65. This, Too, Is Part of Growing Up

This, Too, Is Part of Growing Up

Minute after minute passed. The metal gradually warmed beneath my work until it glowed a dim red, just barely bright enough for human eyes to notice.

The work was calming, almost meditative, and it let me separate myself from the fight I had just survived and from the tangled, useless mess of feelings still knotting up inside me.

The wires had to be braided properly, or they would not support one another. They had to be ductile enough not to snap under stress, but not so soft that they stretched thin and became useless.

It was a practical problem. It was not meant to be a metaphor for anything.

Naturally, it also worked perfectly as a metaphor for everything. Because apparently even metalwork has to be dramatic now.

Piece by piece, the problem yielded. The separate strands came together in neat order until they became a cable almost as thick as my wrist, something like the cables used in suspension bridges.

I used one length to bind the old man’s wrists behind his back, fusing the two ends seamlessly into a slightly tight figure eight. Then I did the same to his legs.

With Force Sense, and with the recent increases to my Perception and Intelligence, calculating forces, including the durability of objects, had become nearly instinctive.

Testing the restraints with my flickering powers produced promising results.

By ordinary durability alone, each binding could safely hold thirty tons. It could take a hundred, maybe even a hundred and fifty, before it started deforming in any meaningful way.

Given the awkward angles and the lack of leverage, that was probably enough.

I did not feel like betting on probably.

Force-Field Creation, Nearby Object Manipulation, and Force Adjustment were never all cut off by his power-nullification at the same time, so I wove force fields into the restraints as well.

Those fields would reduce any force the prisoner applied to the bindings by several times over, increase the durability of the bindings by the same factor, and fold the effect of Nearby Object Manipulation into their strength.

Those force fields could still be nullified, but disabling all of them at once would be difficult, especially when every single wire had its own independent field.

Then it was done, and the last of my doubts faded with it.

The monster had not only been beaten. He had been completely restrained. He could not escape under his own power.

Given the way the bindings were made, he would need outside help from another superpowered person or an industrial-scale plasma cutter to get free.

In other words, he was safer like this than he would have been dead in the hands of an enemy with powerful necromancy.

With that reassuring conclusion settled, some invisible dam inside me broke, and a flood of energy nearly filled me to the brim.

“Welcome back.”

When I returned to resistance headquarters, the tiny menace, Lia, greeted me without taking her eyes off the interactive map tracking enemy and survivor movements through the ruins of the city.

“Was your hunting expedition as productive as expected?”

I did not answer Lia’s nonsense with words. I simply threw a punch at the back of the ten-year-old’s head.

Except the little demon was on the other side of the table, which left me wondering why I had just punched empty air. Or maybe I had not. Maybe that was another one of her tricks.

“Yes, it was productive,” she admitted, and the only reason I did not beat her up was that beating her up would accomplish exactly nothing.

“You knew?” I demanded. “When you sent me there without any warning, you knew he would be waiting?”

I tossed the man I had been carrying over my shoulder. His head slammed into a brick wall hard enough to crack it, which counted as an improvement for both his skull and the decor.

“I almost died!”

“You certainly might have died,” she agreed with a nod, which suddenly made my anger feel extremely justified. “But that was your choice.”

“…What?”

Seriously, what was that supposed to mean? Was this tiny thing insane, or—

“You just escaped from a powerful wizard,” Lia said. “One strong enough to fight a large army and win. One who can flatten whole streets with little effort, teleport through lightning, or unleash lightning far stronger than the towers.”

She looked at me with eyes that were no longer black marbles, but clusters of stars turning inside hollow sockets.

“You can move through time. You can fly faster than bullets. If your life had been in danger against your coach, you could have left at any moment.”

“But… he would have killed those refugees!” I said before looking away.

That was not the only reason I had stayed.

We both knew it.

“Yes. He would have. For that reason, and for others, you chose to stay. You chose to face someone who was both a physical threat and, for you, a psychological one.”

She snapped her fingers, and the city map shifted to show a square building in the north with heavy walls. I did not remember seeing it before.

Large numbers of red figures, monsters, were besieging the building, while a handful of blue figures, superpowered humans, struggled to hold them off.

“For that alone, I respect you as both a warrior and a hero. No,” she added with a soft laugh, “warriors and heroes are not the same thing, no matter what far too much of history would like to pretend.”

“Does your so-called respect come with more information stated plainly?” I shot back.

Being kept in the dark while being supposedly respected was not, shockingly, one of my favorite hobbies.

“I will say what can be said.” She tapped the virtual battle display a few times, first on a red figure and then on a blue one.

The image showed an arrow from the red figure striking at the blue point and missing, only to hit another blue figure in the back and bounce off.

But that second blue figure visibly flinched away in alarm, less than a second before a fireball tore through the place where they had just been standing.

“You see, I sent you out not merely because you were the only fighter on our side who could be deployed immediately. More precisely, I sent you because, considering your newly acquired movement abilities, you were the safest option.

“With the difference in numbers between us and the monsters, arranging our actions so that we create the greatest impact for an acceptable cost is not only my job. It is the only way any of you survive.”

On the map, the building hit by the fireball finally collapsed. It cut off a large enemy advance and reduced the open ground the defenders had to cover.

“Usually that means sending people to do things that are not simple, things they often do not want to do, alongside people they dislike, or to people they dislike.”

She lifted one eyebrow. Above those star-cluster eyes, it glittered like a small rainbow.

“Incidentally, that is also part of growing up.”

“Hilarious.” It was not even slightly hilarious. “You really could not have warned me about him? Told me what I was walking into?”