Sorry that it's been so long but work has been absolute hell for me, and I haven't really had the chance to work on this in depth except on my sick days, which is precisely when I was finishing this up.
Just a warning here ahead of the actual thing, if graphic violence isn't really your style, the entire section in italics is the bit to avoid, You have been warned.

Warhammer's punch drew the attention of the national and international media alike in the days following the attack in Chicago. While All-Might and the heroes of Japan had struggled to best a number of these creatures even with a united front, Warhammer had defeated four of them single-handed- and moreover- in extended bouts similar to the first incident at Yuuei High to boot. His rise to the international limelight could have been- and often was- called meteoric. The reporters had taken their notes on him well enough in the past to recognize his combat flair.

All of that said, Dylan hadn't paid attention to the news for the past couple weeks. The first two days he had learned that he had fractured his leg and nearly shattered the bones in his foot and would need to wear a boot for a week until a doctor with a bone healing quirk could arrive to reset it and heal his foot correctly.

He had done what he could, but it hadn't been enough. Upon hearing the reality of his world now, he quite literally couldn't stomach the news, the return of the memory of the day alone, and then the reminder of the whole affair being put on loop for 72 consecutive hours.

Dylan ran back to his apartment building after Excalibur went off to help Warhammer or try to capture Macht. By the time he got to the door, he noticed it wasn't locked, his eyes darted back to the street corner where he, Natalie and Ben had been standing before most of the debacle. Ben's car was still out there, the unmoving Noumu much to close for any civilian to be moving near, much less one of his best friends.

Dylan's gaze was drawn by movement as the creature stirred. It took a hero the calibre of Warhammer to hold one of these monstrosities back, and he was tied up managing the other one. It was everything he could do to get out there quickly enough before the Noumu saw the pair of them

"Ben, what the hell are you doing out here?! I told you and Natalie to go inside!"

"Dylan! Thank god you survived!" He was looking through the back seat of his car for something, while the creature groggily rose to its feet. It looked blankly down the street towards the building it had been knocked from. As if by some unheard command from the puppeteer who had followed Warhammer away from their initial scene, the Noumu turned it's head to face the car next to it. The two young men froze as it drug its eyes across the vehicle. This thing that used to be human was now an engine of destruction meant to be manipulated from any distance near or far. Regardless of the distance Warhammer had knocked it away, It had not been knocked so senseless that It forgot its last order.

Dylan barely had time enough to pull Ben back away as the creature flipped the car into the third story building behind them, leaving them on an empty street corner with no cover, no way to escape the lethal blows of the Noumu. Dylan stood, ready to engage the creature, and shouted to his friend.

"Ben, Get out of here!"

"Dylan, You'll-"

"That's the chance I'll have to take. Now, GO!" Dylan shouted at the creature, "C'mon UGLY, I'm the one you're after."

Better to die saving you than to live while leaving you behind, Dylan thought. The creature moved as if it had turned its focus from Ben.

The Noumu punched at Meterro twice while he circled the creature, Dylan all the while hoping Ben had the sense to run back to the building. After pausing for a moment he was prepared to dodge the next blow the creature had wound up. In a surprise, the next strike met little more than the ground as Ben used his quirk to send a mass of loose stone to knock the beasts punch off trajectory.

"NO, BEN, RUN!"

No sooner had Dylan finished those words than the monster had grabbed Ben by the ankles and slammed him back-first into a tree. The snap of his bones on impact was audible even from Dylan's distance. If any of his ribs were intact before, the crash landing from the Noumu throwing him aside onto a set of concrete steps shattered the rest.

"No... No... No! NO!" Dylan's friend lay unconscious a few yards away, thrown away like trash.

That creature would pay. Macht would pay for bringing these monstrosities to Chicago. They would pay for hurting one of the only people he had to depend on in this world. His vision started to go red as the Noumu turned to face him again. Dylan began to feel the world slow to a crawl, until for a moment, time itself seemed to stop.

This thing had it coming. In a microsecond to any witness of the fight, Meterro began to strike the creature.

The first made little impact because of the creature's Quirk, but The flurry of blows landing upon the coal skinned beast set the thing off it's balance. As Meterro threw kick after kick after punch after tackle, he felt with every blow, the creature's speed increase, the sway of the trees picking up speed in the distance. Dylan couldn't keep this up, his body simply couldn't maintain the strength at which he was using his quirk. Even still the Noumu was teetering from the sheer ferocity of the onslaught, the punches and kicks connecting within fractions of a second, faster than the beast's quirk could activate. The Noumu staggered back a step as Dylan rendered the final blow. Meterro brought his heel to bear on the creature's brain and kicked its disfigured maw into the pavement with a resounding crack. Meterro wasn't sure if it was from the creature hitting the pavement, his foot on the beast, or some unknown middle-ground, but for a moment, he had forced it down.

After a few deep breaths, and a few second's of relative silence, Meterro's breathing grew ragged quickly. As the adrenaline and rage ebbed from his mind, a searing pain from his entire right leg caught up with him. Given the amount of energy he had used, Dylan knew he only had a moment or two of consciousness left. Dylan struggled to hold onto every little bit of awareness he had, that Noumu was stirring again. All he had hadn't been enough, going beyond his limit hadn't been enough. As his legs buckled he fell to a knee, forcing himself to stay alert, but to little avail. Just before he fell forward, unconscious, he felt a gust of wind as a red form, abounding in a green lightning struck the then rising Noumu back into the pavement.

Meterro got off the L near a bus stop, one that would take him to the renamed planetarium just off the Lake. By the time he arrived at the Aldrin Planetarium there were quite a few families enjoying one last hurrah of summer before the school year started proper. It wasn't Downtown by any stretch of the mind but it was still a center for foot traffic. Amongst the bustling crowd Dylan just wanted nothing more than to be done with the week- no, this entire month. So much pain and destruction caused by some quirk enhanced human beings. It was appalling that these people a would go about their daily lives as if nothing happened.

A week earlier Dylan sat beside Natalie at Ben's viewing and funeral with both her parents and Ben's family. While she visited him during his week in the hospital Dylan noticed something on Natalie's finger that hadn't been there the last time they met up before the whole debacle with the Noumu. Upon seeing it, his heart sank further. Ben had finally proposed to Natalie, and now she had to bury her fiancé. During the funeral, Dylan silently mourned the life that Natalie would have had with Ben and his passed friend as well.

A man in a dark grey suit had joined the funeral party shortly before the service began. After Ben's body had been laid to rest, he walked up to Meterro and spoke with him for a short while, telling him to meet him on the lake shore just south of the aquarium and planetarium. It was strange seeing the 6'7" titan of a man that was Warhammer in his civilian get-up, much less being told to meet him in the middle of the day in a pretty well travelled area.

"I told you to get here by 11." Warhammer still refused to mince his words.

"First, It's 10:59. Second, why did you want to meet me?" Dylan was many things that month and that day specifically, stress from his bill situation being only the last thing that got added to the pile, but not late. He refused to let himself be that anymore.

"Walk with me for a minute, kid. We've got things to discuss." Warhammer began trudging down the beach. September's usual morning chill had worn off a bit inland, but right on Lake Michigan's edge it was still pretty brisk. It sufficed to say that Dylan was happy to have brought his coat. As they got some distance from the stairs leading back to the parking lot, Warhammer continued, "I understand you used your quirk on that Noumu."

"Yeah," Dylan replied curtly, seemingly realizing why the Pro-hero had brought it up.

"And that more importantly you used it to subdue the creature. You refused to back down, you responded to Macht before any Pros arrived, which though incredibly reckless was something I haven't really seen in quite a while. You're lucky another pro Arrived on-scene, though. If he hadn't, you might not have made it out alive either," Warhammer said, pausing only to interrupt his own train of thought with the question he should have asked to begin with,

"What made you step in in the first place"?

"I've seen what those things can do first hand. I couldn't stand by and let MQSI happen again." Warhammer visibly recoiled after hearing that last sentence.

"You mean to say you were-" Warhammer hung on the end of the word as he stared forward for a moment. Then, he gripped the bridge of his nose, "damnit, I knew you looked familiar."

For a moment, both Dylan and Warhammer stood in silence, one out of shame for his blindness, the other short for words after mourning a friend. Warhammer was the first to break the silence.

"Frankly, MQSI's shutdown was a two-fold loss for Chicago. No only did we lose one of the most advanced heroics support programs in the country, we lost three years worth of Quirk Law majors. And they-"

"Would have been some of the first picks to join with your agency." Dylan finished as Warhammer paused. When Warhammer nodded Meterro continued.

"I got a recruitment offer from your agency a couple days before those Noumu wrecked the block. I was going to save it for a last resort, but I'm now a month back on rent with no car and no job. I think it's time for last resorts"

"Are you sure you know what signing on like this entails?

"I'm out of other options," Meterro paused again, "I burned too many bridges to go back."

"If you're serious about this, you'll need to make some serious progress in the next weeks. Being frank, with your involvement in that Noumu situation, If I don't have you trained up by the end of the investigation into that whole mess, you'll face vigilantism charges." Warhammer said flatly, turning to face Lake Michigan. "I've thought about it, and as demand for talent like you showed rises, I'll need a personal shadow. and I don't want to have to mess with other heroes and sidekicks, and their careers. Besides that, I've needed another training bender, I've let myself get a little too beat up." Dylan looked at the pro quizzically at his last remark, people had theorized what his quirk was for years, but much like All-Might's it wasn't known to the public.

"But that can wait. We need to get our formal introductions out of the way. You know me by my hero name, as Warhammer. Since you're going to be training with me, having you know my actual civilian name would be wise so you don't give me up to some of these vultures people call journalists. My name is Geoffrey Blake. " he said as the pair began to walk back towards the lot.

Within a handful of days, Meterro was on his way to a training facility on the other side of the state-line. It was almost surreal. Over the course of a handful of days he had went from a jobless civilian, in the midst of an ever increasingly violent war between the heroes and villains worldwide, to a side-kick in training. Dylan swore left and right that first day that he was going to have at least ten different paper-cuts from all of the various forms he had to fill out, but at the end of the first day, Meterro had everything lined up (legally speaking) to start sidekick work.

If the first day was just paperwork- not just for Dylan but Warhammer's support crew, too- then the second day was a crash course in support gear and its uses. Dylan worked with the crew for two hours on concept and design alone for his suit.

The color pallet at least was simple enough, since Warhammer is my… mentor I think would be the best word, contrasting with his colors will make for a unique enough statement, he thought to himself as he saw the luggage in behind his seat in the SUV. Meterro turned his gaze to the passing cityscape. Even just driving on the interstate, the once abandoned and still crumbling industrial yards of the city of Gary, Indiana- infamous in that part of the country- were easily recognized.

Arguably hit the hardest when martial law was implemented in US during the first days when quirks became widespread, Gary became a refuge city for the Quirked from Chicago suffering all the major criminal activity that that entailed. It never truly had recovered, even after the dawning of the Age of Heroes as many had dubbed the modern day. Gary was a testament to the flaws of mankind, once its greed, during the era of automation in the late 20th and early 21st century, and its fear, when Quirks emerged. Only now that Pro Heroes had invested in the old industrial lots had there been any real life brought into the city. The once dead industrial yards were being used, the abandoned, obsolete machinery and structures made a decent enough city-scale training facility. The few six or seven story buildings littered throughout that were just too new to look like they fit in, the US Heroics checkpoints and their attached police stations were quite obvious to any onlooker.

"Mr. Meterro, Phone call from the lead car, would you like to speak to Mr. Warhammer, yourself?"

"I would, please"

… Meterro bided his time during the inevitable pause while the screen lit up with its usual branding, the boot up seemed to last forever.

"Meterro," Warhammer's visage filled the screen as he greeted the sidekick-in-training. "Are you ready for the roughest three months of your life?"

Sorry again about the delay
psssst. can you tell I'm teasing his costume for a reason, I want to have his first suit up be at just the right moment! Soon, I promise.

Until next time. PLUS ULTRA!