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Chapter 8: Dick Sitting Contest
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Simultaneously, his form began to lose definition, as if he were fading out of phase with reality itself.
To Wolverine, it was a confusing sensory input; his eyes told him the kid was both speeding up and disappearing.
To Jean, watching through the reinforced glass, it was a dissonant psychic and visual signal; her mind struggled to lock onto his presence.
[Wait, what's happening? Is he vibrating?]
[No way he can win against Wolverine, right?]
[It's obvious. Look at Logan! He's moving slower. Adam used Slow on him and Fade on himself!]
Adam hadn't vanished. He had simply become an afterimage. He had layered his curses seamlessly.
Slow fell upon Wolverine, a heavy, invisible blanket seeking to drag his legendary reflexes down to a mortal level.
At the same instant, Adam applied Fade on himself, lowering his presence, making him a peripheral blur.
Fade is extremely effective. In fact, every curse that he can apply to himself is very effective, since his curses are more effective on himself than on others.
Thus, it was no surprise that Logan found it hard to focus on him, when Adam had deprived himself of a significant portion of his presence.
Envy is conceptual in that sense.
The effect was disorienting. To Wolverine, the world turned to molasses. His own thoughts felt thick and syrupy.
The kid who had been twenty feet away was now a fading ghost, closing the distance in a heartbeat.
Adam didn't throw a punch. He flowed inside Logan's guard, his movements swift.
He targeted pressure points; the brachial plexus near the neck, the solar plexus; strikes that would have dropped any normal man instantly.
He was trying to apply the knowledge he had learned.
THWACK. THWACK.
The blows landed with solid, meaty thuds. Wolverine grunted, more in surprise than pain, his body barely moving.
His healing factor neutralized the damage before it could even register, if there was any in the first place.
Adam didn't follow up but leaped back. He reappeared ten feet away, his breathing slightly elevated. The entire exchange had taken less than two seconds.
Adam, however, wasn't happy. He was frowning. The exchange felt odd, almost staged in a way.
Adam wanted to test that odd feeling, and walked toward the beast again.
It felt to Wolverine like Adam's form flickered, not like Kitty Pryde's phased intangibility, but like a bad television signal, his edges blurring and fading from direct perception.
One second, he was there; the next, a ghostly afterimage was materializing right beside him.
A fist, moving with surprising force, was already arcing towards his ribs.
Adam saw how Logan twisted, managing to turn the direct hit into a glancing blow.
Before Adam could react, he felt an impact in his jaw, followed by a wave of dizziness, but he quickly caught himself and leaped back.
Not only did hitting Logan feel like hitting concrete, but he also realized that Logan had somehow adapted to his low presence and speed from the very first confrontation.
Did he allow me to hit him the first time? Adam had to wonder.
Well, it wasn't surprising. The gap between them is wider than that bitch life's butt crack. He mused with his usual twisted humor.
"Not bad at all," Logan said, flexing his hand, the sensation of which was deeply unsettling. "What the hell did you just do, kid? Everything feels… off. Like my body's a half-second behind the world."
Adam stood calmly a safe distance away, his chest rising and falling with controlled breaths. "My mutant power. I call it Envy. It allows me to deprive others, or even objects, of certain things."
"Think of it like a curse. In this case, I deprived you of some of your speed. There are many limits to my power, but it's still quite useful, I think."
For someone with trust issues, he sure told them a lot, but he felt it necessary to tell them for many reasons.
First, it's likely he will be their teammate soon, and they will have to know his capabilities to work together.
Second, his biggest secret is still [Information], which brings out the last point: Envy will serve as a mask or an explanation to basically every extraordinary thing he would achieve with [Information].
Everything can be explained with Envy. It's a white lie that shall hopefully serve him well.
Wolverine's expression shifted from interest to a strange, focused intensity, "And the other thing? Why is it so damn hard to keep my eyes on you?"
"That's another aspect," Adam said simply, offering no further explanation. "A different curse."
Surprisingly, Wolverine didn't press. He, of all people, understood the need to keep cards close to your chest.
He'd been a caged animal himself; you didn't show your full hand to anyone.
A grunt of understanding was his only response. "Alright. Let's see what else you got. Don't hold back. I won't."
The test evolved into a full-fledged, if one-sided, spar.
It was immediately clear that Wolverine was operating at a fraction of his true capacity, even beyond the Slow curse.
He was a master of virtually every martial art on the planet, a living weapon honed by endless war.
Adam, by contrast, was a novice. His strikes, while powerful and well-placed thanks to his analytical mind and stolen speed, were textbook and predictable.
He had form, but no art.
Yet, Wolverine quickly realized something profoundly irritating: Adam was one of the most annoying people he had ever fought.
If the kid had anywhere near his own combat experience, fighting him would be a special kind of hell.
The Slow curse was the foundation. It forced Logan to fight through a constant, mental and physical drag.
Every punch felt like it was thrown through water. Everything felt slower and harder to do.
Then there was the Fade curse. Adam had applied it to himself, and as he'd explained to no one, his self-curses were far more potent.
Wolverine's enhanced senses, his killer instinct that could track a target by the scent of their fear, were what allowed him to adapt and quickly lock on to Adam.
Adam would be right in front of him, and then his mind would simply… slide off him, dismissing him as a non-threat until a fist was already near.
It was like trying to focus on a specific drop of water in a downpour.
But the most exhausting aspect was Recoil.
Wolverine feinted a low kick and came in with a hard right cross aimed at Adam's shoulder.
Adam, his movements a blur of stolen speed, managed a partial block, but the force of Logan's punch, backed by his dense muscle and metal skeleton, was immense.
CRACK. The sound of impact was followed by a sharp, jolting pain in Wolverine's own wrist and shoulder.
It wasn't the full force of his punch, but a significant, jarring fraction of it, rebounding as if he'd just punched a perfectly reactive surface. He grunted, shaking his hand.
With every hit came pain. That little pain was nothing to Logan, but it was annoying.
It, of course, was even more painful for Adam. It was like a little kid fighting a grown-up.
No matter what he did, Logan would easily see through him and counterattack, and that's with the latter going easy on him.
The fight became a lesson in frustration for the master warrior. Adam was inexperienced, yes.
He left openings a mile wide. But exploiting them was punishing. Hitting him hurts you.
Even the act of focusing your intent to attack him felt mentally taxing.
Adam changed his tactics for the rest of the fight and fought defensively, using his enhanced speed to evade, parry, and create distance.
He wasn't trying to win because that's impossible; he was trying to survive and learn.
He absorbed every blocked strike, every near-miss, filing away Wolverine's footwork, his feints, the economy of his movement.
But the toll was immense. Sweat poured down Adam's face, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
Maintaining three active curses; Slow on Wolverine, and Fade and Recoil on himself; while also fueling his body with the Prime version of Slow was draining his stamina at a catastrophic rate.
The constant, background hum of the Hollow curse, protecting his mind from psychic intrusion, was another silent energy sink.
Recoil feels especially taxing, the act of making any action against him self punishing is too strong, thus its consumption.
It's also the most fascinating manifestation of Envy, for instead of depriving something, it makes freedom self-punishing.
After a particularly clumsy dodge that left Adam stumbling, Wolverine called a halt. "That's enough, kid. You're runnin' on fumes."
Adam didn't argue. He simply nodded, his legs giving way as he sank to the floor, chest heaving.
The curses dropped, and the strange, oppressive feeling lifted from Wolverine instantly.
The world snapped back into sharp, clear focus.
[Okay, fighting him looks like an absolute nightmare.]
[Yeah, Envy is such a cool ability.]
[He's a walking, talking status effect. A debuff dispenser.]
[Wolverine just got kited by a level 1 random.]
[Actual Dick sitting contest above. Like, what do u mean kited? Wolverine bodied him]
[Oh shut up, I'd sit on that dick all day, every day.]
[?????]
[His stamina is trash though. Glass cannon build.]