The morning started normally. Or what passed for normally in the Tennyson family's new paradigm of normal, which involved a ten-year-old girl staring at a green alien watch with the intensity of a jeweler appraising a diamond while her cousin ate cereal behind a barricade of camp chairs.
Ben had constructed the barricade at 6 AM, using every available piece of campsite furniture. It was, objectively, a terrible fortification—camp chairs were not load-bearing, the gaps between them were large enough to fit a human child through, and the entire structure would collapse if someone looked at it too hard. But it represented a philosophical boundary, and Ben felt that was important.
"You know I can see you through the chairs, right?" Gwen said from the picnic table. She was eating a granola bar with one hand. Her other hand was on the Omnitrix.
"The chairs are a statement."
"They're a fire hazard."
"Oh, so NOW you care about fire hazards? You literally SET THE FOREST ON FIRE two days ago."
"That was different. That fire was warm and protective. Your fire is a pile of aluminum death traps that could collapse on you at any moment." She eyed the barricade critically. "The structural integrity is terrible, Ben. If you're going to build a defensive position, at least triangulate the load distribution."
"I don't NEED structural advice from—"
"I took an engineering elective."
"WE'RE TEN."
"I took it ONLINE."
Max emerged from the Rust Bucket with coffee and the energy of a man who had slept three hours and spent the other five on a heavily encrypted satellite phone. He surveyed the scene—Gwen at the table, Ben behind his chair fort, the continuing cold war of affection and resistance—and decided not to comment.
"I'm going into town," he announced. "Supply run. We need groceries." He paused. "Normal groceries. From a normal store."
"Can I come?" Ben asked immediately, seeing an opportunity to put miles between himself and Gwen.
"You're both staying here."
"WHAT?"
"I'll be an hour. Maybe two." Max fixed Gwen with a look that carried approximately thirty years of paramilitary authority. "Gwen. No transforming while I'm gone."
"But—"
"No transforming. The watch stays on standby. You stay human. You stay at the campsite. You do not pick up your cousin."
"What if there's an emergency?"
"Then and ONLY then."
"What constitutes an emergency? Because I feel like Ben being cold—"
"IT'S NINETY DEGREES."
"—constitutes at least a minor emergency—"
"Gwen." Max's voice was final. "No. Transforming."
She slumped. "...Fine."
Max nodded, grabbed the Rust Bucket keys, paused, visibly reconsidered the wisdom of leaving these two alone together, and then left anyway because the alternative was bringing them both to town, and the last time he'd done that, the grocery store had needed to be evacuated. That had been before the Omnitrix. He didn't want to imagine after.
The Rust Bucket rumbled to life, pulled out of the campsite, and disappeared down the road.
Ben and Gwen were alone.
The Omnitrix glowed.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Forty-five minutes into Max's absence, the explosion happened.
Not at their campsite. Somewhere else. Somewhere over there—maybe a mile away, maybe two, on the other side of the ridge that separated their campground from the larger, more populated camping area near the lake.
The sound was unmistakable: a deep, percussive BOOM that rattled the trees and sent birds screaming into the sky. Then another. And another. A rhythmic, mechanical pounding, like a giant's footsteps, accompanied by the sound of tearing metal and splintering wood and, distantly, faintly, the screaming of people.
Ben was on his feet instantly, his cereal forgotten, his camp chair barricade suddenly seeming very, very insufficient.
"What was that?!"
Gwen looked up from the Omnitrix. She'd been staring at it—again—her thumb tracing the faceplate in the slow, meditative circles that had become her default state. She listened to the distant explosions with her head tilted, the way someone might listen to a neighbor's argument through thin apartment walls.
"Sounds like it's coming from the other campground," she said.
"Shouldn't we—I mean—people could be in trouble—"
"People we don't know," Gwen clarified.
"What?"
"Those are strangers, Ben. Stranger-people at a stranger-campground having a stranger-problem." She returned her attention to the Omnitrix. "I'm sure it's fine."
BOOM. CRASH. SCREEEEE.
The last sound was metallic—grinding, shrieking metal on metal, like a car being crumpled by a hydraulic press. A column of smoke began to rise above the tree line, thick and black and decidedly not the product of a campfire.
"Gwen, something is ATTACKING that campground!"
"Mm-hmm."
"PEOPLE could be HURT!"
"Probably."
"We have to DO something!"
Gwen looked at him. Studied him. Her green eyes moved from his face to the smoke column and back to his face with the careful evaluation of someone running a cost-benefit analysis.
"Is your campground being attacked?" she asked.
"What—no—"
"Are you in danger?"
"Not at this exact—"
"Then I don't see the problem."
Ben's mouth fell open. He stared at his cousin—his brilliant, straight-A, morally upstanding, would-normally-lecture-him-about-social-responsibility cousin—and tried to reconcile what he was hearing with the person he knew.
"You—Gwen, there's a thing destroying a campground and you want to just sit here?"
"I want to sit here with you," she corrected, as if that were an important distinction. "You're safe. You're right here. I can see you. If I go over there—" she gestured vaguely toward the smoke and screaming, "—then you'd be over here. Alone. Unprotected."
"From WHAT? The biggest threat in a five-mile radius is apparently over THERE!"
"You could trip."
"I could TRIP?!"
"There might still be pinecones I missed."
"GWEN!"
Another explosion. Closer this time. The ground trembled. Through the trees, Ben caught a glimpse of something—a flash of red light, a mechanical shape, something big moving between the trunks with the deliberate, systematic motion of a machine on a mission.
"Gwen, I think that thing is coming THIS way."
"Hmm?"
"GWEN!"
She looked up. Squinted toward the tree line. Through the gaps between the pines, they could both see it now—a robot. A giant robot. Easily twenty feet tall, maybe more, all angular red-and-black metal and glowing energy ports and legs like industrial pistons that cratered the earth with every step. It was tearing through the forest with the unstoppable purpose of something looking for something, its head—a flat, sensor-studded dome—sweeping back and forth in a scanning pattern.
It was heading in their general direction. Slowly. Methodically. Destroying everything in its path with casual, incidental violence—trees snapped, boulders shattered, a public restroom was reduced to porcelain confetti.
"Okay," Gwen said, watching this. "That's big."
"YEAH."
"Is it coming here?"
"IT LOOKS LIKE IT."
Gwen's eyes narrowed. She looked at the robot. She looked at Ben. She looked at the Omnitrix.
"Well," she said, and her voice was different now. Harder. The analytical Gwen—the one who solved problems, who planned, who strategized—was still in there, even when filtered through the obsessive lens of Ben-protection. And the analytical Gwen had just identified a threat to Ben.
That changed things.
"If it comes here," she said slowly, "it might hurt you."
"That's what I've been SAYING—"
"Then it needs to not come here."
She stood up. Walked to the edge of the campsite. Planted her feet. Crossed her arms.
And watched.
The robot continued its rampage through the forest. It was maybe half a mile away now, its scanning head sweeping in wide arcs, the red glow of its sensors cutting through the trees like searchlights. Behind it, the path of destruction stretched back toward the other campground—flattened trees, churned earth, the smoking remains of what had once been a very nice glamping setup.
Ben came up beside her. "Aren't you going to transform?"
"I'm assessing."
"ASSESS FASTER."
"It's not here yet. It might change direction." She paused. "It might go somewhere else. Somewhere that isn't where you are. In which case—"
"In which case there are still PEOPLE over there!"
"Stranger-people."
"GWEN!"
"I'm just saying! I have priorities, Ben!" She turned to face him, and there was genuine frustration in her expression—frustration not at the giant robot, but at the expectation that she should care about anything that wasn't him. "My priority is YOU. My priority has ALWAYS been you. Whether I'm—whether I'm me or Heatblast or XLR8 or WHATEVER—you are the thing that matters. Everything else is just... scenery."
"People aren't SCENERY!"
"People who aren't you are approximately scenery!"
BOOM.
The robot had gotten closer. Much closer. Close enough that they could feel the ground shake with each step, close enough to see the details—the pistons, the sensor arrays, the massive mechanical arms that ended in energy cannons currently glowing with charged red light.
Close enough that it saw them.
The scanning head swiveled. Locked. The red sensors focused on the campsite—on Gwen's wrist, specifically—and the robot's entire posture changed. It went from "systematic search pattern" to "target acquired" in the space of a heartbeat.
It raised an arm. The energy cannon began to charge.
"GWEN!"
"I see it."
"IT'S GOING TO SHOOT—"
"I see it, Ben."
She grabbed his hand and pulled. They dove sideways as the energy blast tore through the space they'd been standing in, vaporizing the picnic table, two camp chairs, and Ben's cereal barricade (which, in its final moments, proved exactly as structurally sound as everyone had predicted).
They hit the ground, rolled, and came up behind the Rust Bucket—which Max had, thankfully, parked between several large trees before leaving.
The robot took another step. The ground shook. It was maybe three hundred yards away and closing.
"Okay," Gwen said. She was breathing hard, but her eyes were focused. Clear. The threat had crystallized her thinking. The only thing that mattered was keeping Ben safe, and keeping Ben safe now required dealing with a twenty-foot robot. Ergo: the robot would be dealt with. "Okay. I'll transform."
"FINALLY!"
She reached for the Omnitrix. Popped the dial.
The holographic display appeared. Silhouettes rotated.
Her hand moved instinctively toward Heatblast.
"Heatblast might not be the best choice here," Ben said quickly, because even in mortal terror his survival instincts included managing Gwen's alien selection. "Fire against metal? You'd need to get really hot to melt that thing."
Gwen's hand hovered. She wanted Heatblast. Every fiber of her being wanted Heatblast. Heatblast was warm and perfect and had the right chest for post-battle Ben-cradling.
But Ben had a point. She hated that Ben had a point. She hated that his point was correct and logical and that she couldn't just be Heatblast for everything forever.
"Fine," she muttered, and spun the dial past Heatblast with physical effort, like she was turning against a strong current. Past XLR8. Past Four Arms.
She landed on a crystalline silhouette. Broad-shouldered. Angular. Made of something that looked hard. Very hard.
"That one?" Ben said. "What is it?"
"I don't know and I don't care and it's not Heatblast and I already hate it." She slammed the dial down.
The transformation began.
Different again. Every alien was a new experience, a new set of sensations rolling across her body like a tide of other. This one started with weight—a heaviness that began in her wrist and spread outward, her bones thickening, her flesh hardening, her entire body gaining mass in a way that was immediate and undeniable.
Her skin didn't change to magma or scales. It changed to crystal.
Pale green crystal, translucent and refractive, spreading up her arm like frost on a window—if frost were made of semi-precious gemstones and grew with a sound like wind chimes made of diamonds. It was beautiful, objectively. Each facet caught the morning light and broke it into rainbow fragments that danced across the surrounding trees.
But it wasn't warm.
It wasn't warm at all.
"Oh," Gwen said, and her voice was already different—resonant, harmonic, like someone speaking inside a cathedral made of glass. Multiple tones layered on top of each other, creating a sound that was simultaneously musical and slightly eerie. "Oh, this is... this is cold."
The crystal spread across her shoulders, down her torso, and—inevitably—the proportions began to shift.
Her hips expanded. Of course they did. They expanded with the same glacial inevitability as every other form, the crystal surface cracking and reforming to accommodate the widening frame, new facets appearing along the expanding curves like geodes being split open from the inside. But where Heatblast's hips had been soft despite being made of rock, and XLR8's had been smooth and organic, Diamondhead's were angular. Every curve was expressed through planes and facets and sharp geometric edges. She was a being of acute angles pretending to be curvy—and somehow, against all logic and crystallography, succeeding spectacularly.
Her thighs followed suit, thickening into columns of translucent green crystal that caught the light and threw prismatic rainbows in every direction. They were massive—every alien form seemed contractually obligated to give her thighs that could crush industrial equipment—but they were hard. Not the yielding warmth of magma or the smooth density of Kineceleran muscle. Diamond. Literal diamond. Or something very close to it.
Her chest expanded last, and Gwen felt the difference immediately.
It was big. Proportionally absurd, as usual—the Omnitrix's apparent commitment to giving every form a chest that defied physics remained unshaken by something as trivial as being made of gemstone. Two massive crystalline formations jutted from her upper torso like the most structurally overengineered geological formations in the history of mineralogy, faceted and gleaming and catching the sunlight in ways that were almost blinding.
But they were hard.
Not soft. Not yielding. Not the warm, impossible softness of Heatblast's volcanic chest that Ben's face sank into like a pillow. Not even the smooth, vibrating density of XLR8. These were crystals. Faceted. Angular. Beautiful, maybe. Impressive, certainly. But pressing a human face into them would be like pressing a human face into a chandelier.
Gwen's expression, as the transformation completed and she stood at her full height—seven feet of crystalline excess, rainbow light scattering from every surface, her proportions a geological impossibility rendered in precious stone—was not happy.
She looked down at herself.
She looked at her chest.
She tapped it with one crystalline finger. The sound was tink tink tink—glass on glass. Hard on hard.
"No," she said.
"Gwen, the ROBOT—"
"This is TERRIBLE."
"GIANT ROBOT, GWEN—"
"My chest is a ROCK, Ben!" She cupped her massive crystalline hands under the formations in question and looked down at them with an expression of profound betrayal. "It's a HARD ROCK! How am I supposed to—you can't put your face in a ROCK!"
"I don't WANT to put my face in ANYTHING—"
"That's not the POINT! The POINT is the OPTION should be AVAILABLE!"
BOOM.
The robot had reached the tree line at the edge of their campsite. It stepped through the last row of pines, splintering them like matchsticks, and its full form was visible now—twenty-two feet of alien military hardware, bristling with weapons, its sensor dome focused on the Omnitrix with unwavering, mechanical intent.
It raised both arm cannons.
"GWEN!"
Diamondhead-Gwen turned to face the robot. Her expression shifted—not to fear, not to determination, but to annoyance. This thing was between her and complaining about her chest, and she did not appreciate the interruption.
"FINE," she snapped, and raised one massive crystalline arm.
The robot fired.
Twin beams of red energy lanced across the campsite, converging on Gwen's position with enough power to level a building.
They hit her arm.
They bounced.
The crystal surface of Diamondhead's body didn't just deflect the energy—it refracted it, splitting the twin beams into a dozen smaller beams that scattered in every direction like a laser light show at a very violent concert. Trees exploded. The ground cratered. One redirected beam sliced the robot's left leg off at the knee, and the massive machine staggered, tilting sideways, servos screaming.
Gwen blinked. Looked at her arm, which was completely unscathed. Looked at the half-crippled robot.
"Oh," she said. "Huh."
The robot, running on one leg and pure mechanical spite, raised its remaining arm cannon and fired again. Gwen didn't dodge. She didn't need to. She held up both arms and the beam split across her crystalline surface, refracting into a kaleidoscope of destructive light that carved the forest behind the robot into modern art.
"Gwen, hit it!" Ben shouted from behind the Rust Bucket.
"With WHAT?"
"YOUR ARMS! YOU'RE MADE OF DIAMOND!"
Gwen looked at her arms. Looked at the robot. Considered this.
Then she ran at it.
Running, in Diamondhead's form, was not the graceful, blurring sprint of XLR8 or the thundering, magma-trailing charge of Heatblast. It was more like watching a gemstone avalanche develop opinions about velocity. The ground cracked under each footfall. Each step sent prismatic shockwaves through the earth. Her massive legs—those enormous, faceted, crystalline pillars—pumped with a power that was less "athletic" and more "tectonic."
Her thighs ground against each other with each stride, producing a sound like two diamonds being rubbed together—because that was, in fact, exactly what was happening. It was a high-pitched, musical shreeeee that accompanied every step, throwing sparks of rainbow light in all directions. A running Diamondhead-Gwen was essentially a seven-foot disco ball of destruction.
The robot fired again. The beam hit her mid-stride, refracted off her chest—tink—and carved a trench in the hillside behind her. She didn't slow down.
She reached the robot.
She pulled back one massive, crystalline fist.
And she punched a twenty-two-foot alien war machine with approximately the same energy she'd devote to swatting a mosquito that had been buzzing near Ben's ear.
CRRRUNNNCHHH.
The robot's torso caved in like a soda can. The impact sent shockwaves through its frame, shattering sensor arrays and rupturing power conduits. Sparks and mechanical fluid sprayed in every direction. The machine staggered backward—one step, two—its remaining leg buckling under the structural damage.
Gwen hit it again. Same fist. Same annoyance. The robot's arm cannon shattered, fragments of alien metal scattering like confetti.
Again. The sensor dome cracked, then shattered, raining crystalline fragments of its own across the ground.
Again. The robot's chest plate caved completely, exposing a core of pulsing red energy that flickered and sputtered.
"STAY. AWAY. FROM. BEN." Each word was punctuated by another hit, each hit accompanied by the musical crash of diamond on metal, each impact driving the robot further back toward the trees it had destroyed on the way in.
The final punch went clean through. Gwen's crystalline fist entered the robot's chest and exited through its back, trailing wires and sparking components. The machine's red glow flickered once. Twice.
Died.
The robot toppled backward with an earth-shaking crash, its massive frame crumpling into the already-devastated tree line, its systems going dark one by one like lights being turned off in an empty building.
Silence.
Gwen stood over it, her arm still extended, her fist still embedded in the robot's chest cavity. She was breathing hard—could Diamondhead breathe hard? She was doing something that sounded like breathing hard, a harmonic resonance echoing through her crystalline body.
She withdrew her fist. Shook off fragments of alien metal. Turned around.
Looked at Ben.
The expression on her face was not triumph. It was not satisfaction. It was not the warrior's pride of a battle won or the hero's relief of a crisis averted.
It was distress.
"I can't hug you like this," she said.
"...What?"
"I can't HUG you!" She strode toward him—each step a seismic event, rainbow light scattering from her body in every direction—and stopped in front of the Rust Bucket. She looked down at Ben. He looked up at her. Seven feet of crystalline alien, still sparking slightly from the robot's energy blasts, the wreckage of a giant war machine smoking behind her.
She held up her arms. Turned them. Showed him the faceted, angular, extremely pointy surfaces.
"Look at these!" she said, and her harmonic voice cracked with emotion. "Look at these ARMS! These are STABBING arms, Ben! If I hug you with these, you'll get IMPALED! And my chest—" She gestured at the massive crystalline formations. "—is basically a WALL! A hard, cold, WALL! If I put your face in there, you'll get a CONCUSSION!"
"I—that's—I don't WANT you to put my face—"
"It's the PRINCIPLE, Ben!" She was actually upset. Genuinely, unironically upset that she had just single-handedly destroyed a twenty-foot alien robot and the alien form that allowed her to do it was insufficiently soft for cuddling purposes.
"You just SAVED me!" Ben pointed out, gesturing at the smoking wreckage. "You just punched a GIANT ROBOT to death! Doesn't that count for anything?!"
"What GOOD is punching robots if I can't HOLD you afterward?!" Gwen countered, and she seemed to genuinely mean this. The robot was an afterthought. The robot was paperwork. The real issue—the important issue—was that Diamondhead could not provide adequate post-combat snuggling.
Ben stared at her for a long, long moment.
Then he did something unexpected.
He stepped forward. Reached out. And patted her crystalline leg.
It was a small gesture. Barely a touch. His small, warm, human hand against the cool, hard surface of her diamond-skin thigh. A brief contact, lasting maybe two seconds, that conveyed something he would absolutely deny later if asked.
Thank you. You did good. I'm okay.
Gwen went still. Every facet of her crystalline body seemed to catch the light simultaneously, a brief, brilliant flash of rainbow radiance that lit up the entire campsite.
"...Ben," she said softly, and her harmonic voice was very, very gentle.
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird."
"You're ABOUT to make it weird."
"I just want to say—"
"DON'T."
Beebeep.
"NO!"
Gwen's crystalline form blazed with refracted light as the familiar fury ignited. She clamped both hands over the Omnitrix—an action that produced an alarming CRACK sound as diamond met alien technology with more force than was probably advisable.
"NOT NOW! HE JUST TOUCHED MY LEG! HE VOLUNTARILY TOUCHED MY LEG! THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE AND I NEED TO PROCESS IT AND I CANNOT PROCESS IT AS A STUPID HUMAN—"
Beebeep. Beebeep.
"I WILL SHATTER YOU! I WILL BREAK YOU INTO A MILLION PIECES AND MAKE A NECKLACE OUT OF YOUR COMPONENTS AND WEAR YOU AROUND MY NECK SO HELP ME—"
BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP.
"FINE! FINE! BUT I'M COMING RIGHT BACK AND I'M GOING TO BE HEATBLAST AND I'M GOING TO HOLD HIM AND HIS FACE IS GOING IN THE CHEST AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT—"
Flash.
Gwen Tennyson. Ten years old. Standing in front of a destroyed robot, next to a scorched RV, in a campsite that looked like a war zone.
She immediately, without missing a beat, without even pausing to process the detransformation, reached down and grabbed Ben's hand.
He was too surprised to pull away.
She held it. Tight. Her small, human, ten-year-old fingers laced through his, and she stood there, holding his hand in the wreckage of a battlefield, breathing hard, eyes slightly wild.
"...Gwen?"
"Shut up. I'm holding your hand. Let me have this."
He let her have it.
Max returned forty-five minutes later to find a destroyed alien robot in his campsite, a daughter-shaped hole in three trees, scorch marks on the Rust Bucket, and his two grandchildren sitting on the ground holding hands while Gwen wrote furiously in a notebook with her free hand.
He looked at the robot.
He looked at the kids.
He sighed.
That night, Gwen added a new entry to her comparative analysis:
ALIEN #3: DIAMONDHEAD (Petrosapien)
Overall Rating: 2/10 ⭐⭐
Power: Fine. Good, even. Very hard. Very strong. Punched a giant robot to death with five hits. Can refract energy blasts, which is actually really cool if you care about that sort of thing (I don't, really, but it saved Ben's life so I grudgingly acknowledge its utility). 8/10.
Protection Capability: Excellent in theory. I am literally made of diamond. Nothing can hurt me. I can stand between Ben and literally any attack and it will bounce off. This is good. This gets a high score. 9/10.
Warmth: ZERO. Absolutely ZERO warmth. Crystal is COLD. Cold and hard and horrible. When I stood near Ben, I could feel the temperature difference between us—his warm little human body and my cold dead crystal body. I hated every second of it. I wanted to be Heatblast SO BAD. 0/10.
Chest:
I don't even want to talk about it.
Fine. I'll talk about it.
HARD. So hard. SO UNBELIEVABLY HARD. I knocked on my own chest and it sounded like someone tapping on a WINDOW. A WINDOW, Grandpa. How am I supposed to provide adequate facial immersion in a WINDOW? I can't. I literally can't. If I pressed Ben's face into my Diamondhead chest, he would get a BROKEN NOSE. Or a FRACTURED CHEEKBONE. Or a CONCUSSION.
The size is fine. The size is generous. The Omnitrix continues to do whatever it's doing to the proportions and I continue to not question it. But size without softness is POINTLESS. It's like having a swimming pool with no water. It's like having a bed made of GRANITE.
I HATE Diamondhead's chest. I hate it with every facet of my crystalline being.
1/10. And the 1 is only because the size is technically impressive and I don't want to be unfair.
Holding Capability: TERRIBLE. My arms are covered in CRYSTAL EDGES. They're not sharp enough to cut, but they're not SMOOTH. They're FACETED. Every surface has angles. Holding Ben would be like hugging him with a CHANDELIER.
I didn't get to hug him. I WANTED to hug him. I had just defeated a giant robot FOR him and I couldn't even hug him afterward. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, including the time I got a 98 on a math test because I forgot to show my work on problem 7. 1/10.
Mobility: Slow. Not as slow as Heatblast, but not fast either. I run like a beautiful, sparkly freight train. The thigh situation is similar to Heatblast—significant mass, significant friction, significant shreeeee sound that draws attention. 4/10.
Special Notes:
Ben touched my leg.
He reached out and touched my leg VOLUNTARILY. Without being asked. Without being grabbed or tricked or bribed. He just... touched it. And it was the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of the universe.
I was in the WRONG FORM for it. I was DIAMOND. He touched DIAMOND when he should have been touching MAGMA. If I had been Heatblast—if I had been WARM and SOFT—he might have... he might have...
I don't know what he might have done. But it would have been BETTER. Everything is better as Heatblast.
The Omnitrix timed out SIX SECONDS after he touched my leg. SIX. SECONDS. I needed AT MINIMUM another hour to process the emotional significance of voluntary physical contact and the watch gave me SIX SECONDS.
I will never forgive it. I will hold this grudge FOREVER. In EVERY form. Across ALL timelines.
Time Limit: See above. I am LIVID. -∞/10.
Overall Assessment: 2/10. Useful for punching things that threaten Ben. Useless for everything that actually matters. Would not use again unless something needs to be punched very hard, and even then I would rather be Heatblast and just punch it with a WARM, SOFT fist.
HEATBLAST REMAINS SUPERIOR IN ALL MEANINGFUL CATEGORIES.
(Written at the bottom of the page, in smaller, more careful handwriting:)
He held my hand after, though. When I was human.
He held my hand for four whole minutes.
That was nice.
That was really nice.
...Heatblast is still better.
TO BE CONTINUED...