After we’d gotten debriefed by the powers that be and helped with the clean-up, I ended up flying off to go take care of other matters. Mostly heading back to my apartment so I could properly sign up for music lessons and find somewhere that sold a niche instrument on short notice. Blessedly, money solved all problems in this life, and it wasn’t like I was using most of my money for normal stuff.
I didn’t need to eat, even if I did appreciate doing so immensely. All of my bodily functions could be entirely supplanted and replaced by just expending chakra. The Ōtsutsuki were many things, but inefficiency was not one of them. It wasn’t until the next day that I actually got around to meeting my tutor properly.
Fadzai Ncube was a Zimbabwean immigrant working as a part-time tutor for anyone interested in the art of playing a kalimba. Tall and slender with dark, dark skin and tired eyes, he wore a happy smile on his face all the same as he saw me. Though, part of that was likely due to no small part of the disguise I was wearing over my body.
My hair had been darkened to a more traditional black, and my pale skin rendered to a fairer complexion, so my overall features looked more traditionally Asian. Even my horns and pupilless eyes were covered by the improved henge that I was wearing, as I looked like anyone that you might have seen just walking down the street in Fadzai’s NYC borough.
“Genji?” He asked, unsure if it was me from the posted advertisement, his smile only lighting up as I nodded his way in confirmation. “Outstanding! Come, come and sit.”
We were in a spare room at a community center, graciously loaned out for these sorts of lessons. Normally an instructor could expect numerous students for whatever they were teaching, but I’d specifically chosen something obscure enough just for my own satisfaction and amusement. When I was still human, I’d always wanted to learn how to play something goofy, like the accordion.
Hell, with how long my lifespan was, chances were I’d still get my opportunity to do so.
A kalimba, also known as a thumb piano, was functionally a westernized version of an African instrument known as an mbira. To play it, one held it in their hands and plucked the tines with their thumbnails. In the process, it produced a delicate, almost music box-adjacent sound. I was personally familiar with it because of the usage in Avatar: The Last Airbender’s music.
It wasn’t something as prolific as, say, a piano or a trumpet when it came to how commonly it was played. Yet I could literally fly anywhere within the United States in a matter of minutes, so a little bit of a commute was no problem at all. Learning how to play one might not have been constructive in a brutally pragmatic sort of way, but it did make me feel good in other ways. Nothing about the lesson was going to make me a better fighter or let me pull some crazy shinjutsu after brainstorming.
I just also knew that I couldn’t be a machine that did nothing but fight, kill, and tinker around with chakra. That was the same path to madness that created the worst excesses of the Ōtsutsuki in the first place. I was trying to avoid devolving into just another supervillain. Especially when I wasn’t sure anyone in this world could stop me if I went rogue.
So if to prevent that I had to give in to flights of fancy or just throw my attention at things I’d never have done before…so be it. There were worse vices than trying to learn obscure instruments and being a little silly.
Bit by bit, though, as the lesson continued, I could see the barely hidden respect as I was covering the basics with a staggering speed as quickly as Fadzai could teach them to me. Going from some monotonous tones to something more melodic as my fingers danced to the tune of my new dexterity.
“You’re pretty good at this,” he murmured, blinking at the sight of my nimble fingers. “Are you sure you’ve never played before?”
“I’ve got a little bit of prior experience with instruments,” I smugly responded. He likely didn’t count me playing Hot Cross Buns as a kid on the recorder as experience, but whatever. It was a flute, technically!
“At this rate I’m unsure how much I’ll have to teach you. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try to pass on as much as I can.”
That brought a smile to my face. “That’s all I’m asking for, Fadzai. So how did this song go again…?”
It was nice to learn something new that wasn’t how to slaughter green aliens in new and interesting ways. For all that the Flaxans served as handy ways to acclimate myself to my new body and powers, that didn’t mean I tremendously liked the outcomes of their invasions. I wasn’t one of those people that believed that killing was a verboten act.
That was fundamentally silly; some people just flat out needed to die. It didn’t mean I took any tremendous enjoyment in the slaughter, though. Doing something else, anything else besides killing, was ultimately a balm for my soul in ways that I hadn’t realized before. All good things had to come to an end, however, and once I was home I finally got around to calling the GDA.
Mostly because…I needed their help to explore some of my ideas.
When I was giving it some further thought, the concept of autonomous puppets had a lot of niche use cases. Many of which were things that my various subsets of clones might objectively be better at. However, it’d be a fun side project to explore, especially if I could figure out how to properly integrate technology from this world into them.
Their use cases would skyrocket from being inferior to clones to being a competitive option in every way. Outside of that, I thought that there was room for me to focus on more fūinjutsu tools. Not explosive seals, mind you. Those were kind of useless compared to what I could do with a singular jutsu.
However, things like storage seals had a lot of use, and I got the feeling that I could tempt the GDA into paying for other things just by sharing these basic ones. It was a very barebones plan and likely had an enormous amount of holes in it. That said, I could see the shape of it working.
Finding the number for the GDA in my phone, it rang for a good, long time before I actually got through to someone. A person I briefly made the acquaintance of, one Donald Ferguson, who might have been the most extensively augmented cyborg that I had seen so far on this planet. The guy was practically a puppet himself, save for a small portion of his remaining brain matter that technically would classify him as a cyborg.
Bro was giving Adam Smasher a run for his money with how deeply he’d abandoned his flesh. If nothing else, I’d give him credit for being so committed to his job. A guy had to wonder what would inspire someone to go to those lengths… Then again, people did far more for less, so maybe I shouldn’t be all that surprised.
“I’m surprised to hear from you so soon, Genji,” Donald’s clear, crisp voice came through. “Is there an emergency of some kind you’re having?”
“I wouldn’t be calling If I didn’t have a reason to bother you,” I informed Donald as I sat in my apartment and scribbled some preliminary puppet and seal designs on pieces of paper. Compared to the premier work of the Elemental Nations, my own cursory explorations of the practice were…drastically divergent.
Most shinobi didn’t have the instinctive adaptive capabilities of my kind, though they probably had a few select points of innovation on us as a whole. Shinobiware, for example, depending on how that might work with people that didn’t have a chakra pathway system to connect to. As a whole, though, their weakness prevented them from relying on brute force to solve a lot of problems. But we certainly understood chakra better on a conceptual level than any other living thing alive.
I was mapping out chakra pathway networks for puppets, the basic principles of some of the myomers that were used in simulating muscle contractions and extensions, and things of that nature. There were countless little components that to me were obvious and simple to make. To the people of Earth, it’d be a brand new technological base that they had no experience with.
Fūinjutsu wasn’t any different, though I kept the sketches far more circumspect to not accidentally make anything in the process. Still, I was genuinely curious what they might make of it. Donald was proof alone that they certainly had the technological sophistication to potentially take advantage of chakra-derived designs of their own. Who knew what they could make if given a sneak peek at the end of this road of development?
“Such as?”
“I’ve got some possible…let’s call it 'technology' from my people that I’d like to offer for global defense. The mechanisms are a touch esoteric, though.” That was putting it lightly, considering that it would require chakra as a resource to even function.
…Unless they’d get around that hang-up for me. Yet another reason to put this stuff out in the wild.
Which wasn’t a downside, per se. It just meant I had to be exceedingly mindful of the limitations that these puppets would be operating under. For a brief moment, I considered making a self-operating set of plans that could absorb its own natural energy from the local environment and living creatures. Then I immediately canned that concept within seconds.
Perhaps I was just being a little too cautious concerning the setting I was now in, but that sounded like the origin story for some bootstrapping artificial intelligence that’d inevitably spin out of control. Or at the very least a worse sort of parasite than the Ōtsutsuki were as a species. As inefficient as it might be, I would stay a slave to my own caution and refrain from doing so.
Besides, there were plenty of other avenues I could take this in. A world like this was host to all manner of mighty supervillains, superheroes, and more, right? All I had to do was pull a Sasori and see if I could use their bodies as the springboard for existing projects. Granted, I then ran into wildly different ethical concerns, but that was a problem for future Genji.
Thus, returning to their chakra issue. People here lacked chakra networks, which proved to be a dent in the idea. Could I somehow find someone who could create braindead Ōtsutsuki clones for this purpose? Eh…This was already becoming a little too fucked up, even for me.
Better to just stick with the initial idea of non-living materials for the most part and try not to violate every ethical convention in the process of my research.
Donald had paused on the other end of the line after my proposition, with only the rapid-fire clicks of texting audible on the other end for a few moments. Until he responded, sounding a little hurried. “We would be interested in discussing this further. Would you need a workshop for creating a demonstration?”
“More than likely, and materials.”
“Provided you show results, or at least measurable effort, we can foot the cost of anything you require. Do you know how to send emails yet?”
Oh, if only Donald knew. “Yep.”
“Then send an email to the link I’ll text to you with an approximation of the materials you’ll likely require. We’ll have a workshop prepared shortly and inform you when it's prepared.”
God bless shadowy government agencies with silly budgetary constraints.
“I’ll eagerly be awaiting the call,” I said, smiling, setting down my little sketchpad as the call came to a close. There’d be time to finish the design later, considering how quickly I worked and my utter lack of a need to sleep.
Provided I had chakra, there wasn’t a singular biological need I had that couldn’t be supplanted with it. Without it…
It did raise a question of whether an Ōtsutsuki could even survive without chakra. Just the thought of it made me shiver as I turned my mind from thoughts of puppets and ethical violations to more important pursuits. I needed to get ready to swing by the Teen Team base, and by golly, I was going to make a good first impression.
I mean, how hard could it be to befriend a bunch of teenagers, plus one robot? Being simultaneously in my twenties and over a century old didn’t mean I wasn’t hip with the kids! I was still cool; I knew they played… Fortnite, or Roblox, or something.
It’d be fine.
The Teen Team base was impressive, at least at first glance. I didn’t know enough about technology to give a value judgment just glancing around at things, but it was about as good as a surreptitious secret installation inside a bridge could be. Vertically dynamic and focused, with an upper shaft that I flew in to enter, though a quick pulse of chakra through my eyes revealed that there were multiple other exits to the structure as a whole.
Robot was the one to meet me there, hands clasped behind his back and stock-still in the way only a machine could be. “Greetings, Taijitu. I’m pleased that you took my invitation.”
I shot the machine a smile as I landed, hands shoved inside of my pockets. “It’s the least I could do, considering the spirit in which it was given. That and the fact I haven’t actually met anyone outside the field yet.”
To that end, I wasn’t even in my costume. Instead, I dressed about as casual as I could manage. Blue jeans, with a tight black compression shirt squeezing my torso snugly, and silver sneakers. As much as I was tempted to just steal the fits of famous anime husbandos, sometimes it was better to just dress down and keep things simple.
This was supposed to be a hangout, not some introduction to the group as a whole.
“Is there anyone else around?” I asked, glancing around without actually invading every iota of privacy immediately.
“Kate and Rex should present if you’d like to meet them. They’re in the lounge area.”
“Lead the way. I’d love to hear more about the Teen Team if you’d like to share.”
“It’d be my pleasure.”
Robot was an interesting sort, given that, as far as I knew, true AI that were thinking, breathing beings was simply a pipe dream in my world. Yet the same couldn’t be said for a world of superscience and aliens, where men flying in the sky were as common as clay. The sheer technological advancements that allowed for his creation must have been staggering.
As we went through our impromptu tour, I thought it was even more impressive that he specifically chose to be a superhero after his creation. It was a level of altruism I found inspiring. To be created for a purpose and to rise above and beyond it, all for the sake of helping people.
“I am technically the first member of the Teen Team,” Robot explained, gesturing around the halls as we walked and talked. “However, in time I made an initial connection with Cecil Stedman and the GDA, who put me in contact with the recruits that followed.”
“Dupli-Kate, Atom Eve, and Rex Splode, right?”
“Kate and Rex were already operators for the GDA in other functions before joining my group in earnest,” he confirmed with a nod, green lenses focused on me unerringly. “Eve, however, was a heroine in her own right before I extended a hand to her in fellowship.”
Considering the molecular control her powers gave her, I imagined she had a successful career on her own. It was, if nothing else, one of the more impressive superpowers I’d seen. Even if I had some strong opinions on how effectively she was using them. My knee-jerk responses also tended toward the lethal, so maybe my opinions weren’t as reliable as I first thought.
“And who pays for all of this anyway?” Most of the equipment present wasn’t the sort of thing that seemed to be a little something you could pick up on the private market. Unless the nature of this world’s technology that was accessible to civilians was a lot more generous than my own world.
It might have been my imagination, but I almost thought that Robot’s body stood a little taller at that question, preening in something that might even be pride. “Most of the Teen Team’s operations are funded wholesale by my own private tech patents, with a smaller subsidy coming from GDA resources.”
“So you’re bankrolling this by yourself.”
“That’s an overstatement, but essentially yes.” How could such a flat, robotic tone also contain such immeasurable levels of smugness? I had much to learn before I could hope to embody a potent young master archetype like Robot.
Before long we made it to what passed for the lounge area for the Teen Team, and to their credit, it did look comfy. A big, flatscreen television; a massive couch; a connected kitchen area; and other little odds and ends that made the entire place seem decidedly lived-in. In it too were the two superheroes I was hoping to meet.
For her part, Dupli-Kate was still in her superhero outfit, doomscrolling on her phone. Rex, next to her, was in what looked like a stripped-down version of his costume. No mask, no goggles or jacket, just the pants, as he lounged back on the couch and seemed totally engrossed in his video game.
Both of them looked up at our approach, and Kate at least had the politeness to put down her phone and get up. “Hey. You’re Taijitu, right? You really kicked ass out there yesterday.”
“That’s so,” I confirmed, giving her a smile in return. “Though, frankly, I wouldn’t have been able to focus on saving all those people if it wasn’t for your efforts in fighting our wayward invaders.”
“I mean, we are pretty cool,” Rex agreed.
“For those of you with superpowers, yeah,” I agreed readily. “And for the level of martial arts that Earth seems to be saddled with, you’re adequate.” The moment it left my mouth, I realized how unspeakably arrogant that must have sounded.
Whatever hope I had of the moment not causing genuine offense died, as something flickered across Kate’s face at those words. “What? I’m one of the best martial artists on the planet, and you’re saying you’re better than me?”
A low groan escaped Rex as he paused the game, dragging a hand down his face. “Oh boy, here we go again…”
“It’s not personal,” I added, holding up my hands to forestall any further complaints from the girl. “The fact of the matter is that earth-based martial arts seems to be rather middling from what I’ve seen. Perhaps it’s just the quality of the fighters, though?”
Kate could only give a scoff my way as she crossed her arms in front of her chest. “It must be nice to rely on your superpowers to bootstrap your way through fights, but some of us have to rely on basic human limitations.”
It was a statement that made me pause, an unfamiliar pang of anger rising inside of me at the insinuation that my martial arts were in any way coasting off my strength and speed. Did being superhumanly fast, tough, and strong help to deliver a certain oomph where there might not have been any? Certainly, I wasn’t going to pretend like it didn’t.
Yet to presume that I was some flying brick, without any manner of technique…
“In terms of pure, technical skill, I would put myself as the best martial artist on the planet. Bar none.”
“That title belongs to Best Tiger. Perhaps Darkwing as a very close second,” Robot commented from the side.
“Then I suppose neither of them has met me.” Oh, to be sure, everything about I was saying did come from a place of pure pride. However, that didn’t make it unjustified.
A muscle trembled in her jaw as Kate stared over at him. "...Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?”
I blinked. “Pardon?”
Robot tried to interject, too. “Kate, this seems a little—"
“No, no!” Rex stopped him, putting a hand on the rust-colored robot’s frame with a grin. “I wanna see where this goes.”
Kate continued, completely ignoring the other two in the room. “You’re saying you’re an exemplary martial artist, so let’s put that to the test. Me, you, in a proper spar.”
I didn’t have anything to prove and already knew what the most likely foregone conclusion was by humoring this situation. With that said, there was a competitive spirit that hadn’t been there before rising up inside of me. What was the point of being the best fighter on the planet, if only on a purely technical level, if I didn’t flex that mastery over other people?
Listen, I was trying to be a nice guy and do the right thing. But sometimes it wasn’t enough to win. Sometimes, another person also had to lose. It was a shame that this time around it was going to have to be Kate.
“Alright,” was my simple agreement, shrugging softly as a smile came over me. “I’m willing to humor you for a bit. Do you guys have a sparring space here?”
Robot didn’t sigh, but I got the feeling that he wanted to. Unfortunately, his robotic body precluded him from doing so. The weariness in his coming words was still plenty evident, though. “We have a sparring ring, built for reasonable encounters between peers.”
“Let’s go! Alien kungfu fight!” Rex yelled, pumping a fist in the air. “C’mon, let’s get this show on the road.”
That was how we found ourselves in a part of the base that was functionally just a spacious ring with a padded ground. The two of us stood equidistant from each other, with Robot standing at the center and Rex on the sidelines vibrating with excitement and amusement. For the sake of fairness, Robot had been designated as the proctor to ensure that I kept myself at the stated restriction of human limits.
Not that it’d make that much of a difference with what was about to happen.
“Are the fighters ready? I’ll state that for the record, there will be no strikes to the eyes, ears, or sexual organs of either fighter,” Robot declared, looking between both of us carefully.
“I’d have rather you not put that last part like that, but sure. I’m good for a clean fight,” I agreed readily.
Kate, now dressed in her costume, nodded along as well. “Same here.”
“Then on the count of three, you may begin.” Carefully, he stood stock still, staring straight ahead as his voice sounded off. “One…two…three, fight!”
And then it was on.
If I were a normal man, with equivalent rough physical capabilities to Kate, I might have been pressed. Even doing my best to limit myself to as close as human levels as possible, without any active chakra reinforcement, she might have had a genuine leg to stand on. The problem was that even with all of her exemplary technique, or her powers, I just had a few overwhelming advantages over her.
One of them was the fact that my reflexes, as they were, weren’t something I could turn off. It was too tied in to the alien neurology I now inhabited, so just seeing her move toward me felt like the world was in slow motion. As for the other advantage, that was a much simpler affair, derived from the memories I’d inherited.
I was, fundamentally, just a flat-out better martial artist than she was.
That couldn’t have been said of me before I’d ended up in this body. She would have been able to beat my ass like a rented drum with ease. The problem was that the taijutsu style that I possessed, frankly, just wasn’t something that could be overcome by any earthly style, unless there were practitioners of even higher skill on this world that I wasn’t aware of.
Fighting was fundamentally different when you could create your own leverage or were faced with even restrained superhuman strength, speed, and durability. Regular, mortal martial arts were not designed with these capacities in mind. Your average person could not reasonably disembowel their enemies with an outstretched knife hand through the stomach, not unless there was a significant size disparity between themselves and their target.
However, the form of taijutsu that I was familiar with could. It was designed, first and foremost, for fighting relative peers that would also be using shinjutsu of various stripes, to the point where they could reasonably counter everything you threw at them. Which meant to subjugate the Ōtsutsuki in question, you’d need to beat every living fuck out of them.
That wasn’t to say it was useless when scaled down to more terrestrial levels of combat. Hardly, seeing as it was built from the ground up for optimized biomechanics on a humanoid frame that was roughly equivalent to a human’s. Equal in all the ways that mattered, anyway, like joints, bones, and proportions.
When you had eyes so powerful that you could literally see the internal composition and movements of a person’s body, I imagined it wasn’t that hard to make a sort of ur-taijutsu style that broke things down to the brutal basics.
As she split off into three, I folded my hands behind my back and allowed her to rush toward me. One clone moved to my right, darting ahead of the rest of her to deliver a flying kick while the one to the left slid to try and take my feet from under me. All while the Kate in the middle was in the wings to cover whatever vector I tried to use to get away.
For a normal human of middling skill, this would have been a genuinely troublesome scenario. For me, it was child’s play to navigate through it.
“Splitting yourself this early was a mistake,” I commented idly, leaping toward the attacks, dodging through the narrow space between the first two Kates, almost going as flat as a plane in that moment as they swept above and below me.
All while the third came in to try and punch my face. She could have managed it, too, if it weren't for my foot planting against the ground and twisting me narrowly out of the way. “A much better use would have been to use your cloning as an attack, in itself, or a feint.”
The way she moved, the way she acted, everything about her martial arts style was laid bare to me the moment I saw her stance. And what I saw was that Kate was fond of swarm tactics, applied with her natural skill and coordination between clones. Yet that wasn’t enough to stop someone like me.
It was as if I knew how this entire fight was going to go from the moment that she initiated it, even without using my bullshit eye hacks. As unsettling as it was to have those ingrained combat instincts at first, they were beginning to grow on me.
“Is that all you’ve got?” I asked, arching a singular brow her way as the clones stumbled but quickly regained their footing. “Earth martial arts doesn’t seem very advanced from what I’m observing.”
That was enough to make a muscle in her jaw clench as I attacked her pride. However, Kate was smart enough not to react with speech and waste her breath that way. Instead she attacked me…but not before taking my advice.
A punch flowed into a new version of her, budding off and carrying into the momentum, while I caught the fist and used the force against her. That clone was sent flipping onto her back, but the main Kate was already moving, still shifting position, and reabsorbing another of her selves into her. It was the new tenor of the fight that she was establishing, learning as we fought, trying to test new avenues or ways to catch me off guard.
I was, if I was being honest, genuinely impressed. It was a level of adaptability that I didn’t think I’d get to see in a simple spar like this. Not that it mattered in the end, when it came down to it.
Three, five, eight—it didn’t matter how many versions of herself she practically threw at me, because the outcome was the same. I could nimbly weave my way through a flurry of blows without a care in the world, dipping and dodging with delicate steps here and there as she sweat and threw her all at trying to get me. All while doling out little bits of advice here and there.
“You should try to use your clones to amplify your natural acrobatics. Then again, that sort of flying movement is bound to leave you open.”
“I suspect your clones have some sort of sensory-sharing component. Maybe take advantage of that to attack more in concert, at my blindspots?”
“You’re letting your emotion get in the way of your actual technique. Try to clear your mind before you knock my lights out. Well, if you can.”
My goal here wasn’t to humiliate her. This was meant to be a friendly bout, and I genuinely did wish for her to improve.
It just happened to turn out like that, as slowly but surely, she began to see Mt. Tai cresting on the horizon. Especially as I sighed and changed my stance. Something about it, about the set of my shoulders or jaw, made her tense. All while that sanguine, peaceful expression on my face shifted into something more determined.
“I think that’s enough of a handicap. Allow me to retort.”
Keeping myself limited to purely human restraints of motion was harder than expected, though that was a point where my human memories came in handy. It allowed me to properly stay at merely a blisteringly fast rush as my fist slammed into the first and nearest clone, impacting against Kate’s diaphragm and dropping her to the ground.
A flinch went through the rest of her clonal network, yet it wouldn’t be the only one as I properly went to work. Despite the fact that they were surrounding me, I was darting through their strikes and attacks like flowing water. And wherever I was, there were punches or kicks that were dropping clones like sacks of potatoes.
Kate was an exemplary martial artist, even with all of the limitations that kept her from reaching her full potential. She was just a century too late to deal with someone with my level of skill and training.
Dropping into a roll, I moved between two clones, sweeping out my legs to knock them to the ground and then immediately kipping up. Moving toward a Kate coming at me from the side, I tilted my body to the side and allowed her punch to miss me by degrees before clotheslining her with just enough force to topple number six.
So it went until each of them was groaning on the ground as I stood without even breaking a sweat.
“You’re such bullshit…” One complained, rubbing her abdomen mournfully.
“And you didn’t even use your powers?” Another complained, looking up at me with a dubious expression.
“Not to the extent where it would have mattered for this fight,” I shrugged. “If I’d gone all out, I probably would have frozen Kate before we ever actually met in a clash.” Which was the truth. I just…really liked freezing things.
To a degree, one could argue it was a little unhealthy. Ice release was just too fun, though.
“So is your crazy alien kung fu just part of the powerset?” Rex asked, genuinely seeming interested in the answer. “Because you went like…K’CHAW! WAPOW!” He illustrated the point with a few exaggerated imitations of my own movements, much to my amusement.
“The Ōtsutsuki, provided nothing truly changes for us, can live for centuries. And the sort of distractions that exist for humans, like entertainment, reproduction for pleasure, and sincere social connections, just don’t tend to be priorities for most of us.” I folded my hands behind my back as I rolled my neck entirely. superfluous reasons. “During that time we do almost nothing but train in whatever fields of interest we find ourselves gravitating toward.”
“So the accumulation of power is the only worthwhile pursuit your people follow?” Robot accurately surmised.
I gave him a nod. “To the exclusion of everything else. However, it does give me plenty of experience to draw on for this sort of thing.”
“Your folks sound intense,” Rex bluntly stated, with the delicacy of a bull in a china shop.
It was too much for me not to laugh when things were phrased in such a way, a sharp bark escaping from me. “You’re not wrong! However, I’m happy to be one at the end of the day.”
“I hope to leave a different mark on this universe by the time I’m gone so that Ōtsutsuki means something considerably more hopeful.” A small smile tugged at the corners of my lips at those words. “Perhaps we can say your earthling habits of heroism have begun to rub off on me.”
“Think you can teach me some more of your moves, then?” Kate inquired as she began to reincorporate her clones. “I’ve always prided myself on my fighting skills, but it’s another thing to know I still have so far to go.”
“Well…” That was a good point. Did I want to spread my taijutsu style around…? Well, without chakra, I didn’t think she’d be able to use it to the fullest. But it couldn’t hurt. “Sure. There’s no reason why I can’t show you a few techniques and see what you make of them.”
To which Kate could only give me a beaming smile. The rest of the afternoon passed by in a much more friendly manner, now that the initial dick-measuring had been over and done with. Though, the competitiveness definitely started to come out of nowhere in me during it. Something to be wary of, I suppose.
As it was, though, I’d still call the team meeting relatively successful.
Author's Notes:
Ultimately, a lot of fun firsts are going on when it comes to meeting the Teen Team and getting a handle on their personalities. I had to go back and watch, but yeah, Kate is kind of arrogant in some of her abilities and capacity to handle certain threats. Which, y'know, pop off queen. The confidence is attractive for some people, I guess. Robot, outside of some ethical violations with cloning, is pretty reasonable, much like Cecil. I'm hoping I captured their personalities well enough, though.
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.