“So, we ain’t afraid of Stretch, just gotta keep him from going off the rails. Why would we be afraid of you?” he asked.

I eyed him, and then just Holo’d up my Stat line.

He looked at it, blinked, and looked between his Stats and mine. Slowly, he set his coffee down.

“You didn’t show yer Levels, neither,” he noticed.

“No, I didn’t.” I tapped my coffee cup. “Let’s just say my highest Level is Nineteen.”

He blinked again, looked at his own Stats, and put out a long, low whistle. “Dyna, what the Hell have you been doin’ with your time?” he had to ask. “I’m pretty sure we’re among the higher Levels here in the States, although we don’t compare to the Champions or nuthin’...”

“Reed’s pretty good at a Fourteen, but that’s where most of his Karma goes. As far as things go, you’re doing pretty good. The original Avengers over there are keeping pace with you, although Thor has a fifteen-century head start at uberness, and the Patriot has been doing crazy stuff since the ‘40’s.”

“Rogers is good people,” Ben said, and pointed at me. “So are you. A 52 in brains...” he just shrugged. “I can’t understand being that smart, Dyna. How do you even relate to normal folks? You sure don’t talk like someone that smart.”

“Oh, my social interaction thoughtstream works on a 12 Intellect basis. Keeps the vocabulary down, doesn’t come across as an intellectual snob, blah blah blah.” I waved my hand absently.

“So, I’m talking to a dumb version of you, ‘cause I’d be weirded out and intimidated by the smart one.”

“Ben, I think in over forty different languages, whatever is best suited for the topic at hand, including machine code.” He just kind of blinked at me. “Yes, talking to one of my primary thoughtstreams would be quite unnerving, not the least because they are working somewhere between thirty and fifty times faster than that of a genius-level human being.”

He was quiet again for a minute. After all the silver and gold he’d been eating, his reflexes and reaction times had noticeably improved greatly, and he had the power to apply that to real life, enabling him to shift just enough to make blows reflect or deflect, instead of taking them straight on. It wasn’t to bullet-time yet, but he was at arrow-time.

I was still ten times or more faster than him when thinking. The default Spider Totem Buff of a 40 Dex I’d left behind, and my physical reaction time was in the forty-plus times peak human range.

I just thought even faster than my reflexes and reaction time. My very superhuman reaction time.

Which doubled when I turned my Bones on. Eh!

“So that’s why you got a Nova Core from them,” Ben finally said, a light coming on in his eyes. “Even though you’re cloud-cuckoo smart, you’re high enough Level to control it.”

I tilted my head at the back-handed compliment. “Yeah, that’s part of the reason. Really, it’s because I have so much sunk into the Alchemist side of the equation that I do not have the combat power a Nineteen should be displaying. It’s like asking your average lab geek out there to play professional baseball. The only reason I can hang is, well, my powers. I don’t have the foundational skills to really shine.

“A Nova Core is more power. Power I can manage.”

“Yer saying yer so book-smart yer not that good in a fight?” he asked incredulously. “Dyna, the whole world’s seen you fight. I’ve sparred with you plenty of times!”

“The Shielder assessments of my fighting skills add up to superhumanly sound fundamentals. By contrast, a Shielder’s fighting skills should measure at superhuman mastery or better. I’ve got a couple tricks, sure, but the main reason I’m so good in a fight is I’ve got great Stats, and I’ve got super-powers.

“Super-powers and Stats cover a lot of ground, Ben.”

“Huh, don’t I know it.” He trailed off thoughtfully. “You’re saying that if you ditched all the alchemy, magic, and science stuff, and instead focused on fighting, what? You coulda beat Champion’s blue schnozz in?”

“Let me put it this way. If Steve Rogers had the strength and power I showed, would he have won?”

His bushy brows went up. “Ohhhh... That’s a really good question. When you started describing those fights and how the blue schnozz was actually hitting... wow, I dunno how to answer that.”

“The answer is probably not, but it would have been one heck of a fight, and it would have accelerated much faster than the one I fought. After all, I was fighting for time, not to win, because I knew I couldn’t. Champion has literally been around for millions or billions of years, Ben. He’s forgotten more about fighting than you and I have ever learned, and probably only pleasantly rediscovers old techniques, rather than finding new ones.

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“I’m not sure he knows about the Seven Dragons, but the Way Masteries involved mean he definitely isn’t following them. You know Hercules is just in a league above you and Mr. Hill in skills, right?”

“Yeah, that Wall of Hands he has is definitely sumthin’. I still don’t know how to get past it, ‘cept maybe wrestlin’, an’ wrestlin’ a god of strength sounds dumb right on the face of it.”

“Well, the Bear and the Hag are in the next tier up, close to Champion. Where he has martial arts that he’s altered to work with whatever cosmic power keeps him fit, Briggs and Sama use martial arts that are so fundamental that Champion probably can’t comprehend them, let alone use them.

“He’s a master of the higher energies, sciences, and forms of combat. In terms of sophistication, there’s nobody on Terra who can match him. But Briggs and Sama would beat him on fundamental truths, true foundation comprehension.”

“So, he’s good at the fancy stuff I saw the chi-users pulling off, just adapted to his own techniques. But... the non-showy stuff, the basics, they’d kill the blue schnozz with?”

“Pretty much. Not that he has a freaking clue what they are really capable of.” I drummed my fingers on the desk slowly. “Would you like to try out a Mark, Ben?”

“It can be taken off pretty easy, right?” he asked slowly, after thinking that over.

“Well, yes and no. If you ask me, I’ll cut the link and it’ll depower instantly. It can be removed by enemy Casters and such, so usually you put it somewhere it can’t be neutralized easily.”

“Like?” he asked curiously.

“The nasal cavity tends to work best. The roof of the mouth was used, but too much food and drink abraded it over time. Anywhere on the skin makes it a target, unless you’ve got so many Tats it’s a moot point.”

“Well, I got all them Runes you put on my hide,” he pointed out.

“Have you never tried to light them up in your human form?” I asked him.

He was about to take another bite of an Earth-blueberry jelly Donut and paused. He deliberately put down both his Coffee and Donut and opened his hands.

There was a flicker of silver light as hundreds of Runes in silver-edged black surfaced on his untanned skin. There were no chunks of stone showing how they were edged, so the Runes themselves formed the scale patterns, spread across his human form. Their rise keyed all his Soul Chakras to manifest with his normal enhancements from them, surrounding his forearms, hands, and lower legs and feet with black and white plates that hung on the Runes like ersatz scales of their own.

He clenched his hands, felt his chest. His skin didn’t feel any different, save with the Soul magic up he could definitely feel the activated Runes more easily.

“Anywhere I put it will make it an instinctive target, because it’ll stand out and be something to focus on... and let’s say it gets uncomfortable to have the thing tingling if you try shoving it between your buttocks. So, the default is the nasal cavity.”

“Huh. So, you gotta go up through my nose to put it there?” He sounded kind of resigned.

“Well, usually we go the other way around. Through the nose tends to result in a lot of interference from sneezing.”

He gave me a suspicious look. “And how do you manage that?” he asked.

“With normal folks? Usually a very long kiss.” His jaw worked for a moment at that admission. “But you’re a Sorcerer, and you know Alter Self. I’ll just have you morph away your nose and leave a big hole in your face, stick in my finger, and place it.”

“Oh. Oh!” He was actually almost sweating. “That’s much safer, yeah,” he agreed quickly, doubtless thinking of his fiancée Alicia Masters. “Do ya need anything special?”

I held up a finger. My nail glowed silver.

Alter Self was one of the lower-order Morphing Spells, only able to give minor adjustments to Stats, and having to stay within the rough body shape of the Caster. For us, that meant humanoid, and no size-changing, i.e., not too much bigger or smaller, and it couldn’t replicate anything more than the most natural of abilities, like, oh, maybe a cat’s night-sight, or a good sense of smell or hearing.

I flicked up a mirror in front of him to help him picture what he had to do, and he murmured the words and made the gestures as needed to help him Cast it.

It was considered a Water spell as it governed mutability of form, so it was a great Valence II spell, and of course being able to whip up a disguise at will was always useful.

I watched the spell shimmer inside him, and he looked at the floating mirror, scrunching up his nose as he focused on it.

His proboscis flowed away slowly as he stared at himself, conquering his own revulsion and the weird sensation of moving flesh... and open air moving through the gaping hole in his face above his mouth.

He hadn’t seen me move around him, but I pulled his head back irresistibly, and he found himself looking up at me from very close range. I kept his eyes as I traced a glowing finger down his forehead, between his eyes, and he tried really hard not to look at my eyes and nose and lips and cheeks as my other fingers touched his lips, and he flinched as I made contact with the top of his nasal cavity.

He jerked as the magic drew itself in, right below his brain. I paused carefully, and withdrew my finger smoothly. He gasped in relief as I leaned away, looking at the holo and rather urgently canceling the magic so that he could get his nose back.

“There’s a symbol floating in my head,” he murmured, staring at the mirror as he touched his pugnacious nose to make sure it was still there, then glancing up at me as I resumed my seat on the other side.

-That’s the Markdoor,- I /told him through it, and he jumped. -It bypasses your magnapsium defense, naturally. I’d tell you to test out that you can remove this, but you should be able to obliterate it with a wave of earthpower, say, by turning into The Rock and just not wanting it to transfer over along the quantum shift.

-To use it, just push it open. I can talk to you through it, but you can’t talk back unless you open it up.-

He wasn’t unfamiliar with mental discipline, having had to train against mental attacks from the likes of the Puppet Master and others trying to strike at him through his mind instead of his Rocky physique. Of course, being a Sorcerer of Earth also meant a lot of time working with his thoughts instead of his body.

He mustered his will, pushed the Markdoor open, and stepped through.