105. Magnifying the Effect of a Nuclear Blast

Magnifying the Effect of a Nuclear Blast

By the time my double vision finally cleared, my entire body had begun to cramp in protest against my continued streak of questionable decisions.

Unfortunately, we were nowhere near out of danger, which meant more of those unwise measures might still be necessary.

After more than a dozen traps, surprise weapons, and overcomplicated schemes, I had not actually expected the giant tungsten bullet plan to work.

So when I saw, heard, and felt deep in my bones that Mort’s football-field-sized heart was still beating, I was not all that surprised.

Seeing the wound in the back of his skull start healing, though? That made me furious.

“Oh no, you absolutely fucking don’t!”

I flew over his enormous body, landed on his back, and started putting my second plan for making this big bastard stay dead into action.

That plan began with the realization that, ridiculous size aside, he was still only one person. One single target. As long as I was touching him, I could use Nearby Object Manipulation or Force Adjustment on him.

Technically, because he was a living creature, I could not interfere with his forces from the inside.

But adjusting all incoming forces—say, the force being applied to him by the particle-beam turret? That I could magnify by an order of magnitude.

All at once, the beam that had previously been dazzlingly bright yet barely able to cut into his several-yards-thick, absurdly tough skin began biting deep every time, burning all the way down to bone.

For Mort’s current size, what had amounted to cigarette burns became a blowtorch slowly reducing his head to ash.

The bastard noticed, of course, but there was nothing he could do about the cannon in the short term. He was too busy trying to stand up.

One minute passed. Then two. At last he pulled himself together enough to struggle onto his knees, even though the top of his head had become a smoking, smoldering ruin.

In fact, roughly half of his horns had already fallen away, and his crackling crown of lightning had dimmed considerably.

But he still got to his knees, and slowly, inevitably, began to rise.

“Hey, asshole!” I shouted, using Nearby Object Manipulation to vibrate the air around me, amplifying my voice until my words rolled out like thunder.

“Back on Earth, we have a saying for situations like this. The bigger they are…”

Then I adjusted his relationship with Earth’s gravitational field, increasing his weight by almost an order of magnitude.

His sheer size made him powerful. In absolute terms, even I was little more than an insect compared to his strength.

But in relative terms? For a colossal body several times denser than flesh?

Relatively speaking, his strength might only have been average.

And average-strength people could lift about their own body weight, not ten or twenty times it.

“…the harder they fall!”

He had been halfway to standing when the increased gravity took hold.

Then he fell.

Which meant he dropped at least a kilometer under eight times normal gravity, striking the ground at twice the speed of sound.

The force of that impact exceeded every other effort I had made against him so far, including the tungsten bullet.

It triggered a violent earthquake and a shockwave as powerful as a nuclear blast. It cracked both his elbows and both his knees, shattered his jaw, and broke half of his excessive number of razor teeth.

Even worse for him, he landed face-first, with nothing beneath him to brace against and push himself back up.

With Cheng Rui’s beam turret chewing through his head little by little—with my help—we were actually winning.

“Hey, Ye Lin, you may want to get off Mort’s back,” Lia’s voice suddenly said from behind me.

Lia’s appearance did not surprise me.

The way she looked did.

She was now as tall as I was, a slender teenage girl who was clearly superhuman and just slightly wrong in some way I could not quite define. Maybe her limbs were a little too long. Maybe her features were subtly misaligned. I could not tell, because her illusion kept wavering.

“It’s going to get very hot there in about a minute.”

“He’ll be dead in about five,” I told her. “Whatever the new crisis is, can’t it wait for once?”

“I tried telling a few generals that,” the meddlesome outsider said thoughtfully, “but they did not believe me. They were a little alarmed by the fact that I knew their plans and could appear inside their most secure facilities.”

“Of course…” I said, scowling. “They’re trying nukes again, aren’t they? Why? Didn’t the first attempt fail?”

“They believe it may work this time because Mort is distracted and cannot absorb the energy,” the teenage alien’s projection said with a shrug.

“They are wrong, but it is an understandable mistake. For ten thousand years, people have used violence to solve problems. Even when the evidence shows that most violence, no matter how extreme, cannot kill a Lord of Mavis, abandoning that assumption is not easy.”

“Most violence?” I looked from the projection to the canal-sized wound in Mort’s head. “Not even what we’re doing right now?”

“The way you gained your power is, in many ways, aligned with the core concept of the Mavis. Fighting fire with fire is difficult, because fire usually does not burn fire.”

Her image flickered and vanished for a moment.

“By the way, thirty seconds.”

“No. No! He does not get to escape.” I spat the words. Not after everything we had sacrificed to protect each other and this world.

“Using Mavis principles will not change anything,” she told me.

And then I had an idea.

A terrible idea. Quite possibly a stupid one.

“What if I don’t? What if I use a concept other than violence? Cheng Rui did that, didn’t he? And it worked beautifully.”

“The nuclear blast will kill you,” Lia warned.

But even her objection only hardened my resolve.

“Everything I’ve done so far has not been in pursuit of power, no matter what some people might say about me lying to myself.”

I clenched my fists, nails biting into my palms, forcing down the urge to run. The urge to save myself first and come back to fight another day.

“I protected my friends. I helped people. I defended my own life and the lives of the people who are truly my family. I did not kill, even when others thought killing might be better, because killing should be the last option after everything else fails!”

I looked up at the silver-blue trails burning through the atmosphere.

Nuclear warheads.

They would be blinding. They would be unimaginably violent.

And in the end, they would only feed Mort and help him recover, because their nature was destruction—and destruction was his nature too.

Even without that cheating ability of his, those explosions would not be enough to destroy a mountain-sized body tougher than steel.

“Tell Chi Li, Cheng Rui, and my sister that all is lost and there is no other choice, all right?”

“I will,” Lia’s image said.

Then she disappeared.

As the bombs fell, I made one final Force Adjustment to Mort’s soon-to-be corpse.

I magnified the effect of the nuclear explosions a thousandfold…