99. The Great Cannon Takes Shape

The Great Cannon Takes Shape

My fingers dug deep into my palms. My fists clenched so tightly they creaked, and all I could do was take one step after another.

When had I stopped flying?

No. That did not matter.

What mattered was getting through this… whatever this was, and finding out what had happened to my friends and my sister.

Chi Li’s and Ye Lin’s faces stood clear in my mind, and I took another step.

It was like the wall you were leaning on suddenly collapsing. Like the final stair of a staircase you had been blindly running up. Like a door that opened inward when you were trying to force your way through it.

The curtain of light filling my entire vision vanished.

It revealed a small platform—what had once been the rooftop of the city’s only shopping mall.

Although the building itself had completely collapsed, this platform had somehow remained intact. On it stood more than a dozen very familiar faces…

And one truly enormous gun.

Around the hundred-meter-tall device stood Cheng Rui, Chi Li, Lily, Zhao Mancheng, Dr. Beth, and old Zhao Linshou.

Ye Lin was there too, standing beside a bundle of cables as thick as wrists, staring straight upward.

Two brilliant silver beams shot from her eyes into the sky, then spread outward, forming a silver dome over the entire area.

“You’re late,” Lia said from right beside me. “Was getting through Ye Lin’s barrier hard?”

After everything I had been through, her sudden appearance no longer surprised me.

Her new height did.

The tiny little girl she had once been now stood only about a meter shorter than I did. Her body was proportioned like a fifteen-year-old’s rather than a prepubescent child’s, and her simple black dress had adjusted accordingly.

Her hair was now longer than mine, falling down to the small of her back. Her eyes shone with such intensity that looking at her face hurt whether or not I reinforced my resistance.

“Ye Lin is making that pillar of light?” I gasped, horrified. “But to release that much power, she must be—”

“Don’t worry. I’m helping,” she “explained,” her eyes flashing and giving me a very real headache.

“Your little sister wanted to be safe from all monsters, so she received a power of sanctuary. The less violent her intentions are, and the more violent someone else’s intentions are, the harder they find it to approach or perceive her.”

“…That could have saved our lives over the past few weeks,” I muttered.

“Yes, it could have,” agreed the girl who was no longer quite so tiny.

“It is rather strange, isn’t it? Out of several hundred people who wished for their powers, she was the only one who received something like this. Do you know how difficult it was to protect everyone without revealing myself before this?”

“Not really. No.”

Just one attempt to keep Chi Li safe had required specific advance preparations.

Then the other implication of Lia’s words caught up with me, and I stared at her—or at least at the part of her below her shoulders.

“Your new appearance seems rather more… exposed, doesn’t it?”

“Mort is no longer hiding, is he? That gives me more… freedom.” She grinned, showing two rows of shark-like teeth.

“Would you like to help us blow up his ridiculous spiky body?”

The hundred-meter-long metal rod slammed into the ground like an enormous railroad spike. Its needle-like tip pierced the ruins, soil, and bedrock like a hot knife through butter.

It kept sinking deeper. By the time I stopped pushing, it had driven thirty meters underground.

I released the round, yard-thick cap at the top and drifted backward, using Force Adjustment to quickly wipe the sweat from my eyes while I caught my breath.

Although the rod weighed more than a main battle tank, weight was not the problem. If I were fully recovered, I could have thrown a locomotive without much trouble.

The difficult part was what came after the physical labor.

I prepared myself physically and mentally, placed both hands on the two-meter-wide metal rod, and extended my ability into the shining material.

First came Force Adjustment: strengthening the interatomic bonds that held all the atoms together, then weakening any forces that obstructed subatomic motion.

Over the course of a minute, the effects slowly spread through the entire rod and stabilized enough to last for several hours.

Next came Nearby Object Manipulation, spreading in the same way and seizing every part of the rod to prevent any movement.

The moment the dual enchantment finished taking hold, the silver metal began to cool rapidly.

That was expected. In fact, it was the entire purpose of the second spell.

What was not expected, and definitely not welcome, was the frost beginning to form on the top. It built up and spread across the surface.

I frowned and added a fourth effect: water repulsion.

That cleared away the ice and prevented more from forming… for about twenty seconds.

Then more white, extremely cold ice began to form, and it took me a moment to realize that it was dry ice—solid carbon dioxide.

I made several adjustments to the second Nearby Object Manipulation field to make sure other kinds of ice would not cover it in the short term.

“Hey, girlie, are you done over there?” Lily—my schoolmate—shouted so I could hear her over the metal cutters, welders, and all the other noise.

“You’re wasting time!”

As desperate last-chance plans went, ours was truly miserable, but we had no other way to kill the giant demon currently destroying everything twenty kilometers north of the city ruins.

“This has to be done carefully!” I shouted back, then grimaced at my own stupidity and flew straight over to the older woman.

The sharp-tongued brunette had already used her metal-manipulation ability to finish shaping the second metal rod and was halfway through the third, but simply shaping these things was nowhere near enough.

“You heard your boyfriend,” she shot back, wearing a malicious smirk. “If we don’t have the gun ready by the time that thing is within fifty kilometers of us, we may never get another chance.”

“This is ninety tons of silver, not a two-pound sword I can enchant with a little effort,” I snapped back, too worried about other things to get truly angry.

“More importantly, one mistake and it becomes a ninety-ton explosive atom bomb, and then we’re all dead.”

Or at least they would be dead. Thanks to Focused Invulnerability, I would merely wish I were dead.

“And Cheng Rui is not my boyfriend.”

Lily sneered, but said nothing.

We were working together more out of necessity than anything else, and if Xia Xinglan had not been leading their team, she probably would not have helped at all.

Unfortunately, we needed her help.

Cheng Rui could create metal, but his limited magic was better spent actually building the weapon. The more the rest of us could contribute, the more resources he had available.

So, aside from the occasional sneer or glare, we all did our best to complete our parts without “accidentally” killing one another.

One enormous enchanted silver rod became three. Then it became two rows of five, arranged in a semicircle facing the distant monster crowned in lightning.

Even from so far away, the monster’s footsteps still shook the earth.