That punch was exactly what Bella had been baiting.
She pressed both hands down and caught Natasha's wrist in a firm grip.
"Plenty of power. Still not quite at my level." She tilted her head. "Where's your technique? What happened to the finesse?"
Natasha pushed repeatedly, trying to pull free. Nothing.
Bella's smile was dangerous. The light in her eyes was at full intensity, and her lips curved just slightly. "So, sweetheart—now you understand why I'm the one on top, right? There are reasons."
At that level of provocation, the last of the unfocused haze in Natasha's eyes burned away. Two breaths later, the woman she always was—effortlessly magnetic, absolutely lethal—had fully come back online.
"I am furious right now. I know exactly what you're doing, and I am still furious."
She didn't try to pull her arm back. Instead, she shifted her weight, leaned away, and sent her left leg whipping toward Bella's neck like a striking cable.
Leg strength far outclassed arm strength, even before the enhancement. Factor in the whipcrack mechanics and the dramatic boost the compound had brought—Bella couldn't eat that hit. She read the trajectory and power through her enhanced visual acuity, released the grip, and stepped back.
The kick didn't connect. Natasha pulled it mid-swing, torqued her waist, slapped her left hand against the floor, and launched into a savate sequence—left and right legs firing in quick alternation.
It was a creative application of the form. Traditional savate didn't work like this, because most people didn't have the arm strength or core force to hold that position while unloading kicks. Now Natasha did. The stance looked almost like something out of a classic martial arts film—low, sweeping, targeting below the waist.
Bella raised her arms, blocking, deflecting, retreating—barely managing to absorb the combination. She'd lost the initiative.
Seventeen, eighteen exchanges in, and as she continued to settle into her newly enhanced body, the balance tipped—from even to a slight edge for Natasha. Bella's strength was fundamentally psionic in nature. The physical benefits were a side effect, not a specialty. She hadn't managed to take down Wesker with pure physicality back then, and she couldn't outmatch Natasha on raw physical terms now either.
Medical equipment was scattered across the floor. The life-support unit had been reduced to eight pieces. Natasha's speed spiked—she launched herself upward, planted both feet on the vertical wall, and ran across the surface for more than ten paces, building velocity by using it as a springboard. At maximum speed, she unleashed a kick.
Fast and devastating. The timing, the power, the speed, the technical precision—everything converged into a strike Bella could no longer take with her body alone. She gave a sharp exhale, raised her left hand, and raised an ice shield. The first shattered. The second shattered. Two broken shields to stop one kick.
"That's a new spell. Interesting." Natasha flexed her left foot, then raised her right arm, ready to press the attack. "And cold."
"Stop—okay, stop, time out!" Bella waved her hands rapidly.
She had zero interest in being beaten up. She'd gone a few rounds to give Natasha a read on her new capabilities. That was enough.
"Boring." Natasha gave a dismissive pout with just a hint of petulance behind it. Bella had seen that act far too many times to be affected.
Combat was the fastest way to take ownership of new power. Even a handful of exchanges was enough for someone of Natasha's caliber.
She had fully shaken off the residual influence of the Ladder of the Sun's plant-consciousness, and completed the first stage of physical calibration.
She picked her jacket up off the floor and shook it out—then lost control of her grip for a moment and tore a long gash in it with her own fingers.
"Still not there." Natasha frowned slightly. "Any tricks for bringing control up to speed faster?"
Bella looked at the ruined jacket and thought it over.
Her own psionic development had never involved a loss-of-control phase. She had no personal frame of reference.
Then an idea came to her.
She crouched down, undid the laces from both of Natasha's boots, knotted the left and right laces together, and tied them into the most viciously complicated dead knot she could manage.
"Get that undone. When you can do it cleanly, I'd say your control is at passing grade."
Natasha gave her a deeply strange look. What a wonderful big sister you turned out to be...
She attempted it. Even under normal circumstances a knot like that would be brutal—now she had to consciously restrain her own muscles while working at it. She crouched on the floor, working and sweating, and couldn't get it. Bella covered her mouth with one hand, laughing hard enough to nearly pass out.
"You need to dial in your feel for that strength gradually. Stay here with me for a few days and just live normally—adapt through everyday activity. That'll get you calibrated faster than anything else." She delivered this with the solemn sincerity of someone dispensing hard-won wisdom.
Natasha raised her chin, all pride. "Do you know who I am? A genius. I don't need your step-by-step process. I'm leaving."
She never did get the knot undone.
She pulled her boots off, tucked them under one arm, and walked out of the lab barefoot with complete composure.
Bella stood watching from the doorway as the red BMW kicked up dust down the road, fighting back a laugh. She's going somewhere private to practice. Obviously.
She was insufferably prideful. Kind of adorable, though.
She had the Weyland medical team clean up the room and archive Natasha's complete data. She'd kept several clone bodies in a half-active state as a contingency against the 1% chance of failure. It hadn't been needed. Those clones could go back to sleep.
She stopped by to debrief briefly with 006 at the Weyland medical center. Cloned organs, synthetic humans, and the Cybertronian spacecraft—those were the three flagship projects at the moment. The cloned organ division had been running long enough that the wealthy clients willing to pay for it had more or less all been cycled through. Margins there would never be what they were in the early days.
Organ cloning was difficult to take mainstream. The cost was one obstacle; the ethical pressure was another.
The synthetic human program remained their most promising venture—strong outlook, high margins, still the company's primary focus. The spacecraft represented where they were going.
"Do you know of any items that improve luck?" 006 asked, almost as an aside, near the end of their conversation.
"Lucky rabbit's foot," Bella said immediately.
006 adopted a consultative expression. "Do you happen to have any...?"
She'd gotten out of that business long ago. It didn't pay, and more to the point, she had no financial need. She had no desire to revisit that particular chapter of her history. She shook her head. No rabbit's feet in stock.
She left Texas shortly after and headed back to Los Angeles. Samantha was nearly eight months along now—that kind of milestone called for family nearby.
Three days after she got home, Natasha showed up.
That woman's natural talent was genuinely something. The biogenetic enhancement was notoriously difficult to master, but she'd achieved full physical control in exactly three days. Nothing in her day-to-day life betrayed any difference—no tells, no slips, no unusual force. She looked completely unchanged from the outside.
Only Bella knew what that actually meant.
At this point, Natasha's strength had surpassed Captain America's. At minimum—the version that wasn't enhanced beyond his baseline.