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…