76. Assaulting the Ghoul Tomb

Assaulting the Ghoul Tomb

I stopped from superspeed, breathing hard.

The two sword demons flanked me. One swung for my throat, the other for my legs.

Every time I flew or teleported away, they used some ability to catch up. So I raised both arms to block the first sword, jumped over the second, and used the force from the first demon’s strike to kick the second.

There was a sharp crack. A quick glance through Force Sense showed that I had broken one of its ribs.

Good.

Compared to that, the two scrapes on my arms were nothing.

The second demon, enraged, lunged toward my lower back.

I did not want to test whether a piercing attack would cause something worse than surface damage, so I rolled aside as fast as I could, my leg muscles complaining.

The lunge missed, but the first demon’s slash left a small wound across my right biceps.

Regeneration quickly repaired the injury and gave me a trace more strength and stamina in the process, but I could not rely on that. At any moment, one of the demons might decide to attack the ground troops while the other held me down.

Invisible blades formed from Nearby Object Manipulation and Force Adjustment became a rotating toothed whirlwind around me, draining my stamina even further on top of the exhaustion of close combat.

They did little more than scratch my attackers, like a crowd of cats trying to skin them alive.

Basically nonlethal, but very, very distracting.

When they tried to block attacks made of invisible force, which no sword in any physical sense could actually stop, I launched a speed assault. In seconds, I shattered bones and battered them into mangled wrecks.

“Got the big ones handled, huh?” Zhao Mancheng asked as I landed heavily and rested with both hands on my knees.

“Yes,” I panted, probably too exhausted to destroy any more houses.

“Give me a moment, would you?” A shame, really, because that was exactly what I needed to do next.

“Here,” the tall soldier said, handing me a small flask. “Grandma Lin’s special formula.”

I took a long drink of the flavorless, colorless, incredibly refreshing liquid, and in that moment I wanted to kiss him.

I glanced at him through Force Sense without turning my head. At this distance, Force Sense worked as well as sight.

Hmm.

With that body, if there were no battle going on, I might have kissed him anyway. Even his internal organs were perfect, and far less disgusting than normal human organs.

I filed that thought away for after the war.

“Thanks,” I told him, then dragged my attention away from him and toward our target: a huge enemy tomb of iron and stone rising behind the broken undead line.

No matter how much the guns had been enhanced, no light weapon was going to destroy a building tougher than a battleship in any reasonable amount of time.

I took out a dense gray-black metal bead and considered it.

Among the many suggestions for heavy weapons, one had been to attach the force field I used to create plasma to a very sturdy anchor, then throw it at anything not sturdy enough to survive it.

After producing that prototype, and after seeing that a single-use version still consumed the resources of a dozen regular weapons, I firmly vetoed and shelved every similar proposal.

“Step back. I want to try something new,” I told the soldiers.

They obeyed.

Since I was already following them and drawing threats they could not handle, I might as well deal with these targets more efficiently.

I pressed both hands against the building and let my Force Adjustment seep into it.

It was a single solid mass of iron and ceramic, very thick and magically reinforced. It would take a bunker-buster to hurt it.

A nuclear bunker-buster.

Even a plasma field would need time to melt through it, and that time would allow more monsters to swarm us. The enemy might also simply remove the field with magic.

Adjusting its internal forces could soften it even through the magical reinforcement, soft enough that eventually I could punch through it.

And there was the key word, wasn’t it?

Eventually was not something anyone could afford in war, except maybe people who could time travel.

But what if I did not weaken force?

What if I amplified one instead?

For example, the force that allowed sound to propagate, one vibrating atom passing energy to the next.

Applying a similar field to air could amplify its internal energy until it became plasma.

What would happen if I applied it to metal and ceramic?

Time to find out.

At first, nothing seemed to happen.

Even after nearly a minute, Force Sense detected only a faint vibration.

I frowned and looked deeper, trying to figure out why it was not working.

As it turned out, metal atoms were far less mobile than gas molecules, and much more conductive.

Since most of the tomb extended underground, it leaked the excess energy quickly enough to keep pace with the amplification, though only barely.

After a little thought, I kicked the building, making it ring like a gigantic gong.

The lingering sound did not fade. Instead, it rapidly multiplied.

No matter how much energy bled into the surrounding environment, the metal remained denser and more conductive than the world around it, which meant enough waves were reflected back into its interior.

There, Force Adjustment amplified those waves faster than the structure could bleed the energy away.

The pitch climbed into a piercing shriek. The surrounding bedrock first became dust, then powder, then a quicksand-like slag. The walls of the building reddened with heat, tiny sparks flickering across the surface.

The sound became deafening, louder than the turbines of a large passenger jet trying to take off.

At last, the building melted and shook itself apart at the same time, collapsing into the surrounding slag and mixing with it to form a blinding orange pool of molten rock and metal.

Metal vapor rose from it, hot enough to sear unenhanced flesh instantly.

The instant contact with the structure broke, the temporary force field collapsed.

I walked away feeling rather satisfied.

“Take any magical weapons you can carry,” I told the soldiers. “We need to travel light, so one each at most, but the crafters back at headquarters will definitely want to study the bad guys’ magic.”

Earth needed every scrap of magical knowledge we could seize by force, loot from corpses, or discover by experimenting on those corpses.

As for me, I took two very nice demon greatswords.