93. Creating a Nuclear Blast

Creating a Nuclear Blast

I poured every last scrap of strength I had into entering a time-stop state.

Unfortunately, that did not change the fact that there was an arm around my neck, a magical taser jammed under my armpit, and I was on my knees, seconds away from blacking out.

I was held too tightly to break free. Worse, every few seconds another portion of my dwindling reserves was burned away just to keep time frozen.

So I used Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation to unclasp the necklace around my neck.

Unlike objects held by someone else, the necklace had been on me from the start. That meant I could still manipulate it even while time was stopped.

I gripped one end of the chain and shoved the other into the giant warrior’s open mouth, pushing it as far down his throat as I could.

Then I did something I never would have imagined doing before.

I used Force Adjustment on the last third of the necklace inside his throat and seized the electromagnetic forces within it, amplifying them by an order of magnitude.

Only the electromagnetic forces.

All of them.

It was less than an ounce of metal. It belonged to me. It had already been enchanted. Adjusting the forces inside an object was something I had done thousands of times by now. It took only an instant and cost almost no stamina.

And because of what it caused, it could not be taken back or controlled.

Time resumed.

The electromagnetic interactions between those few dozen grains of metal were magnified—up to and including the repulsive forces between their protons.

That repulsion intensified to the point that the nuclear interaction could no longer hold most of the atomic nuclei together, and those tiny particles of metal detonated in the fire of a nuclear explosion.

I was not a complete idiot. I had already shifted Focused Invulnerability to make myself immune to the nuclear blast I had created.

That did not stop the explosion from driving me a full meter into the metal floor, nor did it protect a single item I had been carrying. My battle suit included. Everything was utterly destroyed.

Fortunately, more than an hour had passed since I had last conjured the suit. After I used Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation to scrape all the glassy dust and metal fragments from my skin, I summoned a new one, whole and pristine.

It was the only pristine thing about me.

The battle with those warriors had wrung my body out and left it hanging somewhere to dry. Any skill that required stamina was beyond me now, and as for real combat… if an ordinary sword demon got clever, it could probably exhaust me into unconsciousness.

My limbs twitched beyond my control. Every breath made my overworked lungs burn as if they were on fire. My nervous system badly needed a full reset, because every few seconds it decided to remind me what intimate contact with that athlete had felt like.

Probably an aftereffect of that stupid magical drug. And now that the battle was over, the boost from Empowered Regeneration was also fading, which made everything feel even worse.

In short, going to face someone like Mort in my current condition was an absurd fantasy.

Not that it mattered.

There was nowhere near enough time for me to sleep, especially not when new monsters could be summoned at any moment.

The rest of the room was… slightly better.

Around the blast center, the floor had deformed by less than a meter. The nearby walls were completely charred, but they had neither torn open nor melted.

Then again, my desperate little plan was not comparable to a real nuclear weapon in any meaningful way.

There had not been enough material involved, and the instant any part of it ceased to be in contact with me, the enhancement would end. The blast yield had been under a hundred tons of TNT. Maybe far under.

The farther I looked from the explosion’s center, the less scorched the floor became and the less the walls had warped. The force produced by the blast had diminished sharply with distance.

Nearly two hundred meters away, anyone trying to tank it would have received thousands of times less kinetic and thermal energy.

That was a very good thing. It meant I found Chi Li lying in a ring of intact floor instead of burned into an atomic shadow.

“What… was… that?” she forced out through bloodied lips. She was too badly hurt and too exhausted even to stand.

“A small nuclear bomb,” I told her. There was no point hiding it now.

“Fortunately, your insulation, shielding, and reinforcement rings were strong enough to withstand the blast.”

I stared at every wound beneath her clothes, at broken bones and bruised organs.

If she had not gone all out—if she had not attacked those warriors like she was throwing miniature meteors—they might have killed her.

“You look awful,” I finally told her, almost dizzy with relief when I found no internal bleeding, no radiation burns, and nothing else of that kind that I could detect. “But you’re going to live.”

“Give me a minute and I’ll be fine,” she said, then tried to stand.

She failed.

“All right. Five minutes, then. Then we go deal with the bastard who did this.”

I wisely kept silent.

Instead, I opened my character status panel and assigned the points I had just gained.

Name: Ye Rin
Profile: Female human, 17 years, 3 months, 16 days old

Ability Points: 0/83

Word of Force [49 points]
Force Adjustment Lv. 3, Force Perception Lv. 2, Force-Field Creation Lv. 3, Forced Acceleration Lv. 3, Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation Lv. 4, Constant Force Lv. 3, Persistent Force Lv. 2

Other Abilities [34 points]
Time Jump Lv. 1, Empowered Regeneration Lv. 4, Focused Invulnerability Lv. 2, Instant Action Lv. 3, Defensive Counter Lv. 2, Super Battle Suit Lv. 1, Spatial Distortion Lv. 2, Spatial Jump Lv. 1

Attributes [0/83]
Strength 41, Agility 21, Reason 6, Perception 9, Spirit 21, Luck 2

Gaining only one attribute point after my main attribute and two secondary attributes reached their new thresholds did not feel like much, but small things accumulated.

Especially when it came to stamina. One extra attribute point meant more than an hour of intense but not quite maximal exertion.

It meant fighting that long without relying much on skills, or fighting for ten minutes with every low-cost ability active, or using Time Jump once or twice for roughly ten seconds each.

When I was already exhausted, that increase was enormous.

It would also help me recover stamina faster, though unless I rested for a long time, I still would not return to peak condition.

As for raising Force-Field Creation by one level, it made my control over kinetic energy more flexible, more varied, easier to apply, and less expensive.

It was more of a practical upgrade than anything else, but every option I had for increasing raw power cost eight ability points or more, and I simply did not have that many.

Still, all of that was only the excuse I gave myself for improving that particular skill.

It was not the real reason.

“Feeling better?” I asked my best friend as I used Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation to clean her up, set a few broken bones, and support her onto her feet without worsening her injuries.

“If you need more time, that’s fine,” I told her sincerely, holding her hand.

“No, no, I’m fine.” She looked around, but whatever she was searching for, she did not find it. “Let me find my staff, and then we’ll go teach that damned necromancer a lesson. I probably used half my stored energy turning those warriors to ash, but there’s still another half in there.”

“Good. That’s good,” I murmured, and then I used my ability. “By the way, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for wh—”

Before Chi Li could finish the question, a nearby-object manipulation field lifted her into the air and carried her back toward the entrance to the floor.

“No. No! Put me down! You can’t beat him alone!”

“You’re right, Chi Li. But if you come with me, you’ll die.”

She was already crossing the room, drifting slowly toward the passage we had forced open.

“If we both survive this, we can go get ice cream together.”

I remembered the route. I remembered the tower and the map of everything around it.

My Perception and Reason attributes made sure of that, and I fed the information they gave me into the floating spell.

I also bound Force Perception into the effect and programmed it to avoid monsters if it detected them.

The floating spell was far slower and cruder than my own flight. It would last only a few minutes and could be overwhelmed easily.

But Chi Li was not a force manipulator.

Unless the spell ended on its own or she found a way to dispel it, it would carry her away from here, away from the worst of the danger.

That was the point.

“No—!”

She vanished into the passage.

And I was left to face the greatest threat alone.