Superman's eyes shone bright red. "Maybe it's time I got a little serious."
"Uh oh."
My technique had started to rattle at me by the time I realized I'd been hit. Two red beams, thick as pencils, drilled into my shoulder, pushing me off balance just enough that I almost didn't sense the hook coming. For a big guy, Superman sure was sneaky. A plate of bone surrounded my head just as the fist landed, and I went spinning before coming back with a vengeance, slicing out with Piercing Blood.
Between my Body Control, immense stamina, and Blood Manipulation, I was able to take care of most of the compression Piercing Blood required intravenously. When the blood exploded from the center of my palm, it was already approaching the speed of sound. It teetered right over it just before it hit Superman in the chest, shoving him back. I followed with a rising uppercut laden with a separate cursed technique.
Ice Manipulation.
He dodged it, but it didn't matter. Ice exploded out of my forearm, bathing him in a metric ton of magical ice and locking him in place.
There was a flash of surprise before Superman's eyes started to glow again. Then I heard the crack. A bone blade materialized in my waiting palm, and Ratio highlighted his weak points.
The blade accelerated across a lateral vector, splitting the ice and air, empowered by Power Strike and Sword Aura. Superman's hands came up in time to tank the attack, which opened a bloody line across his forearms. Then he swiped outwards violently. The movement was so fast and violent that it raised a curtain of wind and force that blasted me off my feet and left me in the air, where I came to a dead stop.
I saw the punch coming and strained myself out like literal spaghetti to dodge it. I didn't react fast enough to dodge the backhand that followed, though.
The blow spiked me into the ground, hollowing out a crater beneath me.
A frustrated sigh escaped my lips as I pushed up from the ground, mostly unfazed, and reset my jaw. Superman floated above me with the sun silhouetting him. His wounds had already healed, and he had a bright smile on his face.
"Not bad, Son," he said.
"You let me get all those attacks in, didn't you?" I said accusingly.
"Not the first one," he said. "I was genuinely surprised."
"I very much doubt that," I said.
"Believe it or not, even superheroes get distracted," he said.
Uh-uh.
Dusting the ice off my clothes, I rose to my feet. "So, you want to go again?"
He did.
I tried Lightning Manipulation this time, but it didn't last much longer. Superman was just too fast. The bright side was that my attacks hit with the force of a Mack truck. Black-and-blue electricity spiderwebbed across his skin, locking up his muscles temporarily and giving me openings to wail on the Man of Steel. The most I'd ever gotten out of the openings was two strikes before he started to hit back.
The last punch he threw at me actually broke through Inverse Shielding and sent me over the horizon. I took comfort in the fact that the exercise was doing wonders for my stats. I'd gained five whole stat points in Endurance and Dexterity since we started training.
The fight with Wonder Woman was not as ponderous or kind.
The scathing look in her eyes made her feelings about me clear. She didn't try to hold back, and neither did I, for the most part. She charged at me with her sword and shield the second the fight started, closing the distance at speeds Superman reached only during our later spars, and I clapped, switching places with a discarded chunk of ice. Then I summoned a blood-infused bone chakram and tossed it at her with a controlled Expanse.
The weapon blinked through the distance and exploded just before impacting her shield, covering her in shrapnel. I teleported again and tossed another, then repeated the process again and again, sending hundreds of chakrams at her.
Some exploded; others did not, each containing a small amount of blood that allowed me to remotely direct them and harass Wonder Woman.
While she was distracted, I vanished behind a Curtain and came at her from behind with a Power Strike infused with all the Electricity I could squeeze out of my technique—and let me tell you, it was a lot—but the hit never touched her.
She spun at the last moment, tanking a chakram to the back of the head as she chopped off my hand, slicing through Inverse like it was butter. The lightning exploded outward, forking into her and me. She tanked the damage with her shield, but the blowback sent me flying.
You'd assume she let up after that, but she didn't.
I lost my second hand before I even landed and took a flying knee to the face that caved my skull in and put me in a crater.
She might've ended me if I hadn't unleashed Ice Manipulation and trapped her in place. Feeling a little vindictive, I opened a chasm beneath us with my technique and let her fall in before sealing it shut.
She broke out in three seconds, of course, but by that time, I was floating in the air, ready for her. I condensed a water tanker's worth of blood with a lengthy chant to give it more power and let it rip the second she appeared. The Piercing Blood slammed into her shield dead-on and sent her back into the ice, carving up a chasm just as deep as the one I'd tossed her into.
The moment the pressure from the technique dipped, though, everything went black. I woke up in the ice nearly an hour later with the worst headache of my life.
It took me longer than it should've to realize that Wonder Woman had knocked me out.
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