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…