A week went by in a flash.
Everyone in the group was busy with their own business.
Amiya was splitting her time between looking after her parents and studying under the Doctor, and might be heading out on a longer trip before long.
Yuji was training with Megumi, and word was a new member would be joining them soon.
Clark, unsurprisingly, had landed an internship at the Daily Planet.
Reading between the lines, it looked like the person mentoring him was Lois Lane.
The Emperor hadn’t shared any update on his main project, but seemed to be researching ways to cross over safely.
Meanwhile, things on Ritsuka’s end had gone unsettlingly quiet — maybe she’d sensed something too, given how diligently she’d been knocking out her daily quests.
Leon hadn’t been sitting idle either.
Know your enemy, and you’ll win every battle.
Over the course of the week, he’d combed through a mountain of footage of Omni-Man online.
Not that any of it turned out to be worth much — his own commanding officer had spent twenty years playing the role of a T0-tier goalkeeper for himself.
Online, the looks fanbase outnumbered the strength fanbase, and since Omni-Man’s whole niche overlapped with The Immortal’s, he was constantly getting stomped in fan debates, dragged out and mocked with cherry-picked examples.
“Took him forever just to handle the Mauler Twins — The Immortal would one-shot him!”
That was the great and glorious Nolan for you — practically never once showing his full power in twenty years.
Because of all that, all Leon could really do was train daily.
On top of that, the group’s resident big brain, the Emperor, had personally field-tested and confirmed: food redeemed with points had a shockingly good effect on restoring stamina.
That discovery turned out to be a huge help.
First off, praise be to the Emperor.
Second…
Right now, Leon was floating near Pluto, waiting for Nolan.
Gazing at that famous heart-shaped region on the brown planet below, he pulled up the chat group to check the time.
The scheduled time had already come and gone, with no sign of the man.
That wasn’t like a Viltrumite at all.
A man who’d gone on to single-handedly wipe out the Guardians in one brutal push wouldn’t get careless about something like this.
Either he’d gotten held up by some hero business,
“Or — the training’s actually already started—”
A chill ran down Leon’s spine.
He spun around fast.
That red-and-white blur — Viltrum’s finest — had already built up who-knows-how-much speed, and was now less than a hundred meters off.
In the blink of an eye, a fist was already right in front of him.
His reflexes kicked in instantly, snapping into the best possible response.
Turning to face Nolan, his smart-atoms carved out anchor points beneath both feet, and he bent his knees and kicked off.
Pushing himself back as far as he could, angling away to shave down some of the incoming momentum.
The instant the fist connected, the hand he’d braced with got driven straight into his own pectoral muscle.
His left hand seized the opening and swung back, slamming straight into Nolan’s nose.
Crack.
He could hear three separate fractures — both hands, and his ribs.
A pitiful exchange rate for the damage he’d dealt in return. This story is hosted at g.com.
That was the gap in stats between a nearly-thousand-year-old Viltrumite and an eighteen-year-old rookie.
Emotion Amplification!
Skill activated — pain and pressure smelted together into blazing fighting spirit, and Leon’s smart-atoms surged, pumping raw power into his body.
After that clash — over in under a second — he gave up all control of his own flight, grinning wide, letting the force of the blow carry him wherever it wanted.
Away from Nolan, plummeting straight toward Pluto’s heart-shaped basin.
“Solid reaction.
Commendable fighting spirit.”
Watching Leon rapidly shrink into a tiny dot, Nolan wiped away a trickle of blood from his nose and gave chase.
The battlefield shifted to Pluto — a thin, freezing atmosphere.
Barely a few meters into re-entry, Leon already heard the sound of Nolan tearing through the air behind him, that steadily growing silhouette threatening to fill his entire field of vision.
“Commander, are you sure that injury won’t affect your infiltration mission?”
“Don’t get cocky.”
Nolan’s reply came short and clipped over the comm channel.
The punch followed right behind his words.
Leon’s muscles snapped taut in an instant, arms and legs flaring out into a hard stop.
His whole body twisted in a strange, sideways glide, slipping clean past Nolan’s fist.
Mid-spin, his left hand wrapped around his own right fist, aiming an elbow strike at the temple Nolan had just grazed past.
Sure enough, Nolan chose to block — but that was just the setup.
His hands sprang open, right arm hooking under from the triceps to catch the guarding hands.
The real killing blow was — a haymaker aimed straight at the ribs!
With a thunderous crack, Leon’s drawn-back left hand vanished, only to reappear the next instant already buried in Nolan’s muscle.
That very second, as the fist sank deep, ripples began spreading across the surface of Nolan’s battle suit.
And Leon’s own hand bones snapped, a few fragments already pressing up visibly against his skin.
The shockwave from the impact swept the surrounding mist clean away, punching a crater into the planet’s surface.
Second one: Nolan went flying backward, only managing to right himself and stop after a dozen-odd meters.
Clutching his ribs, his expression full of disbelief, he didn’t even notice the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
Third second: Nolan flickered right back to Leon, and, driven by fury, slammed him straight into Pluto’s icy crust.
The surface bloomed outward in a shower of shattered ice spanning over a hundred meters, massive cracks radiating out from the point of impact.
Leon fought back without yielding, and Nolan rode the momentum straight into a Viltrumite Plow.
A dead-straight line carved itself across the surface.
Every so often, the collision between the two of them punched a fresh dent into the ground along the way.
Finally, the two of them slammed together into a towering mountain range.
Once the dust cleared, Leon’s hand-blade was pressed right up against Nolan’s throat, while Nolan’s own fist hung suspended right above Leon’s head.
Cold seeped into his body, his mind slowly cooling along with it.
He realized — this round of training was over.
“How’d I do, Commander?”
“I won’t skimp on the praise.
You’ve lived up to what Kregg saw in you.”
Truth be told, he’d once entertained the thought of using this exact opportunity to kill Leon.
Viltrum belonged to the victor either way — no matter what happened, dying during training was purely the loser’s own problem.
If you’re not good enough, why are you dying?
But in the end, he’d talked himself out of it.
His own kid could awaken his powers at any moment, and he needed to be fully prepared for the conquest ahead.
The decision had proven itself right — however slim the odds, Leon genuinely had it in him to kill Nolan.
And whether it was his imagination or not, this kid just kept getting tougher the more they fought.
“You’re not particularly strong, but your ability to whip up emotion and your flight skills more than make up for it.
Plenty of veterans can’t manage what you just did.”
Nolan reached a hand out toward Leon.
He really had changed.
Not that this counted as going easy on him — for a Viltrumite past their coming-of-age ceremony, needing someone to pull you back up to your feet was proof enough of weakness.
Word was, that used to earn you a hand-chop too, back in the day.
Leon didn’t take the hand.
He nodded, pushed himself up on his own, and started tending to his injuries.
While he worked, Nolan studied the young man, roughly the same age as his own son.
Similar features around the eyes, but sharper.
“Kregg told me — back on the homeworld, you’re known as the kid who landed a punch on the Grand Regent.”
“Ahem.”
Leon kept wrapping his wounds.
It was a little embarrassing, honestly — he’d started out as the weakest of that entire batch of infants.
The godlike Grand Regent had gathered up all the newborns for a show of strength, to boost morale across the species, while at the same time planning to sacrifice this one particular weakling as an offering.
One picked out of nine — that already counted as mercy.
Right around then, Leon had happened to cross over — opened his eyes to find himself in a crew-cut, bearded baby’s body, and honestly, it would’ve been harder not to throw a punch.
Luckily, things had worked out well enough that Thragg decided to let him live.
Nolan didn’t say much else after that, and headed back to Earth first.
Leon took stock of his injuries right there on the spot.
“Once-a-week training, and conservatively speaking, that’s eight or nine fractures and one broken hand.”
Undeniably, though, he really had gotten stronger.
The power that had surged with his emotions hadn’t faded — his enhanced body was gradually locking that state in, even through all the pain.
Combined with the growth from his two skills, next time, he should be able to trade blows with Nolan for longer, and his hands probably wouldn’t shatter quite so fast.
Damn it, Viltrumite education.
You win.
Once he’d patched himself up, Leon didn’t head back right away.
The time was about right, so he chose to stay put and watch the countdown on his screen hit zero.
[Ding — chat group update complete.
New features as follows…]
To be continued…