26. Fighting Side by Side Again

Fighting Side by Side Again

A metal bird-monster came crashing down from above, its enormous shadow swallowing the street.

Before the creature itself fully appeared, the first thing to arrive was a terrifying rain of exploding metal feathers.

The feathers slammed into the street like dozens of grenades, gouging small, hideous craters into the pavement. Countless fragments of metal sprayed outward, riddling everything in their path. Windows shattered with a cascade of glass. Cracks split across walls. Parked cars along the curb were reduced to scrap.

By sharp contrast, the three of us somehow emerged from the lethal barrage unharmed.

“Ow!”

Fine. Almost unharmed.

“What happened?” Chi Li asked while casting a spell, deftly guiding aside the roaring flame the metal bird was breathing. “I thought shrapnel couldn’t hurt you anymore.”

She flicked her fingers lightly. The surging torrent of fire gathered rapidly in her palm, condensing into a tiny but blindingly bright sphere.

Then she blew gently at the sphere.

It swelled at once, transforming into a bird of flame whose outline roughly matched that of our winged attacker.

The monster was clearly shocked by the sudden appearance of a flying opponent it could neither blow up nor devour with fire. The flaming bird had already begun to hunt it.

“Yeah, but metal splinters in my eyes are really annoying,” I complained, rubbing and blinking hard as I tried to work the fragments out. They were much worse than sand.

Fortunately, I no longer needed my eyes to perceive the world around me. In this thick fog, my extra senses let me see far more clearly than sight did.

Speaking of the fog…

“Doesn’t the fog seem a little thinner to you?”

“Over the past eight hours, water vapor density has decreased by seventeen percent,” a deep mechanical voice agreed.

The speaker was an eight-meter-tall, two-ton suit of metal armor currently firing no fewer than six weapons at once.

Each of its arms carried an absurdly oversized handgun. A pair of spherical turrets sat atop the overly thick shoulder plates. Two semi-fixed weapon mounts were built into the torso of the robotic armor.

Powerful laser beams tore through the air like miniature lightning bolts, striking enemies on the street before they even emerged from the fog.

“I have been monitoring the phenomenon. It is highly likely that the enemy has completely stopped maintaining the fog with magic.”

After being injured, Cheng Rui had dramatically upgraded his powered armor from what had once been merely an exoskeleton.

Now he would only enter the field wearing the heaviest protection he could make and carrying the finest weapons he could build.

That greatly reduced the types of missions he could participate in, but in exchange, whenever he had the opportunity to fight at full output, his firepower surpassed Chi Li’s and mine combined.

A mass of heavily armored figures suddenly charged out of the fog.

Hundreds of metal-wrapped feet slammed into the street, shaking the ground more violently than a convoy of heavy trucks.

Cheng Rui immediately concentrated his laser fire on the left half of the formation, tearing through black-and-red steel plates and the flesh beneath them.

Yet even as several enemy soldiers were shredded every second, the rest continued their steady advance without hesitation, without even glancing at the companions falling beside them.

After all, these ghosts had no emotions.

I sprang forward and flew into the center of their formation faster than they could react.

My arrival struck them like a bowling ball smashing into pins, knocking nearly twenty of them off their feet at once.

Before they could bring their swords and halberds around toward me, an invisible force disk one centimeter tall and seventy meters in diameter formed across the surface of the street.

The entire formation lurched, then collapsed into slipping confusion, because within the area of the forcefield, all friction had been reduced by an order of magnitude.

Add in the moisture from the fog, and the road had become slicker than an ice rink.

I moved through Proximal Manipulation rather than the leverage of my body, so I was completely unaffected.

At that point, mowing down several dozen enemies who could barely stand—let alone fight—was only a matter of time.

Of course, it was not entirely one-sided.

Wildly swinging halberds and swords still occasionally cut into my suit or left ugly, bleeding lines across exposed skin.

But with me in close range, keeping the enemy from moving properly, while Chi Li and Cheng Rui attacked from a distance, victory was already decided.

“Finally!” Chi Li shouted as the metal bird dropped from the sky like a lump of melting iron. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think these things were getting stronger.”

“But do we actually know better?” I asked.

Only a few days earlier, executioners—apparently that was what the enemy called the armored ghosts—could barely give me anything worse than a paper cut.

Now the fresh wound on my forehead was still bleeding, and blood kept running down my cheek.

“Maybe the enemy stopped maintaining the fog because their commander is pouring more magic into these monsters.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” the red-haired girl, our resident magic expert, explained. “Magic isn’t electricity, or any other form of energy. A caster doesn’t simply generate, store, and spend magic to cast spells.”

“Of course it is,” Cheng Rui’s mechanical voice came through as his armor approached. “That’s what mana is. In the past hour, repairing my armor almost emptied mine. I only have ten points left.”

“All right,” Chi Li sighed helplessly, correcting herself. “Unless the user specifically treats magic as energy, magic is not equivalent to energy. Most mages don’t do that, Cheng Rui. Especially not if they want to avoid running out of mana in the middle of battle.”

The slightly shorter girl looked around.

She was not really looking at the dead enemies. She was observing farther away.

Not finding whatever she sought, she turned back to face the two of us.

“Are there any enemies nearby? I’d rather not get stabbed in the back during a magic theory lecture.”

“Nothing except a few stragglers two streets west,” I told her.

The situation was strange.

At least the day before, every street and most buildings had been full of wandering monsters.

But now…

Now most of them had left. Thousands upon thousands of them, moving north in organized groups.

“Well, I suppose that makes things simpler. Let’s keep moving. The next tower won’t blow itself up.”

I saw Cheng Rui roll his eyes beneath his helmet. I forced myself not to imitate him, since that would only cause more trouble.

For some reason, Chi Li’s temper had been getting worse over the past day or two. The normally quiet, introverted girl was now erupting over smaller and smaller things.