Over the past week and a half, I'd been shot at, stabbed, clawed and bitten by mutated magical zombies, coated in acid, burned, bathed in molten rock and metal, cursed, blasted with magic and struck by lightning bolts. The Old Man's punch struck harder than any of those had, launching me through multiple trailers, through a telephone pole and finally sending me to carve a thirty-foot ditch in the asphalt, face-first. I got up, spat out the asphalt and a bit of blood and tried to shake off the dizziness.

"See, that's exactly what was always wrong with you," I growled after my jaw healed from being broken with a sound like crumbling chalk. "Instead of acting like the adult you pretended to be, you let your fists do the talking." Flying up, I approached him cautiously. That punch had been worse than anything he'd managed for years now.

"Violence is a part of life, baby girl," he sot back, smiling happily and almost managing to send me into a blind rage. "Conflict and hardship is what separates men from mice, what helps people grow into the best they can be." He stared at me, his squinting eyes almost pig-like in that meaty face. "Gymnastics, top marks, good health, looks. I don't see anything you have to complain about the results of my raising you."

"No," I spat then followed it with an invisible spike of kinetic energy, "I achieved all that despite you." Accelerating downwards, I waited until he braced for the impact then spatially leaped behind him and kicked him with both feet between the shoulder blades, knocking him off-balance. "Sadism thinly disguised as training and inability to get a job do not parental qualities make."

He recovered fast - faster than I'd expected. In the blink of an eye he already had a grip on my legs with those giant hands of his and was slamming me into the ground. Then my gut exploded in pain by an enormously powerful kick that had me bouncing down the field for a hundred feet. The lasting pain and the grinding of bone on bone as my regeneration worked on the injury meant at least a couple of broken ribs, if not worse.

Next came a huge fist punching down as fast as a bullet and I barely had time to block with both arms, which creaked and bruised under its force. I tried to retaliate, but his other hand grabbed the back of my head the moment I started moving and brought my face down on a rapidly rising knee, flattening my nose and making my sight wobble.

"If you'd learned the martial arts I'd been trying to teach you in those lessons," he spoke down at me, "you wouldn't be charging wildly at your target still, with predictable results." The bastard had the gall to sound disappointed!

I blinked away before the next blow could land, flew up and up and up until he was the size of a particularly annoying ant. Then I charged at him, Proximakinesis, Force Adjustment, Forced Acceleration and the Earth's gravity working together to make me deadlier than a heavy artillery shell. And to ensure he could not block, dodge, or pull off some martial arts bullshit at the last second, I used Instant Action to punch him in his fat deadbeat face outside time.

The ground cratered from the impact, soil, dust and shattered bedrock covering everything within a hundred feet. Then came the agony, a disorienting, mind-numbing pain exploding out from my left arm... what had been my left arm. The impact had reduced it to a strip of mangled meat, leaking blood and flopping uselessly as my regeneration struggled to slowly heal everything. Worse, when the dust cloud settled, the Old Man came out with a broken nose, a bit of blood running down his face and little else to show for my efforts.

"Lesson number two for the day, baby girl," he told me, his smile widening to show a single chipped tooth. "Heads are the hardest targets in the human body. Rewarding if you can crack them, of course, but if all you have as a weapon is your hands chances are you'll break them before the head breaks."

"How the hell are you this tough?" I demanded while dodging several casual swipes, remaining on the defensive while my arm fixed itself. Now that I had my guard up it was clear the Old Man wasn't as fast as I was but the skill difference almost made up for it. He'd been beating other people with his bare hands for decades, after all.

"What, you thought you'd be the only one to take advantage of the glorious new opportunities?" He snorted then spread his arms wide. "Look around you. How could anyone possibly miss this and if they could why would they?"

"Glorious new opportunities?" I asked in shocked incredulity. "The city is in ruins, infested by man-eating monsters! Hell, it has even been nuked!"

"Yes, I heard. Your and your friends' doing, wasn't it?" He sent out two blindingly-fast jabs that turned into grabbing attempts at the last moment, tried to sweep my feet under me and headbutt me at the same time. Flight let me avoid all three by leaning forwards and away from the ground, dodging in a way no martial art had ever needed to account for. "A few high-school kids using literal garbage produced the greatest weapon known to man. How can you deny that things are great?"

"Maybe because I care about whether people live or die?" I flew over a roundhouse kick and took advantage of the high ground to kick him repeatedly, to minimal effect. "Or is it wanting more than wallowing in misery in a rusty trailer while ignoring the neighbors?" Several kinetic blasts didn't even leave a scratch. "But it's probably that I'm not a proud owner of a dishonorable discharge for excessive violence." Then I used Force Adjustment to set the air around him on fire.

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I flew back, cradling my broken arm as it healed and watched as the red flames turned from red to orange, then yellow, then white and finally a blindingly bright, crackling, actinic blue. Over a minute passed and I was beginning to hope, when an enormous, spinning shape came out of the glare and...

...I found myself on the ground gasping, a deep bloody gash cut into my right side and into skin, muscle and even bone below. The black spinning shape flew back to be grabbed by one arm coming out of the enormously bright fire, followed by the rest of the Old Man. He was entirely unhurt and was now holding an enormous axe almost as long as he was tall, with a head wider than my torso. One of those silly-looking oversized weapons you saw in comics and computer games... except it did not look at all silly in the hands of someone stronger than me and dripping my own blood.

"You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs," he told me in that pleasant, conversational tone that I hated, the one we both knew he was using to mock without mocking. "As for why I'm tougher when we both had access to battles and opportunities? I didn't waste power on cheap tricks." He slammed the head of the ax to the ground and the whole area shook a little. "Flight, teleportation, telekinesis. Useful, perhaps, but all of them detracting from the concentration of force needing to win in a fight. Mere tricks that don't contribute to the one thing that matters, especially after they're gone." He snorted. "Plus I didn't waste anything on looking pretty or being pansy-ass graceful and all that girly shit."

"So you didn't," I growled, flying up and preparing to continue our fight even if he didn't seem in a hurry to do so himself. "The hell are you doing here?" It was not that I wanted to talk - we had exhausted that avenue of interaction years before - but I had a vested interest in recovering while fully intending the fight to continue. Every second regenerative energy flowed through me was an advantage... plus there was something I was still missing. Something in this picture that was off, that my instincts insisted didn't quite fit.

"Not having to deal with the neighbors, obviously," he said, raising that huge axe and resting it on his shoulder in a display of nonchalance that convinced no-one. "Or ever again for that matter." Wait, did he mean- "But I mostly came here to see you."

"Yeah, no." I crossed my mostly-healed arms and glared. "Pull the other one."

"I am being serious. The world has changed, baby girl." He slowly swung his axe around, pointing at the ruined and burning trailer park. "And I don't mean the monsters or even the war. War never really changes, and monsters have always existed."

I avoided the obvious conversational bait that was the monsters comment. He knew what he was, I knew what he was, both of us knew the other knew and it changed little. So I flew just out of reach but not out of throwing range of that monstrous weapon and waited in silence. He caved in first; he'd always lacked patience.

"I'm talking about the magic!" Pig-like eyes gleamed with malevolent hunger. "You've seen it, felt it, used it. Growing with every fight, every gnat that would bar your path you put to the ground!" His face became disturbingly animated, his voice echoing with eagerness like in the old stories he shared about the wars he'd been. The kills he'd made, the few times he'd ever been drunk and careless. "It's a game-changer in the way not even invaders who could kick the Armed Forces' arrogant asses with their own image of invulnerability could be. I know it - and you know it too, girl!"

"Considering I don't share your opinions of people or your sadism," or his dangerous levels of insanity "I can honestly say I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Do not be intentionally obtuse," he scoffed and pointed at me with the giant axe. "We're the same, baby girl. We both want to excel, we both want to rise above our so-called peers, we both love physical pursuits or getting our hands dirty." His eyes stared with such mad intensity, it was as if they could see deep into my soul... or at least what my crazy father thought was said soul. "Tell me you did not enjoy it. Tell me when you crushed your first zombie there was no satisfaction, no feeling of triumph. Tell me you did not want more of this rush of power after tasting it but once. Tell me you recoiled in horror after your first kill, that you puked and cried like those whiny bitches you call friends."

"Screw you, Old Man!" I shot back, flying halfway to him before managing to stop myself. "My friends cleared more monsters and saved more people than you and your oversized cleaver did, or we would have heard about you earlier!" And I would have made sure never to approach him. Verity had set me up, the vertically-challenged bitch. She must have known who I'd find here and sent me anyway.

"Ah, so you can't say it, can you? Not and speak the truth, for the truth is, we're both monsters by their account." He laughed then and never had I wanted to punch in his face than at that moment, not even when Mom had grown sick of his bullshit and bailed. "Society doesn't like monsters, especially monsters who try to be heroes. I should know. So why try being what we're not when we've been given a unique opportunity to grow doing what we truly love?"

And with those words it clicked; the part of the situation that had not quite fit, the bit I'd been missing. How he was that strong, yet none of the resistance members had brought him up. How he could easily stand up to me, yet the trailer park had been overrun by monsters I'd easily dispatched. What this whole spiel about monsters really was. In retrospect I should have seen it immediately but perhaps there had been some last vestiges of familial attachment, a brief flare of familiarity bias that had blinded me to the obvious.

"You joined the invaders, didn't you?" I stated more than asked in a dead voice while seething inside. How dare he speak of becoming better, of right and wrong, after making common cause with murderers and monsters?

"And why wouldn't I?" That same feverish intensity returned, the insanity showing itself from within. "Gaining power from violence is their entire philosophy! Strength through conflict, power through conquest. Not just power but immortality, the dream all fake religions prey upon finally realized. Can you not see how perfect it is? An entire civilization just like us, baby girl."

"I am nothing like you!" I shouted back and charged.