Standard disclaimers apply. I do now own Teen Titans.
The logical extreme
Training in the danger room was Robin's favourite pastime, and Raven could understand that, even if it was not exactly her cup of tea; put on some good music, get a good workout, get the endorphins rushing and even Beast Boy could have a good time pumping iron. Or jumping rope, or practising his yeti karate.
But no, Raven was the one Titan on the team who enjoyed the physical training the least. And poor, wretched he who dared look in the general direction of her cloak-less, quivering self as she strained to complete her twentieth push-up, sweating and panting in a manner way unfitting for the ice-cold Gem of Darkness. She could understand Robin's logic why she should improve her physical condition, but the temptation was still there to just use her powers: Why should she have to push herself away from the floor when she could push the floor away from her?
Close-combat training was a little better, because half the time she could use her powers. Not to their fullest, but she could ignore everything about footwork and just levitate, phase through and teleport out of the way of kicks and punches, or wrap herself in obsidian darkness to simulate meta-strength and resistance. Her almost inherent aversion to physical contact motivated her to improve her defence, though not her offence - as Robin would tell her again and again despite knowing that she already knew - and of course did nothing to improve the whole experience.
Lately, however, power-training had fallen from her favourite form of training to the absolutely most abhorred. It was all out of necessity, and it was on her own insistence that the regimen was modified, or rather, intensified.
For Raven, power-training was usually all about finesse and concentration. Finesse was the tele- and umbra-kinetic equivalent of motor skills, something she trained with multiple objects on the same time with emphasis on precision, speed and the complexity of her manipulations. It was of course dependant on her concentration, as was the strength of her telekinesis. So basically, it was all concentration. And it followed logically that she trained to keep her it under the most distressing of combat situations, which had finally lead them here.
Starfire stood ready with a bucket, Cyborg with the oversized mallet they had affectively dubbed 'Cinder-Splinter'. Beast Boy had left to play video games in Ops, and Raven didn't blame him. Robin didn't look unsure, as if he was going to fool her or anyone else in the room.
"Are you sure you don't want to stick to mace?" he asked. But 'harmless' chemicals were for normal people; humans. Something police cadets had sprayed in their faces just so they understood what they were putting rioters through. Raven was on a slightly more advanced level, to put it mildly, and answered the Boy Blunder's question with dead freezing silence for three seconds.
The nail in her hand was enveloped with black as the sorceress knelt to the floor, placing the hand on the scratched and scuffed steel and the nail a few inches above it. Then she pushed it down.
The effect was of course immediate. Extensive experience helped her, and she forced her mouth shut. The silence was almost perfect save for the grinding of her teeth, almost there... but alas broken by a small, humiliating whimper. Dammit.
Pressing the hand down to keep it from curling up and opening her eyes, she forced herself to look at her mangled hand. The iron skewer had gone between the bones and lodged itself in the floor, and the broad head prevented her from simply pulling her hand up.
Cyborg hesitated. "Now," she demanded.
Like two gunmen in a Mexican standoff, the towering neotitanium behemoth of half a man and the cowering witch both went into action at the same time, he bringing the 200-kilogram hammer up and down to a place before Raven, and her... concentrating.
The first shield shattered in a fast dissolving spray of obsidian, but the hammer had been stopped in it's stone-crushing momentum, if only for a tenth of a second until Cyborg again pressed it down, now only centimetres above where Raven's head would have been, had she been sitting a meter closer to him.
Again the falling hammer met psychic power, but this time with less force behind it. When Cyborg brought it down again a second later with a full swing behind it, the shield held again, though Raven gasped once and almost slipped in her blood, forcing her to put weight on the impaled hand and pressing the crude metal into bone and sinew. The shield disappeared - for a moment before it reappeared. Cyborg let the blows fall again and again, and again and again the bleeding girl muttered her mantra in-between breaths. And slowly, the pain lessened, until she could feel nothing of her right hand. From here it was effectively over, and bending the nail-head into a smooth extension of the rod was a simple task while maintaining the shield, and finally she lifted her hand over the violent piercing, ending today's exercise.
Her mind was tranquil, but her body had been shaken over the edge and she waved frantically at Starfire, who caught the first stream of bile with the bucket and kindly put a hand on her back. Cyborg felt horrible. She could feel it hanging like a smelly old coat over him, a bad aura. She'd whisk it away with nothing but a thought, but he wouldn't want her to. Not yet.
The blood was seeping back into her hand as she willed it, and the wound closed itself with the healing energy she was channelling into it.
"Success. That's far enough for today," Robin said, and started to pull out the long line of bloody nails rammed into the floor around Raven.