I tagged Blue Shield Walker quite a few times, and he felt every one of them, but they were only painful, not dangerous. At last he shouted, “Uncle!” and I stopped shooting, completing a sideways double somersault and landing on one of the many columns protruding up from the floor.

He lowered his Shield, chuckling despite himself as he touched two tender spots on his cheeks. “I didn’t think you could spin a shot down through that door,” he admitted, having run right into the barrage bounced along six angles to get where it needed to as he dodged and deflected the stuff coming in from behind him.

“If you rerun the last twenty seconds, you’ll realize I was herding you into that shot,” I replied evenly from up there.

He did just that, eyes narrowing as he turned back around, retracing his steps mentally, reviewing the angles I was shooting at, and he whistled softly. “Two head shots,” he finally sighed, wincing theatrically. “Okay, I surrender!”

“One more test, Dynamo, John,” Director Carter broke in, strolling in from the side along one of the steel walls, where she’d been trotting along watching us. She pointed at my gloves. “Can you accurately duplicate the Hand of God the Crux use?” she asked me, and actually unslung her own Shield as she dropped down.

“Of course. It’s about half the strength I can manifest, and their current design has about six charges in it. The power supply will probably improve over time, but there’s some fundamental limits on their circuitry design as far as yield, according to Dr. Richards.”

Director Carter nodded and spoke a word into her coms. The walls, ramps, and pillars all receded down into the floor; I rode mine down and stepped off as it went flush with the floor, the whole room basically empty now. “Give us six hits each with the Hand, then.” She settled into a stance with her Shield up, and Walker matched her quickly.

“There’s a push factor to the discharge,” I warned them as I charged up my right hand. “I’m going to give you five punches and one upper-cut; be ready to go flying.” I tapped my chin as I focused Walker. “Okay, to get into proper mood, something hypocritically self-righteous. Ah!

“Traitorous and unfaithful running dog of the capitalist devils! I shall send you and those blasphemers you protect to their proper DOOM!”

They both grinned as my hand came down in an overhand punch, and the boom and crack of the discharge went off.

He skidded a couple inches back, despite his bracing, and lost his smile. “Die, heathen! Die, infidel! Die, traitor! Die, dog, die! Die, blasphemer!” I shouted at him.

One overhand, one straight in, one backfist, two jabs, and then one coming from below.

We both watched Walker as he was blasted off his feet and went soaring ten feet into the air and a good twenty paces back. He rolled with the impact, turning a back somersault in midair, getting his Shield under him, hitting the ground atop it, sliding a few more paces, and then rising back to his feet, unharmed.

“And let that be a lesson to you!” I whined, shaking a sputtering Fist at him, adopted a panicked expression at the sight of it, and turned around and ‘ran away’ in place.

They both grinned despite themselves at the image.

“I can do it without the insults,” the Director told me, bracing herself.

“Pish. You no fun.” I raised my now-humming glove once again. “Throne-kissing traitor to the true Christ! Die! Die! Die!...”

Like Walker, she went sailing through the air on the sixth hit, purposely taking it like he had to see how far she’d get tossed, and how to adjust to it. She did the same somersault, but kept her Shield up, landing smoothly in a crouch with lightfoot, sliding to a quick halt and ready to charge back at me almost instantly. Given she weighed less than Walker, she still ended up right next to him.

Walker didn’t show any reaction. He’d been the example for her to adjust the move to. His job had been to land safely; she had shifted tactics based on him, just like he would have done if she had gone first.

“How hard is an unblocked punch?” Walker asked, wanting to put this blow into a frame of reference.

“Bring up one of those magnetic walls,” I answered, charging up again.

The easily-reassembled wall of magnetized metal slid up out of the floor, there exactly for the purpose of seeing if something could blow through it. I cocked a fist, and let fly.

The crack of impact sent the three metal bricks around my fist flying away, while the kinetic dump shattered the unity of the bricks for two feet around the impact point and they went tumbling too, albeit in all directions, leaving a big gaping hole in the wall.

Walker and Carter both walked up to inspect it. “That hits a normal human being, they’re dead,” Walker stated with certainty.

“And the Hand of God shall not be impugned!” I proclaimed in the same self-righteous tone, raising my fist to the sky in a classic poise. “Thus fall all the enemies of the true faith!”

“They really do talk like that,” Director Carter sighed, slinging her Shield onto her back as I let the charge die off. “And you can charge yours up to double that strength?”

“Basically. I can either double the kinetic dump, or really increase the push. The kinetic dump won’t do anything to a Shield, but the push would probably send you halfway across the room.”

They glanced at one another. I knew what they thinking: another weapon in my arsenal. Pushing was a decent battlefield control skill.

“More fun if directed at the ground. Shockwave will lift everyone around me right off the ground, naturally enough.” Unless they had some REALLY good heavyfoot.

“I want one!” Walker finally admitted. “Just in case...”

“You’ll have to ask Dr. Richards what he can do for you. I can probably replicate mine, but power systems are not my specialty.” Which was true enough, as I was my power supply!

“Is there a counter?” Director Carter asked, studying my hand. “Other than a Shield? If not and the technology proliferates, this could be quite dangerous...”

“It’s a kinetic field. It’s cancelled out by similar fields, they’ll mutually short on contact. I think the model Dr. Richards has takes about six seconds to charge up after each discharge, nowhere near as fast as I was doing. If they don’t discharge, it’s just like getting hit by a sledgehammer or something; dangerous, but not lethal unless you let them smack you about the head or something vulnerable, certainly not in decent armor. As long as your power armor has any kinetic dampener effects, you can mutually short out the fields, and then proceed to tear their arm off and hit them with it, or something. Most personal force fields operate on a similar basis, merely on a pure defensive posture so as to cut down on power draw.

“Other than that, the batteries for this thing are expensive as heck, and the circuitry takes both high-end Elements and a lot of skill. It’s basically power armor, after all, and even after all these years, how many people can afford to run around with those without being plugged into a wall?”

She considered that, and nodded shortly. Not a huge thing to put into a suit of working power armor... or even a gauntlet, if they knew they’d be fighting Crux. At half-power draw, twelve blocks against six attacks was totally usable.

“Also, I have a query. Jewel would like to start looking at the tanking route instead of the super-agile bouncy-bounce route the spiders all have covered, but she doesn’t have the ranged attacks or durability to do it. Can you issue her a set of power armor with defensive, offensive, and ranged attack support, without need for the muscle boosts or maneuverability/flying upgrades?

“If not, I hope you won’t mind if I can add at least some basic defensive equipment to her attire.”

“She’s already superhuman, and can fly,” Director Carter commented thoughtfully. “That’s a fairly unique set of characteristics for an armor user. We can of course supply body armor, but a power armor suit with those characteristics... interesting.” She looked down at me. “Have you considered going that route yourself, considering that you won’t need a power supply, one of the most expensive and limiting factors on those suits?”

“Of course! But it would be an emergency purposes only thing, and it rather limits my other options while I’m wearing it, since all my output would be going towards powering the thing.

“On the flip side, helping recharge or boost a teammate wearing one of those things is always an option...”

They looked at one another over my head. I was definitely taking things to the next level all the time.

“What is your assessment of the other students?” Director Carter asked calmly.

“They are kids with a lot of potential. Iron Fist in particular has a fantastic amount of upside to him if he can develop his chi usage. Luke Cage has the misfortune of being an athlete and having to overcome his own mental limitations.

“The Spiders need some modularity and flexibility in their equipment. They are effectively super-mobile chassis for proper weapon systems; keeping them to suits and webs is basically trying to limit them to civilian levels of ability.

“Jessica’s paramount array, even if low in power for that lot, gives her tremendous flexibility in problem approach. She just needs support and a lot of training.

“Ryder is entirely too rash, but potentially the most devastatingly powerful member of the team. He doesn’t seem like much, but he could develop into a Delta+ grade powerhouse without too much problem.”

“What?” they both spoke up in concert, and didn’t even find it funny. “Ryder?” Walker repeated, startled.

I eyed him. “You know that suit he’s wearing is alien super-science, probably better than anything made on Terra, and he’s the power source for it, right?”

I could see they knew the former, not the latter. “And you know this how?” Walker asked me.

I held up my hand, and sparks flowed between my fingers. “Look, I’m not an electrokinetic, but I’m extremely sensitive to Kirlian fields, especially at short range.

“That suit he’s wearing doesn’t operate on frequencies used by human science, so it’s alien. It’s one of the hallmarks of the sciences of different species, and even within species. Dr. Richards’ tech operates on several unique frequencies, and so does the Starktech I’ve run into.

“I just had my hands on Nova, and on his helmet. He probably doesn’t have the slightest idea he’s wearing a battlesuit that would give Tony Star’s new armor conniption fits, probably because that suit is made to operate with a massively higher power supply.

“That power supply is supposed to be him. He has a massive power core inside him, waiting to be filled up.

“I posit that whatever alien force gave him the suit and his personal strength gave him just the minimum amount of juice to make it operational at his level.

“Richard Ryder is like an empty lake, and someone threw a few buckets of water into it and called it good. You consider what he’s like now, and what he’d be like with that lake filled.”

They did so, and their expressions changed. “What do you think his limit is?” Director Carter asked directly.

“A Great Lake. At the top end, I think he could be hanging with the High Guard as an equal.”

“Damn,” Blue Shield Walker murmured, caught totally by surprise. “That kid’s main interests are baseball and girls. He stumbles into trouble, more than he finds it.”

I’d gotten an earful of some of the things they’d all been involved in during the past couple hours, mostly independently. While they trained together, they didn’t actually do too much together, unless it was SHIELD business and out of the public eye.

They were kids. You don’t send underage kids, even Powered, into deadly fights unless you’ve got no choice. Their vigilante activities were their choice, and risky if beneficial training.

Facing down a Crux plot with soldiers, explosives, and the like? Not quite the same thing.

“Do you know what alien race supplied the tech?” Director Carter asked quickly.

Yes. “I’ve only been exposed to Skrull tech and some Kree tech by Dr. Richards. He’s got samples of a few others – Rigellians, Shi’ar, Arcturans, some others – but none that matched Ryder’s.

“I suggest a polite inquiry to the High Guard through back channels. That suit of his is obviously a uniform, and they should know where it is from.”