"You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve," - J. K. Rowling

It's always strange to wake up one day and just say to yourself, "Oh yeah, his arms were torn off again, looks like it'll be another few hours to reattach the nerves and reconnect the actual arms. Maybe I should add more plating to the hydraulics and pad the biochemical structure of the face plate?"

Of course, I had to get used to this almost every day after the guy left, but it was still so appalling to know how destructive he could get about his own body. Granted, it was almost completely destroyed when it was first found after the wake of a rampaging cyborg-but still! He had no self preservation skills whatsoever.

Aside from troublesome cyborgs, I decided to have a normal morning, the kind where you just relax out of bed. Eat cereal, watch TV, check emails, that sort of thing. There were no calls on my phone, which could only mean one thing. I got to stay home for once! I practically squealed with giddiness. It had been such a long time since I last had a full day to myself in my snug little apartment, I couldn't even remember the last time I didn't pull an all nighter in the shop just to repair an arm!

I stretched out my legs and toes to revel in what luck I was in for once in what felt like years. It was absolutely divine!

I picked up my phone again, just to check whether I had gotten a notification again or not. Peeking at the home screen for only a second, my hopes and dreams for the day were shattered. A text was on screen and I could already feel my broken happiness turn into a growing agitation.

"Left arm missing, torso torn, face plate damaged, gouged endoskull, almost self destructed," the list went on and on from there, listing more injuries, parts that needed replacing, and parts that needed to be made from scratch, again.

I groaned aggravatedly. Did this damn guy know nothing about self preservation?! I slammed my phone on the table for the seventeenth time the week and picked up my coat, and a briefcase filled to the brim with tools and other necessities. I walked out the door at a brisk pace. The doctor was going to be waiting for me.

Genos was seriously going to pay one day.

Ever since I was a kid, I had always loved engineering and all of its aspects. I was a pretty smart kid, and not to brag, I was called a prodigy child, able to manufacture anything with simple household items. My mom used to tell me my first accomplishment was turning my diaper into a fully functional, paper airplane.

I graduated middle school and high school at an early age and moved on to any college and university courses I could find to sate my desire to become a great engineer. Once I had completed those, I still found myself unsatisfied with how much I knew, or how little. I moved out of my parents' house to become a freelance engineer to get out into the field and just experience the working world for what it was worth.

It turns out it wasn't much.

I became completely broke and had to get a job at a café. I was utterly embarrassed and felt ridiculous. I wanted to build, I wanted to create! I didn't want to be stuck in a hole of a run down business with customers yelling at me to make their frappuccino with extra caramel and little to no milk! In my spare time, anything I could get my hands on, I fiddled with and created something new out of. My boss wasn't exactly satisfied when I turned the coffeemaker into a working double barrelled, air pressurized gun, able to shoot scalding mocha lattes. I didn't see what he had to get so worked up about, I only burned seven people! …Fine… it was fourteen. At least I wasn't fired, my boss only docked half of my pay. Which didn't exactly help me pay rent. Everything was as fine as fine could be.

And then I got a call.

It hadn't seemed strange at the time, in fact it felt completely normal. Someone was calling me for business reasons; maybe I was being assigned a different position in the workplace because they knew someone with the skills to make a coffee blaster needed to be elsewhere, maybe they had caught wind of a genius engineer and wanted her services, just maybe.

Instead, I was told my parents died.

I never knew why, I never knew how, all I knew was that they were both gone and I hadn't done a damn thing to help them. They had been staying in a small town ever since I moved out, to enjoy the scenery of the urban sprawl. They used to send me little postcards of them holding each other in front of skies so blue, and grasses so green…

I didn't have time to mourn. The only time I had was to work, and work, and work. If it wasn't in the shop, then it was a self project, and if it wasn't a self project, then it was applying for more workplaces looking for a qualified engineer or inventor.

During my weekend in which I was free from the shop, I secluded myself in my workshop, working on my self project: steam powered repulsor boots. They were prototypes. I wanted my final product to be powered by a self sustaining reactor, but I hadn't come across the proper tools or technology. If my steam powered boots flew me somewhere for a minimum of four hours, then it was deemed a successful prototype. The way they were designed was to intake the vapour in the atmosphere and heat it up in the system, thereby creating steam, but the output compared to the intake was too little.

Even so, my boots still required testing, and the immediate area of my workshop was much too small for a full scale evaluation. What better way to test them than visiting my late parents' rubble of a wiped out town?

Starting off, I was wobbly and struggled balancing myself. I admit, I also destroyed some of my more expensive equipment, and fell on my ass too many times to count. It was my first time being up in the air rather than the ground, so I allowed myself room for mistakes, trying to be as patient as I could be. It was better than blowing up at every failed attempt.

By attempt #247, I deemed myself capable enough to fly in the sky for a full length test run. By car, the time taken between my parents' town and my city was an hour and a half with traffic. Given how my boots could at least reach 150mph, it could get to the village in about less than half that time, and given how there was no air traffic that I could think of (besides planes), including a base of a three hour run, the evaluation was fully possible. I hit the switch outside of my workshop, and my evaluation began.

As I flew, I absorbed the actual feeling. There were no words to describe it. The wind blowing, the clouds floating, the everything. All I knew was that it felt amazing. Was this how birds felt? Did they feel the rush of being hundreds of feet off of the ground? Did they feel the surge of adrenaline that humans did? An almost silent part if my mind knew it wasn't, it just didn't want to be a killjoy. But that same killjoy was also a realist. The actual happiness I felt of being up in the air wouldn't last long, or at least not long enough.

Time slipped me by, and I neared a patch of land. The sky was darkened over it, a purple/brown hue settling. I grimaced in preparation of the sights I was about to witness.

I landed extremely shakily, managing to land incorrectly, and scratching up my hands and knees a good bit. "Shit!" I cursed, patting my stinging, red hands on my pants. I'd need to make sure they were cleaned later, but I wasn't going to leave the village so soon; I needed to see things for myself.

The stinging sensation in my knees was worse than that in my hands, with my walking agitating my scratches. Who knew what sort of thing destroyed the village? If it was some sort of poisonous mysterious being, then I really had to be cautious about what I might have subjected myself to.

I strolled around the village, the old place I grew up in. The streets and paved roads were unrecognizable, tree roots and building rubble sticking in the air. What was once so familiar to me was lost amongst all of the ruins.

There was a slight pressure underneath my boot as I walked, and I jumped, holding my fists up thinking the mysterious being might have returned. It didn't. I only stepped on a children's doll. I slowly kneeled down, and picked it up with a frown, turning it over a few times to examine it. Dried blood covered its side. A child lived here once, and how sad it was that a monster had been their final thought. No one deserved to die that way, especially not a child. Grimly, I put the doll back down to continue my search.

About half an hour in being there, I grew impatient wondering the lonely streets, and a little frightened as well. It was quiet, save for the howling wind, and the signs which were landmarks in my childhood were illegible or gone. "Haf," I muttered, placing two fingers to my earpiece, and taking out my phone, "scan for any genetic features matching mine in the immediate area."

"Underneath artificial substances, ma'am?"

"Yes, please."

From my phone, a large, blue translucent field came out, spanning at least fifteen kilometres of where I stood; a large enough field to find my parents' house, I estimated. It spun round me several times until it retracted into my phone curtly. Haf's voice came back onto my ear piece.

"Of your genectics, there are two sources approximately 2.5 kilometres northeast from your current location,"

"Thanks Haf,"

"It is what I'm here for, ma'am." I followed Haf's directions diligently, who so thankfully inserted a map on my phone to guide me. I resented it slightly, reminding Haf that I had a great sense of direction even though we both knew it wasn't true.

The 2.5km which Haf gave me, didn't allow me any better of a scenic route than what I'd earlier viewed, in fact, it got worse; more blood, more crushed buildings, more…. just more…. There were even more personal belongings of the late citizens. There were strollers, bags, shoes, clothes…. It was a ghost town where the ghosts of these people now lived.

My heart beated faster as I steadily approached my destination. 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1…. All at once, everything stopped. My body began to move on its own accord, ignoring the signals my brain sent. No, no, no, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop! My brain begged. Nothing about me felt in control, like I was a stranger out of my own body. I felt dead to the world.

And then I saw it. I dropped to my knees as tears leaked out of my eyes. This pile of rubble was supposedly my old house. My head was held in my hands and shook it repeatedly. I knew this sort of thing was going to happen if I came back! I just wanted to scream. A thought suddenly came to me in my frustration and denial. Just because my parents' house was now rubble, didn't mean they were dead inside of it!

I ran to the ruin and started moving stone, brick and wood haphazardly until I found concrete evidence my parents were really dead. I cut my ankles multiple times with stray shards of glass lying about the stones, and I ignored them through bitter cries.

"If you're looking for survivors, you'd best save your energy," a cynical voice quipped from behind me. My head whipped around, my ears deceiving me for momentarily believing I'd heard the voice of my father. "I've already checked. No survivors whatsoever." I disappointed myself. Instead, I had found an old man with a large nose and strangely styled hair.

I scowled, looking down at the large mess I'd made of my hands, and the rest of my body. It really was for nothing then, wasn't it? Blood trailed down my legs slowly from the parts I cut further with the debris I rummaged through. "What did this?" I whispered after a long stretch of silence.

"A mad cyborg," I was surprised the old man even answered. I thought he left me to wallow in self hate.

"How does a cyborg go mad?" I wondered with heat behind my words. If cyborgs were supposed to be more advanced than humans yet still retained humanity, how did a human do all of this?

There was a pause, and the old man seemed to contemplate an explanation. "Sometimes, the electrodes wired near the body's nervous system can cause errors. It estranges the brain and causes irreversible damage. The electrodes wired near this cyborg's brain made it more aggressive and hostile. It went on a rampage. It was because of my carelessness that this happened. I'm so very sorry."

He sounded miserable, and there was nothing that could make me forgive him. He said it himself, it was his fault this village got wiped out, that my parents were killed. Though, what could I do to give him at least the benefit of the doubt? I never partook in the creation of a cyborg, but I couldn't imagine wiring nerves and actual wires was an easy thing to do. The entire process of creating a cyborg sounded taxing and complicated, even for my standards.

No, I really didn't have it in me to forgive him. I wanted a change in conversation immediately, it was way too dreary. "Who are you, gramps? Some sort of scientist?" At first glance, I was at least able to see a lab coat, so my assumption probably wasn't that far off.

The old man accepted the change in topic. "Yes," he said, and I imagined him nodding behind me while I rolled a piece of stone around in my hand. "My name is Doctor Kuseno,"

My eyes widened. How hadn't I recognized him before?! The Doctor Kuseno was to my backside?! I gulped to myself. He was a well known scientist when I was younger, in fact he was one of my role models. "H-hey, gramps," my breathing became shaky while I turned around to face him. "You're looking for this mad cyborg, right? You might be following its path of rampage, but what if I offered my services?"

I just found myself a new job.

I screamed.

"Oh my God, what the hell did you do?!" Latching onto the cyborg's in tact arm, I slid my hand over the scratched metal to assess damage. My eyes roamed over every inch of damaged equipment. Just like what the message said on my phone, but imagining it and seeing it for real were two very different experiences. And then of course, one arm was completely missing! "These were the arms I worked on myself, how can you just-!" I gestured over how broken and destroyed they were, making distressed and angry noises. There were no words to describe how angry I really was. I settled on seething through my clenched teeth.

"Now, now, Jade. This happens often enough, there's no need to be angry." Doctor Kuseno, who was behind me, attempted to calm my ire. It wasn't working.

"But, Doctor-!" I whined.

"I'll be working on Genos's default arms, you remove any damage and shrapnel." He chuckled, waving me off. He went over to a corner of the lab to assemble the arms, just as he said. The man was too lax for his own good, but we did have a good system going, and he kept with it.

I sighed, trying to release any lingering aggravation in my system. "Alright, fine." I trailed around the table where Genos was lying down. "I'm going to need to make a full list of your injuries, so let's start with that." I muttered, making sure Genos could hear me. I started with his face plate. As I moved closer, I saw him flinch. It was barely visible, and I only caught it at the last second, but it wasn't hard to tell what he was thinking. "Look, just because I'm still pissed, doesn't mean I'm going to rip you a new one when you're like this, so why don't you actually tell me what happened while I inspect your body, and I might not rip you a new one when you're in one piece."

He thought about it for a moment. "Very well," he shifted his shoulders to the best of his possibility in his state. "You've heard of the strange occurrences with the mosquitoes recently?" I nodded absent mindedly, picking up a clipboard and a pen, writing down what I saw. "I decided to investigate, and ended up in Z-City where they all collected. I eliminated all of the mosquitoes, but they had a leader who was much stronger. I believed I had eliminated her too when I incinerated a radius of five hundred meters, but she took the blood from her minions and made herself stronger."

I cut in, needing more clarification. "So, this mosquito girl, leader person, she was the one who did this to you?" I waved my pen in his direction.

"Yes," Genos nodded.

"And you managed to kill her?" If she inflicted this sort of harm to him, and wasn't dead, then we had a problem. Then again, Genos probably wouldn't be alive if she weren't dead.

"No," He wasn't shameful of admitting it, and there was a certain glint of respect in his non-missing eye. Of what, I wasn't sure. Even so, I started freaking out.

"What?" I asked, my voice quickening with worry. "Then she's still out there?! Sure, I heard the mosquitoes went after wildlife and cattle, but you said yourself that the leader's stronger now, and she attacked a city! What if she-!"

"Someone else did," Genos continued, as if my freak out never happened. I waved my pen again for elaboration. "Someone else killed her. He destroyed the mosquito girl as though she were nothing, like my efforts against her were nothing. He's strong…." His eye was filled with fire, his determination.

Slowly, the corner of my mouth lifted upwards into a smirk seeing his resolve. "Well, I'll take comfort in that at least." The was a long period of comfortable silence in which I continued writing and checking off things on my clipboard. I listed off all major injuries and parts in need of replacing, now I needed to find all the minor areas where shrapnel might have entered, or where screws were rattling. This was the hard part. I'd need an in depth analysis of Genos's anatomy and its' abrasions. I placed two fingers to my earpiece. "Haf, perform a full body scan of Genos. Find any small discrepancies from the original model."

Genos frowned. "Is Haf really necessary in this situation?"

I snorted, placing my pen on my clipboard. "When isn't Haf necessary? I know you're not very fond of them, but you have to admit, Haf is extremely helpful," I paused. "That pun wasn't necessarily intended, but for the sake of your annoyance, we're going to pretend it was. For the sake of your comfort, Haf won't be connected to the lab's speakers. Happy?" The smile on my face was absolutely cheeky, which I could tell annoyed him even more.

From the ceiling lights, a thin stream of light emitted and flanked out into a small gridded field. It waved up and down over Genos's body, and quickly, it retracted back into the lights. "Alright Haf, how many discrepancies are there aside from the major ones?" My fingers were back on my earpiece, awaiting Haf's response.

"Approximately five hundred and seven, ma'am."

"Yeah, figured it was large number," I muttered. "Thanks, Haf," I added in a louder voice. I took my hand away from my ear and looked towards Genos, who had an eyebrow raised. Well, an eyebrow raised was as much as I could tell. Part of one was missing, so it wasn't like I was working with much.

"There's over five hundred, gonna have to tend to those now." I said, not even needing him to ask me anything. It was sort of how we worked. He may have been more metal than flesh, but for me he was still pretty easy to read.

I connected some wires hanging from the ceiling to Genos's body to push out some shrapnel near his chest, and to be certain his core wasn't giving out on him during the operation. An hour or more might have passed, I wasn't keeping track, while I made sure there weren't anymore abrasions near his torso and legs. All five hundred and seven were hard to find, and I had difficulty after the four hundredth mark. Once they were taken care of, I began to replace them all, then I removed Genos's arms to prepare his torso for Doctor Kuseno. I removed his shirt for good measure.

"You didn't do anything to your core, did you?" I asked curiously. I almost forgot about the part of the message that said, "almost self destructed."

Now, he looked shameful. His chest was heating up a bit. "I didn't think I was going to make it after that mosquito girl strengthened herself, so I was going to take her out with me."

There was an angry fire brewing in my chest. I nullified it before it could grow too large. There wasn't a use in getting any more angry than I already had been. "You're really reckless, you know that?" I murmured tiredly. My back was starting to ache, and I still had to reattach his legs and fix up his torso.

"I let my guard down," Genos conceded. He had a really bad habit of doing that, I found. Each reason he had to go through repairs was because at one point in the fight, he had let his guard down. He could really use someone to watch his back.

From behind the corner, I heard the doctor's familiar footsteps. "Oh, you made it further than I thought you would," Doctor Kuseno said from around the corner, holding a case which contained Genos's default arms. He sure took his sweet time preparing those, I thought grudgingly.

I puffed up my chest proudly. "How far did you think I would get?" Impressing the good doctor as an engineer wasn't a very easy thing to do, but when I did, it felt glorious.

"Significantly less than you did," he chuckled, approaching the both of us and laying the case on a cart beside Genos and his table.

"Aw, come on!" I griped jokingly. "Have a little more faith in me, doc!"

"Well," he huffed, lifting an arm on the table while I took the other, "that's a hard thing to have when you manage to almost dehydrate yourself with hydrophobic equipment,"

My face heated up, and I saw Genos's lip quirk upwards in amusement. "Shut up," I grumbled, flustered. It was not a story I wanted to retell, anytime soon, especially not to him.

"There's no need to be embarrassed," Doctor Kuseno said comfortingly, moving the arm closer to Genos's torso as I did the same. "Now, help me attach this arm."

"Right," I nodded, unclenching my teeth. "Do you want to be up or out for this, Genos?" I asked before we actually did anything else professionally, forgetting my previous embarrassment.

He shrugged with his neck for the lack of not having shoulders to shrug with. "It doesn't matter," he said apathetically, because of course it didn't.

"Up it is then," I decided, because getting him unconscious would be more work, which my fatigued body really didn't need.

I put on some goggles and got to work. Doctor Kuseno had me attach the wires from the torso to the arms because my hands were smaller and more nimble than his were, but he made sure to tell me which wires needed to be connected and how to connect them. I didn't need him to hold my hand anymore thanks to how long I'd been now doing this, but the sentiment was appreciated nonetheless.

"Alright, now can you move your arm," I asked Genos, who did so. It twitched a few times and Genos laid it back down on the table. "Looks like there's a spoiled wire," I mumbled, "this might sting a bit," I warned. Thanks to the goggles, I located the spoiled wire easily, and snapped it. Genos inhaled quickly, indicating he had felt it, but I soothed it over by ripping out the wire and replacing it. Sure, he could feel pain, but we dulled the nerves to the point where attacks should at least feel like a bee's sting. I asked Genos to move his arm again to make sure it was now functioning properly, and it all checked out. The same process went for the other arm.

"Jade, help me turn him over," Doctor Kuseno said, holding onto Genos's side. We were going to fix up the legs next, which were damaged near or directly on the femurs and the meniscus'. The entire knee section of both of his legs were torn and needed replacing with completely new parts. I removed all of the wires connected to Genos's chest and turned his legs over while the doctor turned over the rest of his body.

"I'll handle this part, Jade. Why don't you relax?" He offered. I could have melted in the spot from the words I'd been waiting to hear for the whole day. I thanked him happily, fairly certain I was skipping on my way out.

I went out to the front of the lab where I knew we kept a couch, and flopped on it lazily. Fixing up Genos was such a pain. Why did he have to get hurt so often? What kind of people did he fight? This was the seventh time in the year we had to replace his arms. Over the four years of being a cyborg, he'd at least replaced eight pairs of arms, two arms per year, so what made this year any different? Was monster activity rising? Well, he did go to Z-City; the place was the spawn point for all monsters.

But, God damn it, his fault or not, I was still pissed at Genos for managing to break the arms I made. I worked really hard on the design and everything! That was over a week's work down the drain. I guess I really did need to add more plating to the arms if one was taken out so easily, maybe even add more weapons and firearms. I guess I should work on them now, I thought despairingly. If I didn't do it now, then the inspiration I had for it would be gone for a long time, even if this was at the expense of my sleep. I could work on a concept first, not the final product.

I got up and walked over to the desk I was given and sketched out a rough draft. If I was going to fit all the heavy firearms in the arms, then they were going to have to be large and bulky. Maybe they could fold over Genos's default arms? I noted it down as an idea in the corner of the page. They had to have a great destructive power too, and that needed to be showcased through its design. Black spikes, and a lot of them. If it was powerful, I also needed to be certain they wouldn't blow themselves off of Genos's body. It needed a securing area where they would stick. The face plate, possibly? Of course, if he wanted to use this much power on an opponent, it was optional. The attachments to the faceplate weren't completely necessary. If the battle got really desperate, then maybe there would be a part of the arm where he could attach his core, and make a particle beam out of it.

I noted it all down in the corner of the page and began sketching the design. It looked kind of ridiculous at first, but it began to grow on me, and I continued with the sketch until it was detailed enough. On the sketch, I then listed the places where things would go. The core/particle beam processor would enter by unfolding the upper arm and a large blast would exit through the palm of the hand. As I began to make it more detailed, I heard Doctor Kuseno come up from behind again.

"I thought I told you to relax!" He chastised lightly, letting his eyes go over my sketch anyway. He was no doubt interested. It was the fifteenth sketch I'd made, yet none of them really came to life just yet; we were just too busy.

"I know, I know," I groaned, "I just needed a way to let off some steam, and as great as relaxing is, it's not exactly how I relax," I put down my pencil and stretched out my back. "How's Genos doing?"

"The operation was a success, everything works out perfectly, but Genos told me something interesting,"

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "Was it about the mosquito girl?"

Doctor Kuseno looked pensive. "Yes and no," he shrugged. "He told me about the man who defeated the mosquito girl, who supposedly killed her with one punch,"

I raised a brow. That couldn't have been right, could it? One punch? Maybe Genos wasn't able to see correctly when it happened, because there was no way a guy defeated the monster Genos had trouble with, with one punch. It wasn't possible. I expressed my skepticism to the doctor.

"It may sound impossible," he nodded sagely, "but monsters were said to be impossible just over three years ago, and we've seen and done things said to be impossible as well. Surely you're not about to say something is not possible, are you?"

I huffed a laugh. "Well, when you put it like that, I kind of have to believe it!" My grin turned downwards and my tone grew a bit darker. "Genos was talking to me about how strong this guy was. I don't know what he plans to do, but I'm sure it has something to do with following him around or something, should we do anything about that?" I was kind of worried about it, to be honest. Sure, the guy saved him, but what was he really like? Bloodthirsty? Demon like? Strong or not, that wasn't the kind of person Genos should have done anything with.

"I suppose the only thing we can do is hope Genos knows what he's doing, but if he does end up visiting the other man, why don't you accompany him?" He offered.

I frowned contemplatively. I supposed there wouldn't be any harm in joining Genos. "You can gather data on this person and report back to me," Doctor Kuseno said, like that would be what convinced me. Fine, I took the hook. The doctor was pretty manipulative when he wanted to be, and seeing how he was putting me in this position, it wasn't surprising this would be something he chose to be manipulative on, Genos was like his own son, after all.

"Alright, sure." I agreed. It wasn't like I had anything better to do, anyway.

This was much longer than I anticipated.

This is also the first time I've written anything Onepunch Man related, and I'm just now trying to figure out how to write people. Hopefully this first chapter turned out okay!

Also, the format that I'm going to be going by every chapter is sort of like the one here! I wanted to get right into the action, but I also want to explain some things, so it'll be present time, past time, and present time, or maybe the other way around, depending. I'll be putting in some canon stuff and some original stuff, so it'll mix up every once in awhile.

Please leave a review on your way out, I would love some feedback on this first chapter. If you have any questions too, feel free to send them my way!

Reviews are love and motivation!