58. Fighting My Former Coach

Fighting My Former Coach

Over the past week and a half, I had been shot, stabbed, clawed, and bitten by mutated magical zombies.

I had been splattered with acid, burned, submerged in molten asphalt and metal, cursed, blasted by magic, and even struck by lightning.

The old man’s punch hit harder than all of that.

It sent me flying through several trailers, snapped a power pole, and finally scraped me face-first across thirty meters of asphalt.

I stood, spat out asphalt and a little blood, and tried to shake the dizziness loose.

“See, that’s always been your problem,” I growled as my jaw reset itself with a sound like chalk breaking. “You never acted like an adult. You only ever knew how to talk with your fists.”

I flew upward and approached him cautiously.

That punch had been far beyond anything he had thrown in years.

“Violence is part of life, little girl,” he shot back, wearing a smug smile that almost made me lose my temper completely.

“Conflict and hardship separate people from cowards. They help people grow into the best versions of themselves.”

He stared at me, his narrowed eyes almost piglike in that fleshy face.

“I taught you boxing for years. What do you have to complain about?”

“No.” I spat the word and immediately released an invisible spike of kinetic force. “Everything I accomplished, I accomplished because of me. Not you.”

I accelerated downward, waited until he braced for the impact, then instantly jumped behind him and kicked him with both feet between the shoulder blades, throwing him off balance.

“Dressing abuse up as training does not make you a teacher.”

He recovered quickly.

Faster than I expected.

In the blink of an eye, his enormous hands caught my legs and smashed me into the ground.

Then a brutally powerful kick drove agony through my abdomen and launched me bouncing and skidding a hundred meters across the ground.

The lingering pain and the sound of bones grinding as my regeneration repaired them meant at least a few ribs were broken. Possibly worse.

A giant fist came down like a bullet.

I barely got my arms up in time to block. They creaked and scraped under the force.

I tried to counter, but the moment I moved, his other hand seized the back of my head and slammed my face into his rising knee, flattening my nose and blurring my vision.

“If you had actually learned the martial arts I taught you during those lessons,” he said, looking down at me, “you wouldn’t charge at a target like a lunatic and get exactly this predictable result.”

The bastard actually had the nerve to sound disappointed.

Before his next attack landed, I jumped away through space and flew upward.

Higher and higher, until he looked like an especially disgusting ant.

Then I dove.

Proximal Manipulation, Force Adjustment, Forced Acceleration, and Earth’s gravity combined to make me more lethal than a heavy artillery shell.

To make sure he could not block, dodge, or pull some last-second martial-arts trick, I used Instant Action and punched his fat, useless face during normal time.

The impact blasted a crater into the ground, covering everything within a hundred meters in dirt, dust, and shattered bedrock.

Then came pain.

Disorienting, mind-numbing agony erupted from my left arm.

What had once been my left arm.

The collision had turned it into a mangled, bleeding limb that hung uselessly while my regeneration slowly struggled to heal it.

Worse, when the dust cleared, the old man appeared with only a broken nose and a little blood on his face.

Aside from that, my effort had barely done him any obvious harm.

“Lesson two for today, little girl,” he told me, smiling wider now, revealing a chipped tooth.

“The human skull is one of the hardest parts of the body. Sure, the reward is good if you can break it, but if all you’ve got is your hand, chances are your hand breaks before the other person’s head does.”

“How the hell are you this strong?” I asked while dodging several casual swings, staying defensive as my arm healed.

Now that I was paying attention, it was obvious the old man was not faster than me.

But his skill advantage almost made up for it.

After all, he had been beating people with his bare hands for decades.

“What, you thought you were the only one who could seize a golden opportunity?” He snorted and spread his arms.

“Look around you. How could anyone miss an opportunity like this? And if they could miss it, why would they want to?”

“Golden opportunity?” I asked, shocked and doubtful. “The city is in ruins and full of man-eating monsters! Hell, this place has even been nuked!”

“Yeah, I heard. That was you and your friends, wasn’t it?”

He threw two punches so fast they blurred.

At the last instant they became grabs, while he also tried to sweep my legs and headbutt me.

Flight let me lean forward, away from the ground, avoiding all three attacks in a way no martial art had ever been designed to handle.

“A few high school kids built the strongest weapon known to mankind out of actual garbage. How can you say this situation isn’t great?”

“Maybe because I care whether people live or die?”

I dodged a spinning kick, then used my height advantage to keep kicking him, with very little effect.

“Or maybe because I don’t want to be like you, rotting in a rusty trailer and drowning in self-pity while ignoring the neighbors?”

Several kinetic impacts failed to leave even a scratch on him.

“Though it’s probably because I’m not proud of being dishonorably discharged for excessive violence.”

Then I used Force Adjustment to ignite the air around him.

I flew back, cradling my regenerating broken arm, and watched the flames go from red to orange, then yellow, then white, and finally to a dazzling, crackling, actinic blue.

One minute passed.

I began to hope.

Then a massive spinning object flew out of the glare, and—

—I found myself on the ground, gasping for breath, with a deep bleeding wound across my right side. Skin, muscle, and even the bone underneath had been carved open.

The black spinning object flew back and was caught by a hand reaching out of the blinding flame.

Then the rest of the old man emerged.

He was unharmed.

Now he held a gigantic axe almost as tall as himself, its head wider than my torso.

It was the sort of absurdly oversized weapon you saw in comics and computer games.

But in the hands of someone stronger than me, dripping with my own blood, that axe did not look stupid at all.