29. We Had to Split Up

We Had to Split Up

For an instant, the world slowed.

The fireballs and I seemed to be moving at the pace of marathon runners, while the arrows in flight were almost crawling. Everything around me hung on the edge of stillness.

That rare sluggishness gave me a desperately needed sliver of time to think, because fighting the way I usually did clearly was not going to work here.

On the nearest stretch of ground in the square, Cheng Rui’s turrets and oversized handguns were pouring laser fire into a solid wall of enemy infantry.

The undead soldiers wore heavy armor. Behind their visors, dead fish eyes stared fixedly forward while the repeated burns of the lasers gradually punched through their plates.

But these heavily armored undead were not so easy to bring down. Every one of them was like Captain America wrapped in a fortress of armor—far stronger than an ordinary zombie.

The enemy attack kept advancing like a tide. Now that Cheng Rui had lost his big gun, the weapons he still had simply could not hold back so many enemies.

On the other side of the square, near the edge of my superpowered perception, Chi Li was drawing the fury and arrows of more than two hundred skeleton archers.

Tiny fireballs, each no bigger than a raindrop, flew constantly from her palm. Every little bead of exploding flame struck an arrow with perfect accuracy and destroyed it.

Either the fireballs shattered the arrows outright, or they cleverly knocked them off course.

But the short red-haired mage had clearly reached her limit. Some arrows were already slipping through her defense, and more archers were streaming in from the enemy’s rear.

Damn it.

The next move was going to be ugly, but Chi Li was my best friend. No matter what, I had to do it.

I made a brutal turn.

Darkness flashed at the edges of my vision. Blood roared in my ears. My chest felt as if some invisible giant hand had clenched around it.

Taking the time to properly adjust g-force would only waste precious seconds.

The fireballs followed close behind me. Because the hard turn bled off some of my speed, they drew nearer. In less than one second of real time, I crossed the entire park—though to me it felt much longer—and slammed into the skeleton archers from the side.

Magically strengthened bones shattered under the impact like chalk struck by a sledgehammer. Liquid-metal ligaments burst apart into a rain of scalding droplets. Countless quivers filled with magical thermite went off one after another, burning thousands of tiny holes through my suit.

Dozens of enemies were knocked down by the crash. Each collision stole far less momentum from me than it should have, until I finally came to a stop in a heap of bones and slag.

Then, within a spherical space of ten cubic yards around me, I magnified explosive force on everything except myself.

An instant later, the two fireballs chasing me entered that space and detonated.

Two enormous, bone-rattling, whole-body shocks smashed me flat against the ground.

My eardrums burst at once. My eyes felt as if someone had punched each of them as hard as possible. The rest of my body was bruised and battered all over.

Before I gained powers, those injuries would have been worse than anything I had ever suffered, including the accident that nearly killed me.

Now, they ranked somewhere in a distant third place.

I did not even pass out.

The skeleton archers were not so lucky.

Under the amplification of my ability, the explosive power of the fireballs increased by an order of magnitude.

The blast struck the nearest skeletons and instantly turned them into more than a ton of shrapnel, the fragments flying out at speeds far beyond sound.

Those fragments did not slow when they left the range of my enhancement, because according to physics, an object in motion remains in motion unless something stops it.

Then those fragments swept across most of the skeleton archers on the battlefield.

If the original fireballs had the power of tank shells, then after enhancement, they had the firepower of cruise missiles.

I used Proximal Manipulation to lift myself to my feet and dispersed the cloud of dust around me with a weak forcefield. My newly regenerated eyes slowly opened, and I saw half a block of scorched, ruined ground, littered with the remains of enemy archers.

Oh.

And there were two fireballs hanging above my head, swaying gently in the grip of the invisible power holding them still.

“Thank you for saving me,” Chi Li’s voice whispered in my ear, despite the fact that the red-haired girl was almost three hundred meters away.

And despite the fact that my eardrums had not healed yet.

“Can you go help Cheng Rui? I can hold these spells for a minute or two. That way our two chained friends won’t be able to make any more fireballs.”

“Of course,” I said, and immediately felt a little foolish.

Could Chi Li hear me from across the park? Also, since when could she talk at long range like that?

I stretched my body and winced at the pain. Fortunately, nothing was broken—or if something had been broken, my regeneration had already fixed it.

My suit, however, had been reduced to charred wreckage. Beneath the melted material, my skin burned painfully.

Bruises covered my entire body. Even breathing or moving hurt badly. And that would not go away soon.

Progressive Regeneration was already showing diminishing returns. Blunt trauma spread across such a large area of my body would take longer to fix than this fight would last.

Since it was not life-threatening, I told myself to endure it, then flew toward Cheng Rui to lend him a hand.

By the time I arrived, the armored ghosts had almost reached him.

I was not about to plunge straight into infantry that were stronger and better at close combat than the skeleton archers.

Instead, I touched Cheng Rui’s powered armor lightly with my fingers, used my ability to reduce its weight by an order of magnitude, and lifted both him and myself away from the charging enemy with Proximal Manipulation.

We could not fly too high, or the enemy’s main tower in the city center would start attacking us with lightning.

But we were certainly faster than any enemy chasing us on foot, and Cheng Rui’s turrets could continue firing at them while we moved.

“Hey, nerd,” I greeted him with a grin. “Ever heard of running away? Ten seconds later and you’d have been sliced into sashimi.”

“Says the roasted muscle-girl cheerleader,” he laughed back.

Then he immediately blew the heads off four ghosts at once.

Show-off.

“That was entirely intentional, and it achieved the intended effect,” I retorted. “Because I, unlike some people, know when it’s time to retreat.”

No, I did not.

But Cheng Rui did not know that.

And he was even more prone to overestimating himself than I was, so…

“Anyway, consider your little life saved. Need anything? Chi Li can temporarily block the enemy’s magic attacks.”

“Can we go pick up the remains of my laser cannon? We don’t need all of it, just the important parts.” He pointed toward the place where the scattered electronics had landed after the demon’s first attack. “And after that, how fast can you get me to the shopping mall?”

“No problem. Just a few seconds,” I told him, ignoring the continuous complaints from my body.

Those were problems for Future Lin.

“But what happened to not splitting the party?”

“I need a break to repair my equipment properly, and the mall has suitable resources,” his deep mechanical voice told me.

“Honestly, we should have raided it before coming here. If you can hold off the infantry, and Chi Li can deal with the magic attacks, I can build something that will end this fight.”

“All right. You understand this stuff better than I do.”

And what I had tried so far was not working anyway.

I could only hope Cheng Rui had a better idea.