8. Squeezing the Enemy into a Ball

Squeezing the Enemy into a Ball

My back smashed through the brick outer wall of a motel, then through cheap interior plasterboard, then through a sofa and an old cathode-ray television, until I finally stopped against a solid mass of concrete and rebar.

I staggered to my feet, shook my head to clear the stars from my vision, and spat out a broken tooth.

My jaw was probably fractured. It certainly felt that way.

Normally I would have been more worried about the tooth and the ugly gap in my smile, but it would grow back eventually. Probably after my regeneration finished dealing with the broken forearm, or the cracked ribs, or the frostbite, or the bruises and burns pretty much everywhere else.

During the fifteen minutes this fight had been going on, my regeneration had already repaired those injuries and more.

Several times over, in fact.

A tall, vaguely humanoid shadow flickered into existence within arm’s reach behind me.

I swore, spun around, and barely got my arm up in time to block a sweeping blow that would otherwise have sent me through several more walls.

The monster’s ability to flicker in and out like that was probably its most obnoxious power, and it quickly proved why.

While I was blocking, it blinked around to my side and hammered a downward strike into my left kidney hard enough to drive both my feet into the motel floor.

I screamed, because being hit in the kidney really, truly hurt.

No sound came out of my mouth. The shadow’s presence was still devouring everything.

I countered with an elbow and hit the thing in the abdomen. The shadowstuff forming its body scattered through the room, then pulled itself back together.

While it was busy recovering, I rose a few feet into the air so my legs would not be trapped, seized the higher “ground,” and began hammering it with a flurry of strength-amplified blows.

After roughly ten seconds and dozens of punches, a newly reformed shadow arm stabbed into my chest and exploded in a flash of green.

The close-range magical blast hurled me out of the building, through a parked car, and into the middle of an alley, where I stopped facedown on the pavement with green fire splashed across my front.

I slapped the flames out with a few rapid bursts of Near-Object Manipulation, then stood up again.

More slowly than before.

More unsteadily.

Breathing hard.

My suit had more holes than intact sections. Every inch of exposed skin was coated in grime and soot, baked on by heat. Except where the last fireball had charred me, my whole body was drenched in sweat.

I wanted a break.

My pursuer had other plans.

A green fireball the size of my head shot from the motel ruins faster than an arrow.

Without Forced Acceleration, it would have been far too fast for me to react. With it, I felt like a tennis player trying to catch a drop shot, only in reverse.

From a dead stop, I threw myself into a desperate barrel roll. I felt the wind of the fireball’s passage stir my hair.

Then it turned and chased me.

I endured brutal acceleration. Wind blasted against my skin like a sandblaster, making my eyes stream. I led the fireball in circles through the nearby streets, avoiding the main roads like the plague—or more precisely, like sudden lightning.

With uniform acceleration, flight had become much easier. I felt like an astronaut in orbit. If I were using any normal, physics-obeying propulsion method, I would not want to make a ninety-degree turn at the speed of sound.

After nearly half a minute of turns, the fireball finally exploded behind me. Before it dissipated, barely any of the flames touched my bare feet.

Of course, my boots had been destroyed long ago.

The shadow appeared directly in front of me, far too close for me to slow down or dodge. Even though I could push objects four hundred times heavier than myself, my powers did not let me stop instantly.

So I hit the enemy head-on, the same way I had hit so many zombies.

Like the zombies, it burst apart from the force of impact.

Very unlike the zombies, it did not die.

Instead, it began to reassemble.

Also very much like ramming zombies, the collision felt as if I had dived headfirst into ice water—except a thousand times worse.

Energy drained rapidly out of my body. My bones ached. Everywhere else felt as though it had caught fire. For a single instant, my powers flickered, and I fell to the ground.

“You know what? I am sick of this crap!” I shouted.

This time, the words came out. Evidently, the despicable bastard could not absorb sound while busy putting itself back together.

“If hitting you doesn’t work, let’s try this.”

I reached out and touched the still-incomplete body with my fingertips.

“Got you. Now it’s your turn.”

No, I did not blow the shadow apart. Blasting it to pieces—or him to pieces?—would only make it reassemble.

Instead, I used Near-Object Manipulation to squeeze it from every direction at once.

The utterly black, smoke-like substance that made up its body seemed weightless, without a fixed shape, somewhere between solid and gas.

A solid object would have resisted what I was doing. A gas would not.

As it turned out, the shadow behaved more like a gas than a solid, because its body was being compressed from all sides by a force equivalent to the weight of a small tank.

It grew smaller and smaller until it became a dense, roiling sphere of black smoke about the size of my head.

“Got you!” I shouted, looking down smugly at the ball cupped between my hands.

“Not so impressive now, are you?”

From all its bombing, blinking, and punches that made my teeth ache and my skin freeze, it seemed that every action it took required some gesture, step, or actual strike.

When it had been blown apart, it could do none of those things.

Now that it had been compressed into a ball, it had no arms, no legs, and not even a head to glare at me with those cold eyes.

“I may not be able to kill you,” I told the sphere as it struggled violently, “but I’m guessing you and I are going to spend a lot of quality time together.”

Then I used Near-Object Manipulation to scramble whatever was inside it like beaten eggs.