49. Where the Tower Stands, We Stand

Where the Tower Stands, We Stand

When the lightning towers proved ineffective, the enemy did not ease its attack.

Imagine an entire stadium full of furious football fans charging a referee.

The referee has made a painfully, obviously terrible call, refused to reverse it, and ruined their team’s chance at the championship.

Now imagine that the furious crowd is made of monsters who desperately want to eat human flesh.

By a rough estimate through superhuman perception, at least twenty-five thousand monsters were slowly forcing their way through rubble, wrecked cars, craters, and raging fires toward us. More were arriving from the city center every minute.

With the army retreating, every monster the enemy had—or could produce in short order—was now attacking the resistance strongholds. And among all the human teams I knew of, Chi Li, Cheng Rui, and I had the most direct firepower.

Worse, we tended to operate in the open and make absolutely no effort to hide.

Naturally, the villains wanted us gone.

The only reason we were still alive was that the monsters could not move through narrow, bombed-out streets quickly enough.

I glanced again at Cheng Rui’s progress and saw the interior of the new tower gradually filling in, drawing close to completion.

Too slowly.

Chi Li was already being pushed back, and I could probably hold for another minute at most.

Unless I was wrong, we only needed to hold for a few more minutes.

One minute longer than we actually could.

Unless…

Math had never been my strong suit, but superhuman perception and agility gave me an instinctive grasp of space, angles, and geometry.

With those in hand, a new plan formed at impossible speed.

A heartbeat later, I charged the nearest cluster of monsters.

By the time I arrived at supersonic speed, a dozen ghouls had been turned into paste, but I barely cared about them or the dozens of companions around them. I touched the ground and focused.

Forcefield Creation level two allowed a single force effect to apply across a volume of several cubic yards, and allowed slightly more complex geometric shapes.

I chose a dome and made it as thin as possible.

Less than a centimeter thick. With several cubic yards of volume, that was enough to create a dome large enough to enclose me, Chi Li, Cheng Rui, and his tower.

Within that volume, I selectively amplified gravity by sixteenfold.

But one forcefield and one effect would not be enough.

At most, it would slow the monsters down.

So I spent an enormous amount of energy—almost half my remaining stamina—to make the forcefield persistent and independent of my continued maintenance.

The effort dropped me to the ground as if I had sprinted full-out while holding my breath for an hour.

It felt worse than being burned by a demon’s draining breath. More exhausting than anything I had ever done.

But I had to push through, because none of us had time for me to gasp like a fish out of water while ghouls stabbed me.

So I made time to kill the nearby monsters, then overlaid a second forcefield on top of the first.

This was something I had never tried before, especially not against living enemies.

But most of the enemies were not truly alive, were they?

Animated corpses. Skeletons held together by molten iron and magic. Shaped metal and fire. Mindless flesh warped by magic.

Most of them were basically drones, if drones could be made of corpses and nightmare.

The second field reduced the structural integrity of all nonliving enemies by the same factor as the gravity increase.

The forces holding their bodies together weakened dramatically.

It was the same thing I did when I smashed magically strengthened steel as if it were cheap clay, and it worked beautifully on the monsters.

The moment they tried to pass through the dome, any part of their bodies touching it suddenly became sludge-like for as long as contact lasted.

Then the increased gravity struck those weakened parts like a hammer.

They basically melted between one step and the next, and the entire horde fell into chaos as the battlefield changed beneath them.

Unfortunately, the second dome only lasted as long as I maintained it.

It would either follow me, or vanish the moment I moved.

I could not maintain two completely independent forcefields at once, and the two fields had to overlap precisely to work the way they were working now.

So, no matter how awful it felt, I spent most of the stamina I had left to make the second forcefield permanent as well.

That almost knocked me out on the spot. My enhanced recovery and regeneration barely kept me conscious.

I lay on the ground, wheezing weakly, darkness creeping at the edges of my vision.

As wave after wave of monsters died beneath the invisible dome, I tried not to smile smugly, mostly because every muscle in my body felt as if it was about to cramp, including the ones in my face.

Then a demon hit the dome, staggered, and passed through.

Unlike the undead and the metal birds, it did not turn into muck.

The second field did not affect it, because it was “alive” enough to be excluded.

The thing stood above me, kicked me in the stomach, then the chest, then the head.

I tried to react, but I had spent myself completely.

At most, I could lift my own body and fly slowly, and the demon did not let me.

It grabbed one of my legs, slammed me into the ground, stepped on me, and began swinging its overlong clawed arms while my struggles achieved almost nothing.

Bit by bit, I recovered enough strength to breathe.

I might have been at the end of my rope, but I was still as tough as ever. Relative to my regeneration, there was only so quickly the demon could hurt me.

It must have realized that too, because it stopped swinging, grabbed my leg again, and pulled.

When I realized I was being dragged toward the dome, I tried to resist again, but my muscles refused to obey. Under the circumstances, Proximal Manipulation was not strong enough to break the demon’s grip.

It touched the dome, slowed, and grunted when it discovered that carrying me through the amplified gravity zone was difficult.

Then a violet-hot flame blew its head apart.

“Come on, Sister Lin. Get out of there,” Chi Li said, standing over my prone body.

She destroyed every demon that tried to cross the dome. “Cheng Rui is about to push the button, and this place is about to get hotter.”

“That dick-shaped cannon tower of his doesn’t have a button,” my exhausted brain replied, because apparently that was the best it could do.

I only realized after saying it that the thought had left my mouth.

“If you still have the energy for crude jokes, you’ve recovered enough to fly,” the red-haired witch told me impatiently.

She blew another demon apart using heat stolen from a different monster, leaving it behind as a crackling pillar of ice. “You know I can’t keep this up forever!”

“Then you should have leveled your stamina,” I shot back.

But she was right.

I was not about to set any speed records, but I could definitely fly again. Even the cramping was beginning to fade.

As the demons became more cautious about charging into the dome, we retreated to Cheng Rui’s masterpiece to catch our breath and see exactly how powerful his thing was.

“Cover your ears!” the nerd shouted unnecessarily.

I noticed that his own ears were already bleeding.

If we survived, healing would repair that.

But I knew better than anyone how little comfort that really brought. Even when you recovered, you still definitely felt the injury happen.

My red-haired best friend took Cheng Rui’s advice.

I did not.

Under these circumstances, anything powerful enough to hurt my eardrums would turn Cheng Rui’s entire body into scraps, whether he covered his ears or not.