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…