4. One Hunt After Another

One Hunt After Another

Why was the water glowing?

Why was my skin so dry?

Were the beads of sweat running down my face exploding when they touched the bath?

I rolled over and retched. Spit and stomach acid splashed when they hit the water.

No. This was wrong.

I had to get out.

My limbs were as weak as boiled noodles. I crawled out of the “bathtub” that had nearly killed me and tripped over a pair of heavy iron boots.

I looked up.

Thick plates of black-and-red metal. An open-faced helmet resting on a skull. The thing wearing the armor had hollow sockets instead of eyes, and where lips should have been there were only bare teeth.

Armored skeletons.

They raised their enormous spears and thrust at me.

It did not hurt much. After so much constant fighting, my body was no longer something ordinary weapons could really injure. It felt like a few paper cuts across bare skin.

If the spearhead was a curved blade instead of a point, did it still count as a spear? I did not know. The dozen or so nearly identical fellows did not know either. They took turns stabbing and chopping at me, and occasionally tried to bash my head with the shafts.

Did none of them know how to use these weapons?

Also, rude.

They had barged into my damned bathroom.

Their attacks were annoying and a little painful, but I still stood up, grabbed the one who had started the trouble, and slapped him with all my strength.

His head, helmet and all, flew off his shoulders.

He kept stabbing me anyway, just with worse aim.

A punch and a kick dented his armor inward. Something important must have broken, because he went down.

I nodded in satisfaction, turned toward his remaining seven or eight—or twenty-something—companions, and began slapping and kicking them too. They needed to understand why one did not barge into a girl’s bathroom and poke spears at her pretty head.

It took more effort than I expected, but I persevered and won.

Then I flew away to look for…

Whatever I had been looking for.

Wind passed over my skin. Fog hissed when it touched me, and my vision grew a little less blurry.

Then my skin prickled again.

Another enemy.

Seconds later, I was struck by an impossibly bright, deafening…

Shockwave. Fine. We could call it a shockwave.

I crashed through several things. Walls, maybe. Cars, maybe. Then I came to a stop in a living room with thick, soft carpet and a lot of old wooden furniture. For some reason, things began to smoke, but I was not in any position to do anything about that.

After a few minutes, I propped myself up on elbows and knees and worked at making my mind clear.

Mostly, I succeeded.

My whole body still ached and tingled. Regeneration did nothing to lower my core temperature, and it was not doing a great job repairing the damage heatstroke had done throughout my body.

My brain had probably healed itself several times in the last few minutes. So had most of my nerves.

Lightning.

I had been struck by lightning.

Whatever had caused that bolt, it was horrifying. By comparison, a stun gun was a cheap toy.

Luckily, it had not killed me. It had not damaged my brain beyond repair either.

The worse part was the timing of the attack. The giant metal bird pinning me down and trying to roast me alive, the lightning strike, even that suicide squad of armored undead with their oversized blades—none of it had been random.

Someone had just tried to kill me.

Whoever they were, they had some degree of control over these monsters. Otherwise they could not have launched repeated attacks in such tight sequence.

I knew they were outside. Closing in. Hunting.

I flew close to the ground, only a few meters above it, and focused Force Sense across the surrounding streets, building a map inside my head.

Adapting to the new sense was frustrating because it lacked precise detail. My brain had to struggle to focus on blurred impressions of distant objects while dealing with the occasional synesthesia that came when the new sense and ordinary vision mixed together.

It was like trying to use Hollywood thermal vision through one eye while the other saw normally, except I had also grown an entire extra pair of eyes that could see in every direction, including the back of my head.

Despite its flaws, the more I used Force Sense to navigate the outskirts, the more it proved its worth.

Any object dense enough appeared clearly in my mind, even behind obstacles or around corners.

Dense moving objects showed up in a different “color”—for lack of a better word. Perhaps binding matter together and moving it were two different kinds of force at work.

Around a corner one block away, a pair of undead creatures were skulking.

Their two-meter-plus silhouettes betrayed them not only by their size, but by what was absent inside them. No pulsing whirl of motion. No blood flow.

Every step struck heavy against the sidewalk. Dead muscle turned like flecks of color against a still background.

But not for long.

With the target and route both “visible,” all it took was one thought, and my body moved.

This time, there was no sensation of acceleration. No individual body part felt tugged or pulled. There was only the shriek of wind past my ears. In less than a second, I crossed more than a block and hit the two enemies like a missile.

For me, the impact hurt. It even made me stumble. The force shuddered through muscle and bone, leaving damage that would take a minute to heal.

The two monsters simply exploded.

The fight ended before it began.

That was nice.

The moment I flew into the air above a wider street, the air changed. In my perception, a jagged, violent wave of color pointed toward the city center.

My body kept moving along the flight path I had already set, crossing the street in an instant and slipping into another alley. Every patch of exposed skin began to itch.

Then a dazzling, deafening bolt of lightning struck, passing less than ten meters from me and making the entire street tremble.

Apparently someone was very unhappy about me flying over the city.

In the hours since my “bath” in molten asphalt and metal, and since fighting that squad of undead spearmen, I had been trapped in a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek.

Every time I tried to cross a main road, I had to dodge a lightning strike. Flying in open spaces was completely impossible. Worse, monsters kept converging on me, trying to force me out.

I killed ground monsters as quickly as possible. But any flying creature, even a little devil, I either avoided or dealt with from a distance. I could not afford an aerial duel.

Fortunately, my recent upgrade had given me better speed and maneuverability than the monsters had.

Near-Object Manipulation lv3:
While in contact with an object, you may apply a total force up to twice your maximum strength, distributed and controlled in any way you can easily imagine.

The difference was enormous.

Before, I had to manipulate Near-Object Manipulation like an extra limb. Now I only needed to imagine what I wanted it to do. Earlier, I might have been locked into a fight long enough for more enemies to arrive. Now I could stay ahead of most of my pursuers.

Three little devils dived from above. They kept near the skyline, circling back and forth over the street.

I tore chunks of rubble from a ruined building and hurled them with Near-Object Manipulation at just under the speed of sound.

All I had to do was imagine where I wanted them to go.

The aim completed itself. In an instant, every shot struck true.

Little devils were tougher than stone. If someone shot at them, they might even stop bullets.

They were not tough enough to withstand projectiles fifty to a hundred times heavier than ordinary bullets. Each one tore apart.

A faint ripple of energy echoed inside me, marking my three-hundredth kill since that last giant bird.

Whoever was hunting me seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of monsters at their command, and some rough sense of my movements.

But eventually I would find him and—

Guh!

A huge clawed hand struck my abdomen with the force of a runaway truck and knocked me out of the air.

Its towering owner appeared in the same instant…