102. An Enormous “Bullet”

An Enormous “Bullet”

Lightning crackled along those tree-like horns. Bolts almost as thick as houses formed, then tore through the air with the same overwhelming power and lethal purpose as our weapon’s beam.

Despite his vast, unstoppable physical strength, despite his mind-warping aura, despite his ability to alter terrain and weather, despite the endless monsters spawning behind him, that lightning was the enemy’s most dangerous power.

With it, he could strike anything within the horizon in an instant, and for someone as tall as him, the horizon was more than a hundred and fifty kilometers away.

He could destroy any fortified position, erase anything that dared challenge him—from a single soldier to a warship—and intercept more dangerous attacks like nuclear missiles if needed…

And now that lightning was coming for us.

The overwhelmingly powerful magical bolt closed to within three hundred meters of our position…

Then it was intercepted by the outer perimeter of silver pillars Lily and I had placed.

Silver was the most conductive metal known to man, and these pillars were thicker than any wire ever built.

Under the enhancement of my ability, the silver’s conductivity had not only increased by a huge margin; its melting point had risen while its temperature had been driven sharply downward.

The pillars absorbed the magical lightning, conducted it into the earth, and cooled back down below freezing before the second volley arrived.

Then our weapon hit Mort in the face.

“We did it!” Lily shouted triumphantly.

“No, not yet,” I shot back before everyone could get too hopeful. “He was hurt, but this is more like a cigarette burn than a serious wound.”

Assuming that body could feel pain, the injuries probably hurt. But we would need many, many such cigarette burns before we could actually stop a very angry demon wizard from blasting all our faces off.

“Increase output to fifty percent,” Cheng Rui announced, and the next beam did not grow stronger…

But it lasted twice as long.

It burned across the avatar’s cheek, cutting open dozens of cubic yards of nearly indestructible flesh. Even a wound that massive, however, was not a truly serious injury to someone the size of a mountain.

And now that mountain was turning toward us and taking a step in our direction.

More lightning hammered our position. The avatar’s horns blazed like a crown of stormlight, but the perimeter of huge, magically enhanced lightning rods could hold it back for the moment…

For now.

Mort’s demonic form took another step toward us. Even as the beam carved into his neck, he raised a forearm the size of the Empire State Building to block it.

When his foot touched the ground, a forest of iron spikes grew outward in every direction, but that would not become a problem until he was within five kilometers.

No, the main problem was that he was still growing.

It was as if every step he took on our planet made him larger. He had already grown by nearly a third of his original height, more than doubling in volume, and presumably increasing his strength and endurance along with it.

By the time he was close enough to simply stomp us flat, those gains would double again.

It had been half an hour since he appeared. He had spent most of that time playing with the poor soldiers who gave their lives trying to stop him, and he had already grown enough to make Cheng Rui’s original predictions about the weapon’s effectiveness wrong.

If he kept growing…

But we would not have the luxury of watching him grow larger and laugh at our best efforts, because he was no longer playing with us.

His continuous lightning bombardment forced everyone except Lily and me behind the runic dome to hide from the flashes and the rapidly rising heat, while the giant avatar’s strides grew longer than before.

At Mort’s current speed, he would be on top of us in minutes instead of half an hour.

“Maximum power!” Cheng Rui announced, and somehow we heard his voice over the deafening, eardrum-rupturing chaos.

The weapon fired in one-second pulses, leaving only a single second of cooling between shots. More and more steam rose from the turret, and the barrel began to glow.

“We have to reduce output before the weapon melts!” Chi Li shouted. She was already using magic to draw heat from the turret and send it deep underground.

“If we stop, we die!” Cheng Rui shot back. “Low-power shots don’t do enough damage!”

“We can’t cool it fast enough!” the red-haired witch argued. “You think it looks bad out here? The energy core is hot enough to melt steel right now!”

She was right, and I told them so.

We could not keep firing at maximum power for more than a minute or two, and that was nowhere near enough to kill this demon.

It would definitely have wiped out an army of monsters. It would have worked just as well against something the size of Godzilla.

But against a demon who was now three kilometers tall?

He was just too…

Damned…

Big.

“Lily!” I shouted as an idea struck me and set me moving. “I need you to make me another metal rod!”

“Don’t you think we have enough already?” the metal-manipulating upperclassman asked with a long sigh. “They seem to be holding for now.”

“No, not silver! I need one made of tungsten.”

She stared at me.

I stared back.

“You know, the metal they use in lightbulb filaments—”

“I know what tungsten is!” she snapped, crossing her arms with the same disgusted expression she had worn through half of our earlier work together. “Why do you need it?”

“So you don’t get stepped on by a giant demon,” I muttered.

Because if it were only me, I could go live on Mars or something whenever I wanted.

Honestly, some people still hesitated even at the end of the world.

“Fine! Tell me the dimensions.”

For all her complaining, the black-haired girl moved quickly once she had the specifications.

As it turned out, tungsten reserves were far more abundant than silver, so summoning tungsten was much faster—still slower than iron, but iron was unsuitable for this purpose for more than one reason.

In only two minutes, we had a thick cylinder a yard in diameter and twenty yards long, with a conical cap on one end.

“Seriously? This is not going to work,” the black-haired contrarian insisted.

“You’re not Sun Wukong. You can’t swing a weapon hard enough to hurt a demon that huge, even if that weapon weighs a hundred tons.”

“Two hundred and thirty tons, actually,” I quipped, then grunted as I lifted the enormous “bullet” off the ground.

With Force Adjustment, that was only about a quarter of my maximum lifting strength. With Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation added in, the burden was smaller still, but it was still an awkward weight to handle.

“And I’m not going to swing it.”

I glared at the monster advancing from the north—the monster responsible for this invasion, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, for the destruction of my hometown, and for the end of life as we had known it.

Even if we defeated him today, our world would be changed beyond repair in ways most of us could not even imagine.

Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month. Maybe not even next year. But the existence of superpowers itself promised, in the long run, more upheaval than Mort had caused in two weeks of destruction.

But in order to see future days and deal with future problems, we first needed to have a future.

So I glared at him one last time, raised the enormous bullet, and flew away from the monster.