3. The New Skill: Force Sense

The New Skill: Force Sense

With the death of that horrifying giant bird, my power rose again.

It was the third time since the battle with the mutant plant monster. I began to suspect that gaining more points might not depend only on killing monsters. Perhaps pushing my own abilities to their limits helped too.

Whatever the truth, I put my attribute points into Spirit so I could adjust to the unexpected increase in Strength. For my abilities, I spent three points to patch a glaring weakness in my build.

Force Sense lv2:
Sense the application and distribution of force around you. More accurate than ordinary hearing, but less precise than sight.

Name: Ye Rin
Profile: Female human, 17 years, 3 months, and 8 days old

Abilities [3 points available, 30 total]
Strength Modulation lv3
Force Sense lv2
Forced Acceleration lv2
Constant Strength lv2
Progressive Regeneration lv3
Near-Object Manipulation lv2
Super Suit lv1

Attributes [1 point available, 30 total]
Strength 16, Agility 10, Intelligence 3, Perception 5, Spirit 10, Luck 2

Hunting little devils in the fog was an exercise in futility. Since they apparently had some way to see me through it, I needed a way to return the favor.

This new sense was completely unaffected by fog. Walls did not block it. Neither did the ground. If I was close enough, I could sense sewer pipes and buried electrical cables.

It would be excellent for avoiding ambushes, especially monsters hiding nearby but out of sight. And with more points invested, it would only grow stronger.

Some future Ye Rin could decide whether to upgrade this, Forced Acceleration, or Near-Object Manipulation once she had enough points.

For the present Ye Rin, I did not enjoy how fighting the giant bird had felt. It had been like wrestling an enraged cat and coming away covered in bleeding claw marks. So I put my last attribute point into Strength, gaining a little more power and durability.

A faint stiffness went through me. My control over my own strength worsened slightly. But with Spirit at 10, these were things I could overcome and adapt to, not true body-image problems.

I was still a beautiful superwoman.

As I flew over the suburbs, I saw fewer destroyed buildings than I expected.

Directly below, an uncontrolled fire had reduced several neighborhoods to smoking ruins. Ahead, a few houses had been torn open—practically half-demolished—by something much larger than a human and almost certainly as strong as me.

Still, seven out of every ten little suburban houses were intact. Many had been abandoned, but plenty of them were still occupied.

Unfortunately, I could not tell whether the occupants were monsters or survivors.

During that brief stretch of flight, I saw hundreds of ordinary zombies wandering the streets. Even if there were survivors below, I had no idea how to help them.

Trying to fly out of the city would almost certainly trigger the same kind of attack that had destroyed those convoys. Fighting while carrying ordinary people would end badly. Trying to bring them somewhere safe…

Was there anywhere below that still counted as safe?

I certainly was not going to relocate them to the university. Xia Xinglan was good at manipulating people. Besides her support ability to duplicate objects, her most frequently used attack method was a mind-influencing power. Sooner or later, the superpowered survivors on campus were going to turn the place into something dangerous.

That was one of the reasons I had left.

The more I saw on the way, the more problems piled up in my head. Frustration weighed on me. So did rage at what the invaders had done to this home. So did worry for my friends, who were still missing.

So I dove toward the nearest group of zombies wandering in the street.

Like bowling, except I was the ball.

I flew straight through the middle of them and turned about a quarter of the group into a bloody mess. A second pass killed more.

It was surprisingly cathartic. Like finding a cockroach in your bed and spraying the whole room with pesticide. Or yelling at the idiot who had kicked a pizza box under the refrigerator and forgotten it there until it attracted roaches.

My Force Sense caught wingbeats in the air six streets to the south. Another small-plane-sized object was flying out from the city center.

Another oversized iron chicken with exploding feathers?

I smiled and flew up to meet it. It would make a perfect outlet for all my frustration.

Halfway there, a strange prickling ran over my skin. At the same time, my new sense made me stop.

I looked around and saw nothing.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

Just as I was about to turn, something hit me—harder than any enemy had ever hit me before.

A blinding flash burned itself across my retinas. Then every muscle in my body convulsed and twisted wildly. Agony spread from my abdomen into my limbs, like a thousand knives cutting all at once. It made the iron bird’s earlier impact feel insignificant.

I saw drums. I smelled purple. I heard the scent of bacon.

Then I found myself lying in a crater, twitching helplessly as the bird landed on top of me.

The metal bird opened its beak and breathed fire.

I could do nothing. My limbs would not obey.

It felt as if every nerve in my body had been scorched. Obviously that was not entirely true, because I could still feel pain, and heat, and the jagged chunks of asphalt pressing into my back.

All my efforts produced were uncoordinated writhes, blinking, and a tongue that had become absurdly clumsy inside my desperately dry mouth.

The metal bird kept breathing fire.

What had felt at first like a hot shower turned into painful warning stings. My toes curled. One leg lifted. More or less under my control.

The monster did not seem to need to breathe the way dragons did in stories, so the stream of flame did not weaken. Heat seeped through my hissing suit and sank deep into muscle and soft tissue. This hot shower was so hot that every breath became difficult, and my body temperature climbed toward danger.

Under Progressive Regeneration, my strength slowly returned. I began punching the thing, trying to throw it off, but it was far too heavy.

The bird itself burned red-hot. Its flesh softened. With every blow, my fist sank deeper into its body. Still it stubbornly pinned me down, turning the crater into a furnace.

Half submerged in boiling asphalt, I finally damaged the monster enough to kill it.

Then it exploded, spraying scalding fragments of metal in every direction.

The blast crushed me down into the asphalt pit, where tar mixed with a great deal of molten iron and burned me all over.

Everything hurt.

This bath was much too hot. It scalded my skin red and raw.