Stitches had to practically drag Bain away from the cafeteria after that, and although he clearly didn't have a strength power, he still had a strong grip. "All right, let's get you away from all that and check on the training rooms."

Bain looked wistfully behind him, but followed regardless. "Why do you want to go to the training rooms?"

Stitches shrugged. "Well, this is the best way to see what your limits are, in terms of ability. Don't expect to win - I've got a crapton of experience."

Bain nodded dutifully but disagreed internally. He had fought one or two veterans in the tunnels, although he'd had Nahma's assistance at the time. It couldn't possibly make too much of a difference, right?

Heading to the sizable elevators, Stitches pressed the button and stood back, rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet.

Bain decided that it was good a time as any to ask something he'd been wondering about since he'd met him. "Earlier, when your eyes watered. Doesn't that require tear ducts?"

Stitches looked at him strangely. "Yeah. So?"

Bain retreated somewhat from the offhanded response, but pressed forward. "Well, you're dead, right? How does that work?"

He looked Bain dead in the eye, an eyebrow raised. "How much do you know about the twenty-third-century strain of zombification virus?"

Bain thought for a moment before answering honestly. "Nothing really, only that it's really old. Why?" A thought occurred to him and he looked at the man sideways. "You can't be that ancient."

Stitches nodded to himself, muttering something Bain couldn't hear. He clapped his hands together, leaning forward and smiling. "All right, you get to have a history lesson before you get a beatdown. Necros-9 hit one of the other supercities, Bastion City, around twenty-two fifty-nine AD, and was immediately dubbed the zombie virus, although it wasn't the original virus. Anyway, it was a unique contagion because it was a bacteria that had powered and evolved the heck up.

"The virus was contagious, bloodborne, and effective as all get out. It shut down major parts of the brain and mutated pheromone centers feeding off dead skin, hence the rotting often seen on most zombies. It wasn't too original at that point, just a basic zombie strain. All in all, it wouldn't have been too hard to suppress, at least until its true abilities showed up."

He leaned in closer, grinning. "It heavily enhanced all powers already in place. Not just that, it severely decayed the frontal lobe and converted the excess bioelectricity into high-grade regenerative abilities. Using the pheromone organs to work together, it essentially developed a hive mind, though why it didn't just go airborne I'll never know. It was even capable of parasitically devouring bioenergy from its targets and devoting it to the more powerful ones. As a result, you had yourself an almost unkillable superpowered army that worked together almost flawlessly."

Bain hadn't noticed he was holding his breath until he gasped, his mouth hanging open. The elevator had opened a minute ago and had departed without either of them noticing. "How did it lose?"

Stitches grinned wider. "It infected me. My powers... well, I'll just say they're highly mind-based, and I'm immune to mind control as a result of it. In other words, when I got bit, the pathogen couldn't decide between decaying the frontal lobe and improving my powers, and decided to up my game instead of nuking my brain. Naturally, without the mind control affecting me and a crapton of power backing me up, it wasn't too difficult from that point to take out the army. They were actually making my powers even crazier - the virus identified my powers as the highest rank and invested all of the amassed bioelectricity on me. Rookie mistake, really - never give too much to an ally you don't know much about."

Bain's jaw dropped further, revealing an impressive assortment of extraordinarily sharp teeth. "So you saved the world? As in, you actually saved the world?"

He nodded. "You better believe it. I've still got the medal somewhere in my room."

Bain's eyes narrowed. "If you were such a big deal, how is it that I've never heard of you? I keep track of the top fifty heroes in Centropolis. And how did you end up here from Bastion anyway? That's a good distance away."

Stitches pushed the elevator button again, shrugging. "I'll answer the first question, but the second is a long and pretty dull story. The higher-ups didn't want a dead man with a dangerous virus in his brain getting all the attention. Thought it'd affect their image negatively. I mean, of course it would have, but they essentially patted me on the back and told every major - and quite a few minor - media company to keep me out of the papers. Not a whole lot of people showed up to my awarding ceremony."

Bain leaned against the wall, shaking his head. "I can't believe I'm talking to you. I thought I'd gotten apprenticed by a shut-in earlier based on how you looked, but you... you saved the world."

Stitches looked at him, nonplussed. "I am a shut-in. I just happen to be a more active shut-in than most. Also, it's disrespectful to call your mentor a shut-in."

The elevator arrived, and they both stepped in, Bain ducking under the door as he turned. Something occurred to him, and he glanced at Stitches sideways. If he'd beaten an army as unbeatable as the one he'd described, then how much of a chance did Bain really stand?

"Uhhh..." He didn't really know how to start asking that question, but 'uh' seemed like a good start.

Stitches chuckled before he finished the sentence. "Don't worry, I'll go a bit easy on you. Not much, though. You look plenty tough." He poked Bain's shell as he said the last part, and he felt a shaft of concern.

The elevator dinged politely, and the doors slid open to reveal the second largest room Bain had ever seen. It was a football field's worth in both length and width and was easily a hundred feet high. The whole thing was made from wide squares of white concrete, though the way it glinted led Bain to believe that it had been infused with some type of metal. The walls, ceiling, and floor were heavily dented, currently covered in a swarm of bots repairing the walls, hovering with some sort of gravity repulsion tech. Probably Tinker's work, based on the trademark gear located on the bottom. At any rate, the moment that Bain and Stitches walked in, the bots hastily finished their work and filed away through a sliding trapdoor near the ceiling.

Stitches walked forward, talking loudly as he did. "All right, here are the rules. No wounds that could be considered fatal and no dirty tactics. Whatever counts as a part of your power is fine, though." He reached a point about a hundred feet from Bain and turned, shouting, "Are you ready?"

Bain hunkered down, lowering his center of gravity and focusing his mass towards his front. Bracing for the first attack, he raised his shoulders. Slamming his claws into the ground, he dug them into the concrete for extra grip as his backward-facing knees bent. He twisted his neck sharply, getting all the pops out of it, then growled at the top of his lungs, "Ready!"

Bain was hardly unfamiliar with heroes with high speed. Firepower had some decent speed when using his flames to throw himself through the air. He'd seen Hot Rod get moving and thought that was as fast as anything could go. If he tried, Bain could see a .45 caliber bullet through the air, although it gave him a headache.

Regardless of all of that, Bain had never seen anything move as fast as Stitches. 'Seen' was a bit of a misnomer, really, as he only saw Stitches when he was directly in front of him. Startled, Bain began rising from his position, but Stitches simply poked him.

He went weightless, floating in the air for a moment as he held him with some sort of gravity-based power. Bain hovered there for a moment, the strange feeling of not being affected by gravity suspending his ordinarily flawless instincts.

Stitches frowned. "Slow reaction time, much?" He spun neatly, flinging Bain towards the far wall and ceasing the contact with his torso as he did. Instantly, the weightless feeling vanished as he crossed the floor, skipped off the concrete and flipped, slamming into the wall full force. The impact shattered the concrete, sending shards exploding outwards and knocking the air out of Bain. The cracks spiderwebbed up the wall all the way to the ceiling.

Bain struggled to inhale, finally managing to suck in a heaving breath. What in Nahma's Monday mornings was that? He had never been hit as hard as this, and the hero claimed he was going easy. He swore he could feel a crack in his carapace, something he had previously thought impossible. Tilting forward, Bain toppled out of the crater in the wall and fell the full forty feet, trying to reorient himself.

He almost succeeded, but landed on one foot and twisted, slamming into the floor. He didn't bother getting back up. This was an utterly unwinnable fight. Even Nahma had never hit this hard, to say nothing of the ridiculous speed.

Stitches nudged him with his foot. "Bain? You all good there?"

Bain sighed into the ground. "Nope. I'm not doing this."

He couldn't see Stitches' expression, but he could hear the disappointment in his voice. "You sure? You took a pretty hefty hit, yeah, but you're still conscious. If the villain hit as hard as I did and was threatening a bus or a ship of civilians, would you still give up?"

He thought about it hard. Would he keep fighting?

There was nothing he wanted more than to be a hero. It was tantamount to a critical need, an itch deep inside him that he couldn't explain if he tried. Saving people was what he had wanted to do for as long as he could remember. If someone like Stitches was threatening the world, would he really be able to stand back up and fight his survival instincts?

Groaning, Bain pushed himself up, his arms trembling slightly. He almost collapsed before he managed it, but a few moments later he was up on his feet, swaying somewhat. Crouching, he bent back into his combat stance, claws shaking.

Stitches had a huge grin on his face. "Good job. I'm proud of you, bud. I wasn't holding much back when I threw you just now. You ready to go again?"

Bain nodded. It was taking everything he had just to stand right now, so he wasn't sure he had the willpower to answer the question with words. The zombie smiled in response and pulled his hands out of his pockets, flexing his fingers. "All righty, then. Begin... now."

Bain took the initiative this time, launching himself forward and clawing at Stitches so fast it left trails through the air. Raising a hand, Stitches twisted his wrist and flicked Bain's claw away, the force nearly dislocating his shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Bain leaned forward, all four arms pumping in a complex pattern of strikes faster than most people could even see.

Stitches had a distant, unfocused look in his eyes, every casual tap of his fingers giving enough force to hurl a car, and keeping his movements in a tight, flowing manner that perfectly accounted for the slight gaps Bain was leaving in his wide swings. The force caused by the connecting impacts was beginning to crack the floor.

Then Bain took it up a notch.

Sucking in a huge breath, Bain's eyes flashed, red light pouring from them as his attacks increased in speed. A low growl emanated from his throat, slowly evolving into a primal roar as he poured more and more energy into the strikes. He started walking forward, trying to pressure Stitches into stepping his own game up.

So he did indeed step up. The gaze in his expression crystallized as he began delivering more power into the tips of his fingers, maintaining the carefully developed fighting method he had created exclusively for his powers. He was using three fingers to deflect Bain's furious attacks now, the impacts sending rippling craters into the ground.

Several seconds later the barrage hadn't slowed and somehow had increased. Stitches glanced at Bain's face and raised an eyebrow at the blank expression he saw there. "Bain?"

Bain roared in his face, the seam in the center of his head splitting open to reveal a much scarier mouth lined with much larger teeth, a long black tongue flailing out of it. Stitches raised an eyebrow. "Okay, then. Sorry about this, bud." He used both hands to knock away Bain's arms, and he tilted back, arms wide open, unbalanced. Stitches stomped forward, and tensed his right hand into a strange shape, as if he were holding a pencil. He aimed straight for Bain's unprotected torso.

Bain locked all four of his arms together and braced them together in a tight net of carapace and muscle, standing his ground and taking the hit full on. The impact completely shattered the ground, sending a foot-wide crack into the floor that stretched across the whole room.

For a moment, time seemed to stand still for Bain as he was knocked back into his senses. Stitches had a huge grin on his face, happy to see him hit his limits. Shards of concrete were suspended midair, the air rippling as the shockwave from the force spread out. He could feel the cracks in the carapace covering his arms and knew he'd lost.

To his surprise, he wasn't disappointed with himself.

Bain was hurled away at a shocking speed, slamming into the wall and burying himself a solid ten feet into the surface. The surrounding area was demolished instantly, boulders of cement falling out of the wall and crashing to the ground, and everyone in the Tower felt a slight rumble. Only the veterans recognized that it wasn't a small earthquake and merely smiled as the rookies began flying around, making sure that the countermeasures were in place.

Stitches coughed into the dust, a massive smile covering his now-filthy face. "Bain! You doing all right there?"

He walked into the dust cloud, squinting with a hand over his eyes. "Bain?"

It was a moment before he found him, his eyes closed as his chest rose and fell slowly. The massive rends in Bain's arms were already closing themselves, carapace weaving complex structures in order to repair the enormous damage caused by Stitches's strike.

Stitches grinned and patted Bain's unconscious form. "Good job, bud. You did great."

Looking around at the thoroughly decimated training room, he winced. Someone was going to have to clean all of this up, and it sure wasn't going to be him.