49. Where the Tower Stands, We Stand

Where the Tower Stands, We Stand

When the lightning towers proved ineffective, the enemy did not ease its attack.

Imagine an entire stadium full of furious football fans charging a referee.

The referee has made a painfully, obviously terrible call, refused to reverse it, and ruined their team’s chance at the championship.

Now imagine that the furious crowd is made of monsters who desperately want to eat human flesh.

By a rough estimate through superhuman perception, at least twenty-five thousand monsters were slowly forcing their way through rubble, wrecked cars, craters, and raging fires toward us. More were arriving from the city center every minute.

With the army retreating, every monster the enemy had—or could produce in short order—was now attacking the resistance strongholds. And among all the human teams I knew of, Chi Li, Cheng Rui, and I had the most direct firepower.

Worse, we tended to operate in the open and make absolutely no effort to hide.

Naturally, the villains wanted us gone.

The only reason we were still alive was that the monsters could not move through narrow, bombed-out streets quickly enough.

I glanced again at Cheng Rui’s progress and saw the interior of the new tower gradually filling in, drawing close to completion.

Too slowly.

Chi Li was already being pushed back, and I could probably hold for another minute at most.

Unless I was wrong, we only needed to hold for a few more minutes.

One minute longer than we actually could.

Unless…

Math had never been my strong suit, but superhuman perception and agility gave me an instinctive grasp of space, angles, and geometry.

With those in hand, a new plan formed at impossible speed.

A heartbeat later, I charged the nearest cluster of monsters.

By the time I arrived at supersonic speed, a dozen ghouls had been turned into paste, but I barely cared about them or the dozens of companions around them. I touched the ground and focused.

Forcefield Creation level two allowed a single force effect to apply across a volume of several cubic yards, and allowed slightly more complex geometric shapes.

I chose a dome and made it as thin as possible.

Less than a centimeter thick. With several cubic yards of volume, that was enough to create a dome large enough to enclose me, Chi Li, Cheng Rui, and his tower.

Within that volume, I selectively amplified gravity by sixteenfold.

But one forcefield and one effect would not be enough.

At most, it would slow the monsters down.

So I spent an enormous amount of energy—almost half my remaining stamina—to make the forcefield persistent and independent of my continued maintenance.

The effort dropped me to the ground as if I had sprinted full-out while holding my breath for an hour.

It felt worse than being burned by a demon’s draining breath. More exhausting than anything I had ever done.

But I had to push through, because none of us had time for me to gasp like a fish out of water while ghouls stabbed me.

So I made time to kill the nearby monsters, then overlaid a second forcefield on top of the first.

This was something I had never tried before, especially not against living enemies.

But most of the enemies were not truly alive, were they?

Animated corpses. Skeletons held together by molten iron and magic. Shaped metal and fire. Mindless flesh warped by magic.

Most of them were basically drones, if drones could be made of corpses and nightmare.

The second field reduced the structural integrity of all nonliving enemies by the same factor as the gravity increase.

The forces holding their bodies together weakened dramatically.

It was the same thing I did when I smashed magically strengthened steel as if it were cheap clay, and it worked beautifully on the monsters.

The moment they tried to pass through the dome, any part of their bodies touching it suddenly became sludge-like for as long as contact lasted.

Then the increased gravity struck those weakened parts like a hammer.

They basically melted…