45. Emergency Charge

Emergency Charge

With chaos raging all around us, I could only spare a hurried glance in Cheng Rui’s direction to make sure the accident had not thrown him into a situation even worse than the one we were already in.

The military bombardment had not only destroyed the city’s buildings; it had shattered every last hope I had that my hometown might one day recover.

Aside from the invaders’ black metal fortifications, the entire city center had become wasteland.

Not a single building still stood. The streets were full of craters. Broken water pipes leaked everywhere. The sewers had collapsed.

From the ruins, hundreds of monsters crawled, slithered, or leapt toward our position from every direction.

There were enhanced skinless ghouls, heavily armored undead warriors, even several demons and ghosts.

Chi Li was drawing deeply on the enemy’s fire magic, using it to unleash tremendous explosions that shook the earth and tore enemy formations apart.

While she did that, my job was to meet the enemy head-on, smash through their formations, and prevent them from surrounding and overwhelming her.

Unfortunately for us, the enemy had clearly become smarter than ever, and more coordinated.

An executioner ghoul swung its absurdly sharp magical halberd at my legs, while two of its companions harried me from above with constant weapon strikes, sealing off my flight path.

If I tried to fly over them, I would take even more damage.

After I crashed into a pair of demons, these three ghouls and several of their companions had approached me under cover of one ghoul’s invisibility spell. Now they were buying time while the surviving demon from that pair attacked me from behind.

Unfortunately for them, we had all learned new tricks.

One Spatial Jump took me out of the ghoul encirclement at once.

The demon fired a fireball at me… but fireballs, even magical ones, did not weigh much.

They were certainly nowhere near a quarter ton, so I promptly used Spatial Jump to move the fireball directly above the demon that had launched it.

At the same time, I lashed out at the ghouls with the narrowest Proximal Manipulation field I could create.

The cannon-like impact hammered the demon straight into the ground by two meters, while the ghouls were cut apart by an invisible war halberd.

A loosely spaced group of skeletons advanced from the direction of what had once been the shopping mall, firing magical thermite arrows toward my best friend’s back.

They had finally learned not to bunch together in the face of Chi Li’s fireballs or my charges, and their tactic was reasonable enough.

But they really should not have used projectiles loaded with that much heat and fire magic.

The arrows struck a magical dome around Chi Li and bounced away. I was the only one who could see it.

Though my senses could not detect the details of magic, its general function seemed to be pushing back anything with sufficient heat or magical power, so long as it belonged to Chi Li’s thematic domain.

Before the enemy could adjust tactics and do something that might actually threaten us, I accelerated to a speed greater than anything their flying units could manage while keeping enough maneuverability to control myself.

Then I flew across the battlefield, darting from one skeleton to another and smashing into them, using Temporal Jump to make the entire movement take far less time than it normally should.

At Mach 1, I could shatter more than twenty skeletons in a single second.

Now I could do it in the blink of an eye.

Boom.

A bolt of lightning struck me directly in the chest, burning pain racing through every nerve in my body.

I tumbled out of control into a twenty-meter-high mound of rubble, sending broken stone spraying everywhere as if it had been shelled.

The damage was much less severe than the first time I had been blasted from the sky, but it still left my body twitching, my movements uncoordinated, and every part of me aching as if I had been hit by the world’s worst cattle prod.

Then lightning came again.

And again.

Because of course I had fallen into a place where the lightning tower could still see me.

A demon arrived to join the fun, and more executioner ghouls began stabbing me with sharp pieces of metal.

While the lightning tower kept attacking me with repeated electric-shock strikes, the demon’s disgusting breath immediately began draining my stamina, and the ghoul weapons left nasty little cuts through my suit.

A few hours earlier, that might have trapped me in a real life-or-death crisis.

Now, for these monsters, things did not go quite so well.

The ghouls fell first. After stabbing me for about fifteen seconds, they were sliced apart by invisible blades.

Not long afterward, the lightning tower stopped firing too. The distant pillar had turned red and was smoking.

Only the demon remained, wildly blasting me with more stamina-draining breath.

My body burned with the exhaustion of having run a full marathon, but the trembling soon faded. It was not enough to put me down.

Not anymore.

A kinetic spear pierced the demon’s eyes one after the other. Its pained roar brought a vicious little smile to the corner of my mouth as I punched hole after hole through its body until it died.

I spent thirty seconds catching my breath—which, objectively speaking, was almost seven minutes—then flew into the sky.

Higher than the rubble pile.

Higher than the distant metal wall.

High enough that every lightning tower could clearly aim at me.

I stood there with my hands on my hips and challenged the enemy.

No attack came.

Because it had not been my direct action, nor anyone else’s, that destroyed the ghouls and quickly stopped the lightning tower that had tried to electrocute me to death.

It was simply the result of applying Defensive Counter to Force Adjustment, reflecting all damage stopped by that defense back to its source.

Force Adjustment could reduce harmful forces by eightfold. Nearly ninety percent of most attacks’ damage was redirected back to the attacker instead of me.

Apparently, the enemy was not willing to sacrifice his lightning towers just to try to kill me.

With my back to the distant fortress and its master, I turned my attention to the ground.

There, I found Cheng Rui building a tower of his own.

Cheng Rui ignored the chaos around him and smiled at the skill he had just acquired.

Emergency Charge:
Instantly replenish mana and stamina reserves. Each use of this skill reduces maximum reserves by 10%.

For every full day of rest, one percentage point of the reduced reserves is restored per skill level. This skill cannot be used if you have moved or participated in combat within the past minute, and it has a one-minute cooldown.

The cost and restrictions were awful. Each use would essentially lower his maximum capacity for several days. And ever since the monster invasion began, in the sort of close-range battles they kept experiencing, this skill would have been useless.

But as reality had proven again and again, Cheng Rui was not—and should not try to be—a front-line fighter.

He was a superpowered engineer.

He built armor.

In comics and movies, people like that usually wore absurdly powerful suits of armor, wiped out armies of enemies, and for a while Cheng Rui had been living that dream.

But aside from personal protection, was that really the best way to help?