show for it and only a few dozen feet of knock-back.

Electromagnetic radiation came out of Mark's eyes, some of it infrared and ultraviolet coherent beams, some in microwave pulses in various wavelenghts and finally something that looked like... R.A.D.A.R.? Yep, military radar frequencies. Two of them even, jumbled so far beyond recognition it was a wonder Mark himself could pick up any information like that. I got ready to give him another blow when things shifted once again. The huge metal sphere was still there - for certain definitions of 'there' - but one of the layers providing him with flight grew larger and larger until he seemed to fly similarly to the largest military cargo planes. The other changed even more and became a bloated, elongated mass of over a thousand tons over a powerful but pitifully slow ground impulse system and a huge mechanical... arm? Barrel? It felt like fifty feet long and very threatening but the physics had become even more nonsensical and I couldn't make heads or tails of how it was supposed to work.

Then Mark knocked me out of the sky. I didn't see how; it was simply too quick for even my senses. One moment I was about to hit him, the next I lay in a twenty-foot crater on the ground with my diaphragm insisting it had been hammered by every single gun on a battleship at the same time. It took me a few seconds to get to my feet, then he shot me again in the back. A tremendous explosion - at least by conventional standards - slammed me back down like being kicked by someone with my full strength getting enough time to bring it to bear properly. Gritting my teeth against the first attack that had truly hurt across both spars, I flew out of the crater.

The dark-skinned teenager was flying several miles overhead at a lazy six or seven hundred miles per hour, turning around to keep me in sight. His eyes glowed and that time I caught the energy discharge in that weird mess of physics that were his powers early enough to dodge. There was a pulse of light, an energy discharge lasting only a few microseconds, then an explosion larger than a dozen cruise missiles put together blasted another thirty-foot-deep crater where I'd been flying over only a moment before.

My senses reported the blast was equivalent to an explosive, armor-piercing cell moving two and a half times the speed of sound and massing over seven tons, three orders of magnitude bigger than shells from a heavy tank's main gun. It was the kind of hit that, without defensive powers to reinforce the intended target, could have blasted through a super's baseline durability in even a glancing blow. A direct hit would have been enough to cut a battleship in half or reduce even a very tough super to a greasy smear against the ground.

The kid could dole out such ranged attacks with a line-of-sight beam every couple of seconds and he was angry enough to do so in a spar. Part of it was my fault and needed to happen, but if he pulled similar stunts in the field, especially in civilian areas? That would be bad, if he didn't learn control. Lesson plan noted for the future, I charged him once again. His low speed and maneuverability were already known quantities; what was left to test was his mettle and planning under threat by a superior opponent... and his ability to survive.

Mark's powers had already proven capable of adaptation on the fly, to a point, a significant advantage over more static enemies. But while I expected him to, even gave him time to make new plans with a slower approach than before, he doubled down on what he was already doing and also revealed his big beam had a sustained fire mode. Unlike before I was braced with Proximakinesis, had amplified it with Force Adjustment, and was using Forced Acceleration to its fullest to give myself effectively a much faster flow of time.

The beam still hit with tremendous force, and kept hitting in a sustained burn. It was delivering the same power as the instant explosive blow spread out over a second, less explosive and more a giant-sized blowtorch. Instead of doing the practical thing and dodge, I kept pushing against it. Even as my costume's gloves blackened, even as my skin reddened, sizzled, then began to burn, I slowly overpowered the pressure, feeling like I was holding up an entire warship. Crossing that half a mile to the angry little black midget took over half a minute but in the end Mark was forced to cut off his attack lest he, too, burn in the backblast.

As soon as he did, I flickered forth, grabbed him by the legs, gave a couple good turns for speed and launched him at the ground. Due to his powers, he massed enough that manhandling him wasn't negligible effort even for my full strength, but that made his own impact crater all the larger when his back struck the ground at thrice the speed of sound.

Bruised all over, bleeding, with at least a couple broken bones, he still tried to get up and ready another attack. So I flew straight down and punched him hard enough to flatten him once more.

"A for effort, Mark, but this fight is over." That it had to be said was all the proof anyone needed to see it had been harsher and uglier than just a spar near the end. "You did surprisingly well." My gloves were actually melted against my fingers, every bit of exposed skin below the face looked well-cooked, even my hair was a bit singed at the ends. Of course, for supers both my and Mark's wounds were superficial at best, but the kid had neither prior battle experience nor the kind of pain threshold countless injuries and necessity had forced me to build up.

"Yay..." the black teenager said in his moody, unimpressed away. Or maybe he was too exhausted and injured to speak up.

"Don't... don't those hurt?" Cindy asked, sounding uncertain for the first time ever. She was pointing at all the red blotches of second and occasionally third degree burns over my neck, shoulders, arms and chest where the costume did not cover and Regeneration hadn't had time to fix. With better control over it now I'd concentrated it on keeping my face intact and only after my landing had it started trickling down to the rest. It was like a mudslide of new, pristine skin and would be done soon.

"Of course they hurt, but if getting hurt stopped me from fighting I'd have died long ago," I told the proud, previously overconfident girl. "Plus they'll be gone in another fifteen to twenty seconds. Up for our spar?"

"Of course I am!" she said, suddenly standing tall and perky. "Who do you take me for, those idiots? As if a bit of fire and explosions could ever touch me!" OK, still overconfident. More bitchy that proud too. Why was I trying to teach those kids again?

Riiight, fate of the world at stake. Let's see how overconfident she'd sound after our little spar, shall we?