Just because I was heading off to go have fun didn't mean that I had taken a full leave of my senses and drive to train. There was a reason why I'd gotten increasingly fond of clone technique variants that allow the memories to transfer back to me. Doing a mass shadow clone training like Naruto was fond of was something I tended to be reticent of, mostly due to the effects on splitting my chakra pool in case I needed to deploy at a moment's notice.
Making two or three, though, and putting them on something we all found enjoyable? That was a very different story entirely. One of them was running through the GDA's literature and available reconstructed rituals on how to access the Underrealm, or Hell, for example. Beyond the debt I owed Damien for getting me out of there, it was a good source of natural energy for senjutsu training. Finding a way to get back and forth was naturally something I wanted, with as much ease as possible.
Another was situated on a task that I found less needed but was still useful in the long term. Trying to branch out and experiment with existing elemental releases until I found the ratio you needed to get to the advanced ones, like boil or scorch release. Mokuton would likely remain out of my grubby little hands for some time yet, but that was fine.
… It was. I swore it was, no matter how much I wanted to aura farm like Hashirama.
None of them were so crazy that I thought they'd stick the landing against certain hard targets. For example, with Battle Beast, my ice only affected him in the first place because it wasn't just normal ice. Each atom of it was suffused with chakra to make it, well, more than what it was on the material science level. That was why the various high-level elemental releases could do some things that they shouldn't be able to do.
That didn't mean that I couldn't be wrong about those presumptions, though. And having as many tools in my toolkit as possible was good in my book. All of it was a body of experience leading up to the things that I knew would really be more difficult to work with. Yin and yang release, most notably, not even mentioning yin-yang release.
Yeah. Most people assumed yin-yang release was a matter of training, but I was pretty sure that was at least a little false. Outside of largely being demonstrated by Ōtsutsuki, multiple characters only received proficiency with it because it had been shared with them. The Sage of Six Paths being the most notable guy doing the sharing.
I wasn't the Sage of Six Paths. Like, he'd gotten a massive boost from being Kaguya's son, yet that wasn't the entire story either. He and his brother had been prodigies in their own right, something that was incredibly evident the more I delved into the more esoteric branches of training chakra. At the moment I was a frog in a well, only now discovering that the walls of my prison went up a lot further than I had believed they did.
Rather than discouraging me, though, that alien instinct reared its ugly head. The drive to acquire power, to evolve at any cost, reckless and wild. Outside of the actual way it might save my life one day, mind you. As for the last clone?
He was meditating in regard to the Eight Gates. They were a useful, if time-limited tool for someone like me, whose body already had a massive amount of chakra running through it at all times. Whatever backlash humans experienced was worse for me, though I also had a much better capacity to withstand and survive the ill effects.
Not that I minded when the benefits were so drastic. Massively improved strength and speed for the short duration that I could balance the trade-offs and boosts. Was it strong enough to beat out Battle Beast…? Maybe, I wasn't in a rush to test it and wasn't in a rush to run into the man again, depending on whatever the Coalition used him for.
It was a potent force multiplier, though, ensuring that I could at least stand on Viltrumite levels of durability and strength, which was the important part here.
With all of that said and done, it was mostly a matter of just waiting at this point. Steady, grinding improvement in one field or another, as I practiced and honed my various crafts to their utmost. It was interesting, and more than before, I saw the need for the work. That didn't make the pace any more satisfying.
Thankfully, though, I was heading out with the rest of the crew, who were even interested in the outing. Or in our rough age bracket. From my eyes, I mostly saw Black Samson hanging out with the Immortal, too, and Bulletproof had mentioned stuff with his girlfriend going on. Amanda was a bit of a loner, at least when it came to social events like this due to her visible age. So it was almost like a reunion of the Teen Team, including myself and Shrinking Rae in the roster.
And honestly, it was the first time I'd been involved with anything social in a good, long time. So I was a little more excited than I'd like to admit.
Seeing everyone dressed casually always threw my mind for a loop. Mostly because I'd gotten used to associating people in their costumes, and while they might wear more stripped-down versions in the base, most of the time they were usually fully dressed up for work. With the exception of Amanda, anyway.
For myself, I'd sprung for what I usually dressed in back in my old life. Which was to say, sneakers, jeans, and a Seance Dog t-shirt. Very safe, as far as outfits went, and partially because my style of dressing myself had not evolved that far past what I wore in high school. If there was a saving grace, it was the fact that I was aesthetically appealing.
People gave handsome men dressed in a mediocre way a lot more grace than they did frumpy guys dressed in a hoodie.
Though, the way I was dressed wasn't what people were looking at. "Why do you look like that?" Rae asked, peering at me behind her glasses. In white sneakers, with her hair back in a ponytail still but with long bangs framing her gentle features, she was wearing black trousers and a yellow shirt, with a light denim jacket finishing off the ensemble.
"Like what?"
"Like that!" She exclaimed, gesturing to my face.
Rex, precious Rex, fell on the grenade of saying what had to be on everyone's mind. "Bro, you look like you're wearing a human costume. It's you, but not." The auburn-haired teen was dressed in a tight, form-fitting shirt and lighter brown trousers and had his hair in a man bun I couldn't decide was stylish or awful.
Maybe both at the same time. Rex had a singular talent for inspiring mixed opinions on his behavior.
"Kind of uncanny," Kate commented.
As for what they were referring to? Well, none of them had ever seen me in my henge, so I could understand why they felt that way. It was me, but with a skin tone that ventured toward the more human ends of the spectrum. My hair was still the same tone, and I had pupils, but outside of that I just looked like a well-built guy who dyed his hair.
"We're going out in public, and while I know most of you barely have a secret identity, I want to not be swamped as Taijitu," I pointed out, gesturing to my face.
A lot of superheroes didn't wear masks here, and while that was still something that psyched me out, there were reasons for it. One of the bigger reasons was that while superheroes largely tried to avoid killing, under certain circumstances of threat they didn't hesitate. Which meant that supervillains and criminals that targeted families usually got mysteriously murdered when they were being fought by superheroes.
A real series of oopsie-daisy moments where someone "didn't know their own strength" resulted in civilian identities and their personal lives usually being off-limits. Did it stop everyone? No. But I suspected the GDA either was complicit in this status quo or looked the other way when the community at large enacted its own vigilante justice.
Compared to most other superhero universes, this was probably on the better spectrum of how things were. It wasn't perfect, and I didn't really have any dependents who would be threatened but I was a known hero. However, I did want to turn that off and not have to worry about being Taijitu for a little bit.
"Nah, I get it," Rex nodded. "It's why I wear a mask."
"I've never seen the point, personally," Kate shrugged.
"We were basically raised by the GDA but took different shit from the experience, Kate," Rex pointed out.
"Now, now, let's not get into old history," Rudy mentioned as he stepped up to the meeting spot in the Guardians HQ. I was going to portal us to downtown Chicago from there. "Let's look forward to our plans for the night."
Out of everyone's fits, it was Rudy that surprised me the most, as he was dressed in a way that was oddly stylish. And not in the function that came from just researching trends, but someone with an actual eye for fashion threw on those jeans on him or the t-shirt that framed his muscular physique in a way that was appealing to the eye. My friend had a lot of good, strong points, but his eye for aesthetics was not one of them.
"... Those are suspiciously nice clothes," I spoke up, squinting over at Rudy. "Who dressed you?"
"How do you know I didn't dress myself?" he asked, sounding faintly offended. "I'm a grown man, fully capable of dressing myself."
Everyone stared at him, long and hard, before he wilted and glanced away. "It was Kate…" He murmured.
"That makes more sense," Rae nodded, giving him a speculative look, before nodding over to Kate. "Good taste."
"I thought so too," the Asian girl smiled. "He fills out clothes nicely when I can get him out of his undersuit."
"I thought the articles of clothing I picked out were fine, but Kate had other opinions," the pale-eyed man admitted.
She scoffed at him, hands on her hips as she turned to face him. "A shirt that says 'Science Rocks' with E=Mc^2 and the weird tongue picture of Albert Einstein is what a middle schooler wears. Are you a middle schooler, Rudy?"
"No…" He begrudgingly admitted.
"If it makes you feel better, you do look nice, Rudy," I offered. "But Kate is right." It sounded like the type of thing parents bought their children when doing back-to-school shopping at Burlington Coat Factory. As much as I wanted to roast Rudy, it wasn't worth the hassle of explaining why I knew what all of those things were. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
"What are we actually going to be doing, anyway?" Rudy asked, glancing between everyone. "These sorts of outings are totally foreign territory to me."
"First, we're hitting up Dave & Busters," Rex stated, lifting up a hand and beginning to count off different sites. "Then we're going to karaoke. Maybe hit a bar…"
"I believe you, Rachel, and Kate aren't actually legal yet," Rudy stated, only to get disbelieving stares from the three of them. "What?"
"The man who committed several crimes for his new body, calling us out on getting drinks?" Kate pointed out. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black."
I laughed. "You walked into that one, bud."
"That I did," Rudy admitted, giving a chagrined smile at those words. "I suppose when looked at it from that perspective, a touch of underage drinking in controlled environments is not without merit."
"All fine and good, but are we heading out or what?" Rex spoke up.
A fair enough point. Focusing on the continental United States, I waited till I found an alleyway in Chicago that was mostly empty and near our first destination before opening a portal. "After you."
In the beginning, everyone had been a bit wary of my portals. Kate had even asked if this was more teleportation, like their Star Trek analog's example, but I assured them all that wasn't the case. It was closer to a wormhole, a stable Einstein-Rosen bridge than anything else. Rudy's own studies proved that much, as the matter that came out was the same that had went in.
Months on and however many missions and operations we'd performed together, nobody even blinked about trusting me implicitly. They all walked through the matte black portal, exiting the Guardians HQ and straight into the streets of Chicago.
"Smell that?" Rex.
"The smell of construction?" Rachel asked, glancing back at him.
"No," he responded. "The smell of time off, baby!"
"You make it seem like we're being worked to the bone."
"Aren't we?"
Kate of all people shrugged as the group of us walked down the street as a gaggle. "He's kind of got a point. With Omni-Man gone, a lot of villains are getting antsy, y'know? People that wouldn't have made a move before starting to think that the Earth isn't as defended, since we don't have the same reputation as the old Guardians of the Globe."
"That's coming along," I pointed out. "It helps that you guys have Black Samson and Immortal, don't get me wrong. On the level of continuity, it makes it seem like you guys are the successors. But I wouldn't count out the fact that all of you were names in your own right before you were ever Guardians."
"Indeed," Rudy agreed, nodding along. "I've read our social media analytics, and we've received no small amount of support from the public as a new direction for the organization to go as a whole."
"Because we're all young and hot?" Rex asked.
"Not in so many words—"
"So basically yes," the teen grinned.
"—but effectively, we're being seen as a new team for a new generation. Outside of that, our roster is hardier than ever. And Genji, you discount something pretty important in your own calculations."
I blinked, trying to wrack my mind as to what he was talking about. "I'm drawing a blank. What are you talking about?"
It was my turn for everyone to look at me like I was the dumb one. "Dude," Rex spoke up, staring my way. "You beat Omni-Man in the first place. Anytime someone thinks about if they can rumble on your level, they just have to look at videos of that shit to realize what a stupid goddamn idea that is."
"I, uh… kind of let that slip my mind."
"If I beat up Omni-Man, I'd never let anyone forget about it," Rex stated.
Kate laughed. "We know! We can't get you to stop talking about that time you beat up King Lizard!"
"His pants were on fire! It was some funny shit!"
In hindsight it was rather obvious, wasn't it? I'd beaten Omni-Man, shown him for the villain he was to the majority of the world for the lives he'd callously taken, and in doing so had become socially responsible for the old role that he'd used to fulfill.
I'd thought about it as the work I'd been doing before, when I'd considered the situation. When it came to how other people perceived me as Taijitu, though, somehow that had completely slipped my mind. A bit of an obvious thing in retrospect, really. The notion that I was the guy holding up the world still did funny things to my stomach when I thought about it.
Part of me, the alien, fight-sexual aspect, was pleased by it. My overweening pride and ego stroked by the fact that everyone knew that I was the strongest on the planet, if you discounted what I'd done to beat Thokk. The other part was more nervous, admittedly, at the very real concept that public opinion could be fickle.
One fuck-up, and all of that goodwill I'd made would go up in smoke.
"What actually is a Dave and Busters?" Rachel asked, glancing over at the two relatively normal members of our posse.
"It's like an arcade, a restaurant, everything all in one supercenter place for kids and adults," Kate explained. "We're coming up to it now."
Blessedly, it was one of the places that wasn't actually screwed over in the Chicago Incident. With the budgets that we got paid, it wasn't too hard to rack up a bunch of points to play games and just… go buckwild across the building.
There wasn't anything really to mention about the process of having fun. It wasn't a technique I needed to engineer or analyze; there was no real complexity in how I handled the situation. The whole thing was almost a period where I could come as close as possible to just turning my brain off. We played games, most of which were unfamiliar to me in terms of their specific franchises, but the broad strokes were similar enough to what we'd had in my old life.
Dancing rhythm games, where Rudy demonstrated astounding competency but a profound lack of swagger that made his rapid movements seem a bit robotic, ironically enough. Light gun games, which were fun but not really all that complex, and the targeting systems seemed borked, because Rachel managed to score higher than me during that bout. No, I wasn't salty at that, and I'd call anyone who said I was a slanderous liar.
We ate unhealthy, greasy food at the restaurant and agreed it was kind of bland before stalking off to find other places with similarly unhealthy foods to consume that were open this time of the night. The bunch of us talked about bullshit that didn't matter. What celebrity had cheated on, who were the nominees for movie awards, what songs had just come out, and what were we listening to. Things that had nothing to do with superheroes, alien invasions, or technological exchanges.
Weirdly enough, this was the most normal I'd felt since I'd come to this new world. Sure, I had attempted to try and make normality through the process of learning instruments, reading comics, and things like that. Goofy things that felt like I'd been aping humanity in some respects. Here, and now, though, was when I'd felt the most like my old self in almost a year.
I was still different. I couldn't ever stop being an Ōtsutsuki, couldn't turn off the hyper-processing in my brain, or the fact that my eyes absorbed so much information at nearly all times. That didn't mean I couldn't find a way forward that wasn't just turning into an unfeeling monster who only lived to protect people and fight.
Don't get me wrong, I liked doing both of those things. But… this was nice too.
Eventually the night passed by in a blur, and it came for what Rex had really wanted in the beginning. And frankly, once I'd dumped them back at the Guardians' rec room and went out to grab the beer myself, the liquid libations didn't take too long to arrive. Was this technically a crime? To be supplying them booze? Yes. Did I care all that much about supplying alcohol to them? No.
If you could defend your country, save the world, and fight life-or-death battles, you deserved to take a shot of whatever you wanted to. Provided they weren't doing anything crazy with their powers or drinking and driving, I didn't care. Here, in the confines of our base, it wasn't like the police were coming to crash our party. Cecil might come in, but there were no outstanding emergencies that required us. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
If there were, all three of my clones being thrown at the problem would likely solve it in very short order. So yeah, I bought a few cases of beer, which Rex wasn't even hesitating to crack open.
"Hell yeah!" The guy cheered, shooting me a grin. "You're the fuckin' best, Genji!"
"I've never drank recreationally before," Rudy admitted, looking down at the bottle in his hand dubiously. "Though I've seen the consequences through studies. I might have to decline."
Kate was there with a bottle in her hand and did that thing girls did when they fluttered their lashes at a guy and proceeded to scramble their brains. Usually, most men figured out how to resist these wiles when they were still in middle school. Given what Rudy had missed out on…
The poor guy had no defense at all.
"Really?" She spoke, gently clinking her bottle against his. "I was kind of excited to share a beer with you."
There was not even the pretense of resistance, as my man crumpled immediately. He folded, cracking open the bottle with his thumb. "...Maybe one wouldn't hurt. My enhanced biology should be able to blunt the effects."
A low, throaty chuckle rolled out of her as Rudy twitched gently. "Atta boy."
Forget being whipped. My friend was about to be doing circus acts, and he didn't even know it. On the other hand, good for Rudy. If anyone deserved to have his cork popped, it was definitely him. Like every neurodivergent autist, I suspected his entire demeanor would change after he got laid. There were so many awkward guys I knew whose brains got rewritten for good or ill after they'd crossed that rubicon.
As everyone got their own bottles, I took a seat on the couch while Rudy engaged Kate and Rex in the actual differences between the various types of alcohol. He was innocent enough to perhaps know what they were academically but not actually have experienced them personally. Both of them, social animals as they were, took him under their wing to explain them happily.
It left me alone, right up until Rachel took a seat next to me. "Hey."
"Hey."
She seemed nervous and a little awkward as she shifted in her seat before glancing my way out of the corner of her eye. "Is it sad if I say this is the first party I've ever been to?"
"I'm in the same boat, mostly," I admitted. "The part about hanging out with friends isn't… unfamiliar to me, but this is a touch out of my wheelhouse."
"Good," Rachel nodded, something unwinding in her with that admission. "When I started my superhero career, parties with my teammates wasn't exactly what I planned for."
A slender, white brow arched her way. "Is the party better or worse than you expected?"
"We'll see once Rex gets a couple of drinks deep," she wryly responded, shooting the tanned teen a stare. "What about you? What made you want to be a superhero?" she asked, taking a swig of the beer.
At this point, with everyone in the privacy of the base, I'd banished the henge and noticed at her eyes lingering on my horns or eyes. Not quite with the same fear that had been there before, which I suppose was progress. "You're strong enough that it must have crossed your mind when you came to this planet. Saw all these cardboard, paper people, thought that it might have been better if you threw your weight around to get what you want. Whatever that is."
"The thought crossed my mind," I fully admitted. "But I didn't entertain it for very long."
Resting back against the chair I was in, it was hard to parse my thoughts on why I wanted to be a superhero. At first, it was a matter of just presumption that this was what you were meant to do when you were gifted all of that power. For most people, that might have been enough, with no real introspection or interrogation of the feelings beyond that.
Yet I'd been here in this new world for almost a year. Those superficial, surface-level reasons hadn't survived first contact with some of the more brutal realities of my new existence. In their wake I'd have to be honest with myself about why I did what I did, and the answer was relatively simple.
"Helping people makes me feel good," I spoke up, taking a longer swig of beer from the bottle. At this point I was mostly drinking for the flavor, rather than actually attempting to get drunk. It'd take a lot to get me to that point. "Selfish or self-serving as it might be, I like the warm and fuzzy feeling in my gut when I help people, save them from disasters, and hear them thank me. Altruism is, well, a means to an end. Besides, if there's no one else who can pick up the slack, it naturally falls to the guy who can."
Rae hummed, taking a sip of her own drink as she mulled it over. "I wish I had a reason as good as that for being a superhero."
"What's your damage?"
"My parents," she admitted, shooting me a crooked, halfway grin. As nonchalant as she might have made it seem, though, there was a tension in her frame when she mentioned them. "When they found out I had powers, they were over the moon. So was I."
"I'm assuming something changed."
"Well, when you've got powers, you've got to be a superhero, right?" Rae admitted. "It's not like it was something I minded at first, before the training became everything. I was homeschooled; they took me out of anything that wasn't gymnastics or boxing classes, it was…"
I could see where she was going from here, despite the fact that she trailed off. "They made it your entire life, not even giving you the chance to look for other options."
"Right," she confirmed. "I maintain my human strength when I'm shrunken, y'know. There are plenty of things I could have found work in."
"Do you not like being a superhero?"
There was something bitter in the laugh that came out of her as she shook her head. "That's the thing, though. I love being a Guardian of the Globe. Going around the world, throwing myself into fights and stuff like that. I just wish that sometimes I'd gotten the choice. Late at night wondering what if, typical bullshit like that. It's stupid."
"I don't think there's anything stupid about thinking of lost opportunities," I spoke up, reaching out to rest a hand on her shoulder and squeezing ever so lightly. "But it does sound like you're happy with your life, mostly."
Rae nodded. "I am."
"Then that's all that matters. Still, that's boring work-adjacent topics. Tell me the most embarrassing shit you ever used your power to do."
She laughed, her face flushing a little red. "Are you sure? It's a bit shameful, y'know."
"I don't think there's anything you could say that'd really make me blink, with the shit I see with my eyes on a daily basis."
"Well. There was this one time…"
I didn't know what my immediate future was going to hold. Maybe it'd be better; maybe it'd be worse. But here, now, with these people, I felt like everything was going to be just okay. I genuinely believed it for the first time since I'd fought Nolan. Hope was a dangerously intoxicating thing, yet I didn't find that I minded getting addicted all that much.
Author's Notes
Trying to slow down and give Genji some time to interact with other members of the Guardians of the Globe that he hasn't gotten a chance to bounce off. But also establish that the people here are friends. It's not as if when something happens to any of them, you'll care as much if they aren't developed.
Is this foreshadowing? Who knows, you'll have to wait and see. Next chapter we're getting back to THINGS happening.
Additionally, if you would like to read ahead, you can find up to ten chapters ahead via the linktree in my profile. For the time being, all adult content like future smut in anything I write, will be on , though in due time I'll likely try to get the processing and authentication through on to be able to post it there as well. So be mindful of where you're supporting me.