9. At Last, I Found Them

At Last, I Found Them

Dozens of arrows fell around me.

Their bone-white tips exploded on impact, bursting into sprays of blazing sparks. Asphalt, concrete, parked cars—whatever the arrows struck, they burned through in seconds, even eating holes into metal.

Have you ever seen those videos online of people playing around with thermite?

It was like that, except the burning, spark-spitting parts stuck to whatever they hit like glue.

I learned this the hard way when one arrow struck my left thigh. No matter how I worked at it with Near-Object Manipulation, the thing refused to fall off or go out. It felt less like being burned by something solid and more like being continuously shot by an invisible heat ray, which was frankly ridiculous.

Limping at sixty kilometers an hour, with my left leg only half recovered, I rounded a corner while an entire squad of burning skeletons chased after me.

The walking piles of bone were not actually on fire. They simply used glowing, red-hot molten metal as tendons, somehow binding their bones together without burning them away.

Each one carried a steel longbow in one hand and a quiver on its back. The bows were covered in so many spikes they looked less like practical weapons and more like something stolen straight out of an aggressively edgy fantasy game. And the quivers did not hold arrows.

They held molten metal.

Whenever one of the skeleton archers reached for an arrow, one formed out of the molten metal, already white-hot and ready to use.

None of it made sense.

All of it worked.

Very effectively, too.

The burning skeleton archers ran faster than any human sprinter and never seemed to tire. While I was injured and stuck on the ground, they could keep up with me.

Molten-metal tendons or not, they were probably lighter than humans. If their steel longbows were any indication, they were also stronger. Or, when magic got involved, physics could only crawl into a corner and cry, making every observation I had meaningless.

Even so, under normal circumstances, they would barely have posed a threat to me.

Unfortunately, nothing was normal anymore.

Nearly all the attention I could spare for Near-Object Manipulation was being used to keep the struggling shadow trapped, and the steady damage I had taken meant I was nowhere near my best condition. Shaking my pursuers was far from guaranteed.

But with so many parked cars around, why was I running?

I spun around and kicked a sedan into the street behind me.

Almost a ton of environmentally friendly metal and plastic went tumbling into several dozen physics-defying constructs of metal and bone, crushing them like a bowling ball rolling over chalk.

Bones dislocated and shattered. Steel longbows bent. Molten metal splashed onto the asphalt and set it burning. The once-pretty little car finally stopped as a crumpled wreck, its body and flames forming a barrier across the alley that no normal human could pass.

The remaining burning skeletons quickly proved how wrong Hollywood’s lumbering undead had always been. They vaulted over parked cars, passed through flames, and even climbed across the burning wreck to continue the chase.

But they had already fallen far behind.

Because I had not stayed to watch. I was watching them with Force Sense while running for my life.

Wingbeats sounded overhead, though I had already seen the iron-beaked bird coming through Force Sense before I heard it.

The bird was busy shrieking menacingly and spraying fire everywhere, which meant it failed to notice the flatbed truck I hurled at it.

The truck smashed into one of its wings, knocked it off course, and gave me enough room to duck beneath it and run the other way.

Unfortunately, a projectile made of a ton and a half of metal was unlikely to slow a twenty-ton magical metal bird by much, especially when the bird was even denser.

Nor did it stop the two squadrons of little devils that had appeared from nowhere and were diving at me in a frenzy of bombing runs.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

A sound halfway between the crack of a whip and the sweep of heavy machine-gun fire tore across the night sky, rattling the nearby windowpanes.

Suddenly, little devils began dropping like flies.

Whatever had made the sound was at least a block away on the next street—too far for Force Sense to capture clearly, and impossible for my eyes to see through the fog.

Boom!

A fireball shot from that same direction, passed about a foot above my head, and struck the iron-beaked bird in the middle of its wing.

Unlike the shadow’s favorite magic, this fireball burst into a sea of brilliant red flames, a color somewhere between ruby and spilled blood.

There was almost no shockwave.

But the temperature was unbelievable. Half a street away, the sweat on my skin evaporated dry.

When the flames dissipated, a roughly bird-shaped mass of slag fell to the ground and broke apart.

More burning arrows filled the sky than before.

I made the decision at once and ran toward the source of the attack. Whoever—or whatever—was attacking the monsters had to be friendlier than the monsters themselves.

With the fingers of my left hand crossed, praying that my luck would not behave like my usual luck, and my right hand still maintaining the trap around the shadow, I ran toward what might be safety.

Probably safety.

Maybe.

Under the circumstances, I was willing to accept possible safety.

But all my pessimism and suspicion did nothing to prepare me for the sight that actually appeared in front of me.

“Sister Rin! This way, hurry!”

Chi Li was waving one hand from the mouth of a sewer entrance, her lower half already inside.

Deep red hair flew around her face. In her other hand, a dark crimson fireball was taking shape. She looked nothing like the timid girl I had last seen five days ago.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

A thin blue beam shot from the watermelon-sized device held in both arms by a skinny robot beside Chi Li. The beam swept across the rows of burning skeletons in the distance.

Whenever it struck concrete, bone, or even metal, it produced a small explosion and left a crater slightly wider than a ten-cent coin.

In the larger picture, those craters were small. But at the rate the machine fired, the damage accumulated quickly. Every few seconds, another skeleton collapsed into smoking fragments.

It took me at least several seconds to realize that the “skinny robot” was actually Cheng Rui.

He was gaunt and haggard, half covered in a metal exoskeleton. The frame supported the weight of the weapon in his hands, while crackling electricity flowed from his arms into the device, making it shine in my Force Sense like a tiny star.

“Hurry up, Sister Rin. You can stare later,” Chi Li said after hurling the fireball she had just formed. “Something kicked the hornet’s nest. Half the Dark Masons’ army is marching this way. If we don’t retreat now, it won’t just be the vanguard catching up to us.”