Los had chosen to fight Steve, ranked 18, for more than one reason.
It wasn’t purely to put the rest of the school on notice.
It was also to show Godolkin a measured portion of what he could actually do.
In the days since arriving, his X-ray Vision had shown him what was happening beneath the campus: a number of the experimental subjects in the underground laboratories had died.
The replacements came from somewhere.
That somewhere was the lower-ranked students.
Sitting on his hands indefinitely wasn’t going to work.
He needed to demonstrate some real combat capability.
The match began.
Los kept his eyes on Steve throughout.
Through his X-ray Vision, he could read the pressure building in the muscles of Steve’s legs, the blood vessels compressing and pulling tight through the tissue, and from that he could read the charging attack before it fully committed.
Read.
Predict.
So in the instant Steve launched forward, Los shifted left almost simultaneously, rotating his shoulder, slipping the bear-hug attempt by a margin that looked like it shouldn’t have been enough.
“Not bad reflexes, kid.”
Steve laughed, not frustrated at all, his tongue running over his lips.
Like a hunter who had just located something worth chasing.
A target too easy to beat wasn’t any fun.
He wanted a real fight, something that brought the whole crowd to its feet.
Something worth the applause.
Steve pivoted, came back around, and attacked again, his broad palm swinging at Los’s head like a millstone.
Los ducked.
The palm grazed the very top of his hair and kept going.
The way Los moved made Steve’s enormous frame look slow and lumbering by comparison.
From the stands: “Come on, Steve.
Is this really all you’ve got?”
“Step down and let someone who can actually land a hit have a turn.”
“Hold on.”
The jokes from the stands got through.
Steve’s eyes went level.
He bore down.
Under Los’s X-ray Vision, almost every blood vessel across Steve’s body compressed at once.
His blood began moving at a speed that had nothing to do with an ordinary human.
The next moment.
The Steve who had already looked powerful became something different.
His agility and speed stepped up an entire tier and he drove himself at Los again, wind audible around him as he closed the distance.
In the stands, Golden Boy’s fist closed hard.
“There it is.”
Steve’s primary ability: physical enhancement.
A body multiplied to several times its human baseline.
Almost in the same instant that Los read the shift in his opponent’s body, Steve was already on him.
The shadow from that massive frame dropped over Los completely.
“Done.”
Steve grinned, and facing a non-combat ability user, he abandoned his own defense entirely, arms thrown wide to close the bear hug.
It was a wall.
Raw numbers crushed the comparison, regardless of reaction speed.
In the stands, Jordan closed her eyes.
She couldn’t watch.
Then a gasp rippled through the crowd around her.
Jordan opened her eyes.
It wasn’t Steve bearing down on Los.
It was Steve’s massive body stumbling backward.
On the field, Los stood in his hooded jacket, locked in the follow-through of a punch.
Steve clutched his lower abdomen, recovered after two staggering steps, and stared at Los with something stunned and fixed in his face.
He couldn’t work out why Los’s fist had felt like iron.
A non-combat ability user who could hit hard enough to send him backward.
“Again.”
Steve came at him a second time, throwing a straight punch.
This time Los didn’t move out of the way.
He drew his right arm back, bowing it like a loaded spring, and threw his own punch to meet it.
Fist against fist.
Boom.
Steve’s sandbag-sized fist and Los’s gloved fist connected head-on with a heavy, loaded crack.
Neither of them moved.
It was even.
“Impossible.
Again.”
Steve refused to accept it and kept swinging.
“Come on then.” Los matched every one.
Back and forth across the training ground, the two of them traded raw, direct, unrestrained punches, both of them putting everything behind each one.
The crowd that had been cheering solidly for Steve began to go quiet.
What everyone had expected to be a one-sided match had been dragged to a full standstill by a student ranked in the three hundreds.
The noise died down.
Then something shifted.
Students started switching sides.
Voices calling for Los broke through the crowd.
Godolkin ran on the law of the jungle, and strength moved people here faster than anything else could.
In the stands, the female students who had been watching Steve started looking at someone else.
Worth mentioning.
Los was actually good-looking.
Tall and lean, clean sharp features, and a smile when he used it that landed well.
Not a step below Golden Boy, honestly.
And here he was in the arena, ranked somewhere in the three hundreds, taking on a top-twenty student without backing down once.
That was the kind of story people got behind.
Golden Boy and Anderson sat side by side in the stands and registered something that made neither of them comfortable: the noise for Los was climbing.
It had started to overtake the noise for Steve.
On the field.
His fists were going numb.
Another exchange.
The glove on Los’s right hand finally gave out under the accumulated impacts, splitting open.
Underneath, a thin strip of cold metallic light was visible.
“What is that?” Steve’s eyes went wide.
Los peeled both broken gloves off.
What he revealed, fitted exactly to the surface of his arms from knuckles to mid-forearm, was a layer of armor.
Thin, precisely engineered, finished like a precision craft object, and jet black.
Los curled the armored fingers into a loose fist and looked at Steve plainly.
“This is part of what my ability does.
Not against the rules, is it?”
These arm guards were something he had built recently, combining his matter conversion ability with what he had absorbed from the Stark Industries knowledge base.
The primary material was titanium alloy.
Not in the same category as the molecularly reinforced titanium alloy used in Stark’s earlier armor, but more than enough for this.
“You haven’t won yet.”
Steve drove at him again.
“It’s already over.”
Los shook his head.
His X-ray Vision had already given him what he needed: the load in Steve’s body running thin, and the exact structural weak points in the human frame.
He stepped sharply to the side as Steve came through, let the charge carry past him, and in the same motion his armored hands closed around Steve’s outstretched right arm.
Working with the forward momentum Steve had already committed to, Los twisted at the waist and drove his weight through.
A clean shoulder throw.
Steve, two meters and more of him, was lifted into the air and came down hard onto the field.
Silence.
The entire arena.
Not a word from anyone.
Nearly every student had gone completely still.
Steve lay on the ground, working through the pain and the ringing in his head, and pushed himself toward getting up.
Los locked both his arm joints from behind, applying just enough pressure to hold them, and said quietly:
“I’ve heard you have another ability.
Healing broken arms.
Do you want to test it?”
Steve met Los’s eyes.
He shuddered.
His head shook before he’d consciously decided to shake it.
He could heal broken arms, yes.
The healing was real enough.
The part that came before the healing was also very real.
The cold of Los’s armored hands settled into his joints.
Steve thought it over and said flatly:
“I concede.”
****
…
where did he create them?…ugh, seems like this is going to be a story where the MC pulls stuff out of his ass, the