Chapter 5

With the help of Overseer, I poured the ring's energy into my broken arm. The moment I did, my I felt a chill surround my arm and I felt my bones shift into place yet there wasn't any pain. I dispelled the armour on my arm and saw a bruise that had begun to form from underneath the cast I made. However as I kept on circulating the energy into my arm, it began to fade.

By the time the heroes managed to take down the Wrecking Crew, my arm had been healed almost halfway, shows just how experienced Spiderman and his team were unlike Robro. The latter had blown up two more walls after I was forced to tap out without putting a scratch on the Wrecking Crew.

When i noticed the heroes make their way back, I stopped healing my arm, despite the ensuing pain. It was not that I didn't trust any of them, but I didn't want them to know about my full capabilities. The less they knew about the ring, the better. Makes it less likely for the information to fall into the wrongs hands. Such as the badly damage mech formerly known as Robro who was following Spiderman and his friends while trying to get their attention, though it didn't seem any of them were interested in listening to him expect for Nova who seemed to tell something back at him every once in a while.

It was white tiger who first reached me, her mask showing a giving my now casted arm a look before taking a seat next to me.

"How are you? Do you need us to take you to a hospital?" she asked me. And I shook my head to turn her down. To be honest, I wanted to go and continue my training after healing my arm as soon as possible but I didn't want to ditch the people who saved me and disappear without thanking them. Especially since they are some of last genuine heroes left in my opinion.

"Thanks for the save. I don't know what would have happened if you weren't here?" I said while looking at all five of them. Spiderman bashfully rubbed the back of his head and was about to speak when he was rudely interrupted by

"Pfft... These third rate heroes? They are nothing but a menace. I had it under control!!" Robro roared in anger after hearing my words.

"You almost fired missiles in range of civilians. If it werent for me, many of them could have gotten seriously hurt even if the missiles were concussive. Not to mention the fact that you're responsible for the majority of property damage here." I spat back at him, quite miffed at his tone.

"Says the so called hero who was taken down in less than 5 minutes. Maybe next time leave it to the 'real' heroes. Better yet, why don't you sign up with the Squadrons I'm sure I can give you a proper lesson or two." he said, his tone making intents crystal clear.

I was about to tell him off when Powerman got in between me and Robro.

" Why don't you go back to your mom's garage before I hurt you?" he snarled, making Robro take a step back. A smart desicion in my opinion as most of the heroes looked like they were ready to turn him into scrap metal.

"This is not over." he spat before flying away, noisily.

Spiderman then walked up to me.

"So first day as a Superhero?" he asked.

"Yeah." I answered.

"I saw some of your footage. You have a pretty neat power." he said while pointing at my arm.

"Yeah I guess I do." I answered with a small laugh.

"Well, you looking for a team? We could always use an extra hand to keep fighting the good fight." he then asked.

"No. I think I'd stick with training my powers for now. But hey, if need any help I'll be there if I'm in the area." I shook my head before adding.

Spiderman looked a little disappointed but seemed to respect my desicion. I then bade my farewells and flew away after giving one final glance at the Wrecking Crew who were being carted into a shield vehicle.

Once I was out of sight, I shifted to cloaking mode and made my way back home. And after setting down in my bedroom, I resumed healing my arm.

"Overseer, how much energy do I still have?" I asked. Once I finally finished healing my arm. I clenched and unclenched hand and moved it around to find it good as new.

[Power levels has dropped to 31.52%. Recommended immediate recharge before undertaking further activities.]

I complied as I took out both my bag and the power pack from the pocket dimension and recharged the ring. I then made my way to the kitchen and had myself a quick lunch before taking off towards my new training ground.

The first thing I did was boot up the physical enhancement training simulation. It was taught by Kilowag, a pinkish alien which somewhat resembles a boar. Under his guidance, I went several training exercises ranging from lifting weights, sprints and stretching excercises to even an exercise where I had to try my best, to block or deflect or dodge attacks, all the while holding up a crushing weight of about 600 pounds. The bastard has the gall to make a pun about it as well. To quote his own words, "A Green Lantern must be able to uphold justice even under pressure.". Oh I was under pressure alright. I had to try and create constructs or shoot energy beams at projectiles that was coming at me from everywhere. The objective of the simulation was not get hit 5 times. The first time I tried it, I failed in less than 15 seconds. I did better on the second attempt by throwing the circular weight up before moving out of the way of the projectiles. On the third turn I created a hydraulic contraption on my free hand to help keep the weight up while using my free arm to create a shield to try and block the projectile. This time, I lasted for nearly 8 minutes.

After that, I took a small break, before loading in the beginners close quarters combat training simulation. My teacher this time, was an alien women with red hair and slightly purple skin named Laira Omoto. The first task she gave was for me to try and land a hit on her body using only melee weapons. I first tried to attack her with my bare fists but as I had little to no experience in punching, my performance wasn't too good. I:e I got wiped out in 3 seconds. Something even the memory clone of Laira bluntly told me much to my embarrassment.

And so, I tried once more, this time, I constructed a stick to try to beat her. Unfortunately, the copy disarmed me fairly easily as expected from someone who was raised amongst warriors. After all five of my trys ended with my back kissing the ground, I finally managed to land a hit on her by using a feint. And with that accomplished, the second part of the simulation began. It was basically a dojo where I could choose to learn a specific fighting style or weapon from different instructors. I chose to learn unarmed martial arts from Laira since her style was less agressive and worked around gracefully evading enemy attacks while countering with debilitating attacks unlike most of the other lanterns, who mainly seemed to depend on their ring over actually learning how to use martial arts or even other weapons.

What followed was a hellish training as she began teaching me everything there was to know about her unarmed combat style. I had to practice the same kata for what felt like a 100 times and once in a while, I had to defend against Laira as she woulf randomly attack me so that I would keep my guard up.

By the time I stopped for the day, I was covered in bruises which I made short work of using the ring before moving on to my final training for the day. Portal creation. After getting a small tutorial from Overseer, I began to visualise the living room of my home. I then focused on circulating the energy in a circular motion and soon, a green portal the size of my fist was created in front of me. Unfortunately I couldn't maintain it for long as it disappeared a few seconds later. I repeated this for several time and eventually the portals size was increased twofold when I first began. Still, it wasn't big enough for me to leave so, I opted to go home the old fashioned way.

Back home, I simply had a small dinner before resuming my training. I stuck with creating constructs. These constructs while rather small, were progressively more complicated so that I could practice creating faster under pressure. I also went on to several websites which showed how certain machineries worked, getting insight on creating different types of constructs before going to bed.

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This routine went on for the next week, by which point, I learned how to create forcefields, temporarily phase through objects and even began delving into matter manipulation. Other than that, I kept on training my shooting skills and construct creation skills and training my fighting skills with Laira which still is mostly me getting the crap beaten out of myself. But in my defence I was getting better.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything about my mother's attackers via the probes so I did the sensible thing and brought them back. It seems I'd have to wait for my mother to wake up to learn anything about her attackers. I instead sent the probes to the police station to gather information about the local villains and heroes while monitoring my mother's case files for clues.

And while I wasn't in the midst of training, I have been Superheroing as well. Granted, I haven't fought a villains since the Wrecking Crew incident. Instead I limited myself to help out with the smaller stuff. Like catching muggers, rescuing kittens from trees, helping out the firebrigade, just the smaller acts of heroism that no one from the Squadron does. And I think its safe to say that I was becoming pretty popular amongst the citizens.

Things at school however was pretty tense, especially when Overseer revealed that my new classmates had same biological signatures as the heroes that had saved me. The revelation came as a shock to me but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it became. Their 'disappearances often coincided with the entrance by their heroic alter egos. And if I'm being honest, I'm surprised that I haven't noticed it sooner since all four boys tend to act the same be it in their civilian personas or their heroic personas. I mean Luke was only using a paid of goggles to keep this identity safe.

However, thats not my stay at school has become tense. It became tense when a cursory scan by Overseer revealed a multitude of machineries and tech hidden around the school, some where meant for defence but a majority of them were for surveillance all belonging to SHIELD. This made me wonder if there was a reason why I was grouped with the other teen heroes. If SHIELD was aware of my identity since it was apparent that the principal was part of SHIELD as well. Needless to say, I kept my distance from the heroes since it wasn't clear whether they knew about me or not. I contemplated sending probes to hack them before Overseer convinced me not to. His reasoning was that SHIELD severs were better monitored than the police hence there was a chance that they might detect an intrusion. Furthermore SHIELD has a variety of allies, some of whom maybe able to track me and the ring via mystical methods.

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And then on the on Wednesday, I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing incessantly and I answered it before bringing it close to my ears without sparing a glance at the caller ID and muttered a hello.

"Hello. Ms Smith. I'm calling from Midtown General hospital. Your mother, she's awake."