36. Covering Them with Everything I Had

Covering Them with Everything I Had

First, I adjusted the forces acting on myself, reducing friction, weight, and the other factors pinning me down by roughly an order of magnitude.

Trying that earlier had not worked.

For some reason, it worked now.

There was no time to investigate this unexpected blessing. Better to use it while I could.

Second, I used Proximal Manipulation to reach behind myself for the thing that might prove useful.

The great demon was either too relatively slow to react to these changes, or perfectly content to exhaust and suffocate me at its leisure.

Considering that until very recently it had held the advantage—and even now still did—perhaps inaction seemed like the wise choice.

At least, it probably thought so until a short sword stabbed into its belly.

The blade was wielded through Proximal Manipulation, not the strength of my arms.

The force behind the strike was less than half what I could have managed at the beginning of the battle—oh, roughly half a minute ago.

But I had enchanted that sword at the start of the fight, giving it the ability to cut with its own Proximal Manipulation.

Back then, I had not yet been drained into near uselessness.

So the blade sank straight in up to the hilt.

The monster screamed and recoiled in the strange slow motion characteristic of beings that did not possess true super-speed.

As soon as its grip loosened—even though, with a sword in its stomach, it still had not let go of me—Proximal Manipulation pulled me sideways instead of trying to fight its strength head-on.

For one long, horrible moment, nothing happened.

Then, aided by the massive reduction in friction, my wrist slipped out of its grasp.

My body slid along the ground as if across snow-covered ice. Then, over the protests of the many spasming muscles in my limbs, I was pulled into the air.

This time, when I sucked in a breath, new life stirred through my muscles.

Regeneration began working, now that it had many more things to repair.

Unfortunately, that did almost nothing for my exhaustion, and in any case, there was no time to recover slowly.

I took a hurried glance across the battlefield, then desperately drew on every scrap of speed my abilities could provide.

As I shot through the swarm of imps surrounding Chi Li, they scattered like a pile of pebbles kicked hard apart.

Every part of me wanted to stop and take care of my best friend, but the situation was urgent.

I could not slow down.

At that moment, the demon standing above Cheng Rui’s prone and battered armored body had gathered a fireball the size of a washing machine, preparing to throw it down at him.

I knew I could not stop the explosion from happening.

I was not even certain I had enough strength left to carry armored Cheng Rui out of danger, or to knock the demon away.

So I did the only thing I could.

I rushed in and wrapped myself around both the fireball and the demon’s arm.

The explosion hit me like my entire body had been struck at once by a thick baseball bat.

The blast dislocated both my arms. My face was bruised and bloody. One leg twisted at a deeply unnatural angle. My whole torso went painful and numb, as if sensation itself had been beaten out of it.

I wanted to rest in the furrow I had gouged through the park and wait quietly for my regeneration to fix all of this.

I even wanted to pass out, if only so I would not have to endure the pain while the injuries still existed.

But the two terrible monsters were still nearby, and my friends could not win this battle on their own.

The moment regeneration repaired my eyes enough for me to see again, I flew back up.

My body was… probably in horrifying condition.

So horrifying I could no longer even tell exactly how bad it was. Muscles, bones, ligaments, and organs all sank into the same state of tortured, exhausted numbness, as if they were close to shutting down entirely.

But I had experienced that state several times now, both before and after gaining…