43. Breaking Out of the Tunnel

Breaking Out of the Tunnel

Compared with my other abilities, Instant Action was extremely expensive for what it did.

But it was a trump card that could help in many situations, and hopefully as it leveled, it would evolve into something less costly.

As for Defensive Rebound, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the defense associated with it did not have to be chosen immediately when I acquired the ability.

Instead, it could be chosen for each particular “situation,” though whether that meant each attack in a battle, each enemy, or once per battle still required testing.

As long as they did not have enough endurance to survive my rebound in return, or enough power to make my defenses meaningless in the first place, it would help.

Finally, Cheng Rui gave the signal.

A large portion of the rubble around our small pocket of air began to fuse with the walls, forming new structural supports in the span of a heartbeat as all the energy the black-haired boy had accumulated poured out of him in a vast, crackling blue torrent.

Concrete, asphalt, rebar—according to our nerd, all of it was completely recyclable, and his abilities could do the job without equipment.

His powers lacked the persistence Chi Li’s and mine had, however, so he could only treat a small portion of the debris.

But that should be enough.

In the impossibly brief pause between one second and the next, I doubled the distance between the ground and the already-unstable tunnel ceiling.

Then everything went to hell.

The world slowed to a crawl.

My two friends had braced themselves for what was coming. In that moment, they almost looked like wax figures. The only sign that broke the illusion was Cheng Rui’s involuntary blink, an action that seemed to last several seconds.

Dust motes hung nearly motionless in the air. Bits of brick and concrete falling from above drifted down slower than feathers.

Sound sank deeper and duller. The only reason colors did not shift was that my newly enhanced senses could already directly perceive the full spectrum of light.

Fresh information and understanding struck me all at once, and I resisted a sudden urge to bash my head against a wall.

Under full Forced Acceleration, everything from my muscles to the electrical impulses in my brain to the chemical reactions inside my cells was overclocked to two and a half times its normal speed.

As a force effect, the full use of Force Adjustment magnified that speed increase by eight times.

Together, they stretched one second into thirteen—and from a superhuman baseline, I was already far faster than an ordinary person.

At least, that was how it should have worked in theory, if my brain had not subconsciously decided that a human body could not move at such speeds.

Proximal Manipulation threw me toward the tunnel roof at a speed that would once have seemed like a blur.

Now, before I struck the rubble pile at half the speed of sound, it was only a brief upward rush.

Three hundred tons of broken concrete and brick moved, lifted upward by my full momentum.

But they rose only about a meter before beginning to fall.

The impact had broken their cohesion further. More cracks had spread through them. They would collapse inward with ease, crushing Chi Li and Cheng Rui.

I had no time to retreat, and another impact would only delay the inevitable.

But I was no longer as limited by the fourth dimension as I had been.

With an act of will, I returned to the position I had occupied one twentieth of a second earlier, the instant when I had begun accelerating.

Another use brought me to the place I should have been one thirtieth of a second in the future—fully accelerated, one centimeter from striking the collapsing tunnel roof.

When the second impact landed and transferred my momentum, two Temporal Jumps reversed and accelerated my personal frame of time, causing a third impact.

Then a fourth, a fifth, and more. I pressed that mental “button” as quickly as I could, turning myself into a superpowered jackhammer.

Objectively speaking, in the span of a quarter second, after fifty impacts, three hundred tons of rubble began to explode slowly upward as I forced my way through the expanding cloud of debris.

Bricks, chunks of concrete, lengths of rebar, broken pipes, and more smashed against my suit and shattered while I carved a relatively safe path for the others with my own body.

But as soon as I returned to the tunnel, I realized I had seriously misjudged the situation.

Chi Li’s face had twisted in pain, caught between a flinch and an instinctive recoil. The skin of her lips and cheeks pulled into something that looked like wrinkles, but was actually the result of overlapping shockwaves.

Cheng Rui was worse.

His eyes were bloodshot. Fine droplets of blood sprayed from both ears, and his lungs looked as if someone were kicking them from the inside.

Damn it.

I reached out and grabbed both of my friends, spending almost an hour’s worth of effort to anchor two persistent forcefields to each of them.

One was a Force Adjustment field to reduce further physical shock.

The other was a thin layer of Proximal Manipulation, covering any wound inside them, preventing bleeding and physically holding injured tissue together.

Chi Li did not seem to need the latter, but Cheng Rui definitely did.

The fields were unstable. They would fail in a few hours. But we had no time to arrange anything better.

And if I tried to force something better, I would feel as if I had run a dozen marathons instead of only one.

Simply dragging them out would not work.

There were the problems of pulling people through a narrow, rapidly changing passage—one that basically existed inside an ongoing, slow-motion explosion.

There was also the fact that human bodies were not built to withstand hundreds of gravities of acceleration, nor supersonic air pressure.

And during the time I had spent stopping the shockwaves from injuring them further, the passage I had carved through the debris cloud had already partially collapsed.

I pushed off, then used Temporal Jump to move myself outside the expanding cloud of rubble, opening a new path behind me.

Force Sense let me see my friends through the ground and track the trajectories of the stones inside the debris cloud, so I used Spatial Jump.

In the blink of an eye, Cheng Rui was moved twenty meters into the air.

A second use brought him to a temporarily safe place in the channel through the explosion zone.

A third brought him to the edge of the shockwave.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth left him safely on the ground behind me.

Chi Li needed fewer jumps, and her route was less straight, because I had to adjust constantly for falling debris, collisions between stones, fractures, ricochets off larger chunks, and the pull of gravity. Any area that had been safe could turn lethal within a hundredth of a second.

Spatial Jump’s range was far too short. Guiding the red-haired witch through that chaos was brutally difficult.

Then I called myself an idiot and used Spatial Distortion.

A distance related to myself could be doubled?

Then apply that to Spatial Jump’s range. It was also my ability, and its range was always related to me.

That made pulling Chi Li to safety almost effortless, which meant I could sit down and catch my breath.

The next time a Batman fan told me Superman had it easy because superpowers made saving people no big deal, I was going to acquire an ability that let me punch people through the internet.

Naturally, before I could properly savor that fantasy of righteous revenge, monsters attacked us.