5. Chi Li and Cheng Rui

Chi Li and Cheng Rui

“Mom, you really can’t stay in the house anymore! It isn’t safe here!”

For half an hour, the teenage girl had been trying to persuade her parents to go somewhere safer than this suburban house, and she was so anxious she was nearly in tears. The house’s greatest defense was a white picket fence.

“Would it be safer to run into the fog while there’s a war going on?” Her mother was barely five feet tall, not at all imposing, but she still glared and repeated the same argument for what had to be the seventeenth time. “There’s no power. Communications are jammed. The water is only dripping in. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. There are explosions everywhere. Ever since the blackout, we’ve heard them every single night. Leaving is what would get us killed.”

The older woman said this to her younger, slimmer, almost mirror-image daughter.

“Here, we have a good, solid basement. Supplies, medicine, fuel, and a generator that can run for months. Waiting here for the country to send rescue is the sensible thing to do. Why won’t you and the other children stay with us?”

If this had been an ordinary war, and not something far worse, it might have been a convincing argument.

But that was the trouble with magical disasters: no one with common sense really believed they could happen.

And that was the trouble with common sense: it only worked on ordinary things.

A magical disaster was about as far from ordinary as anything could get.

Perhaps she was tired of arguing in circles. Perhaps she simply did not have the patience of the older generation. The teenage girl let out an angry huff, turned, and stamped away. Each step rang through the silence of the night like a hammer striking stone.

“Chi Li, come back here right now!” the older woman shouted.

As expected, Chi Li ignored her and disappeared into the fog.

She walked to the nearest intersection, where the other two children were waiting at a safe distance from the blast radius of the argument.

By any ordinary measure, Chi Li was a normal teenage girl. She was small, dressed in clothes that were badly worn but more or less clean.

Her two companions, on the other hand, had succeeded magnificently if their goal was to look anything but ordinary.

One was a teenage boy encased in half a ton of steel plating, all jagged edges and spikes. The armor over his chest and back had been repurposed from car hoods. The limbs had started life as car and motorcycle parts. The two blades extending from the armor’s wrists were sharpened jackhammer bits.

The other was a little girl who could not have been older than second grade. She wore a black long-sleeved coat, a black skirt, and an adorable pair of little black leather shoes. The outfit belonged on a leisurely Sunday morning stroll through a park, not on a fog-choked street full of craters, rubble, corpses, and corpses that still walked.

More eye-catching than her presence in a war zone, or her spotless clothes, was the way her figure seemed to flicker and twist constantly. A second, more careful look would reveal that it was only an optical illusion.

She was simply facing seven cardinal directions at once.

“Stop doing that. You’re giving me a headache,” the boy in the heavy power armor complained.

The little girl ignored him completely.

“You must learn to think multidimensionally if you want to use your skills correctly,” she said in a sharp, prim voice. “If you find that difficult, you may abstract the matter into a mathematical problem. I’ve heard that helps.”

“I’m using basic armor, car hydraulics, and off-the-shelf electronics! I don’t need multidimensional mathematics to tinker with any of that!”

“Not if you’re content to remain a mediocre little inventor,” the girl began, only to notice the third member of their group storming back from her parents’ house. She changed course. “How bad was it? Did they at least agree to arm themselves?”

“Why ask questions when you already know the answer?” Chi Li muttered.

She stamped hard on the sidewalk. The instant her boot touched stone, it hissed and sank into the suddenly softened, red-hot surface, leaving behind a perfect boot-shaped print.

“Forget it. This is probably another one of those things where you’re impossibly smug but still willing to humor us mortals, or whatever.”

She turned toward the boy in power armor with a frown, and with a trace of discomfort and embarrassment.

“I need a favor. Can you stand guard here for the next thirty minutes or so? My parents refuse to leave the house, so I have to put up a protective ward around it.”

“No problem,” the boy said with a nod. His heavy armor moved with surprisingly little noise. “I don’t see any monsters nearby. It’s unbelievable. This neighborhood hasn’t been attacked once in the last three days.”

“Unfortunately, I can see them,” Chi Li said.

She tied her deep crimson hair back into a ponytail to keep it from falling into her eyes.

“A large monster patrol is headed this way. They’re less than five hundred meters out, and closing.”

“You know, I really envy your magic. You’re not locked into specific skills.”

The power armor suddenly began to hum. Several indicator lights along its limbs came alive.

“How does fire magic let you see that far? That makes no sense.”

“Fire has been used to illuminate and reveal things since human beings first existed. Of course it can be used for distant sight.”

Her eyes glowed red as she burned another symbol into the sidewalk a dozen feet from the first.

“To be more specific, fire is light. Energy. If I can control it, why shouldn’t I be able to draw light from several blocks away directly into my eyes?”

She walked a few more steps and burned another symbol into the ground.

“Now remember. Once the fighting starts, I can’t help you. Setting up a large-scale magic circle requires most of my focus, and once I begin, I can’t stop. If I do, all the energy I’ve gathered will discharge uncontrollably.”

“Mm.”

The boy pressed buttons on both wrists. Electricity began crackling along his two blades.

“Why don’t we beat the monsters back together first, and then you cast your magic?”

“Excellent idea, Cheng Rui,” the red-haired girl said with a bitter smile. “It would have been even better if I hadn’t already started casting when dear Mother made up her mind to be impossible.”

“That’s what happens when you don’t plan ahead,” Cheng Rui muttered, as all the systems in his power armor finally turned green.

“Says the witch casting real magic in Elvish,” the little girl added under her breath.