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, replaced by endless fatigue and weakness.

My first opponent stopped swaying and leapt over as well, seizing my legs and breathing out its slow, lethal breath.

The two of them hauled me between them, holding tight, leaving me unable to break free and keeping me constantly inside the reach of their flames.

I had hurt them.

I had nearly gutted one of them, and I had turned the other’s magic against it.

So I had become their first target.

They would not stop until I was too weak to resist. Then they would kill us all.

Yet just as they thought victory was in their grip, a world-shaking bolt of lightning slammed down and blasted away the demon holding my arms, ruining their plan in an instant.

Because both enemies had been entirely focused on me, they had not paid attention to what my two friends were doing.

A second bolt of lightning tore through the sky.

Something inhuman shrieked in pain, proving that immunity to fire did not mean immunity to lightning.

I was not idle either.

After those few immensely exhausting seconds under the magical attacks of two enemies, I forced myself to hold on to a thin thread of consciousness—just enough to find a few targets that were especially easy to attack.

Under one demon’s flame, I could barely gather enough strength to scratch its skin, much less pierce it.

But eyes?

Eyes were much softer.

The monster howled in pain and fury, throwing me down. Its breath stopped long enough for me to take the chance and fly away.

Fly, specifically, to where my enchanted shortsword had fallen.

My target was blind now.

It did not matter that I was nearly crippled and weak. I only flew back, then farther away, letting myself accelerate over the distance before driving the sword point-first into the back of its head.

The two-meter blade, reinforced with magic, pierced easily through skin, bone, and whatever the monster used as a brain, then emerged from the other side.

At the same time, Cheng Rui and Chi Li were rapidly finishing off the other demon.

Cheng Rui’s many laser weapons fired at full power, turning several square meters of ground into blazing magma in an instant. As he continued shooting the molten rock, Chi Li absorbed the heat to strengthen her magic.

She did not use that extra power for fire attacks.

Instead, she repeatedly hurled lightning, neatly bypassing the enemy’s fire resistance.

The first bolt knocked the monster violently backward. The second and third turned it into a twitching lump of meat, because long before the current became powerful enough to cook it, it had already savaged its nervous system.

After that, all that remained was to keep firing lightning until the helpless target was dead.

The instant the first demon died, a surge of power stronger than anything I had ever felt rushed through my body, washing away all my exhaustion and clearing my mind.

It was not pleasant.

The injuries remained. Without fatigue or numbness dulling them, the pain came roaring back even worse than before.

When the second, much smaller rush of power from the second demon’s death proved that enemy was gone too, the tension of fighting for survival vanished, and every muscle in my body relaxed at once.

I collapsed onto the ground like a boneless puddle of uselessness and let myself go utterly limp.

In five minutes, or perhaps fifteen, or longer, I would stand back up. I would help the others return to base, get treatment, and take a proper, comfortable bath.

Maybe we would celebrate our first major victory that was more than merely defeating ordinary infantry. Maybe I would look for a new ability to cover the weakness I had just discovered, or improve one of the abilities I already had.

But in that moment, I could lie still and enjoy the simple privilege of breathing and being alive.

Nature, however, always did enjoy playing jokes on people.

No sooner had the thought formed in my mind than reality hurried to prove it wrong.

A fine drizzle began to fall—the first rain we had seen in many days.

Heavy drops came down, dragging the fog with them.

Then, in the distance, explosions began to sound one after another.