The two enemies were undergoing their own transformations: the bronze-eyed man's skin took on a metallic sheen, while the red-eyed one seemed to be wreathed in a low-frequency hum of pure violence.
Seeing them, Thomas felt the true, staggering weight of his own insignificance. He wasn't just in a different world; he was a different species. This was true might.
Thomas didn't know it, but he was currently sitting in the front row of a high-stakes C-grade execution.
The silver-haired man was half a beat faster. He moved with a predatory grace that suggested decades of combat experience.
In a single, fluid motion, he fanned out the fingers of his free hand, and a web of silver lightning erupted from his palm. It expanded instantly into a shimmering, electric umbrella that shielded him from head to toe.
At the exact same moment, he thrust his cane forward. The lightning at the tip didn't just strike; it uncoiled.
The two enemies launched their own attacks—a burst of bronze energy and a concussive red wave—but their strikes splashed harmlessly against the silver lightning umbrella, dissipating in a shower of sparks.
They were wide open. The silver-haired man snapped his wrist, and the lightning from his cane extended like a massive, crackling whip.
The "whip" caught both enemies across their chests, the electrical discharge throwing them backwards with enough force to dent the heavy iron doors.
"This… he's using the cane as a handle for a whip of pure energy," Thomas realised. His mind was frantically trying to categorise the physics of the fight. The sheer aftermath of that initial clash was devastating.
The interior of the truck was shredded in seconds; seats were torn from their bolts, and the metal scraps that formed the interior walls were pulverised and sucked out into the wind as the train roared onward.
The cabin was now an open-air death trap, with the wind howling through the skeletal frame of the car.
"Hold onto something tight!" the silver-haired man shouted. He didn't wait for a response. He took a predatory step forward, his boots clicking on the floor before he jumped.
Thomas watched in horror. With the train travelling at such high speeds, a jump seemed like a suicide attempt. But the man didn't fall. He hung in the air for a heart-stopping second, silhouetted against the orange sky.
He lashed out with his lightning whip again, the silver cord penetrating the very floor of the truck, anchoring him to the machine as he prepared for a final, crushing blow.
Thomas threw himself toward a bolted-down table, wrapping one arm around a support beam and the other around his tree. He squeezed his eyes shut as the silver light grew so bright it burned through his eyelids.
"We won't let you escape again!"
The roar erupted from the wreckage of the rear car, sounding less like a man and more like a wounded, cornered beast. Thomas, crouching behind a heavy metal table, had assumed the first clash had finished them.
Given the velocity of the train and the explosive force of the lightning whip, any normal person—or even a lesser hero—would have been tossed into the canyon and pulverised.
To his absolute shock, the two muzzled figures were still there. They were standing ten meters away, perched atop the jagged remains of the last truck. Beneath their boots, a chaotic bridge of metallic debris had formed, woven together from the scraps of the train's own hull.
"This... one of them is a metal-weaver," Thomas realised, his detective's mind piecing together the combat mechanics.
The synergy between the two was flawless. The bronze-eyed hero acted as the foundation, his power over magnetism or metal-shaping providing a stable, mobile platform amidst the hurricane of the train's wake.
He was the anchor. His partner, the red-eyed one, was the executioner. He had ignited his Qi into a series of jagged, incandescent daggers made of pure, white-hot flame.
From their high vantage point, he began to rain the fiery blades down upon the silver-haired man suspended in mid-air.
By all logic of Earth-style physics and tactical positioning, the stranger with the silver lightning was in a death trap. He was caught in the open, facing a perfect combination of a high-ground anchor and a long-range artillery specialist. His lightning seemed to favour close-quarters destruction, and the distance between the cars made him vulnerable.
But Thomas saw the look in the silver-haired man's eye—it wasn't fear. It was calculated with precision.
The man hadn't been trying to kill them with that first strike. He had been playing for time and position. He knew exactly what these two were capable of.
He used one hand to snap the lightning umbrella back into existence, a shimmering shield that caught the fiery daggers in a spray of molten sparks.
With his other hand, he drove the lightning whip deeper into the coupling of the train. He wasn't aiming for the enemies anymore; he was aiming for the machine.
With a series of rhythmic, electric pulses, the silver-haired man used his cane to literally saw the truck in two.
Moments before the final car would have detached and plummeted into the ravine, the stranger performed a feat of aerial gymnastics that left Thomas breathless.
He flicked his wrist, making the lightning whip arc through the air like a grappling hook. The electric cord lashed around the iron railing of the main train, and he used the tension to slingshot his body back toward Thomas's position.
It was a brilliant display of tactical wit—using the enemy's momentum and the environment to negate their numbers.
He had successfully severed the path of the pursuers, leaving them stranded on a disconnected, metal-shapen platform that was rapidly falling behind the main engine.
But the victory wasn't clean. As the last of the fiery daggers missed the superhero, they slammed into the floor and walls of Thomas's truck.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The explosions were concussive, turning the interior of the car into a furnace of heat and flying shrapnel. Thomas felt like a kite caught in the heart of a level-five tornado.
The world tilted on its axis, and he felt his grip on the table slipping. In a final, desperate act of preservation, he lunged for the one thing that hadn't moved: the Bonsai pot.
He wrapped his arms around the heavy stone vessel, expecting to be dragged along the floor. Instead, he found a bizarre, inexplicable pocket of calm.
Despite the train's violent swaying and the shockwaves of the explosions, the tree pot stood perfectly erect. It was as if it possessed its own gravitational field, anchoring itself to the floor with an authority that defied the laws of motion.
Thomas buried his face against the cool stone. He didn't see the battle's final moments. He didn't see the way the silver-haired man landed on the platform with the grace of a cat.
Most importantly, he didn't notice the strange, microscopic phenomenon occurring within the pot. As the air grew thick with the residue of three superheroes' Qi, tiny, shimmering wisps of energy—stray silver lightning, bronze sparks, and red embers—began to be pulled toward the tree.
The leaves, usually a dull, dusty colour, flickered with a faint, internal light as they drank in the aftermath of the violence.
Thud!
The sound was heavy, the impact of boots hitting metal just inches from Thomas's head. The fierce heat of the explosions began to dissipate, replaced by the ozone scent of lightning.
Thomas dared to peek over the rim of the stone pot. Standing before him was the stranger, looking like a tall, jagged mountain of silver and shadow.
The silver fire still licked at the tips of his hair, and the halo around his body hummed with a low, menacing frequency. He stood in a defensive crouch, his fingers fanned out, ready to ignite the world again if necessary.
In the distance, fading into the orange haze of the canyon, the two muzzled figures stood on their floating scrap-metal platform, their eyes still burning with a hateful, dying light.
"We won't let you live!" Their voices echoed through the canyon, distorted by the wind and the distance. "We will always hunt you down, traitor! You can't hide forever!"
The stranger didn't respond. He simply watched them vanish, his silver light slowly dimming until he was once again just a man in an expensive leather suit, clutching a wooden cane. But the word they had shouted—traitor—hung in the air between him and Thomas, heavier than any Qi.