37. Drawing Fire to Recover

Drawing Fire to Recover

“If I can focus long enough to draw in a little fire power, I’ll recover better than before,” she said.

I considered that seriously.

“Does it have to be fire?” Cheng Rui asked. His mechanical voice tried to lower itself and failed.

Suddenly I was not entirely sure we should be discussing our plan out loud. Then again, what choice did we have?

“Could it be something else? Like lasers?”

“…Maybe,” Chi Li answered, uncertain. “Lasers don’t last long enough to draw power from, unless I set up a magical boundary in advance, and we don’t have time for that. Why?”

“I spent so much effort building a powerful weapon system and a fireproofing spell, and neither of them mattered,” Cheng Rui said.

His voice was mechanical, but we could still hear the anger and frustration beneath it—the anger of someone who thought he had been useless.

“Maybe that way I can still contribute to the fight.”

“Don’t be stupid. You injured your monster just like I injured mine,” I snapped back for him, angry on his behalf.

“So you needed saving. So what? We’ve all needed saving. If we didn’t help each other, we’d be dead already. Don’t give up because you feel useless. If you can actually help, then do it.”

I glanced toward the demons and found that they, like me, were working hard to recover.

Waiting any longer would do us no good.

“So shooting the ground would heat it up, right?”

“Do it,” Chi Li ordered decisively.

Her magic had already begun to move, unfolding in a chaotic knot of power I could not understand.

“Give us… ten seconds.”

“Ten seconds starting now,” I agreed.

Then, before logic and common sense could catch up with me, I charged straight at the demons.

I did not choose to trade close-range punches with these muscular monsters and their powerful magic. Instead, while accelerating with everything I had, I adjusted the force of the coming collision as cleverly as I could in my favor.

At the last instant, I rolled in midair with full agility and kicked the demon’s body with both feet, moving faster than it could react and faster than a bullet in flight.

A typical bullet weighs less than a dozen grams. After my adjustments, the impact I carried in that moment was equivalent to more than a ton—over a hundred thousand times stronger.

Even with every one of my abilities, both my ankles still broke.

My target was driven backward with me until both of us slammed into the invaders’ iron wall with a deafening crash.

It did not die.

Given the absurd regenerative ability it had already shown, I had never expected a one-hit kill. But its chest was badly caved in, and more than one rib—or whatever passed for ribs in that thing—had broken.

In return for the inconvenience, it backhanded me with brutal force.

As I staggered backward, it tried to gut me with its other arm.

Its dagger-sized claws sliced through my suit with ease and dug into my side. I rolled with the impact fast enough to keep my guts inside me, but my right hip was carved open in several deep gouges.

The pain from those wounds did not soften in the slightest.

Green flame burned fiercely inside the fresh cuts, using my blood as fuel, scorching my body from within the wound.

But it was not enough to cripple me.

I counterattacked immediately, striking the bastard as fast as possible with invisible beams of force.

The attacks did far less damage than they would have at the beginning of the battle, because my abilities were tied, to some extent, to the condition of my body.

But they could still make it bleed.

And right now, that was what mattered.

I kept myself just outside its melee range and continued attacking, wearing the monster down little by little.

Then the second demon ambushed me from behind.

Its claws sank deep into my arms as it clamped onto me and dragged me backward, pain flaring sharp and vicious. A moment later, green blood-flame splashed across my chest.

Every place the fire touched began to drain rapidly of strength…