103. Tungsten Rod from the Sky

Tungsten Rod from the Sky

Flying toward him would not accomplish any of my goals.

In the two minutes it took us to make my new weapon and get ready, Mort’s towering demonic avatar had closed another twenty kilometers.

The nearer he came, the stronger the turret’s beam became because less energy was lost to the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the same was true of Mort’s colossal lightning.

Our efforts had hurt him. Dozens of craters pocked his black skin, and what seeped from them was not blood but red magma.

With every step he took, those craters grew more numerous and deeper.

On an ordinary human, they would have been like ulcerated wounds the size of a coin—agonizing, weakening, and potentially crippling.

On his body, they were only flesh wounds, and he could endure them long enough to crush his only opponents underfoot.

And as Lily had said, even I could not swing a weapon hard enough to change that outcome.

I poured all my strength, plus Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation, into pushing two hundred and thirty tons of tungsten, enhancing both efforts through Force Adjustment while largely negating the effects of gravity and air resistance on both me and the massive burden I carried.

My acceleration surpassed any aircraft and most missiles. Within seconds I broke the sound barrier and kept accelerating.

The ruins of the city dropped away beneath us, and as I climbed several kilometers into the sky, the true scope of Mort’s destruction became painfully clear.

A fifty-kilometer scar had been carved through Sanguang City, the ruined land overturned and burned as if by a chain of earthquakes.

Then it had been subjected to the nuclear bombardment of Mort’s colossal footsteps. Thousands of square kilometers of jagged iron spikes tore through the countryside, while millions of monsters scurried like a vast swarm of ants.

Farther out, as far as one hundred and fifty kilometers north of his route, hundreds of fires marked where his lightning had struck military convoys, bases, small towns, refugee camps, and even parts of cities.

In half an hour, one bastard had inflicted more damage on humanity with his powers than an ordinary war.

The air thinned rapidly now. Although I was moving at two kilometers per second and still accelerating, the atmosphere faded away before air resistance could overheat me and my cargo.

But that still was not fast enough.

At this rate, by the time the avatar was about to step on my friends, I would be more than a thousand kilometers away.

Without an atmosphere, however, I had more options.

So I activated Forced Acceleration.

In an instant, my personal time flow sped up thirteenfold, and with a thunderous shockwave, the tungsten rod was forced to adjust as well.

My fingers sank into its base as if one of the hardest metals on Earth had turned to soft clay. The only reason it did not shatter was because Force Adjustment held it together.

From fifty kilometers up, even the worst destruction Mort had caused in his tantrum looked like a relatively small scar against the magnificence of the planet.

Almost everyone had imagined being an astronaut at least once, and the view I saw now was better than anything any astronaut had ever seen.

The pure, awe-inspiring freedom of flying through the sky under my own power was truly beyond words. It did not make up for the horrors of the past month, but it was a good start.

In my adjusted perception, those few seconds stretched into minutes, and I simply enjoyed the sight.

Eventually, though, there was work to do.

World-shaking work.

And maybe, hopefully, world-saving work.

Behind me, the violent exchange between actinic light and magical lightning was clearly visible from orbit. I suspected the flashes could be seen from the moon.

But my cargo and I would not be flying that far.

There was not enough time.

In fact, even with Forced Acceleration, we had only enough time to fly less than half the distance to our target.

The tungsten rod was too heavy to carry through a Time Jump, and it was too fragile to be suddenly hurled without my abilities directly holding it together.

So there was only one choice.

I activated Instant Action, and the entire universe seemed to stop for three stolen seconds—three seconds I could use to drive my cargo farther and faster.

We passed over Cuba. After several more bursts of acceleration, we were two hundred kilometers above Panama.

Not long after that, the coastline of Ecuador spread beneath us.

More and more of our acceleration was spent bending our flight path.

Force Perception was the only reason I knew how to adjust our trajectory properly, because orbital mechanics had definitely never come up in our physics class. That was upper-year material.

At least my good grades in geography meant I did not get lost as we flew over Chile, part of Argentina, several hundred kilometers of ocean, and then Antarctica.

I wondered what the labs and observatories near the South Pole thought of my flight path.

As far as I was concerned, the tungsten rod and I made a pretty cool UFO.

Not only did we have an excellent silhouette, not only was our acceleration curve completely unreasonable, but we also appeared to skip over portions of space whenever we felt like it.

…Well, not exactly.

Before I encountered Mort, every three-second Time Jump had felt as exhausting as sprinting all-out for five minutes, no matter how superhuman my endurance had become.

Except during each jump, in order to push the tungsten rod as fast as possible, I also subjectively lived through another thirty-nine seconds of full-power exertion.

The only reason I did not tumble face-first into unconsciousness was Empowered Regeneration.

This level of strain did bad things to the body, and for most of the past half hour I had been pushing my limits.

As long as Empowered Regeneration had something to repair, all of my abilities grew stronger and stronger.

Compared with the improvement gained from serious combat injuries, this was probably only a trickle, but it was accumulating. Without that ability, I would not even have considered this plan.

Australia flew by on my right. After several more bursts of acceleration, I was above Thailand.

Then I crossed Myanmar, most of Tibet, and Mongolia too quickly to admire any of the scenery.

Halfway across Russia, I abruptly realized that my cargo looked very much like a nuclear missile, so I used Instant Action several times in a row until we were above the Arctic.

Maybe this little trip around Earth in eighty seconds of real time would trigger some international incidents and global geopolitical problems, but the urgent priority was solving the enormous, world-conquering demon.

At that moment, Mars was looking more and more like a nice place to vacation after the invasion ended.

Earth had always been beautiful, but I was too busy adjusting my cargo’s direction to appreciate it.

I had to repeatedly burn stamina turning the damned thing, because it kept drifting off course. Advice for everyone: do not attempt to determine low Earth orbit by eye unless you have absolutely no other choice.

When you are traveling at more than fifty kilometers per second, “oops” is not an acceptable result.

I spent half my remaining stamina layering multiple short-lived protective fields over the tungsten rod to keep it from burning up in the atmosphere.

Then, as we entered the atmosphere, I used the full force of Force Adjustment and Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation to hold it together.

In only a few seconds, the temperature went from freezing to molten-iron hot. The compressed air around us ignited, then turned into a blazing, opaque red-orange, before edging dangerously close to yellow.

Our descent angle was steeper than any space shuttle’s, and our speed was an order of magnitude higher.

It was worth it.

The last thing I did was activate Focused Invulnerability to nullify the impact damage, while setting Force Adjustment to multiply the force of impact eightfold.

Then we struck the back of Mort’s ugly, horned skull with the force of a two-megaton nuclear bomb concentrated into a single square yard.