14. The Little Girl from Another World

The Little Girl from Another World

Unlike me, the knife used by that idiot Yue Xiao had not left fragments inside Cheng Rui’s wound. Clearly, however, the damage it had done went far beyond “only” stabbing him and nearly making him bleed to death.

“Feels like I got hit by a train,” he said softly, too exhausted to raise his voice. “Did we get that bastard?”

“He disappeared when my fist was halfway through him,” I told him.

Chi Li was placing a cloth packed with ice against his forehead. Somehow, the red-haired girl had made ice appear in her right palm, while touching Cheng Rui’s clothes with her left hand until the fabric turned warm and began to steam.

“Damn. I was hoping we’d taken him out. But he’s good at slipping away…”

A coughing fit cut him off. Then another. Then a third. He retched several times and brought up nothing.

With Force Sense, I checked his lungs. They were clear and undamaged, so whatever had caused that could not be purely physical.

“I… really hate him…”

“Try to rest, Cheng Rui,” Chi Li pleaded. “Rest a little. Grandma Lin’s medicine will make you better before you know it.”

I hoped she was right.

I did not want to lose one of the few people I knew I could trust.

Cheng Rui lay on the table in his exoskeleton. A few minutes later, he passed out again, the effort of speaking having completely drained him.

Although the magical cookies had fully healed the boy’s wound, Chi Li had expected this. She blamed it on his needing time to recover from the effects of dark magic. I had nothing to say about that. Magic was her field, not mine.

Before Grandma Lin came back, we withdrew from the underground garden and found ourselves in a much smaller, much darker room.

Though “smaller” was relative.

This room was the size of a house rather than a stadium. A plain concrete chamber, it fit much better with what people expected from sewers and tunnels than the garden had.

Only a floating sphere the size of a fingernail lit the room, no brighter than a large candle. Most of the floor was occupied by old wooden chairs placed haphazardly around a large round table.

The rifle-carrying old man was already seated there, deep in conversation with two much younger people wearing strangely colored military uniforms. Like the wearers themselves, the uniforms were badly worn.

All three of them were looking down at a large map spread over the table, depicting the city and the surrounding countryside. Every few seconds, a miniature storm cloud appeared above it, then vanished.

“The squad leader found another blockade point here,” said the man in the blue-and-gray uniform, pointing at a spot between the shopping mall and the old market. “A thirty-meter wall cuts straight across, blocking all western routes into the city center.”

As he spoke, a thick black line extended across that part of the map, forming another side of an irregular hexagon in the middle of the city.

It even looked like a tiny wall, complete with battlements. If it had not been semi-transparent and flickering like the storm cloud, it would have looked like something a child had made from clay.

“How in the hell did they build it so fast?”

“They aren’t called the Dark Masons because they collect bottle caps,” said the little thing, seated on a chair stacked with cushions so she could see over the table.

She waved a hand. The cloud vanished completely, revealing more illusionary walls and towers on the map.

“We are fortunate the enemy only sent two of them to build this. Most likely, within ten days they will finish constructing the gate at this end.”

“How do you know?” I interrupted.

The two newcomers looked toward me as I walked to the table, then took startled second glances.

“How do you know anything you’ve told us is true?”

I did not mean only the Dark Masons, whatever they were. Almost every sentence out of this little girl’s mouth implied that she knew far more than any of us.

So I asked another question that had been bothering me for a while: why everyone here seemed to know more than I did.

I even did my best to keep my anger and distrust under control.

“If you can’t prove what you’re saying is true, at least tell us where you got the information.”

“I can see things others cannot because I know where to look,” she told me.

Then she elbowed the man in the blue-and-gray uniform, who had been staring at me with his mouth open.

He blinked, realized what he was doing, and quickly looked away after pulling his friend out of the same stunned daze.

Unfortunately for them, at less than ten feet away, Force Sense was precise enough for me to clearly notice them wiping drool on their sleeves.

Under other circumstances, I might have teased them until their faces turned bright red.

As things stood, neither the little thing nor I paid them any attention.

“And I know where to look because I am not from here.”

“…All right. That does explain it,” I said with a snort. “Do people from magic worlds all look like seven-year-olds?”

“Don’t be dense. I simply chose the appearance of Wednesday Addams from the original series.”

She sneered. The illusory cloud appeared again, rumbling ominously.

“It is surprisingly appropriate to the current situation.”

Hundreds, thousands—perhaps even tens of thousands—of additional illusions appeared on the map. Most were quarter-inch-tall caricatures of monsters, colored like freshly spilled blood.

Above the civic center, a central tower appeared, taller than the city walls or any building in the city. Electricity crackled around its needlelike top.

In the outskirts, much smaller clusters of figures dressed in blue, green, and indigo formed an extremely loose ring.

Three of those groups were farther out than the rest: one in a five-star hotel to the west, one at an old truck stop and trailer park to the southeast, and the last at the school to the north—my school, and Chi Li’s.

“This is everything we have discovered about the enemy, and about any superpowered survivors still fighting the monsters,” the stranger wearing a little girl’s face told us once no more new illusions appeared.

“As you can see, you people are vastly, hilariously outnumbered. And the villains have almost finished building the fortified beachhead they require, so the true invasion may begin.”

She smiled without expression.