I just remembered that back in second grade, I found out that if you shorted the ends of a battery together, a lot of heat was produced. Somehow I picked up the idea that the key thing about an explosion was the rate of energy discharge, and I obsessed for a long time about building a bomb out of D cells.
Never quite worked. But I had a lot of fun with the idea.
But now I’m thinking, what about a belt pack of large high-voltage (hell, 50 volts would almost do it) lytics, wired together with copper strip insulated with shrink-wrap, leading to pads on your knuckles. Couple batteries, a ccfl inverter… (forget the caps)
That’d be a punch.