Despite how much fun I’d had with Robot, duties took their toll eventually. He had personal projects and Guardians of the Globe leadership business to attend to, and I had no intention of seeing him late to any of it. Despite that, we parted on good terms after an hour or so of collaboration, both in good spirits.
Well, I assumed he was in good spirits. His robotic affectation made it difficult to tell for sure sometimes.
It left me wandering around the expansive, GDA base on my lonesome. The portions that were accessible to me, anyway. Not that any amount of hiding would do much against the Byakugan I possessed, but it was also a trump card I didn’t quite feel like informing anyone about. Considering the range and forewarning it would give me against almost all threats, it felt like the sort of thing a guy should keep in his back pocket.
Not that I distrusted anyone in this new world of mine. Just that there was such a thing as trust, and then there was the kind of unconditional, blind trust that you gave to your closest friends and allies. Much as it saddened me to admit it, nobody on this planet would be as much of an advocate for me as me.
So until I knew I had a true, balls-to-the-wall friend, it’d be something that was kept to myself. That, and other little assets, like the Kama seal. Given that it was basically a back-up in case I died, that was an understandable response.
The base of the GDA itself was a vast facility, with all sorts of corridors that I probably wasn’t supposed to be able to see. Sections of the structure where there were all sorts of experiments and work going on that I frankly didn’t have the faintest idea as to their purpose. As much as I could see, I didn’t actually have the capacity to read lips.
Something I should probably pick up if I intend to use this power as much as I planned on. The added, fringe capability to see into the infrared was another Byakugan bit of bullshit, too, just not nearly as useful. Regardless, I didn’t need to sleep, and checking out another of the key facilities here that were open to the Guardians seemed to be a decent enough way to spend my time.
It was time to properly check out the gym.
One short walk there, and I found myself in a room that smelled faintly of sweat and more strongly of astringent chemicals used to clean up the various benches and items in the room. Around the space were all sorts of agents, some colorful enough to clearly be more superhuman GDA assets in their costumes. Others, more obviously and plainly normal humans.
Not for the first time since I’d arrived in this world, I was wondering how I was going to train the physical energies of my body. Because in order to do so, I was going to have to really stress the already impressive capabilities to the breaking point. Something that I suspected would be fundamentally easier said than done, considering my baseline.
When I was reinforcing my body with chakra, I was pumping straight past anything the vast majority of shinobi could ever hope to achieve. Strong enough to clear kilometers in seconds, strong enough to lift weights that were probably truly godlike in their scope. That was before getting into any future tricks I intended on picking up to make those standard statistics all the more laudable.
Power without a purpose was useless, and my purpose was to live a long, healthy life and to protect people. So I’d take anything I could on the road to that goal, provided it didn’t make me cross certain moral guidelines. As long as I didn’t have to sacrifice a civilization for power or become some unspeakable monster, I was pretty open-minded.
With that said, scanning my gaze over the gym, I didn’t think that there was any equipment built for someone like me in mind. The weights in the gym were primarily skewed to those within a human range of power, even those comic book peak humans, like Rex-Splode, Shrinking Rae, or Dupli-Kate, all of whom were in the gym now.
Perhaps Cecil would be willing to assist with some sort of training regimen…something to look into later.
“Yo,” I greeted, approaching the three Guardians clustered around the sparring ring. Well, Rex was mostly just on the periphery of the ring, watching Rae and Kate go at each other. “Did I miss anything?”
Rex shook his head as multiple Kates tried to pile on Rae, only for the brunette to shrink and slide out of the containment. “Nah. They hit the weights for a bit, but eventually Rae challenged Kate, and…well, you know how competitive she is.”
“We’re not on first-name bases again, ass,” one of the Kates responded, shooting him a glare, while the rest gave their all to the fight. “I’m still pissed at you.”
I blinked, glancing between the two of them. “I’m taking it that I missed something?”
Another Kate in the fray answered the question, two others trying to pin down the rapidly dodging Rae. “He’s the reason why Atom Eve never joined up with us. Because he’s a shitty liar.”
“You still smashed,” Rex pointed out.
“Yeah, because you told me you two broke up!” All three were responding in tandem, distracting the Kates enough for Rae to bring herself back up to full-size and land a vicious haymaker against one of them.
The attacked clone staggered back, and Rae didn’t hesitate to go on the offensive. If there was a problem with her style, it was that it proved a bit simple. Or maybe that wasn’t the right word. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was well designed for the purpose of enabling combat with her power. In my eyes, it just was more tuned for a brawler than anything else.
I dunno. Having all this space alien taijutsu in my brain made me a real fucking critic when it came to someone’s fighting style, and it was still a little weird. I’d gone from barely ever throwing a punch to knowing precisely how to dismantle someone of my rough size, strength, and speed in a head-on conflict.
There was still the matter of what Kate had said, though, as I raised my hands and stepped onto the ring. “Woah, woah, woah, time out. What the hell happened exactly? Because I feel like I’m missing a few steps here.”
At that point the sparring had come to a stop, with Shrinking Rae sharing no small amount of curiosity in her features as well. “I won’t lie, I’m a little surprised. Thought you guys were supposed to be tight with her.”
Good lord, that was a thick Brooklyn accent.
Rex winced and moved to open his mouth. But not quick enough to beat out Kate, as she fused back into one for the conversation. “This asshole told me he broke up with Eve, and I’ll admit, was it my best hour to fuck him? No, obviously not, especially not when Eve walked in on us, very much not aware that they’d broken up!”
“And I apologized for that, okay? I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Rex. I and Eve were friends, and now she thinks I’m kind of a boyfriend-stealing slut because you said she was dating Invincible!” Her voice was genuinely getting heated now, and frankly, I couldn’t say she was wrong to be mad like this.
“Yeah, you were really concerned about being seen that way when I told you we just broke up,” Rex stated, making the girl flinch at the reminder. “Didn’t stop you from hopping on the splosion-ride, now did it?”
And, to Rex’s credit, he did have a point. No matter how you wanted to cut it, getting with your good friend’s ex that quickly after they broke up was kind of a shitty move. Unless, well, you weren’t actually that good friends to begin with.
There were a lot of things that I hadn’t much experience with, and this level of interpersonal drama was one of them. I cleared my throat, though, trying to change the subject. “Okay, uh, that certainly clears up why she didn’t want to join the Guardians of the Globe.”
“It was my bad,” Rex reaffirmed once again, looking rather morose about the whole situation. “Eve also made it very clear that trying to make it up to her isn’t welcome, so…nothing else to do but accept I screwed the pooch.”
Rae scoffed, shooting Rex a dubious stare. “S’alittle more than just a screw-up, isn’t it?”
“Listen, I’ve already gotten my ass kicked, which is obviously karma kicking in,” the older teen admitted, gesturing at his still bruised face. “What’s done is done, and I won’t be going for round two anytime soon.”
Kate crossed her arms, still looking sour about the whole affair. “Damn right you won’t…”
Hmm. Things needed to be cleared up, and frankly, I hadn’t expected this from Rex. Maybe it was just because I’d never thought he was that type of person to cheat. Then again, he’d shown himself to be immature, a braggart, loudmouthed, and a bit childish. Kate hadn’t come off smelling like roses either, though.
When someone shows you who they are, the least you could do was believe them. As bad as this was, at least it wasn’t as bad as X-Men melodrama.
“Let’s clear the air,” I spoke up, not really intending on defending Rex or Kate in the slightest here. They’d both fucked up in different ways, it’d been acknowledged, and trying to continually hammer him about the point wasn’t serving any productive ends. “Kate, I did promise you a martial arts lesson, didn’t I?”
Like a dime, I could see some genuine enthusiasm filter in through her expression. “That actually sounds like a better use of our time.”
“Excuse me?” Rae asked, mildly affronted. “I’m a good enough fighter on my own.”
What was with all these teenagers and their overweening pride? Wait. I think I just answered my own question there.
“As much as I hate to admit it, Genji’s probably the best martial artist that I’ve ever met,” Kate spoke, gesturing over to me. “If you want to get better at fighting with your hands, there probably isn’t anyone else I can think of who’d be better. Maybe Best Tiger.”
“Second time you’ve brought that guy up, but I still can’t believe there’s someone with that name.” She has to be screwing with me. That’s too silly of a name; it’s like something pulled from Hong Kong action cinema!
“He’s a Chinese hero,” she confirmed, because truly what other nation could create a martial artist with that name? “Mostly uses guns, but he’s really, really good at pretty much any weapon he puts his hands on.”
I now had someone I would genuinely like to challenge to a spar. Partially because I wanted the challenge, seeing as I didn’t think I’d just run into someone with that innate skill needed to push me to my limits at random. And partially because how could I claim to be the best martial artist on the planet if I hadn’t earned the title?
“We’re getting off topic,” I sighed, closing my eyes. “You’re more than welcome to stick around too, Rae, if you want to learn a thing or two. And Rex…?”
“I get the feeling I’m not wanted here,” Rex admitted, taking a hint for perhaps the first time I’d ever seen. “The main man himself can see that he has, perhaps, overstayed his welcome.”
A scoff came from Kate. “The main man should stop referring to himself in third person.”
“Also fair. Catch you bozos later!” With that, he stalked out of the gym, a saunter in his step that perhaps seemed like just a hint of forced cheer was put into his gait.
Maybe the events of the day had affected him more than he’d like to let on.
Either way, I turned to face the two women with a deceptively innocent smile. “Now that we’ve got the ring to ourselves, you two can come at me however you like. After that, I’ll give some advice.”
“Two on one?” Rae frowned, eyebrows furrowing together behind her glasses. “Isn’t that unfair?”
“It isn’t,” Kate quickly responded, already beginning to divide. “Presuming he limits himself to human capabilities, we still might not be enough.”
There was just the slightest hint of arrogance in my smirk as I looked over at the two women. “Trust me, I won’t need my full speed or strength to take care of either of you.”
“Big words,” Shrinking Rae commented, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses.
“Unfortunately, they’re ones that he can back up,” Dupli-Kate admitted as everyone got settled into the fighting mat.
It was enough to bring a smile to my face. “Flatterer. It won’t stop me from putting you onto the mat, but I appreciate the praise. Feel free to do so more.”
She rolled her eyes and, in that same moment, jolted forward, not even intending on waiting for an official start to the match to come at me. The smart thing to do, arguably, seeing as she was fully aware of what I was capable of. Rae seemed shocked but followed after the Asian teenager just as quickly.
Not that I thought it would avail either of them in the end. Didn’t mean I wouldn’t say that they were smart to keep doing everything in their power to stack as many advantages as humanly possible. In a fight, that was the only thing anyone could do to come out on top.
Kate split into three and did the logical thing, which was trying to surround me but not drown me in bodies. She’d already tried that before, and frankly, it hadn’t worked the first time. Distracting me, though, was obviously her goal, given I saw the brief and full-of-meaning look she shot Rae before beginning her attack.
On my other side, Shrinking Rae seemed to be circling me, and it wasn’t too tough to sus out what her strategy was. Darting in when I seemed to be distracted, and then just shrinking down to do…whatever it was that shrinking women did to poor, unsupervised men. If I couldn’t see in 360 around me, maybe it would have even worked.
All she got for her trouble was a nimble dodge when she finally tried to shrink down and land on my robes. And then right after, I slid smoothly out of the way and delivered a series of punches to the nearest Kate clone that dropped her to the ground like a sack of potatoes. A general pattern that rapidly continued as the fight progressed.
“You’re dragging that leg, Kate.”
“See how I’m overpowering you, Rae? Try to break that habit of meeting my force with your own.”
“I dunno how much pain is shared between those clones of yours, but you need to tighten it up or fight through it. It was only a kidney shot…”
There it went, as I shot out little rejoinders and constructive criticism, the longer the spar went on. For their part, they did their best to try and handle me however they could…as meager as those efforts proved in the end. By the time I called for a break, both of them were sweating and panting while I looked practically pristine.
“You’re such bullshit…” Kate groaned, having subsumed her other clones and collapsed on the ground, looking up at me with begrudging admiration.
“I am,” I freely admitted. “But nothing I did was faster than you could have done if you didn’t apply yourself accordingly.”
“It didn’t feel that way,” Rae complained, adjusting her glasses. “Felt like I was a newbie all over again in MMA class.”
A snort escaped me as I began to think over their individual issues. “That’s just what happens when you fight a grandmaster like me.”
If I had to still put what the common problem was between the two of them, though, it was the fact that they were still subject to human limitations. Their powers were largely utility-based, despite the fact that I was certainly wary of Shrinking Rae’s already named power. My Byakugan was the only reason I could even track her when she went tiny, and I was very careful not to allow her entrance to any orifice wherein she might commit mischief.
There were some things I never wanted to experience, and being penetrated by a woman was one of them.
Like I’d observed before, Kate’s fighting style was ultimately hampered by the fact that she was limited primarily by very human strength and speed. Definitely scraping the peak for her gender, age range, and build, to be sure, but that might as well have made her an invalid against some of the other threats.
Rae, meanwhile, was a sneaky little brawler. I meant that in a literal sense, in that most of her tactics willfully involved trying to enter someone’s orifice to fuck with their internals, which seemed endlessly disgusting to me. But when you had a hammer, everything looked like a nail. I wouldn’t begrudge her the tactic if it actually worked.
The problem was that it didn’t with me, because I could constantly track her location when she was big and small. That meant she had to rely on more typical avenues of attack. Changing her size at random, for instance, to try and bait me into striking somewhere she wouldn’t be. That almost did manage to trip me up until I got used to the strategy of hers.
It was basically what I told them when all was said and done.
“Both of you, on a fundamental level, just need to put away the hope of brute force when it comes to your opponents,” I flat-out admitted, glancing between the two women. “You’re both just not built that way.”
Kate obviously knew that but still frowned. “What would you suggest?”
I gestured toward both of them with my hands. “Generally? You should be emphasizing reorienting my greater strength toward your advantage.” Then I paused again, frowning. “Of course, I should reiterate, this only works against someone you can practically react to. Someone like Omni-Man, me, hell, even Invincible when he’s strong enough, would probably not allow for it to be workable.”
These were just fundamental, human flaws that I wasn’t subjected to but couldn’t ignore anymore. Unless they were the flying brick, like the Immortal used to be, the fact of the matter was just that they couldn’t practically rely on doing anything against threats of a certain caliber. The Flaxans were already pushing the upper boundaries of what I thought Kate could even be capable of at that point.
Humming softly, I gave it some further thought before an epiphany struck me. “How does your suit work?”
“My suit?” Kate blinked, glancing down at the number on her chest. “The GDA studied my power and somehow got a sort of signature off of it to track my clones that bud off of me. Robot did manage to figure out their work and make some further modifications.”
Huh. Well, considering that Robot was without a shadow of a doubt one of the smartest people I’d ever met in either of my lives, that didn’t feel too surprising. If there was anyone who could intuit supernatural mechanics that well without the assistance of an entire think tank, it felt like it might be him. It did mean, though, that there was something that someone could connect a greater concept onto.
“A couple of follow-up questions.”
“Shoot.”
"What are the exact mechanics of your duplication? Is it items as well, or purely biological?”
She hummed, crossing her arms in front of her chest as the girl thought over the question. “When I was a kid, my brother and I were studied to hell and back. So the lab nerds basically figured out that the mechanism copies our bodies and whatever’s within a few centimeters of our skin.”
“That…” I smiled as I felt an idea beginning to come on. “We can very much work with that. I won’t have any promises, but I might be able to create a very, very snug suit that can boost your strength, speed, and durability.”
The problem for Kate, and pretty much any other human, was that they could not actually combine their physical and mental energies to create chakra. However, what if they had an external method to do it for them? It wouldn’t be as efficient, probably, or nearly as effective. But speaking as someone who purely relied on reinforcing their body with chakra for a lot of the physical feats I achieved, even a fraction of my performance would be a gamechanger for squishy folks like Rex, Rae, and Kate.
“Really?” She blinked. “I mean…that’d be…”
“A gamechanger,” Rae finished, an eager glint in her own eyes. “Is that something you can do for me, too?”
“I can’t see why not, though your power functions off a less overtly supernatural method than Kate’s,” I admitted. “If you’re looking for a purely conventional super suit that can operate off of your power’s framework, I think just straight up asking Robot would be a better plan.”
It wasn’t hard to see the brunette’s trepidation. “I dunno, he seems a bit intense. Would he really do that for me?”
Given that most people weren't that familiar with Robot, the typical lack of inflection and poise might have genuinely made him hardly all that personable. When you got to know him, though? It was clear that the AI was hardly all that unlikable, let alone devoid of emotion. In fact, it was rather obvious that he cared a great deal for everyone around him. He just might be a little awkward to show it.
“Robot just seems like that, but he’s cool,” Kate vouched for her friend. “Super loyal. I don’t think there’s a bad bone in his body.”
Rae arched a brow toward Kate. “He’s a robot.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Either way,” I interrupted, glancing between the two women. “If we’re talking about the last thing that’d help, I think that would seriously be something that could boost your effectiveness as Guardians.”
Did I think either of them would be in a position to save my life anytime soon? Personally, no, but I didn’t know how much of that was overweening arrogance and overestimation of my own abilities. I’d said it before, and I’d say it again; this was a superhero setting. There was no telling what kind of obscure, overpowered threat from within the earth or outside of it might turn out to come from nowhere.
“Anyway, when it comes to real, actionable advice that I could give in any real timely fashion, that’s it.”
“But we can continue the martial arts lessons into the future, right?” Kate pressed.
Rae nodded eagerly too. “I wasn’t sure about it in the beginning. You actually know yourself, though.”
“I have a perfect understanding of the body’s biomechanical range of motion by the capacity of being able to actually see inside of your bodies,” I admitted, shrugging softly. “It’d be insane if I couldn’t leverage that into being a peerless martial artist.”
“Humble,” Rae smirked.
“It’s just the reality of the situation. Like how I’m terrified of you shrinking down and getting somewhere private, to destroy me from the inside,” I fully admitted. “Though to do the most damage, I suspect you’d need to be superhumanly strong and tough to really expand from the inside of an opponent to drop them that way.”
It was an idea that had obviously occurred to Rae before, judging by the blink-and-you'll-miss-it expression that shuttered across her features. “It’s not something I haven’t already thought about, but…” She shrugged, looking uncomfortable with the idea. “I’ve never done that sort of thing before, either.”
“Well, call it a desperation move. We’ll try my plan first and see if Robot can replicate some sort of similar suit to what I have planned for Kate, for your own shrinking capabilities.”
It felt like the sort of project that he wouldn’t even be against. Or maybe I could take it up, though with the caveat that everything would be running off of chakra. A significantly more strategic resource on this Earth, seeing as I was the only one who could actually produce the stuff.
"There are a couple of things that we can practice now, though, if you guys are game.” While I might not have been able to wave a hand and produce the suits in an instant, I could still teach them a bit of taijutsu. “Listen closely, and follow my motions. If someone within an appropriate range of strength and speed comes at you, you’re going to want to try to flip them like this…”
I didn’t know how the last set of Guardians of the Globe ended up, but I had no intention of allowing this new iteration of the team to follow in their footsteps. By hook or by crook, I’d drag them kicking and screaming into competence and combat effectiveness if it were the last thing I did.
Author's Notes
Things have mostly continued apace as I try to establish the basic characters of the rest of the Guardians. If you're gonna care about these characters, it's just the smart thing to do. While also setting the ground level for how Taijitu is going to help them be more effective superheroes.
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.