93. Creating a Nuclear Blast

Creating a Nuclear Blast

I poured every last scrap of strength I had into entering a time-stop state.

Unfortunately, that did not change the fact that there was an arm around my neck, a magical taser jammed under my armpit, and I was on my knees, seconds away from blacking out.

I was held too tightly to break free. Worse, every few seconds another portion of my dwindling reserves was burned away just to keep time frozen.

So I used Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation to unclasp the necklace around my neck.

Unlike objects held by someone else, the necklace had been on me from the start. That meant I could still manipulate it even while time was stopped.

I gripped one end of the chain and shoved the other into the giant warrior’s open mouth, pushing it as far down his throat as I could.

Then I did something I never would have imagined doing before.

I used Force Adjustment on the last third of the necklace inside his throat and seized the electromagnetic forces within it, amplifying them by an order of magnitude.

Only the electromagnetic forces.

All of them.

It was less than an ounce of metal. It belonged to me. It had already been enchanted. Adjusting the forces inside an object was something I had done thousands of times by now. It took only an instant and cost almost no stamina.

And because of what it caused, it could not be taken back or controlled.

Time resumed.

The electromagnetic interactions between those few dozen grains of metal were magnified—up to and including the repulsive forces between their protons.

That repulsion intensified to the point that the nuclear interaction could no longer hold most of the atomic nuclei together, and those tiny particles of metal detonated in the fire of a nuclear explosion.

I was not a complete idiot. I had already shifted Focused Invulnerability to make myself immune to the nuclear blast I had created.

That did not stop the explosion from driving me a full meter into the metal floor, nor did it protect a single item I had been carrying. My battle suit included. Everything was utterly destroyed.

Fortunately, more than an hour had passed since I had last conjured the suit. After I used Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation to scrape all the glassy dust and metal fragments from my skin, I summoned a new one, whole and pristine.

It was the only pristine thing about me.

The battle with those warriors had wrung my body out and left it hanging somewhere to dry. Any skill that required stamina was beyond me now, and as for real combat… if an ordinary sword demon got clever, it could probably exhaust me into unconsciousness.

My limbs twitched beyond my control. Every breath made my overworked lungs burn as if they were on fire. My nervous system badly needed a full reset, because every few seconds it decided to remind me what intimate contact with that athlete had felt like.

Probably an aftereffect of that stupid magical drug. And now that the battle was over, the boost from Empowered Regeneration was also fading, which made everything feel even worse.

In short, going to face someone like Mort in my current condition was an absurd fantasy.

Not that it mattered.

There was nowhere near enough time for me to sleep, especially not when new monsters could be summoned at any moment.

The rest of the room was… slightly better.

Around the blast center, the floor had deformed by less than a meter. The nearby walls were completely charred, but they had neither torn open nor melted.

Then again, my desperate little plan was not comparable to a real nuclear weapon in any meaningful way.

There had not been enough material involved, and the instant any part of it ceased to be in contact with me, the enhancement would end. The blast yield had been under a hundred tons of TNT. Maybe far under.

The farther I looked from the explosion’s center, the less scorched the floor became and the less the walls had warped. The force produced by the blast had diminished sharply with…