“The problem isn’t the design of the tester,” Tony said, from his console, still 50 meters away.
“The problem is that I designed the tester for realistic upper limits.
So we go indirect.” He was already pulling up the methodology.
“We can’t measure your peak punch.
But we can measure your sustained push, separately measure your punch speed, and have JARVIS combine the vectors.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“The disc.
Flip upside down and push it toward the ground with everything you have — like you’re trying to push an asteroid into the planet.”
Leon floated up, inverted, and pressed both palms flat against the top face of the disc.
“Going to full strength,” he said.
“Maximum force,” Tony confirmed.
“Give me everything.”
The number appeared on Tony’s screen.
It climbed through 7 digits and through 8 and then entered 9-digit territory, and Tony’s hand, which had been moving a stylus across his tablet, quietly stopped.
He watched the display.
It was still climbing.
From the meadow, distantly, he could hear something — a kind of sustained low pressure in the air, the sound of force being applied to an immovable object by something that was not checking whether the object was ready.
Then Leon roared, and the numbers peaked, and began fluctuating around a plateau.
“Okay,” Tony said.
His voice was entirely normal, which required some effort.
“What’s the reading?”
“360,000,000 kilograms.” Tony paused.
“360,000 tons of push force.
JARVIS is modeling the single-arm contribution at somewhere between 140,000 and 190,000 tons.”
The line went quiet for a moment.
“That’s high,” Leon said.
It is, Tony did not say.
It’s high by a significant margin.
A recently debuted Kryptonian in a DC film I watched for research purposes has a published strength estimate of around 800,000 tons.
You’ve done 140,000 to 190,000 in 6 months of which half was spent in orbit.
He did not say any of this because he had not fully processed it yet.
“Such power,” Leon said, “is basically sufficient for most threats I’d encounter on this planet.”
“Right,” Tony said.
“But it’s still not enough.”
Tony looked up from his screen.
“The Earth,” Leon said, very calmly, “is a small pond.
The things outside the pond that could threaten what matters on this planet are not 140,000 tons.
They are considerably more than that.
Tony rolled his eyes.
He operated the calibration panel and said nothing about how a man with 140,000 tons of single-arm force had just described his own strength as a deficiency.
He simply moved on to the next test.
“Punch speed,” he said.
“Not full destructive force — use the fastest speed your bio-force field can sustain without breaking containment.
Think: maximum combat speed.”
Leon thought about it.
“If I exceed the threshold where the field can contain the shockwave, we get a repeat of the garage.
So I’ll use the fastest speed that stays just inside containment at full exertion.”
“Correct.”
Leon stepped onto the disc, planted his feet, and ran through the physical preparation: waist compression, hip rotation, shoulder loaded.
A standard straight punch, technically correct, all the mechanics properly sequenced.
Tony watched from 50 meters away, frame rate set to maximum on every sensor he had.
In Tony’s visual field, Leon’s arm did not move.
There was no visible arc.
No blur, no streak, no visible transition between coiled and extended.
One instant the arm was back; then the number appeared on the display.
Tony looked at it for a moment.
“Mach 32,” he said.
“Just under.”
“A bit slow,” Leon said.
Tony put both hands flat on the console and breathed through his nose.
“To be clear,” he said carefully, “you’re describing Mach 32 as slow.”
“Without the bio-force field limitation I could go significantly faster.
But past that containment threshold—” Leon gestured generally at where the garage used to be.
“So that’s the usable ceiling for now.”
Tony wiped his face with both hands.
“JARVIS,” he said.
“Give him the physics.”
“Of course, Mr.
Stark.” JARVIS’s voice was, as ever, completely level.
“Master Leon, using the push-force data and the velocity measurement: a single-arm punch at Mach 31 acceleration, exerted at maximum force, would produce an impact of approximately 1,000,000,000,000 newtons over a contact duration of roughly 4 milliseconds.” A brief pause.
“This is equivalent to approximately 24,000 Hiroshima-class atomic detonations occurring at a single point.”
Tony slammed his palm on the console.
“360,000,000 tons of TNT equivalent!
And that’s before accounting for the reduced contact area of a fist concentrating that force into a smaller surface — which increases the pressure per square centimeter significantly further!”
“To summarize,” JARVIS added, with no change of tone whatsoever, “Master Leon is currently a freely mobile high-yield thermonuclear event with effectively unlimited ammunition.”
Tony took two careful breaths.
My annoying little brother, he thought, looking across the meadow at the person who had argued with him about cover girls and Columbia University and who had, apparently, been carrying around the rough equivalent of the global nuclear arsenal in each arm this entire time.
“Significantly insufficient,” Leon said.
“I need to ask you something genuinely.” Tony leaned forward.
“When we were growing up.
Did I not—was there something that made you feel unsafe?
That made you feel like you needed to be this strong?”
Leon was quiet for a moment.
“Tony, you were wonderful,” he said.
“You carried me to parties around your neck.
You introduced me to cover models.
You bought me 16 birthday cakes the year I turned 5 because you kept forgetting which size I wanted and bought an entirely new one each time rather than ask.”
“That was—”
“That was you.
And you protected me fine.” Leon pressed the earpiece.
“My reasons for wanting strength are my own and we can talk about them another time.”
The actual reason, he thought privately, was spending 12 years waking up at 3 AM wondering whether a knock at the door was the Time Management Bureau coming to delete a timeline.
The actual reason was learning, early and permanently, what it felt like to have information and no capability to act on it.
The actual reason was that powerlessness had a specific texture he had no interest in ever wearing again.
Tony let a beat pass.
“So it has nothing to do with me taking home cover models when you were 4 and you wanted revenge using the mass-energy equivalence of a nuclear arsenal.”
“Then I should really beat you up,” Leon said.
He pressed the earpiece again.
“Next test.
Thermal output.”
The following hour, Tony’s running commentary tracked a recognizable emotional arc.
It started at God — upon learning that Leon’s heat vision operated at approximately 6,000°C, was continuously variable in both intensity and beam diameter, and could be held at any power level along that range with complete precision.
“That temperature,” Leon noted, “is manageable, but barely sufficient for some applications I have in mind.”
From God, Tony progressed to okay fine, when Leon demonstrated that the freeze breath had sufficient range to cover several kilometers of terrain near-instantaneously.
“For extended atmospheric coverage,” Leon mused, “I’d want considerably broader range.”
Then that can’t be right, when the X-ray vision parameters came back.
“I can resolve anything at any depth, on Earth, at any angle, except through lead,” Leon said.
“The lead limitation is an obvious flaw.
It’s somewhat inconvenient.”
And finally you deserve whatever eventually happens to you, delivered flatly into the radio, when Leon described his super-hearing as “technically functional, but the signal-to-noise ratio requires more mental bandwidth than I’d prefer.”
Each ability was, by any reasonable metric, civilization-altering.
Each received a complaint.
Tony sat in his chair at the 50-meter mark, one hand resting loosely on the mouse, and assembled what feelings he still had available.
“And then,” he said, in the voice of a man who has been informed, in sequence, that rain is too wet and the sun is moderately warm and the Pacific Ocean is simply adequate.
“What’s next?”