A/N: Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. It's an update! Believe it or not, I still have some neat ideas I'd like to try and put to paper for this story, so I'm going to dip into it every now and again when the creative juices (I hear lesser men call them 'beers') start flowing. I make all the apologies for quality.

Disclaimer: One Punch Man belongs to ONE. Worm belongs to Wildbow.


Amongst the ruins of what was once a city street, two heroes faced off against a monster from beyond the worst nightmares of many a child.

"So, I can't help but notice," Armsmaster began, watching the stirring form of the monster carefully, "That you seem to be very powerful. Why do you think you need my help for this?"

Dragon didn't take her eyes off their opponent. "I have power and speed in abundance, yes," she agreed simply, "But I am inexperienced, and have let my guard down before. I am also afraid that tactics are not quite my forté," she admitted modestly, "I fear that charging in, blasting it and hitting it until it stops moving may not quite work for this one."

Armsmaster snorted. "No," he agreed gruffly, "Somehow, I don't think so either."

"My understanding is that you are a veteran hero with significant experience and are well-known for a keen tactical mind," she continued, "I may have the power to fight this monster. You have the skill and experience to decide how to best utilise that power."

Armsmaster spared her a glance. "You're better at this than you think," he said approvingly, "If you know how to admit your weaknesses and when to ask for help."

"Thank you," she said with a nod, "But I think we are about to see more action."

Echidna roared, and long tentacles began to emerge from every side of it's body – each one tipped with a sharp, piercing implement, clearly designed to skewer human-sized targets.

"How are you with area-of-effect?" Armsmaster asked urgently.

"Now that is my forté," Dragon smiled.

"Use it now!"

Responding instantly, Dragon's arms, palms blazing, crossed as Armsmaster leapt back. With a grunt, she opened both arms in a large arc as she fired, causing a powerful wave of flame to sweep over the landscape in front of her – and incinerate the mass of tentacles that had shot forward at that moment. The flames swept over Echidna, making the monster scream with irritation and pain.

In response, the monster began to charge again, cracking up the concrete of the road as it rushed toward the pair with the speed of a fast automobile. Armsmaster was ready, this time – firing off an armour-mounted grappling hook toward one of the nearby rooftops, he pulled up and away alongside the leaping Dragon whilst throwing down a series of small, spherical devices.

As Echidna galloped over their former position, the devices exploded – each in a hail of thin, metal spines, propelled at high velocity. The spines dug deep into the monster, but it was too large for them to be anything more than an irritation.

"Mines?" Dragon queried.

"Not just any mines," Armsmaster advised, "Hit it hard in a few moments!"

The effect of the spines soon became apparent. The monster stumbled slightly... and then, just as it raised one of its multiple heads to face the pair, its movements began to slow noticeably.

"That compound was designed to put a ramped-up Lung to sleep," Armsmaster grunted with satisfaction, "I'm pleased there was still a use for it."

Dragon did not need to be told that this was the moment to strike. With a blast that blew a large hole in the roof she had been standing on, she rocketed toward Echidna at speed almost too fast for even the advanced visual assistance built into Armsmaster's helmet to follow.

With a mighty kick, she lifted the monster clear off its feet. Before the pain could break through the effect of Armsmaster's compound, Dragon's arms locked together, morphing and changing into a large cannon, with firing chambers seemingly present on every section of her arms.

"INCINERATE!" she roared, letting loose with an enormous, fiery blast that engulfed Echidna entirely.

The booming sound from her blast shattered windows for miles around. The pillar of flame rose up into the sky as though it were a column propping up heaven itself.

Surely, those present thought as they observed the dustcloud, there was no being on this world or any other that could survive such concentrated power and fury.

They were proven wrong.

Dragon blasted backward frantically to avoid a lashing tentacle, Armsmaster already moving back before she noticed the problem. As she skidded to a stop, she stared in disbelief.

Echidna was certainly not unscathed. A huge portion of her body had been blown clean away by the blast – but it was not enough. The biomass was already replacing itself rapidly, too rapidly.

"Damn," Armsmaster commented, "Do you have anything else you can hit her with?"

"...That was my best," Dragon admitted, "If that was not enough to put her down, I don't know what more I can do."

Whatever they did, they needed to do it fast. Echidna would soon be back up to full fighting power again.

BOOM.

At that moment, something impacted the ground in front of the monster with tremendous force.


Shockwaves blasted huge craters in the ice and snow as the two blurs smashed against each other several times in short succession.

"So, you remember the time we tried to fix the broken stair after getting our powers?" Taylor said conversationally.

"Meaningless prattle won't save you," her clone snarled as she let loose a powerful haymaker, hitting Taylor in the face and forming a gigantic trench in the snow from the girl's flying body.

Taylor exploded out of the crater at the end of the trench, looking at her clone with interest. "I mean, that hole went so deep I could see lava at the bottom. If we were smarter, we could have tapped geothermal and saved on our energy bills!"

She ducked to avoid the roundhouse kick that whistled over her head, before leaping back to avoid the two-handed hammer blow that rocked the ground for miles around. "What about the time we thought we'd missed the bus, overdid it when we sped up and ended up in Mexico? That was some nice chilli, but it was really hot."

"Do you think I'm here to talk? Or to fight?!" the clone roared the last word, launching herself at the original in a flurry of punches and kicks far too fast for regular eyes, or even most parahuman ones, to follow. One particularly good elbow hit the original Taylor clean in the chest, forcing her back at least a hundred meters.

"What about the time we volunteered to chop the vegetables for dinner? I mean, damn. That was a good one."

"Yes, the counter got split in half, alongside the wall behind it, and we barely managed to pass it off as a very localised seismic event, I know, I was there!" the clone shook her head, "What's your point? Are you trying to tug at my heartstrings to try and end this without a fight?"

"Nope, not at all," Taylor shook her head, "I just wanted to confirm that you've got all the same memories that I do, and now I know you do."

"And?" the clone stepped forward, arms raised.

"And, you can tell, can't you?"

Taylor's opponent paused. "Tell what?"

"That you're not as strong as you remember being before."

Everything went still.

Her clone's eyes widened in rage. "I don't know what you're talking about! I am just as strong as you and I'll show you!" She launched forward, intent on releasing a powerful haymaker to knock Taylor flying. A huge sonic boom blasted the surrounding area as her fist connected with Taylor's face, blowing away snow and ice in a huge cone behind her.

But Taylor didn't budge.

"W-what?" the clone whispered. "No!"

She swung again. Connected again. There was no effect.

"This is impossible. This can't be right!"

"That monster did a good job. It made you strong. Really strong. You might even be the second-strongest thing on the planet," Taylor commented from behind her fist, "But whatever it did, it just wasn't able to make you as strong as I am. I don't think anything can. Unless you've got the time to do our workout again, at least."

"No, no, no! Fuck! Fuck!" The clone stumbled back, glaring at her own fist. "Why?"

"Hey, I don't know how cloning works," Taylor shrugged, "But you see this is pointless now, right? You'll never beat me."

"I will," her doppelganger whispered, "I have to! It's the only way to save the world! I have to be a hero! I HAVE TO BE A HERO!"

She pushed her cloned body harder than before to try and strike Taylor. Harder than should have been possible. Harder than what was possible, without consequences. Before her fist struck home, a crippling pain shot through her entire body and made her stumble backward onto the ground with a choked gasp.

"Woah," Taylor stepped forward, concerned, "You okay, there? I didn't hit you too hard, did I?"

"Why?" The clone asked again. "Why like this?" she turned to Taylor, who was startled to see that the clone was crying. "Why did I get the passion back, only to lose the fucking power?"

"That must suck," Taylor commented awkwardly, the situation taking her well out of her comfort zone.

"All of the dreams we had, before we became strong," her clone muttered, "Even those early days of having power, when we killed Behemoth, and his replacement, and even the ones after that, before that overwhelming, disgusting apathy set in... and the moment the dreams came back, the fucking power to carry them out disappeared," She laughed, bitterly. "Maybe it's impossible to have both. Maybe power and drive are mutually exclusive," she took off her glove and looked at her hand, which was beginning to turn an extremely unhealthy-looking grey colour, "You can't possibly understand how it feels to remember having the power of a god only to have it ripped away."

"That looks like the sort of thing you should go to a hospital for," Taylor did not like the way the hand was beginning to shrivel up, "Come on, I can get you to one."

"They couldn't help," the clone chuckled darkly, before suddenly coughing violently, spraying blood out across the snow, "I get it, now. This body, this cloning ability, it was never able to handle even this small fraction of our… no," she corrected herself weakly as the grey matter started spreading up her arm, "Your power, was it? No parahuman power could. I never had a chance to be a hero, even if I did… beat you," she gasped, "I was doomed from the start. Poetic, isn't it? Unable to do anything… but fail. The life… and death... of Taylor Hebert… the useless loser..."

"Woah, let's not get defeatist," Taylor said in alarm as she picked up her copy in a bridal carry, "There's still plenty of time to get you some… help..." she trailed off, because the clone would not reply. She would never reply again.

Taylor stared at the body as it disintegrated in her hands.

She had just watched herself die.

No, not herself – a version of herself that she hadn't been in what felt like an extremely long time.

She supposed she should have been careful what she wished for. She always wanted to get into a fight that made her feel something, anything. Well, here she had it. She felt rather sad.

No, that wasn't right. She looked back in the direction of Brockton Bay.

Sad, yes. But that wasn't the only thing. There was something else building. Something that she hadn't felt in a long, long time.

She leaped.

Ice gave way to water. Water gave way to land. Land became city. With an earth-shattering impact, she landed, and looked upon her enemy in all her fury.


When the dust cleared, Dragon was surprised.

She had never seen her impromptu teacher like this before. The teenage girl, now wig-less but not really looking any worse for wear, glared at the small mountain of flesh that was quickly knitting itself back together.

"I always said I wanted to find an enemy that could make me feel something in a fight again," Taylor said out loud, "Well, congrats. You're it. You did it."

Echidna made no response other than to scream again.

"Because for the first time, in a long time," Taylor continued, glare getting darker, "I. Am. Pissed."

It was over in one punch.

One moment, the strange little hero was facing down the monster. The next, the Monster was gone, in a shower of gore. There would be no regeneration for Echidna, not from the force that was imparted by what could conservatively have been described as the fist of an angry god.

Taylor merely stared at the remains, as Dragon observed her carefully and Armsmaster tried to work his jaw.

"Okay, Dragon," Taylor said after a moment, "I need to talk to you about this 'teaching' thing,"

She turned to face Dragon with one of the most serious looks the android had ever seen on her face, "Specifically, about why it's not going to work."