12. Which One Should I Choose?

Which One Should I Choose?

“Can your healers treat blood infection and poisoning?” I asked.

“They can cure anything,” she said, emphasizing the word. “As long as he’s still alive. But it’s too far, and you don’t know the way.”

“In that case, I’ll buy us a little more time.”

I did not bother explaining.

With one hand, I touched Cheng Rui’s wounded side, right beside where Chi Li was trying to hold the gash shut. With the other, I touched the pool of blood on the ground.

“Sister Rin, what are you—”

My best friend stopped abruptly.

Cheng Rui’s spilled blood rose from the filthy ground, became a thin red stream, flowed up along his body, and returned through the wound.

I was not stupid.

I imagined the blood passing through several filters formed by Near-Object Manipulation, removing dirt, bacteria, toxins, clots, and anything else I could think of.

In the long run, this might still poison him. It might even kill him. I was not a doctor and had no real idea what I was doing.

But at least for now, he would not die from blood loss. We would have time to reach the healers Chi Li had mentioned.

To make sure he did not start bleeding out again, I imagined the torn edges of the wound being drawn together, fitted seamlessly like puzzle pieces, including the tiny blood vessels I could not see but my power could still handle.

Using Near-Object Manipulation to maintain the connection between missing pieces of flesh was better than any stitches.

“All right,” I told Chi Li. “As long as I’m touching him, I can keep the wound closed and stop the bleeding.”

She gave me a trembling smile, red-eyed and full of tears. It reminded me of the timid girl she used to be.

Then we ran.

Time ticked away as we carried the unconscious Cheng Rui through one narrow tunnel after another beneath the city’s outskirts.

Many of the passages were built from concrete or brick, part of the city’s sewers or storm drainage system. But many others had clearly been dug by hand, cut straight through dense clay or bedrock.

Although those passages were narrower than the others, there were so many of them that it seemed impossible for all of them to have been excavated in the few days since the invasion.

Then again, with superpowers, the word impossible had lost most of its meaning.

Despite being underground and connected to actual sewers, the air here was fresher than the air in the city above. The longer we traveled, the less the sweet-sour stink of rotting flesh, the iron smell of dried blood, and the sharp reek of burned wood polluted the air.

The humidity was lower, and down here there was none of the fog that blocked vision.

Everything was quiet.

Despite the urgency of our current goal, the darkness here was not as oppressive as the world above.

If tree roots did not occasionally catch in my hair, and if mud did not sometimes fall from the ceiling as we passed, this might even have been a good place to rest.

Chi Li stopped frequently, more to adjust Cheng Rui’s position in her arms and make sure his condition had not worsened than because she herself needed rest.

At other times, she would pause for a few seconds at an intersection and mutter indistinctly to herself. The red-haired girl’s murmurs were in no language I knew, and every time she spoke the same few syllables, she immediately chose a direction.

I did not ask about her use of real magic.

Nor did I let Cheng Rui’s nerdiness infect me.

Instead, while keeping one finger pressed to the unconscious boy so his blood stayed inside his body and continued flowing normally, I thought about my own powers.

The battles with the Black Hand and that Yue Xiao fellow had revealed several problems I needed to solve.

The most urgent issue was how to injure that shadow, but what I hated even more was that the balding idiot had managed to hide himself from me.

In general, ambushes had been the worst encounters so far, followed closely by tricks.

Name: Ye Rin
Profile: Female human, 17 years, 3 months, and 9 days old

Abilities [2 points available, 33 total]
Strength Modulation lv3
Force Sense lv2
Forced Acceleration lv2
Constant Strength lv2
Progressive Regeneration lv3
Near-Object Manipulation lv3
Super Suit lv1

Attributes [0 points available, 33 total]
Strength 18, Agility 10, Intelligence 3, Perception 7, Spirit 10, Luck 2

Adding two more points to Perception had thrown every one of my senses into overdrive.

It felt like washing away the last traces of morning sleepiness, drinking a full cup of hot chocolate, clearing out earwax that had been ignored for far too long, and getting corrective eye surgery all at once.

I felt more awake, more aware of everything around me.

Even in near-total darkness, my eyes could catch tiny cracks and bumps in the tunnel walls. My hearing sharpened until I could pick out Chi Li’s and Cheng Rui’s heartbeats from several feet away. My nose could easily separate and classify different scents. Even the feeling of air moving through my hair as we ran became something I could track.

The improvement to Force Sense was even greater.

Proprioception—the ability to sense the position, movement, and action of one’s own body parts—is something everyone has. It lets us walk without looking at our feet.

Now that feeling seemed to have expanded.

It gave me similar information not only about my own body, but about everything around me.

It was not as detailed as the sense I had of my own limbs. It came through a filter, and it lacked familiarity, like trying to perform delicate work while wearing thick gloves.

Even a limited sense of the surrounding environment, however, was extremely useful.

Gliding through the tunnel was now as easy as bringing a spoonful of food to my mouth. No more roots caught my hair. No more mud fell onto my face.

Chi Li’s every step, where she would turn, when she would stop, how she adjusted her grip on Cheng Rui—none of these were things I needed to consciously watch in order to stay in contact with the unconscious boy without jostling him.

And when I truly focused?

Every movement Chi Li made, even her body language, opened itself to me like a book. I did not need my eyes to read her.

If I raised Force Sense again, this…

This might create privacy problems.

Comic-book X-ray vision could not compare to understanding another person’s body the way you understood your own, especially because no one could tell I was actually observing.

So far, all of my fighting had involved striking enemies at close range.

As someone with overwhelming physical strength, that was what I knew. It was my instinctive choice. As my powers became more complex, close combat also offered countless options.

But it had limitations.

It lacked reach and required me to get close to the enemy. That meant catching them and entering the range of their melee attacks.

My earlier attempts to find a power that compensated for that weakness had…

Not gone ideally.

Simple explosions and beams had always been staples of science fiction, comics, and games because they were simple.

But with monsters this varied, what I needed was a power with broader applications. Something that could merge with and complement the powers I already had.

Force Field Creation lv1:
Apply the force effects you can personally exert to a volume of space no larger than one cubic yard, at reduced effectiveness. You may apply it to only one simple geometric shape at a time.

Spatial Distortion lv1:
You may selectively treat a distance relative to yourself as half to twice as long as it actually is. This does not directly affect other people.

Spatial Shift lv1:
Within the same local space, alter the position and direction of a target you can perceive, weighing no more than one quarter ton, by up to twenty meters and ninety degrees.

Temporal Shift lv1:
Move a target you can perceive, weighing no more than one quarter ton, to where it was one second ago, or to where it will be one second from now.

Which one should I choose?