91. Hard-to-Kill “Terminators”

Hard-to-Kill “Terminators”

Halfway across the room, a furious battle raged.

Beams of impossible heat, waves of biting cold, twelve constructs made of blazing-bright flame, neon-green bursts of radiation, and tides of blood crashed against one another.

What had once been Chi Li had become a twelve-meter-tall avatar of fire, wielding two plasma maces, each taller than I was.

She was actually winning that tower-shaking fight. Every exchange melted more armor from the warriors and burned another patch of flesh into black ruin.

But the problem was that she had gone all out, and these final constructs were not the greatest threat.

The gray-black warrior’s mace suddenly lengthened mid-swing. The spiked head became more wrecking ball than melee weapon as it struck my right knee.

I frowned and heard something snap.

But at this point, I no longer needed my legs for either leverage or balance.

I appeared behind the warrior in an instant and punched him while using Force Adjustment to give his armor an effect that amplified vibration, the kind of effect that could shake any solid object apart.

However, the armor turned black. The magic effect weakened, flickered, and failed entirely a few seconds later.

The lightning user instantly teleported within reach. Wearing a helmet infused with dark magic, he headbutted me, partially canceling my kinetic defenses. Then, while I staggered, he stepped back and slammed his electrified mace into my chest.

The moment I caught my breath, he teleported closer again and tried to follow up.

So I entered stopped time.

Everyone and everything froze.

I took a deep breath. Then another.

Then I drove an uppercut into the lightning user’s jaw.

He did not fly back. Lightning did not shock my fingers. In the infinitesimal pause between one instant and the next, none of those things could happen.

But during the few seconds of action available to me, I could still strike his stupid helmet again and again, dozens of times faster than any martial artist in history.

Time resumed.

The lightning user’s head exploded, helmet and all.

His body staggered, blood spraying from the broken stump of his neck, but it did not stop.

Even then, his neck had already begun to regrow.

“Oh no, you don’t!”

I stopped time again, this time for longer.

I struck his shoulders, hips, and spine, extending the time stop again and again until I had to stop and breathe.

The instant I stopped, his entire body tore apart as every blow took effect at once.

But if I had been operating at normal maximum effort, that was almost the equivalent of spending an hour’s worth of stamina.

Given my significant superhuman capability, that was like an Olympic athlete running a hundred-meter sprint. Not enough to completely exhaust me, but definitely enough that I needed to catch my breath before trying again.

The mangled body became a cloud of black-blue mist.

By the time the first explosion began, the mist had already split into three parts.

Even to me, the explosion was deafening. An unprotected human within two hundred meters would have died instantly.

For someone like me, with superhuman durability and extra defenses, it was only enough to stagger me.

Then came the second explosion.

Then the third.

Then… no. Pairs of explosions were happening at the same time.

Most of the floor we were on was swallowed by an expanding inferno, but through Force Adjustment I could see through the flames.

Chi Li hovered in midair, radiating enough heat to turn iron into slag from fifteen paces away.

With both arms, she also threw fireballs of equal intensity at her two opponents.

They tried to teleport away, but those fist-sized fireballs were insanely fast. The air they passed through actually exploded.

They crossed more than a hundred meters in a thousandth of a second, moving so fast that even with my superspeed and heightened awareness, I could barely perceive them.

Each enemy was struck four times. When the flames weakened, half of their bodies had been burned away.

Their charred remains became mist, but the clouds were smaller and weaker than the mist produced by the blue warrior.

I used Time Leap and charged forward, landing two punches on the last remaining warrior before he teleported away.

I followed with Spatial Leap and landed more blows before he teleported again, this time closer to the slowly drifting mist.

I teleported beside him, then forced myself into stopped time and began punching.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six…

After two uses of Instant Action, I returned to normal time, unable to maintain the time stop any longer.

His head was smashed apart. Every limb was torn off. His chest cavity had collapsed. Most of his torso was a ruined mess of flesh.

Yet he was not dead.

Any truly living person would have died, at least without regeneration far stronger than mine.

Maybe if he had more time to bleed out, he would die.

Maybe not.

The original mist reached him an instant later, and his regeneration surged.

Across the room, Chi Li’s form collapsed back down to human size.

Then she fell to the ground, utterly exhausted.

“This is bullshit,” I complained to myself.

Then I spent all the energy I had accumulated in the upper levels of the tower, along with all the points I had been saving for the big bad still waiting at the top.

All at once.

Name: Ye Lin
Profile: Human female, 17 years, 3 months, 16 days old

Ability Points: 1/80

Word of Force [45 points]
Force Adjustment lv3, Force Sense lv2, Force-Field Creation lv2, Forced Acceleration lv3, Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation lv4, Constant Force lv3, Sustained Force lv2

Other Abilities [34 points]
Time Leap lv1, Enhanced Regeneration lv4, Focused Invulnerability lv2, Instant Action lv3, Defensive Counter lv2, Super Suit lv1, Spatial Distortion lv2, Spatial Leap lv1

Attributes [0/80]
Strength 40, Agility 20, Intelligence 6, Perception 9, Spirit 20, Luck 2

The changes from all those points hit me like a ton of bricks.

I had not merely crossed a threshold in Strength, raising my raw power and endurance to a level comparable to most heavy vehicles even without force enhancement.

I had crossed another threshold by raising Agility far beyond the human norm.

And I had crossed a third in Spirit, where my mental image, spiritual presence, aura, and physical beauty could no longer be disguised through any technical, medical, or physical means.

It was the last of those that let me recover from the effects of the other two attribute increases just as my opponent fully healed.