A/N: Need some feedback on the pacing.
Is it too slow?
Just right?
Not fast enough? (I know this is the same as the first one, but my brain likes things in threes.)
I'm still planning out how the plot will progress when Mark finally gets his powers, which means I have been flying by the seat of my pants and will continue to do so until then. This feedback will be helping me get an idea of how to pace future chapters.
I've also realized integrating other Image Comics characters with equally vast lore like Spawn into the story is an immense challenge I'm not sure I should go for anymore.
The scale of Spawn's story and antagonists dwarf Invincible's. Spawn literally fights God and Satan at some point.
If I go through with it, I have a feeling this fanfic will turn into one of those ladder of power xianxia stories. The ones where the conflicts and levels of power keep escalating until the MC is fighting primordial gods with abstract higher concepts and the author is forced to use the "random bullshit go!" writing technique that leaves you scratching your head.
If you've read Lord of the Mysteries, Desolate Era, or other similar stories, you'll know what I'm talking about.
This decision isn't final, though. I'll just keep them in my back pocket for now.
-x-
On the fifth day of training, Leon had left the Suite. There was a nagging thought he couldn't shake.
Gaia's Child is a Legendary Trait. The only Legendary I have. And all its description says is it makes forests defend me, animals like me, and nature-aligned beings feel friendly towards me.
Every other reward at that rarity level had been game changing. Energy Heart boosted his energy reserves to an incredible level, and the Brand of Tzeentch was arguably the best reward he'd gotten. The Legendary tier was supposed to be the upper echelon, the kind of thing that redefined what a person could do and then some.
Or at least, he assumed so.
But his first Legendary reward just made trees angry when someone punched him near them? There had to be more to it just like the others. The description couldn't be everything.
Leon stepped through the motel room and walked. He wasn't really aiming for a specific location, just somewhere with enough green to test a theory. Chicago was a concrete jungle, but it had parks. Some big ones, too.
He found what he was looking for about forty minutes later. A nature preserve on the city's outskirts with dense tree coverage and old-growth sections that hadn't been developed or heavily maintained. It was the kind of place where the root systems had been growing undisturbed for decades.
Leon stepped off the paved trail and into the trees. It was like walking into a room where the temperature was exactly right and the lighting was exactly right and everything was... correct.
The tension in his shoulders loosened. His breathing deepened without conscious effort. The ambient noise of the city faded, replaced by the layered sounds of wind through leaves, birdsong, and the creaking of old wood.
Feels like home.
His eyes widened. He'd never felt like he had a home ever since he arrived in this world. The Suite, while comfortable and luxurious, did not have a homely vibe to it. To experience the feeling of being home again in a forest of all things was strange, to say the least.
He crouched and placed his palms flat on the soil.
The earth here was different from the concrete he'd been bending in the training lot. It was alive. He could feel the moisture in it, including the root systems, dense and interlocking, spread beneath him like a buried neural network.
What if I just... listen?
Leon closed his eyes and pushed his awareness downward, feeling the earth. His perception sharpened as the earth responded.
The earth neither moved nor spoke, but he sensed its acknowledgement. It was the softening of the soil, a faint warmth traveling up through his palms, and a sense of being recognized by something.
Leon stayed there for a long time, hands on the soil and eyes closed. He paid attention to what his senses told him.
If there was one immediate distinction he could make, it was that the root systems were powerful conduits. Information traveled through them, though he couldn't understand it.
It was too foreign and too alien to his human senses. But he could feel the flow of it, the way things moved from one plant to another through the networks in the soil.
He focused on a cluster of roots near his left hand. The warmth in his sternum pulsed, and Leon pushed into it, reaching for the connection.
Leon's eyes snapped open. The roots near his hand had shifted, rising an inch out of the soil, their tips angling toward his palm like curious fingers. The way they moved was organic and alive. They were growing toward him on their own in response to whatever he had communicated to them.
[Feat Achieved! Discovered the hidden potential of a Legendary Trait, unlocking the ability to communicate with, command, and reshape flora. Reward: 200 GP]
Holy shit.
He pushed harder, the warmth in his chest expanding and flowing down his arms and into the soil. The roots grew, thickening and twisting upward through the topsoil in a spiral. Other roots joined them, drawn from deeper in the network, weaving together into a dense, braided cord that rose to knee height before Leon's concentration wavered and the growth slowed.
He stared at the structure he'd created in fascination. He rapped his knuckles against it, and the sound that came back was closer to stone than timber. It looked like the woven roots had hardened during their rise, the individual strands fused into something denser than ordinary wood.
Leon stood and walked deeper into the preserve, away from the trails where joggers and dog-walkers might see him. He found a clearing surrounded by old oaks, the canopies thick enough to block most of the afternoon light, and got to work.
Nearly an hour of testing later, he was surrounded by dense wooden structures and overgrown plants of various shapes and sizes.
He looked around the clearing, marvelling at his own creations. A wall of woven branches into a lattice pattern stood at the northern edge. Not far from it, a root pillar jutted from the ground and past the canopies like a monolith. Twisted vines hung from the branches where he'd shaped them into thick cables.
"This looks like something out of a fantasy novel," he whispered.
Loen sat down hard on the grass. All this time, he'd noticed his energy reserves filling up the fastest he'd ever felt. It was safe to say being in a nature-dense environment boosted his energy regeneration as well. Another bit of information he would've liked to know from the start.
He also couldn't create something from nothing. Every bit of growth had to come from existing plants, and shaping large amounts of them drained a noticeable chunk out of his reserves. If he tried to turn an entire forest into a fortress, he'd probably burn through all of his energy in the process.
It was a hard ceiling he could work with.
In a forest, surrounded by decades of existing growth, he would be incredibly powerful. But in a city with scattered trees and decorative planters, the trait's offensive and defensive potential plummeted.
Still worth training. Leon smiled. I'm convinced. Gaia's Child is far from underwhelming. Turns out using a nature-based power without a forest was the wrong way to use it.
Another idea surfaced.
Gaia's Child gives me a relationship with the earth and mother nature. Earthbending gives me a way to interact with it. What if they're not separate systems? What if one feeds into the other?
He'd been failing to grasp seismic sense for days. The sensitivity required for the technique had been beyond him. His feet weren't fine-tuned enough, or his spiritual connection with the element wasn't deep enough. Maybe it was both, or maybe Toph was just built different.
But here, in this forest, with his entire being resonating with nature? There was no harm in trying.
Leon pressed his bare feet flat against the soil and closed his eyes. He reached down with the mentality of being rooted, immovable, and a fixed point in a moving world firmly in his mind.
But instead of trying to impose his will on the earth the way bending demanded, the earth's own awareness guided him.
The forest materialized in his mind, hitting him all at once. A full, three-dimensional image rendered in textureless shades of grey, as clear and detailed as opening his eyes in a well-lit room. Everything within hundreds of feet of him stood in his mental map as a solid and defined shape.
The ground itself had depth and contour. He could "see" the slope of the terrain, the depression where rainwater pooled, and the half-buried boulder four feet to his right that he hadn't noticed with his eyes.
A squirrel sat on a branch about two hundred feet to his left. He could see its body in the map, its four legs gripping the bark as its tail curled behind it. When it leaped to the next branch, the vibration travelled through the wood, through the trunk, and into his feet, updating the squirrel's position in his mind in real-time.
[Feat Achieved! Grasped Seismic Sense by bridging Earthbending with Gaia's Child, gaining a sense beyond the limits of conventional bending. Reward: 50 GP]
Leon opened his eyes before closing them again.
This is it! Finally!
The world opened up as his focus deepened. His range jumped from a hundred to two hundred in seconds, and it kept going.
A jogger ran on the paved trail a quarter mile behind him. Leon could see the figure in his mind, their stride long and even and their weight landing on the balls of their feet. A dog trotted beside them, its gait lighter, pausing every few seconds to sniff at something before catching up.
Half a mile south, a family sat on a picnic blanket in a clearing. Two adults and two children. One of the children was jumping up and down.
Wait. There's something else I'm sensing.
Each living thing that moved through the forest carried a distinct imprint that went beyond size and weight. It was an imprint his brain deciphered near-instantly.
The squirrel on the branch registered as quick and alert, its heartbeat a rapid flutter transmitted through the wood. He read the jogger as healthy, though slightly fatigued. The dog was excited, the eagerness in its movements unmistakable to his mind.
Leon focused on a bird perched in the canopy directly above him. He could feel its heartbeat, fast and light. But there was something else, a quality he didn't have a word for.
If he had to describe it, it felt like the bird was hungry. He just knew, the same way he knew the ground was dry or the air was cold. The information arrived as instinct, translated through his connection with the living network.
He sat on the forest floor, barefoot and grinning.
Seismic sense in the show had been powerful. Toph could see an entire city through her feet, detect lies by reading heartbeats, "see" in perfect darkness, and even sense through metal once she'd learned to bend the unrefined earth within it.
But Toph didn't have Gaia's Child. Her sense was limited, incapable of giving her vision when she was imprisoned in a wooden cage.
Leon's version, inside a living forest, wasn't bound by that limit. On the contrary, being in a forest amplified the range of his seismic sense.
Out of the forest, on earth, metal, or wood, his seismic sense functioned the way Toph's did. Clear, detailed, and precise within a meaningful range that he could extend through training. The range would be shorter without a root network's amplification, but the 3D mental map would hold.
The implications raced through his mind.
If he could lure an enemy into a forest, he'd know their position, their movement, and their physical state in real-time from miles away. Unless they were able to fly, they wouldn't be able to hide, flank, or ambush him since the ground itself and anything connected to it would be his eyes and ears.
Another thought hit him.
He'd been stuck on metalbending for a while. Whenever he tried in the past, he could feel the faint tug of earth within metal, the trace minerals and impurities that hadn't been refined out. But isolating and gripping those traces required a precision his earthbending hadn't possessed.
I need to test this asap.
Leon ran to the training lot he had practiced in during his first training session and grabbed the first few pieces of scrap metal he could find.
Lavabending was still different question entirely. He'd spent time thinking about it during his first training period, but the technique remained a mystery. The show had never properly explained how it worked. Bolin and that Red Lotus guy could do it, but the mechanics had been left vague.
Was it an overlap between earth and firebending lineage? A rare genetic affinity? Pure force of will?
He had no damn clue.
Now that I actually have firebending alongside my earthbending, I might have a shot at figuring it out through experimentation.
He fired the Portal Gun at the ground and stepped through the orange portal on the other side into the Suite's gym.
The next two days passed in a blur of sparring, bending, Aera training, and metalbending attempts. He blended seismic sense in, running blindfolded drills where Lily attacked from random angles while Leon relied entirely on it to defend himself.
On the seventh night, Leon lowered three pretzel-shaped scraps of metal onto the gym floor.
They landed with dull clangs. The bends were crude and imprecise, nothing like Toph's fluid metalbending. But two days ago, he couldn't have budged them at all.
Two weeks ago, he couldn't land a clean hit on Lily. He couldn't make fire. Couldn't fly. Couldn't feel the earth beneath his feet.
Now he was competent in all of them. The gap between where he was and where he needed to be was narrowing every day.
The Cecil Hotline buzzed. Leon smirked at the nickname he'd given the communicator and pulled it from his subspace.
"Leon speaking."
"Tomorrow night," Cecil said. "I'm sending coordinates for pickup to your communicator now. Be at the rendezvous point by 2100 hours."
Leon glanced at Lily, who had already set down his water and was watching him. His tail had gone still.
"I'll be there."
"One more thing. I don't give two shits if they're maimed or castrated or given a damn massage. Just leave them intact and alive enough for us to interrogate. Understand?"
The urge to tell Cecil he was actually great at giving massages almost won.
Leon smiled. "Understood."
"Good."
"Wait. Before I forget," Leon said. "You've had time to look into what I told you about the Coalition of Planets?"
"I have. Are you sure everything you told me is right?"
"I'm confident, but like with Aria, there might be a few differences in this universe. Though if Allen does show up, I need to be there for the conversation."
"Huh. Why you specifically?"
"Because I just remembered giving the Coalition our intelligence on Viltrumite weaknesses is a double-edged sword. I want to make sure nothing goes wrong." Leon frowned. "In my vision, there was a spy embedded in the Coalition. A high-ranking one. The spy fed information Allen acquired back to the Viltrumites and it almost got him killed. If we hand over everything we know about Viltrumite weaknesses, and that intelligence reaches the spy before it reaches anyone who can act on it, we'd be fucking ourselves over."
Cecil was quiet for a few seconds. "You're saying the Coalition itself is compromised? Couldn't have told me about this before?"
"You try tracing back memories from a vision you only had once," Leon fired back with a raised brow. "Anyway, yeah. At least partially. I don't know who the spy is or how deep the compromise goes. What I do know is that Allen and Thaedus are trustworthy. I can't vouch for anything else."
Cecil sighed. "What would you recommend?"
"Engage through Allen and only Allen. Control exactly what information he walks away with, and time it for after we've dealt with Omni-Man. If he finds out Earth is trying to ally with the Coalition before we're ready to handle his reaction... I don't know what he'd do. Maybe it'll accelerate the timeline of events. Maybe he'll call for reinforcements. He might even wipe out the GDA overnight and claim it was a villain attack."
"Noted," Cecil said. "I'll continue flagging any anomalous orbital activity matching the description you gave me. If your alien shows up, you'll be one of the first to know."
"Appreciate it."
The line cut. Leon lowered the communicator and met Lily's gaze.
"It's time?" Lily asked.
"Tomorrow night." Leon put the communicator in his pocket and rolled his shoulders. "Cecil wants them both captured alive."
Lily stood, his tail resuming its measured sway. "What would you like to do beforehand?"
"What else?" Twisting his hands, Leon metalbent the scraps back to their original forms. "We continue preparing for the fight."