One punch. Another punch. And another.
Hawk stood as a mountain in the heart of the waterfall, his body a bulwark against the ceaseless, scouring torrent of water. He threw his fists against the immense, liquid resistance, each blow a sharp, percussive crack against the thunderous roar of the falls. For a fraction of a second, the curtain of water directly in front of his fist would pause, its downward momentum momentarily arrested by a force that defied nature.
But it was not enough.
He didn't want the water to pause. He wanted it to tremble. He wanted it to break. He wanted the waterfall to bow to his will and flow backward.
It was a preposterous, arrogant demand. This was not the legendary Lushan Waterfall from his memories, a cascade said to fall for three thousand feet. This was a humble, terrestrial waterfall. And yet, it still possessed the raw, untamable power of nature. To demand that it reverse its very essence was an act of supreme hubris. The waterfall itself seemed to agree. The water, under his persistent, defiant assault, intensified, the flow becoming a furious, churning cataract.
Hawk met its fury with a blank expression, but within his inner universe, the now-fully-lit Phoenix constellation blazed with a defiant, arrogant light. A magnificent, ethereal firebird, wreathed in golden flames, spread its wings within his soul. He had made a new vow. He would not leave this place until this waterfall flowed backward.
The start of the school year was only a few days away, but it didn't matter. He was an orphan. A ghost in the system. If he failed to show up for class, who would notice? Who would care? No one. And that was fine. He had no one he needed to answer to, no one he cared about.
A fierce, burning fighting spirit ignited in his eyes. He met the roaring water with a silent roar of his own. Come on!
Miles away, at the northern edge of the Cunningham Falls Natural Preserve, Gwen Stacy pushed aside a thick fern, her breath coming in ragged gasps. A distant, rhythmic rumble, deeper and more percussive than the ambient sounds of the forest, reached her ears.
Is that thunder?
She instinctively looked up, but the towering, primordial trees formed a dense canopy, blocking the sky. Only mottled shafts of sunlight pierced through the leaves, painting the forest floor in an eerie, shifting mosaic of light and shadow.
She withdrew her gaze and pulled out her phone, the bright screen a stark contrast to the deep greens and browns of the wilderness. A positioning map was displayed, showing two blinking dots. One, marking her own location, pulsed steadily. The other, her target, was still distant, but it was now, for the first time, visible on the same screen.
Gwen took a deep, steadying breath, gripped the trekking pole she had bought in a small town called Thurmont yesterday, and pushed onward, her jaw set with a grim determination.
At first, she had assumed Hawk's phone had simply been stolen. She was busy with her own work, and she had let it go. But then, a few days later, Dr. Connors had asked if she had delivered his gift. A prickle of unease had led her back to Hawk's apartment after work. The envelope she had left on the table was still there, untouched. In that moment, a knot of genuine fear had tightened in her chest.
She had called her father, begging him to use his resources at the NYPD to find him. Captain Stacy, seeing the real panic in his daughter's eyes, had reluctantly agreed to call in a favor with his colleagues in the Queens precinct.
The result: nothing. Hawk had vanished into thin air. He was a ghost living in a digital society. No credit cards. No driver's license. No social media. The phone she had given him was his only link, and it was dead. The police had no leads, no last known location, and worse, no one who even cared enough to file a proper missing person's report.
Except for her.
For days, she had been a woman possessed, spending every spare moment trying to piece together his life, searching for a clue, any clue. The night before last, her father had found her hunched over her laptop, surrounded by maps and public records, her face pale with exhaustion.
"Gwen," he had asked, his voice gentle but firm. "Have you fallen for this boy?"
The question had stunned her. She had just returned from a cemetery in Queens, a desperate, last-ditch effort to find a grave for the sister she suspected he had, a sister who didn't seem to exist in any official records. "Dad," she had answered, her voice trembling slightly, "Hawk and I are just friends."
Later that night, as she lay in bed, the phone had suddenly buzzed to life. It was not a call or a text, but a system notification from her own account, the one she had forgotten to log out of on Hawk's phone. A remote login. Someone had charged the phone.
She clicked the link, her heart pounding. The signal was no longer a vague, miles-wide circle around D.C. It was a precise, pinpoint location.
Maryland. Cunningham Falls Natural Preserve Park. Under a waterfall.
And that was why she was here now, drenched in sweat, her muscles aching, pushing her way through an untamed wilderness in pursuit of a boy who was more of a ghost than a person.
As the roar of the water grew from a distant rumble to a deafening thunder, her spirits lifted. She was close. She quickened her pace, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs.
Beneath the waterfall, Hawk was reaching his limit. He had thrown nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine punches. As he drew his arm back for the final, ten-thousandth strike, the phantom image of the Phoenix behind him solidified, its fiery form becoming almost real.
He unleashed the final punch. As his fist shot forward, the firebird behind him spread its wings and soared, letting out a silent, soul-shattering cry that resonated with the raw power of his Cosmo.
"Flow backward for me!" he roared, his voice lost in the thunder of the falls.
BOOM!
And the impossible happened.
The waterfall, a force of nature that had flowed downward for millennia, stopped. For a single, breathtaking instant, it hung suspended in the air. Then, with a roar that shook the very bedrock, it reversed. A massive, enraged dragon of water, defying gravity, raised its head and surged upward, a river returning to the heavens.
Time itself seemed to stand still, trapped in that moment of sublime, reality-bending power.
But through that silent, impossible tableau, a single, clear voice reached his ears. It was a voice that was both trembling and impossibly strong.
A voice he knew.
"Hawk!!"