60. Why Is He This Strong?

Why Is He This Strong?

The wind slowed. The air thickened.

Dust motes danced in sunlight like insects trapped in amber.

As I rushed the monster wielding the giant axe, its blade came down toward my back.

A smug smile slowly spread across his too-wide, fleshy face.

But just because years of frustration and anger had driven me into a direct confrontation with this old bastard did not mean I had to play by his rules.

I flickered, jumping seamlessly through space, changing direction.

Then I slammed my fist into the side of his neck.

He barely flinched.

The punch that could have crushed a car engine felt to him like a caress.

My fingers throbbed with pain, the way they would have if I had punched a tree trunk before gaining powers.

Then he reversed the axe haft with a speed I had not imagined possible. The handle crashed into my ribs, filling me with pain.

In another flicker, I jumped forty meters away and avoided his follow-up attack.

“You’ll have to do better than that, little girl,” he taunted, rolling his shoulders. Even at that distance, I could hear the unnatural creaking of bone and ligament.

“Hell, you fought better before you got powers. Wasted too much on looks and tricks.”

I ignored the taunt.

Warmth spread through my fingers and ribs, and the pain faded quickly.

Whether what he said was true or false, it was only the kind of psychological tactic he liked to use during his “tests.”

I charged again, closing through Spatial Jump, and struck the side of his left knee hard with my fist while a fiery line carved across my shoulder.

He lost balance and was knocked backward, crashing through a trailer as if it were tinfoil.

Bleeding wound or not, this time I was the one who smiled nastily.

I had proved he was not invincible.

As he recovered, I lifted higher into the air and fired invisible kinetic beams from beyond his reach.

Unlike my earlier random attempts to hurt him, these were aimed with a plan.

The beams targeted his wrists, fingers, knees, throat, and eyes.

They did not look as if they caused much damage, but his furious roar and the way he quickly covered his eyes confirmed that they did something.

Even if their effects were no worse than pricks and stings, enough interference and annoyance could weaken any fighter’s performance.

That was probably why the giant axe flickered, and in the span of one heartbeat, he was holding an equally enormous rifle.

The muzzle spat lightning-bright fire.

A thunderous boom followed, and a bullet the size of a railroad spike struck my abdomen…

Then exploded violently.

I found myself several trailers north of the old man, smashed through an old red pickup truck, with a fist-sized hole in my suit and an almost equally large hole in my skin, burning as it healed.

Something moved inside my stomach.

Several somethings.

Then hot metal fragments emerged from the wound, pushed out by my regeneration.

I clenched my fists so hard the truck’s metal deformed like putty.

I used Temporal Jump to put myself back into the air, preventing him from tracking my flight path.

The not-very-portable cannon had already turned to aim at me.

I jumped again and again, always evading his aim while closing the distance.

Boom.

At almost point-blank range, the gunshot was deafening.

But the shell missed because I rushed in, struck the old man’s face with a hard, fast punch, flattened his nose, and sent him and his giant axe flying in two separate directions.

Then agony opened along my flank.

A deep, heavily bleeding cut suddenly appeared.

The bastard had changed the gun back into an axe when I could no longer dodge, catching me off guard.

“Your teleports are getting easier to predict, kid,” the old man growled, wiping blood from his face. “Honestly, you were more technical in the summer.”

“Shut up!” I roared, then frowned and pressed a hand against the bleeding wound.

He shrugged, fell silent, and turned to retrieve his axe.

He had hurt me badly, and we both knew I would not immediately engage him again, even though taking his weapon would be a major advantage.

“Easily killing brainless monsters makes you soft if you don’t understand moderation,” he said in that unbearable wise-man tone.

He always used that voice when preaching the most absurd parts of his ideology.

“Sure, they give you quick power. But they make your skills rusty, especially when your body changes.”

He looked me up and down and chuckled.

“You may not have changed as much as I have, but the difference is still obvious. Honestly, I expected you to be stumbling around uselessly by now… if all you’d killed were easy monsters. How many?”

“Three,” I admitted reluctantly.

If he interpreted that very misleading answer to mean I had truly killed people, that was his problem.

If it made him more willing to talk, I could use the time.

Because while he had become even worse over the past two weeks, I was no longer as impulsive or as easy for him to manipulate as the girl in his memory.

And this fight was far from over.

“Tasted a little power and discovered how awful people can be, hm?” he asked.

I answered with another frown, this time not entirely fake.

“That’s human nature, little girl. Power doesn’t corrupt. It just lets us become the monsters we always were underneath.”

“Yeah, because everyone is twisted like you,” I snapped before I could stop myself, plan or no plan. “Spare me.”

“You never wanted to make someone shut up?” He grinned at me again. “Never thought about punching someone until they couldn’t… do anything anymore?”

He lifted the axe and spun it lazily, as if it were a conductor’s baton.

“Never fantasized about…”

His words were both right and wrong, wrong for the worst possible reasons.

So I stopped listening to him and thought about what did not make sense.

Why was he this strong?

I was faster. I had multiple skills he did not. Yet all I had done was bruise him a little, while every blow he landed would have crippled me without regeneration.

He seemed nearly unharmed.

He had a magical weapon that was absolutely lethal at both close and long range.

If not for his love of showing off and talking, he would already have won a direct fight easily.

It did not make sense.

I knew how my own abilities had grown in major battles. I had seen how quickly other people grew compared with the enemies they fought.

Even if he was a vile traitor working with the enemy and had access to enemy resources…

There was a limit to how many enemies one person could kill in a day.

Even assuming the invaders kept summoning monsters for him to slaughter endlessly, I had fought in large-scale battles and repeatedly risked my life against powerful enemies. I should not have been this much weaker than him.

Something was wrong here.

I was determined to find out what.

But first, since he was stupid enough to try dragging me to the dark side after I had endured ten years of his nonsense…