29. We Had to Split Up

We Had to Split Up

For an instant, the world slowed.

The fireballs and I seemed to be moving at the pace of marathon runners, while the arrows in flight were almost crawling. Everything around me hung on the edge of stillness.

That rare sluggishness gave me a desperately needed sliver of time to think, because fighting the way I usually did clearly was not going to work here.

On the nearest stretch of ground in the square, Cheng Rui’s turrets and oversized handguns were pouring laser fire into a solid wall of enemy infantry.

The undead soldiers wore heavy armor. Behind their visors, dead fish eyes stared fixedly forward while the repeated burns of the lasers gradually punched through their plates.

But these heavily armored undead were not so easy to bring down. Every one of them was like Captain America wrapped in a fortress of armor—far stronger than an ordinary zombie.

The enemy attack kept advancing like a tide. Now that Cheng Rui had lost his big gun, the weapons he still had simply could not hold back so many enemies.

On the other side of the square, near the edge of my superpowered perception, Chi Li was drawing the fury and arrows of more than two hundred skeleton archers.

Tiny fireballs, each no bigger than a raindrop, flew constantly from her palm. Every little bead of exploding flame struck an arrow with perfect accuracy and destroyed it.

Either the fireballs shattered the arrows outright, or they cleverly knocked them off course.

But the short red-haired mage had clearly reached her limit. Some arrows were already slipping through her defense, and more archers were streaming in from the enemy’s rear.

Damn it.

The next move was going to be ugly, but Chi Li was my best friend. No matter what, I had to do it.

I made a brutal turn.

Darkness flashed at the edges of my vision. Blood roared in my ears. My chest felt as if some invisible giant hand had clenched around it.

Taking the time to properly adjust g-force would only waste precious seconds.

The fireballs followed close behind me. Because the hard turn bled off some of my speed, they drew nearer. In less than one second of real time, I crossed the entire park—though to me it felt much longer—and slammed into the skeleton archers from the side.

Magically strengthened bones shattered under the impact like chalk struck by a sledgehammer. Liquid-metal ligaments burst apart into a rain of scalding droplets. Countless quivers filled with magical thermite went off one after another, burning thousands of tiny holes through my suit.

Dozens of enemies were knocked down by the crash. Each collision stole far less momentum from me than it should have, until I finally came to a stop in a heap of bones and slag.

Then, within a spherical space of ten cubic yards around me, I magnified explosive force on everything except myself.

An instant later, the two fireballs chasing me entered that space and detonated.

Two enormous, bone-rattling, whole-body shocks smashed me flat against the ground.

My eardrums burst at once. My eyes felt as if someone had punched each of them as hard as possible. The rest of my body was bruised and battered all over.

Before I gained powers, those injuries would have been worse than anything I had ever suffered, including the accident that nearly killed me.

Now, they ranked somewhere in a distant third place.

I did not even pass out.

The skeleton archers were not so lucky.

Under the amplification of my ability, the explosive power of the fireballs increased by an order of magnitude.

The blast struck the nearest skeletons and instantly turned them into more than a ton of shrapnel, the fragments flying out at speeds far beyond sound.

Those fragments did not slow when they left the range of my enhancement, because according to physics, an object in motion remains in motion unless something stops it.

Then those fragments swept across most of the skeleton archers on the battlefield.

If the original fireballs had the power of tank…