62. Regroup, Then Fight Again

Regroup, Then Fight Again

Boom.

The axe strike deflected as before against my newly acquired Focused Invulnerability.

Because I was distracted by my realization, I barely cared.

But when the axe became a gun at the instant of contact and fired, the point-blank shot was much harder to ignore.

The huge bullet punched messily into my abdomen.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

I dodged, turned, and teleported frantically, avoiding as much of the barrage as I could while counting the seconds since my last use of Focused Invulnerability.

The problem with super-speed?

Those seconds felt incredibly long, and every so often, a shot came that I could not fully evade.

Scrapes, bloody wounds, and even two more bullet holes—one above my right knee and one below my left shoulder—combined with the old bastard’s uninjured state to confirm my suspicion.

Force Adjustment did not affect him at all.

Not even slightly.

His own attacks were not reduced eightfold. Mine were not amplified. Even using speed-boosting effects directly on him failed, though the powers still worked relative to the surrounding environment.

Given his earlier comment about my immunity to his axe strikes, he almost certainly had a similar but stronger ability. Not one that ignored a specific action, but one that did the same thing to an entire skill.

It fit his view of skills perfectly.

He would not use tricks himself, but shutting down his enemy’s best trick?

That was exactly the sort of hypocrisy he would embrace.

A minute passed.

When I reset Focused Invulnerability against the bastard’s gunfire, the next shot I failed to dodge bounced off my chest.

Just in time.

I was already light-headed, and my regeneration was struggling to keep up with blood loss.

I flew more than a thousand meters into the air and endured his shooting from a safe distance until he stopped firing.

“Looks like I raised a coward after all.” Somehow his voice carried loudly enough to reach me.

“Only knows how to fight from a safe distance with cheap little tricks. What a disappointment. We still use the same violence and killing to grow stronger, girl, but you waste it.”

This time, I did not answer.

Arguing with idiots and lunatics only encouraged them. Logic and morality could not change their twisted thoughts.

Talking back was useful only for mocking or confusing them while you found another way to win, regrettable though that was.

As the burning heat of regeneration slowly overcame the pain of wounds and the cold of blood loss, a growing energy filled my body. I thought over his words and calmly rejected them.

He had become the monster he had always wanted to be.

I had hated him for years, and would probably hate him for a long time still, but hatred was not what had brought me flying over the trailer park.

People here were being hunted by monsters, and I had come to help them.

He had sided with those monsters, taken power from them, and become one of them.

Everything he had done to me for years, he now intended to do to others—and worse.

As long as I had the power to stop it, I would never allow that.

And as long as I was still alive, as the energy inside me grew stronger through regeneration, I knew I had the power to stop him.

Even if he could ignore my strongest ability and use that to injure me badly, I had his measure now.

I had uncovered his secret.

Most importantly, I had accepted what he truly was and decided that it was all right to hate him for what he had done, so long as that hatred did not interfere with stopping him.

I discarded the idea of gaining power through violence.

In its place, I held onto a sense of duty: someone had to act. Evil could not simply be allowed to win.

So I charged again.

With Proximal Manipulation, Forced Acceleration, and gravity all pulling me downward, I accelerated through fractions of a second until the air ahead of me grew painfully hot.

If enduring attacks had become unreliable because of interference, then the best answer was to be fast enough that he could not hit me.

He reacted as quickly as before.

The barrel of the enormous rifle rose, tracking my movement.

Was the weapon directly formed by some power, like my suit? Or was it a physical object transformed back and forth between rifle and axe through an ability?

Either way, it had to go.

Force Sense told me the instant he pulled the trigger.

I used Spatial Jump and Temporal Jump at the same time, not merely turning around, but crossing the intervening distance instantly. Spatial Distortion halved that distance, letting me reach the target point within two jumps.

My feet landed a few centimeters above his right elbow. The fired bullet passed over me while I continued forward at five and a half times the speed of sound.

The shock of the impact rippled through my entire body, battering every muscle and bone.

Even with Force Adjustment canceled, I was still extremely strong. I knew what would happen, and I used everything I had learned, along with the mechanics my powers let me understand by instinct, to minimize the damage to myself.

The old man had none of those advantages.

A wave of momentum and kinetic energy strong enough to derail a subway train struck the weakest point of the arm currently braced against the recoil of that not-very-portable cannon.

Whether or not he possessed superpowered durability, I heard and saw his elbow dislocate, along with multiple bones cracking.

His arm did not completely shatter.

But given his regeneration, it was still badly damaged enough that he should lose use of it for several minutes.

We tangled together, limbs interlocked.

In spite of the injury, he managed to pin me with one knee and press his intact forearm against my throat.

If we had been ordinary people, that would have ended the fight.

Against someone who could teleport, grappling did not work.

I jumped behind him and hammered fists and kicks into the back of his neck.

Given his size and clear strength advantage, close-quarters wrestling was useless.

And if he was like me, he could not be knocked unconscious unless he suffered truly serious damage.

He turned, elbowing me in the face as he did. It hurt.

An enraged, animalistic roar shook the air.

Veins swelled across his whole body as if blood had been pumped into them until they were about to burst. His skin turned lobster red, like a burn.

Before I could teleport away and assess this new situation, he grabbed both my legs in one hand and slammed me into the ground with the force of an exploding artillery shell.

The trailer park cratered for real.

Dirt, asphalt, ruined trailers, and other debris were swept away by the shock wave.

My back struck bedrock and shattered it, though my spine and ribs did not exactly enjoy the experience either.

The impact left me dazed.

The next two impacts hurt so badly I almost wanted to curl up and wait for death.

But I could still think.

So I used Spatial Jump repeatedly, teleporting in a random direction beyond his reach.

Apparently that direction had an upward component, because I found myself falling.

I used Proximal Manipulation to stop the fall and hover in midair.

I blinked dust from my eyes and looked down at a section of trailer park that now looked as if it had been bombed.

The bastard was kneeling in the middle of a fifty-meter crater, gasping hard. His body hissed and steamed from whatever exertion he had just forced on it.

Whatever he had done to suddenly increase his strength so dramatically, it clearly had a cost.

That gave me a small window to rest before he attacked again.

But screw that.

No victory worth winning came without pain.

I gritted my teeth and charged toward his back.