We kept fighting; I dodging her attacks and kinetic blasts, transforming into shadows when I couldn’t get away fast enough, and Swordjuice deflecting my blows away using the blunt energy coating her body, I attacked always prepared to halt my blows, never fully committing, so I didn’t keep breaking my arms or legs.

Meanwhile, I tried to see where I could fit her power, and the only thing I could come up with was fully integrating how she identified concepts. This, together with the improvements I got from Araphel, would make me able to now deal effectively with energy powers and conceptual powers.

Swordjuice sadly didn’t create the concepts herself, so her matrix didn’t have that aspect for me to copy. The advancement I got was a strong improvement, but not one I would use in this fight.

A fight that had gradually turned into a battle of attrition, which is where I really shine. Swordjuice knew that too and called for a stop.

“You going to win if this just drags on,” she said when she saw me stop in place. “You’re probably going to win anyway because you can’t die.”

“Hey, I know everyone jokes about that, but if you tire me first and I can’t regenerate anymore, then well, I don’t.”

“I know, that’s also part of why I want to go all out for the big finale.”

“So, you weren’t going all out.” I said, arching my eyebrows

She shrugged, “depends, I guess. It’s more like being able to pull all limits down. It’s rare that one gets to fight against people like you.”

“If you say so. Well, kind of you to warn me then.” I’m guessing you are going to use more than one of those jellies at once. I’ll probably be all purple by the end of this.

“Doesn’t your power heal bruises?”

I chuckled, “you’ll see.”

She nodded, “okay then.” Swordjuice got a jelly from the blunt pouch, putting that one in her mouth and waiting for it to settle.

So that’s the reason she called for a lull. She doesn’t really have the control necessary to use two or more during combat easily.

She took another one out then, a cutting and took out her mace, touching it to the weapon and slowly infusing condensed conceptual sharpness into it.

The mace took a sheen just like Swordjuice had around herself. She frowned as sweat formed on her forehead from the strain of controlling so much energy at the same time.

“that’s intensive,” I said, looking keenly as her blue hair whipped about in the energy's wake coating her and the weapon. “It’ll be good for you to get better at controlling it faster.”

She said nothing, only nodding briefly and, to my surprise, taking something from a pouch on the other side of her waist.

These she didn’t use in the battle yet. So they could only be the explosives.

“Oh, I see. That one you don’t need to hold on to.” I commented lightly, preparing myself to dodge.

This wasn’t just a jelly but was instead a metal case around the jelly, a very smart and simple design, I noted.

Swordjuice activated her power and infused the explosive energy directly into the metal case surrounding it, immediately throwing it at me.

It rapidly flew in my direction, shining and spinning in the air. Swordjuice ran in the opposite direction.

Can I survive this? I wondered, seeing the projectile slowly make its way through space.

I still had plenty of energy. Going by the first time I survived an explosion back when Victor and Glassmetal were testing explosives on me, I could try to form some protective armor against this type of thing, but most of the energy in this bomb would be concussive and so this presented an opportunity for me to test something.

I turned completely into shadow electricity as the metal case clinked on the marble ground.

Immediately, there was a flash of pure concussive kinetic energy and heat.

It absolutely rocked everything; the explosion so strong that I didn’t have time to submerse fully in the shadows inside the crevices Swordjuice created before.

The shock wave completely blew off half of my shadow mass.

The light shrunk the shadows I was inside, even as the ground broke down, creating more crevices and tunnels.

It took a couple of seconds for the shaking and reverberating shock waves to settle down.

I reformed atop the broken ground, looking around at the devastation. Dust slowly fell from the ceiling while massive blocks of marble rained down, thundering against the floor, increasing the already sizeable damage.

I heaved a sigh, impressed. “Wo-”

Swordjuice appeared, parting away the dust, her mace descending on me.

Surprised, only my faster processing speed allowed me to react even after only noticing her at the last second.

I dodged uncannily fast, noticing how my skin had a totally different tint to it.

Even dodging the residual cutting force blasted away from her mace still hurts me.

I created an extra layer of armored scales on top of a layer of force resistant musculature. Launching a punch back at Swordjuice, who didn’t even try to dodge.

Force exploded against me, not doing much confirming my observation that her blunt shroud diminished a lot from protecting her during the explosion.

She kept swinging her mace at me and I could dodge and ignore the slashing eruptions that my scale armor tanked.

Keeping my transformation was taxing after having reformed most of my body, but I felt I could keep going for a good while, even more if the fight continued at this stalemate and I didn’t need to regenerate anymore.

Swordjuice was already flagging, getting slower and making more mistakes.

Mistakes which I capitalized on to punch at her, making her shroud slimmer and slimmer.

One of her other weaknesses, I noticed, was that she had a normal humans’ stamina, at this point already not being able to even raise her mace.

Exhausted, mentally and physically, Swordjuice couldn’t keep fighting, and she knew that too.

She yelled in frustration as I laughed, dodging the telegraphed overhead swing.

The mace thundered on the ground, releasing all the cutting energy it had left, making another set of deep gouges in the marble.

“Who would think you packed this much of a punch?” I said to her, letting my armor recede.

She snorted. “I still have a long way to go. My goal is to be one of those officials Araphel talked about yesterday.”

“Oh,” I raised my eyebrows, “a wonderful goal.” She really was serious about this organization, or was it young naivete?

“You’ll get there, I’m sure.” I said, shuffling her blue spikes of hair around.

She batted my hand off tiredly. “Why you’re this gummy color Matrix?” She asked, realizing the oddity.

“Wait, that’s what you meant by getting purple!?” she brought a hand to her mouth, stuck in an ‘o’ shape.

I shrugged slowly, unconcerned. “It happens.”

“It happens to who Matrix? Why you’re like this now.” She demanded, exasperated

“Hmm, so remember the doctor that healed the others?” She nodded, but before I could continue, we heard heavy rocks being toppled and turned to see Glassmetal and LED taking out the debris blocking the entrance.

“Oh, hey.” Swordjuice said, slowly looking around the destroyed place.

Glassmetal only shook his head, his shoulder slumped. “Matrix, you really need to move to the other base.”

“Hey, don’t blame me. It’s always who I fight against that does the destruction.”

“But they do it just because you can take it.”

I shrugged at him. Apologetically.

LED shook his head again, “can you fix it for us to train later Glassmetal?”

“It would be better to find somewhere else. I don’t want you all to cause a cave in,” he said, looking concerned at the mostly destroyed ceiling. “It’s good I put so much redundant support.”

“Hm, how long you think it would take to fix it?” LED asked anyway.

“I’ll need at least two days to fix all of this. I told you not to use your bombs Swordy.”

“Sorry, sorry,” the blunette said sheepishly.

“Well, let’s get lunch. We can have today’s training somewhere recluse in the surface.” LED said, gesturing everyone to follow as he exited the now marble ruins.

“Ooh, daylight, what a novelty.” Swordjuice said, a relieved smile on her face.

“It will be good to train in different scenarios as well.” I said, nodding.

“That’s true, but we need to keep the destruction to a minimum,” LED said sternly. “it’s a good lesson as well. For when we fight in more populated places.”

“The fine line between saving the day and destroying the city, a true heroes burden.” I said, nodding along again.

Swordjuice laughed. “Not for you Matrix, you just take the punches in the place of the buildings.”

I laughed at that and we discussed over lunch what was the best ways to fight in a city so to not destroy everything, almost everyone thought it didn’t really matter your focus should be on surviving but if you had a destructive power then sure, it was your burden to try to not kill everyone together with your enemies, thinking like that I was even glad I had such a defensive power.

Spotlight appeared when everyone was already deep into their lunch, brushing off everyone’s jabs at being a lazy-ass.

“Finally adopted the purple.” he said to me sitting down at the table. I only shrugged again

“It really surprised me,” Swordjuice added.

“It’s interesting to see something so different,” Payback noted. “We see little mutants around.” I got serious at that, reminding myself why we didn’t see them.

“You won’t be able to appear in public like this though.” Spyglass said, pointing at my purplish skin.

“That’s true,” LED nodded, “It’s going to call too much attention.”

“Ah, I have Spotlight’s attention blocking. It’ll tire me, but I can walk around undetected.”

“See Spotlight, we don’t even need you. If you don’t want to train, you can quit. Swordjuice jabbed playfully.”

“I’m going to the training, okay,” Spotlight said, sighing heavily. “I’m not even a combatant, guys. Why do I have to take part in this?”

“Shut up Spotlight even I’m going to be training,” Payback said cutting Spotlights rant, “and Araphel already said they’re moving me to the healers whatever.”

“It’s important.” LED said simply, “and I know you can fight Spotlight. We need to know how our powers function together and train better teamwork.”

“But we’re going to different teams.” Spotlight tried for a last protest

“Well, then it’s a step to know how to work better on teams.”

“Tch fine,” Spotlight said, sighing. “But what’s the plan? If we fight someone, shouldn’t our plan be to just throw Matrix at them?”

“Hmm, maybe, but we need to pull our weight as well. Most of the time there will be multiple opponents.”

“I’m not even that good at taking threats off. My speciality is surviving them. I can keep people busy and serve as a good meat shield.” I said, entering the conversation again.

“For now, you mean.” Victor said from the corner, everyone agreeing with the sentiment.

Yeah, that was a point of consideration. It would be interesting to go to the new base. There had to be a lot of powers there. And who knows how far I’d get then.

We finished lunch and everyone who was going to train. That was LED Payback Spotlight. me and Swordjuice went to talk with Dan about a suitable location to do so, one that wouldn’t attract attention.

“Pretty much anywhere,” he said, taking a pull from the chimarrão gourd he was drinking from. Relaxing in a resting chair on his house’s porch.

“I don’t think there’s anyone paying a close eye to this region, that’s why we’re here to start with.” He put the gourd on the ground, it staying up from the supports it had on the sides. “Although you all raised a fuss these days so I can understand the caution.”

“Yeah, the more secluded the best,” LED said, “we might raise some dust.”

“Well, I know of an old creek, used to be a lake, now’s just a big hole, and it’s deep into the native forest.”

“That sounds perfect.”

“You’ll take us there?” Payback asked curiously.

“You all think I’m crazy? Take a map.” He went inside and found a map for us, an old one that still showed the location in blue with rivers leading to it. I supposed they had all ran dry by now.

We had to take the trail through the thick native forest, but it wasn’t too bad. My body had taken another leap in physicality after being reformed with Rebeca's power as a base, even though it turned me purple. The others were quite fit as well, so no one dragged the group down.

The forest was very pleasant; the day was sunny with the occasional pleasant breeze, we really got lucky with the weather, considering the suddenness of our hiking trip.

About an hour of walking later, we found the rest of what used to be a big river leading to the lake. From here, it was an even easier path, just following the empty riverbed that was rocky and sparse in vegetation until we arrived at the crater.

It used to be a big river, carved into rocky ground. The crater was about a football field wide and around two meters deep, at the lowest.

We descended the walls as LED explained his plans for the day.

“So, I planned for us to fight matches where one of us would fight against all the others.” He explained in his taciturn way, still being able to convey that he was serious and that he was having fun with the idea.

LED liked to fight when it wasn’t life threatening. “We’ll do two rounds,” he continued explaining, “one where the solo player attacks the rest, no preparation.”

“And then another one where everyone has a couple of minutes to devise a strategy. I imagine the solo player will lose most of the time, but that’s okay.”

“After that we’ll start making two against three team battles.” he concluded, smiling at us.

We all looked at each other, nodding. There was some tension, but overall, everyone was more excited about letting loose. “Questions?” LED asked us all.

Everyone shook their heads.

“Okay then.” LED said, his smile getting a little bigger. “Everyone against me, we start now.”