It took a long while, and I mean a long while, before Steve and Bucky finally agreed that that was enough slugfest for the day.
The entire place we were in, stretching for miles upon miles, was desolated to the extreme. There was no single rock that they didn't turn or pulverize in their fight.
Steve seems to have the edge over Bucky for most of their fight due to his ability but I don't think that difference will last for long. Bucky's ability was mostly unknown in terms of what kind of direction it would follow. For now, what he was exhibiting are what I assume to be the standard, or common, usage of his abilities. It didn't make him any less terrifying.
"That was one hell of a workout, and I'm not even slightly winded up." Bucky said, finally coming off the high of blasting through the air at supersonic speeds and throwing punches that punch holes through mountains.
"I feel ya. Even though that did pop some joints, it still feels as if I'm still full." Steve said as he floated down.
I guess I can relate to what they are saying. I've been living with that type of feeling inside my body for years now after all.
"So how did we do?" Bucky asked before whistling as he gazed at what was essentially a black hole that spanned hundreds of kilometers. "Damn, we did that?"
"Yup.. You guys were totally going crazy with powers." Yelena answered. "Speaking of which, we'll need another place for our spar, Draul?"
I nodded at her and willed our position to change. We arrived at basically another continent from where Bucky and Steve had their fight if we were to go by earth's distance. "Both of you can go crazy here."
"Hold this for me, will ya?" Nat said before passing her black jacket to Bucky, leaving her with just her crop-top shirt.
Yelena still had her smirk, a small one, on her face which made me wonder what kind of evolutionary train she hopped onto.
And then there was Nat's ability which wasn't just psychokinesis, at least it wasn't the full scope of it.
Unlike Steve and Bucky who just went at each other like every male super powered character, Nat and Yelena actually took their time testing out the kinks and switched of their ability. Well Yelena just closed her eyes and meditated while Nat was making some hand movements and she was easily picking it up, highly due to the chi practices I taught them.
Chi was all about using every part of your body to feel, trying to control every iota of energy inside it with precise manipulation. Having an ability was just some sort of extra powered limb and right now their chi was mapping out that new limb and helping them have some degree of familiarity over it. The battle would only help stimulate the process more.
As if coming to an agreement, they both stopped their exercises and focused fully on each other. Yelena was every bit as talented as Natasha was as an assassin and could also match her stroke for stroke, an unsurprising conclusion given that she had been training with all four of us for years. When it came to fighting skills and techniques, she didn't lose out an inch to the other soldiers and her assassin sister. That only changes when you start factoring Bucky and Steve's physical enhancements.
"Are you good to go, little sister?" The air surrounding Nat picked up at her utterance which made me think that she had a way of 'telepathically', or rather 'psionically', connecting to the atmosphere. It was the same way she made sound cease when she first got her abilities.
"As ready as I can be."
Nat's body gained a dark purple glow, one reminiscent to the Scarlet Witch's red, and for some reason that didn't seem to bother me one bit. It wasn't magical like Wanda's, but it was still something else.
Cracks appeared on the ground they stood as Nat controlled slabs of rock to float around her and with a flex of her hand, they all turned to car-sized drills.
She sent them immediately to Yelena as a probing attack and Yelena did something I totally didn't expect.
White lighting… pure white lightning coated her body and in an instant she was gone.
"Super speed!" Ororo exclaimed. Sure it wasn't as flashy or terrifying as what the two soldiers and Nat were showing, but it was still terrifying in its own right.
Sure Marvel had speedsters and people who could move at light speed and beyond, but they never had someone who was similar to the Flash like what I was seeing.
If a consensus were to be held on who was the most scariest member of the Justice League when taking in their abilities and taking things like morality out of the equation, the Flash and Superman would easily top that list every time with the Flash taking the number one spot 90% of the time.
But then again, the Speed Force was not a concept that existed in the Marvel universe so maybe….
… And now she was hurtling lightning with such ease as if she was shooting a gun.
Phasing, speed mirages, supersonic punches. She was doing it so well that it would be unbelievable to even think that she got her abilities a few hours ago.
To be honest, I thought that as the one being the most fascinated with super powers she would get some crazy abilities to match some of mine as it was something she always complained about, but to think she went for something so… simple.
Natasha as expected, was having trouble with her speedster of a younger sister. Seeing the way she controlled everything around her made me think if it were that easy to manipulate gravity.
Sure it took me days, over a week even, when I was testing out how to control gravity with the Space Stone but looking at her made it seem as if I was doing a wack job all that time.
Sure she wasn't actually manipulating gravity as much as she was using telekinesis but it still didn't make me feel better. Since when did these types of abilities get easy to control?
Hell, Steve might just have flipped over like half of the US and he still called it a light workout.
While it is true that volatile abilities are easier to control, the same couldn't be said for psionic abilities. Guess using the Power Stone came with some props after all.
Speaking of props, it seems like Yelena had some kind of speed buff since she was punching rock after rock without any sign of discomfort. Most likely a watered-down version of the Infinite Mass Punch, which means some sort of speed-induced super strength. If I was to be completely honest, her choice of super speed was kinda lackluster, not in comparison to the others but the future in general, but I wasn't going to say anything about it. There was no bad ability and even if there was, it wouldn't be super speed.
"I'm just thinking of how annoying she's gonna be now that she's the second fastest person in the house." Bucky said offhandedly. He wasn't exactly wrong to say that as even though Steve could warp, based on what I was seeing, his reaction speed was nowhere as fast as Yelena's.
"Don't sweat it, Bucks. You are only grumbling because she pesters you most of all." Steve commented.
"Oof… that gotta hurt." I said as Yelena just blitz punched Natasha right in the face, sending her elder sister flying and relinquishing her hold of the rocks she's been using.
Yelena didn't stop even after a solid hit and started forming a ball of lighting between her palms.
"That's gonna sting for a while if it hits." Ororo said to which we all nodded.
Unfortunately for Yelena, Nat wasn't someone she could easily take out. She erected a barrier as soon as Yelena let go of her attack which caused the entire place to be covered with an explosion, showing that neither of them were holding back.
Before Yelena knew what was happening, a purple hand appeared around her and grabbed her, leaving the speedster no chance to run away. Though she tried phasing through it, the hand looked as if it was some sort of electromagnetic barrier meaning that Yelena would have to go faster than the frequency the hand was vibrating at.
BOOOM!
Without any show of remorse, Nat slammed Yelena against the ground, burying her younger sister in a crater.
"Goddammit Nat! Are you trying to kill me?!" Yelena gasped out as she crawled out of the earth's bedrock.
Natasha didn't say anything except continuing staring at her sister, causing the girl to shrug and get ready for another bout.
This was a test to see what they could do and get a headstart on their abilities and it's capabilities and I could already guess that Nat would have to put in double the effort if she wanted to progress as quick as the others. It wasn't that it was hard to master psychic control but instead it was the broadness and what it encompassed that was the issue.
She could do a lot, and I mean A LOT, of things with her abilities and it wasn't something that gave her the option of going on just one path. She would have to branch out if she wanted to scratch the surface of what she could do.
She could already shoot energy blasts and control things telepathically. She also briefly touched on the electromagnetic spectrum which was a whole different aspect all together, so yeah. She definitely did have her work cut out for her.
On the other hand, what Yelena needed to do was focus a bit on her speed and then see how she could branch it out. Bias aside, super speed had a lot of potential and it wasn't as if her abilities would cause her to be a one trick pony like the Flash, after all it was the Power Stone that gave her abilities.
The same could be said with Bucky. He needed more physical training to bring out the best of his abilities like Yelena did, Steve too to some degree. Unfortunately, physical training wasn't going to help in any way when it came to manipulating space.
Due to being lost in my thoughts, I missed when Nat and Yelena started their second round, upping up the power as they continued trading blow for blow. Well Yelena had the most hit count which was currently slowing down as Natasha was getting a little bit proficient in using the repelling field around her which in turn was promoting Yelena to go faster if she wanted to phase through it. And she was also learning how to transmute the ground which unsurprisingly wasn't going so well. She'd need to have intensive knowledge before she could go into the harder part of psychokinesis.
All in all, they were all doing great for people who were having super powers for their first time since being a super soldier definitely doesn't count.
I'd have to give it to Natasha since it isn't easy dealing with a speedster and she's doing pretty well against Yelena's onslaught, even managing to subtly shift the tide of their fight in her favor.
None of the sisters seemed to be giving the other an inch and if not that I was used to such a scene, I would have been worried that they were trying to kill each other. It was the same with Bucky and Steve's fight after all.
When it came to sparring, though we held back, it was just a strike short of a killing or fatal blow, everything else was fair game. Stabbed limbs, broken bones, everything was fair game. All of us were killers in our own rights, why would we bother to take it easy on each other?
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