Chương 25: 23: Path of Most Resistance

My back broke through the brick outer wall of the motel, then a cheap internal drywall, went through a sofa and an ancient CRT television, until it slammed into a solid block of concrete and rebar and abruptly stopped. I got up on shaky legs, shook my head to clear away stars, then spat out a broken tooth. My jaw was probably cracked, or at least felt like it was. Normally I'd have been more worried about the tooth and the ugly gap in my smile, but it would regrow... eventually.

Probably after my regeneration handled both cracked forearms, or the couple shattered ribs, or the frostbite, or the bruises and burns basically everywhere else. In the fifteen minutes the fight had lasted it had dealt with that and more... at least a few times over. A towering, vaguely humanoid shape seemingly made of darkness flickered into existence within arms reach behind my back.

I cursed and turned, barely bringing my arms up in time to block a sweeping blow that would have thrown me through several more walls. Blinking in and out like that was probably the shadow-monster's most annoying ability, something it quickly proved by flickering around my block and delivering a downwards punch to my left kidney hard enough to sink my feet through the motel's floor. I screamed, because kidney shots fucking hurt. Nothing came out of my lips, the shadow's presence still drinking in all sounds.

A retaliatory elbow shot blew out a chunk from the thing's midriff, the shadow stuff making up its form scattering around the room before getting sucked back in and reforming. While it was busy with that I flew a couple feet up so my legs wouldn't be trapped and I'd have the higher "ground", then started raining power-enhanced blows on it. About ten seconds and several dozen blows later, a just-reformed shadowy arm sank into my solar plexus then exploded in a green flash.

The point-blank magical blast hurled me out of the building, through a parked car, until I came to a stop in the middle of an alley, lying on the pavement with my front splashed with green flames. A quick pat-down with Proximakinesis put the flames out and I rose to my feet again, a little slower, a little more shaky and gasping for air.

My suit was more holes than not, a layer of grime and soot had been baked onto every inch of exposed skin and except for where the last fireball had vaporized it my body was swimming in my own sweat. I wanted a break, but my pursuer had other plans. A green fireball the size of my head shot out of the motel's ruin faster than an arrow.

Without the boost from Forced Acceleration it would have simply been too fast to react to; with the boost I felt like a tennis player trying to catch up to a drop shot, except in reverse. Scrambling into a barrel roll from a standstill, I felt the wind of its passage ruffling my hair as it swerved to follow.

Pulling so many g's the wind felt like a sandblaster against my skin and my eyes watered, I led it into a merry chase around the neighborhood, avoiding main streets like the plague - or rather, sudden thundering death. Flight was so much easier with uniform acceleration, I felt like an astronaut in orbit. I wouldn't have wanted to try ninety-degree turns at the speed of sound with any normal, physics-abiding propulsion.

After nearly half a minute of twists and turns the fireball finally exploded in my wake, barely any flame licking at my bare feet before dissipating. My boots, of course, had long since been ruined. The shade blinked into existence right into my face, far too close for me to slow down or dodge. Even being able to push four hundred times my own weight my powers couldn't stop me instantly, so I plowed into the enemy like I'd done with so many zombies. Just like the zombie, it was blasted to bits from the impact.

Very much unlike a zombie, it didn't die and started reforming. Also alike the zombie impacts, this one felt like plunging into icy water times a thousand. Energy leeched out of my body so rapidly my bones hurt and everything else felt like it'd been lit on fire. For a fraction of a second my powers flickered and I tumbled into the ground.

"You know what? I'm officially done with this shit!" I shouted, and for once my words got through. Apparently, the shady fucker couldn't eat them while it was busy reforming.

"If punching you won't work, try this on for size." And with that I reached out and touched its half-rebuilt body with the tip of my finger.

"Tag! You're it!" No, I didn't explode the shade. Blowing him - it? - up just pushed them into reforming. Instead, I pushed with Proximakinesis from all sides. The completely black, smoke-like substance it was made of seemed to have no weight, no fixed shape, to be halfway between solid and gas. And while solids would have firmly resisted what I was doing, gases wouldn't have. The shade proved more like the latter than the former as its body was squeezed from all sides by about the weight of a small tank.

It got smaller and smaller until it formed an orb of thick, billowing black smoke about the size of my head.

"Gotcha!" I exclaimed, smirking down at the orb held between my palms.

"Not so tough now, are you?" Because from all the times it had blasted me, or blinked around, or thrown those tooth-chipping, skin-freezing punches, it had done so with a gesture, or a step, or an actual punch. None of it had happened when it had been blown to bits. Now that it had been squeezed into an orb though, it didn't have arms. Or legs. Or even a head to give me that chilling glare.

"I might not be able to kill you, but I predict us spending many, many wonderful hours together," I told the now violently struggling orb. Then I used Proximakinesis to scramble its contents like an egg. xxxx xxxx Several dozen arrows fell down all around me, their bone-white tips exploding into showers of red-hot sparks upon impact. Asphalt, concrete, parked cars; anything the arrows hit they burned through in seconds, melting holes in even metal. Ever seen videos of people playing with thermite on the internet?

It was like that, except the burning, sparking bits stuck to what they hit like glue. I learned that the hard way when one of them stuck my left thigh and refused to let go or go out no matter what I did with Proximakinesis. It was more like being constantly shot by an invisible heat ray than getting burned by something physical, which was totally bullshit. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

I hobbled around a corner at sixty miles an hour, my left leg still only half-healed, a whole battalion of burning skeletons chasing after me. The ambulatory piles of bones were not actually on fire; they simply had brightly glowing molten metal for ligaments, somehow holding their bony bits together without actually burning them. They also carried steel longbows in one arm and had quivers at their backs.

The bows were covered in far too many spikes, looking like they'd come straight out of some super-edgy fantasy game rather than functional weapons and the quivers held not arrows but molten metal; every time a skeleton archer reached for an arrow, one would form out of the molten metal, hot and ready for use. None of that made any sense whatsoever yet still worked. It worked really well, too.

The burning skeletal archers were both faster than any sprinter and tireless, keeping up with me while I was wounded and on the ground. They were probably lighter than men, molten metal ligaments or no, and if those steel bows of theirs were any indication stronger as well. Or physics were just crying in the corner while magic played and none of my observations meant a thing. Even so, they would have been little to no threat to me under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, nothing was normal anymore.

With all my Proximakinesis efforts occupied in holding the still-struggling shadow a prisoner and a steady stream of damage keeping me in less than optimal condition, outrunning the pursuing force was a questionable proposition. But why run when there were s many parked cars around?

Turning around, I kicked a Prius down the street behind me, the near-ton of environmentally-friendly metal and plastic tumbling into the dozens of physics-defying bits of metal and bone, crushing them like a bowling ball going over sticks of chalk. Bones were dislocated or shattered, steel bows bent, molten metal spilled on the asphalt and set it on fire. The crumpled mess that had once been a nice little car finally came to a stop, its bulk and the flames forming a barrier across the alley impassable to humans.

The remaining burning skeletons quickly proved how wrong Hollywood's clumsy undead trope truly was by vaulting over parked cars, running through the flames, or even climbing over the burning remains of the Prius to get to me. They had fallen far behind however, as instead of standing there to watch I'd been running for all I was worth while looking at them with my Force Awareness. Wings flapped overhead but I'd seen the iron-beaked bird coming even before I'd heard it.

It was so busy squawking threateningly and spewing fire all over the street that it missed the hurled flatbed truck that smashed into its wing and knocked it off-course, letting me duck under it and run in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, a ton and a half of metal projectile was unlikely to more than slow down twenty tons of denser, magical metal bird. It wasn't going to stop the two squadrons of imps that had appeared from nowhere and were dive-bombing yours truly for all they were worth.

TATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATA!!! A storm of sounds between a whip and a heavy machine gun split the night air and sent nearby windows rattling in their panes and suddenly the imps started dropping like flies. Whatever it was, it was coming from at least a block into the next street over, too far for either my Force Awareness to pick up clearly or my eyes to see through the mist. BOOM! A fireball shot in from the same direction, flew about a foot over my head and struck the iron beak between its wings.

Unlike the shade's favorite spell, this one exploded into a vibrant red conflagration between the color of rubies and that of spilled blood. With very little in the way of blast wave, it was so incredibly hot that my sweat steamed off my skin half a block away. When it faded away, a roughly bird-like mass of slag fell to the ground and broke apart. Even more burning arrows than before filled the sky and I made an executive decision to run in the direction the attacks had come from.

Whoever or whatever was blasting at the monsters was friendlier than the monsters themselves. Crossing the fingers of my left hand that this wouldn't be like my usual luck while maintaining the trap around the shadow with my right, I ran towards safety... probably. Maybe. At this point, I'd accept even a "possibly". My pessimism and suspicion in no way prepared me for what was actually there.

"Maya! Over here, quickly!" Mandy waved with one hand, standing up to her hips inside a sewer access point. Dark red hair flying every which way, a crimson red fireball growing in her off-hand, she was very far from the timid girl I'd last seen five days before. TATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATA!!! Needle-thin lines of blue light shot out of watermelon-sized contraption the thin robot at Mandy's side held in both arms, sweeping across the distant lines of burning skeletons.

Where the beams struck concrete, bone, even metal burst in miniature explosions that left craters a bit wider than a dime. Small in the grand scheme of things, at the rate the machine was shooting the damage added up and every couple of seconds a skeleton collapsed in smoking pieces.

It took me at least a few seconds to recognize the 'thin robot' as a thin, haggard-looking Jerry half-covered in a metal exoskeleton that helped support his weapon's weight even as crackling electricity fed from his arms into the device, keeping it glowing like a miniature star in my Force Awareness.

"Come on May, you can gawk later," Mandy said after throwing the fireball she'd been forming.

"Something has kicked the hornet's nest and half the Dark Masons' army is marching in our direction. If we don't vanish right now far more than just the vanguard will catch up."

"Right," I said to nobody in particular and followed my two friends down the sewer. Jerry seemed to be struggling with the weight of his weapon so I picked it up in my free hand as we descended into the darkness.

"Thanks. It's light enough when I'm wearing my armor but that won't fit in the sewers," the boy said and gave me a tentative smile before he noticed the state of my suit. His eyes almost fell off their sockets and his neck creaked in his haste to turn away.

"I... err..."

"No problem," I told him, for more things than one. Maybe a week earlier I'd have been less nonchalant about being seen near-naked but that had been six Ego points and a dozen wardrobe malfunctions before.

"What do we do if they follow us in the sewers?"

"They won't," Mandy said decisively, slapping the brickwork and searing a complex glowing symbol into it.

"Traps keyed to monsters. They get too close and-" She hadn't even finished when the obviously magical symbol flashed and the orb full of trapped shade in my off-hand exploded.