21. The Pursuing Fire

The Pursuing Fire

I threw everything I had into Forced Acceleration, and at the same instant reached for Chen Jin and Zhou Xiaorui.

Time seemed to lose its footing. The world slowed to a crawl, sluggish as a snail dragging itself through glass.

Body and mind, I strained myself to the limit, pushing Chen Jin, Zhou Xiaorui, and myself forward as fast as I could with Proximal Manipulation. Between Forced Acceleration and my nearly inhuman perception and agility, every moment stretched thin—slow, excruciating, endless.

And the worst part, just then, was the emerald fire licking at my feet. The heat felt as if it were trying to burn straight through me.

If it had only been me, I could probably have flown clear of the blast wave easily enough. Flight was good for that.

Dragging two comparatively fragile soldiers out with me, however, was another matter entirely.

With one final burst of power, I hurled one of them into the air, then the other.

I knew that trying to throw them both at once would mean splitting my strength between them, and that might only get them both killed. One after the other was safer. Or at least, less stupid.

After that, all I could do was pray their enhanced bodies would survive the landing.

As for me, I curled in on myself, protecting my face and chest as best I could, and took the near-point-blank blast almost without holding anything back.

“Satar Dajinige,” one of the shadows said.

Its voice was like fingernails dragged across a chalkboard—shrill, raw, and loud enough to make the few unbroken windows nearby shiver in their frames.

The good news was that I was alive, and still capable of fighting.

The bad news arrived right on its heels: the explosion had blown the two shadows apart along with most of the street, but they were already knitting themselves back together. The enchanted coins I had made, meanwhile, were very much not doing the same.

Thinking back on my earlier joke about “payback,” I had to admit it had not aged well.

Mental note: next time I made magic items, I would use something sturdier than copper-plated zinc.

Then one of the shadow’s swords—now little more than a pale outline barely visible against the dark—suddenly drove into my stomach and out the other side.

Strangely, it did not actually do me any real physical damage. What it did instead was begin sucking heat out of me at a horrifying rate.

At the same time, I felt, in a very real and immediate sense, as if I had been disemboweled. Pure, bone-deep, nerve-numbing agony.

But I knew with perfect clarity that if I stayed where I was, I would die.

A heartbeat before the second shadow’s sword swept through the place where my head had just been, I panicked and blindly slammed a tremendous amount of kinetic force into myself, launching my body away like a bullet out of a gun.

My knees trembled as I forced myself upright. Then I immediately used my heat-increasing trick.

In a single instant my body went feverishly hot, as though I had been thrown into a violent illness from the inside out. And that was when the shadows came for me again.

Fighting two enemies like that was a completely different creature from fighting one.

I was faster than they were, but the moment I tried to circle around one attack, the other would teleport in front of me or behind me, cutting off the angle.

I was stronger than they were, but if I committed all my strength to one and managed to pin it down for even a moment, the other was free to carve me apart.

If I flew above the buildings, the lightning tower at the city center would begin targeting me within seconds.

If I got outside their immediate range, the emerald fireballs that hunted me would come streaking after me again.

After a few miserable seconds of calculation, I found only two practical ways to fight them: close-quarters brawling, or vanishing completely from their sight.

I slipped under a sweeping strike and drove my fist into one shadow with enough force to knock it off balance. Then I whipped a kick into the other so hard it nearly burst apart.

By the time the one I had kicked pulled itself back together, I was forced to deal with the first shadow’s full assault.

I used Proximal Manipulation in ways my ordinary balance, reach, and combat skill could never have supported, disrupting its absurdly fast and intricate style.

I punched them in the chest while applying the force of the blow behind their knees to break their stance. I kicked their shins and made their heads snap with the motion. I jumped left and moved right in the same instant, leaving them uncertain where my body truly was.

Even sideways, even upside down, I could maintain perfect balance and keep moving.

I still got hurt.

A spectral blade brushed across my right hip with the sensation of a knife tearing open skin. Another stab struck my back, and the pain convinced every screaming nerve in me that I had truly been pierced through.

I tried to block their attacks. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not. It depended entirely on whether I timed the block correctly.

When my flesh could not stop their swords, I layered force over force to hold them back. But when one of the shadows stabbed through both my arms and into my stomach, I learned the limitations of that approach in the kind of pain that makes thought stagger.

They were obviously trying to wear me down—through pain, through stealing heat, or simply through exhaustion. Or maybe they were stalling until more support arrived.

I suspected more monsters were already on their way.

At least the metal birds had not joined the fight, which meant the mafia members were trying to beat me with their own power alone.

Maybe it was pride. Maybe contempt. Maybe even some warped version of honor, though so far the enemy had shown very little evidence of possessing any real honor at all.

Whatever the reason, it was stupid.

And in battle, making the enemy commit stupid mistakes was often the key to victory, even when both sides were evenly matched.

Still, getting the enemy to make stupid mistakes was not quite enough to guarantee the final result. Sometimes you also had to make them do something even stupider on purpose.

Which meant the next part of this fight was going to be difficult, painful, and extremely dependent on perfect timing.

Boom.

A huge explosion went off a few blocks away, near the magic tower marked for demolition.

Almost at the same time, a storm of rifle fire tore through the quiet air. Hearing it, I knew my aim had been exact.

Throwing Chen Jin and Zhou Xiaorui at the last second had not been blind improvisation. With my judgment and abilities, they had reached the target area.

The problem, of course, was that the two soldiers might not have enough firepower to destroy a magic tower, even with an explosion helping them along.

But they had successfully distracted the shadows.

The instant the shadows’ attention wavered, I seized both enemies with one hand each, poured nearly half of my Proximal Manipulation into the grip, and smiled up at them.

As expected, they struggled to break free from this arrogant teenage idiot who had apparently decided she could restrain both of them at once.

Then they stabbed me without mercy.

One spectral blade entered through my navel and came out through my spine.

Unlike a physical attack, it did not paralyze my legs. The pain, however, was close enough that the distinction felt academic.

The second blade aimed for my heart. It missed, but it went through my left chest and left lung.

Pain and numbness broke through me in the same instant, and my legs gave way. I dropped to my knees, held up only by the hands I still had locked around the shadows.

For some reason, my brilliant idiot plan hurt a lot more than I would have preferred.

The two magical assassins loomed over my shaking body. Their dull black, faceless heads tilted down at me with what might have been contempt, satisfaction, or some other disgusting expression I could not read. Neither of them seemed to wonder why she is still holding on.

By then, it was too late.

A massive surge of energy rushed out of me. I wheezed weakly, my body spasming. I was too tired, too numb, too deep in pain to keep fighting.

A moment later, both shadows were swallowed by fire.

At first, only a few pale red tongues of flame kindled around them. The next second, the fire flared a brilliant orange. One second after that, the shadows stood inside two roaring columns of flame so bright they were almost yellow.

The air around them became violently hot. Fog vanished instantly within more than twenty meters, and the asphalt beneath them began to soften and melt.

Naturally, the shadows vanished at once, slipping through whatever dimensional space they used for teleportation and reforming far from the pillars of fire.

The pillars disappeared.

A heartbeat later, pale red flames bloomed around the shadows again and swallowed them whole. The fire intensified with terrifying speed.

Again and again the shadows blinked away, but wherever they fled, the flames returned with them, clinging to them like a curse.