90. Fusion Enhancement

Fusion Enhancement

Both of them were too strong to be seriously harmed by that, but they were hurt and distracted for a moment.

Which was basically the same as being punched in the chest.

That gave me the chance to push again, and this time I shoved them back easily.

Not because their strength had fallen much.

Because their feet slipped, as though the floor had suddenly turned to ice, stripping away their leverage.

Friction, after all?

Another affected force.

Then I touched my new necklace again with Nearby Object Manipulation, deactivating the first magic effect and activating its opposite.

All the air that had rushed into the low-pressure space now found itself at one hundred times normal atmospheric pressure, with no barrier to contain it.

The equivalent of two tons of gas exploded outward at the speed of sound, sweeping away everything in its path.

The shockwave kicked both my opponents backward into the wall, but it only stunned them.

I was about to deal with them when Chi Li’s scream caught my attention.

My best friend was on the ground, with the red warrior on top of her.

Somehow, despite the backlash, he had managed to grab her in melee. Now he was desperately trying to tear the rings off her fingers.

Worse, the white warrior stood above them both, sucking away all the fire Chi Li summoned before it could boil the blood on the red warrior’s body, and the flames did not seem to harm him at all.

One glance told me what had happened.

The red bastard was using only a fraction of his full strength, so the rebound was not enough to throw him off. But even a quarter of his total strength applied to Chi Li was enough to make her struggle.

But how was he still alive?

Hadn’t she burned out his throat?

No time to solve the mystery.

I teleported over and kicked the white one so hard he bounced twice off the ceiling.

Then I pulled the red warrior off my best friend and punched him in the chest hard enough that my hand sank into his flesh up to the wrist.

He sprayed a red mist into my face, and I staggered.

No. It was not poison.

It was the opposite.

It was like a full night of good sleep, something none of us had enjoyed in two weeks.

Like the exhilaration of a morning run before breakfast.

Like a warm, relaxing bath.

Like the beat of my heart when I let loose and slaughtered monsters.

Like the anger that came when I saw my friends hurt.

Like my first kiss with a boy when I was sixteen, before he proved he was just another asshole.

Feelings and sensations struck all at once like a storm, and for one instant, I completely lost consciousness.

But this was a fight between superhumans.

One instant was enough for several attacks.

When I recovered from the mental blow, the red bastard’s sword had already pierced my sternum.

There was a crack, a burst of pain, and then the blade stuck in my ribs.

Then my reactivated Nearby Object Manipulation blasted both sword and swordsman into the air.

BOOM.

A tremendous explosion shook the room behind me.

A warrior’s headless corpse flew fifty meters before hitting the ground with a wet slap.

Chi Li staggered forward, holding a shield with a black hole burned straight through it. Despite being clearly in poor condition, the remaining warriors kept a cautious distance from her.

“You okay?” I asked while watching for teleporting attackers.

“I just made that bastard’s brain hotter than the surface of the sun so fast it exploded,” she told me, mad light glittering in her eyes.

Correction: actual magical fire was now pouring from her eyes.

“I feel much better than okay. Let’s see him regenerate from that!”

“They regenerate?”

Well, of course they did.

The red one had recovered from having his throat burned out.

“Never mind. We know their trick now. We can beat them.”

That was when a cloud of black mist drifted in from the place where I had splattered the black warrior and flowed into the remaining four.

As they absorbed it, they grew half a meter taller, their bodies expanding in proportion. Their weapons melted and changed.

Their shields became breastplates. Their huge swords became spiked maces, shining with the light of each warrior’s original color one second, then turning entirely black the next.

Then the white mist rising from the warrior Chi Li had decapitated drifted in as well, while his corpse melted.

It too was absorbed into our remaining enemies, clearly making them stronger, and the armor expanded over their limbs.

“Big Sister Lin, next time you feel like issuing an open challenge to the whole world?” The red-haired witch glared at me while her staff hissed, rings of flickering runes carving themselves around its surface. “Shut up and keep hitting. Things always get worse.”

A chain thicker than my arm wrapped around my arms and upper body.

Nearby Object Manipulation and Force Adjustment immediately hammered at it, but it flickered with black light, canceled most of the kinetic force, and remained tightly coiled around me.

Then a massive mace glittering with lightning and black magic slammed into my lower back, spinning me halfway around and sending me into the nearest wall.

If the last five minutes proved anything, it was that fighting these four enhanced warriors was harder than defeating the previous six.

They were stronger, tougher, smarter, and now each could use two kinds of magic.

I tore the chain apart with some effort, then lashed a five-meter length of it like a whip at supersonic speed into the gray warrior’s legs.

The length of chain came apart completely, exploding into fragments under the force of my strike while also breaking the target’s greaves and the shinbones beneath them.

Unfortunately, he had already begun regenerating, apparently another effect of the fusion enhancement, while the lightning user fired bolts laced with electricity and dark magic.

His attempt to weaken me, maybe even stun me, was only the secondary purpose. He was buying time for the other warrior to recover.

Yes. Their tactics had improved too.

As I teleported away, I knocked two bracers together and activated their secondary magic.

Two invisible blades formed from Nearby Object Manipulation appeared around me and began spinning at high speed.

They rotated in opposite directions, and because each blade revolved around its own bracer, the planes of rotation shifted whenever I moved my arms. Even if someone knew the blades existed, predicting their paths would be difficult.

The next time the two warriors tried to flank me, they tasted the invisible blender.

But because they were stronger and wore thicker armor now, they were only cut somewhat, rather than sliced apart.

Thanks to Enhanced Regeneration, I was growing stronger too.

The equipment I had enchanted earlier was not.

Neither was Chi Li’s.