Chương 34: 30: Open Season

The giant form of a Stymphalian Chicken dropped from above, a veritable shower of explosive metal feathers preceding it. They pelted the street like dozens of grenades, opening small craters and sending countless metal shrapnel to perforate everything nearby. Windows shattered, walls cracked, parked vehicles crumpled into so much scrap metal. In contrast, the three of us withstood the deadly attack completely intact.

"OW!" Almost completely intact.

"What happened?" Mandy asked as she diverted the Stymphalian Chicken's fiery breath harmlessly aside with her magic.

"I thought shrapnel could no longer hurt you?" With a flick of her fingers the torrent of flame condensed in a tiny, blindingly bright sphere in the palm of her hand. Blowing out into it, she made it expand into a fiery form of roughly the same shape and size as our winged attacker, who was very surprised by the sudden addition of a flying opponent it could neither explode nor burn that started hunting it down.

"Yeah, but metal bits in my eyes are still really annoying," I told her, trying to both rub and blink them off; they were worse than sand. At least I no longer needed eyes to observe my surroundings, and with the mist around super-senses were better than eyes for seeing things. Speaking of...

"Does the mist seem a bit thin to you?"

"There's been a seventeen percent reduction of water vapor density in the past eight hours," a deep mechanical voice agreed. The eight feet and two tons of metal armor it had issued from opened fire with no less than six weapons; a comically oversized handgun in each arm, a pair of ball turrets in the armor's too-thick shoulder pads and two semi-fixed mounts built into the robotic armor's torso.

Laser beams powerful enough to thunder through the air like miniature bolts of lightning tore down the street and into the enemy formation that had yet to clear the mist.

"I've been monitoring the phenomenon and there's high probability the enemy has stopped magically enforcing the mist entirely." After getting caught in just an exoskeleton and wounded, Jerry had considerably beefed up his power armor and would only go out in the heaviest defenses and carrying the best weapons he could build. It had considerably cut down on the type of missions he could go to, but in exchange when he did get the chance to cut loose his firepower exceeded my own and Mandy's both.

A formation of heavily armored figures charged out of the mist, hundreds of metal-clad feet shaking the street worse than a convoy of loaded trucks. Jerry focused his laser weapon fire on the left half of the formation, tearing through black and red steel plating and the flesh underneath, but though several of the enemy's soldiers were torn apart every second the rest continued their inexorable advance without even a thought spared for their fellows. Wights could feel no emotions, after all.

A literal flying leap hurled me into the midst of their formation faster than they could react. My arrival scattered nearly two dozen of them like bowling pins and before they could turn their swords and glaives upon me an invisible disc of force an inch high and seventy feet in diameter formed over the surface of the street. The entire formation staggered, slipped then toppled as all friction within that field was reduced by an order of magnitude.

Coupled with the wetness from the mist, the street had just become more slippery than an ice-rink. Moving around through Proximakinesis rather than relying on physical leverage, I was entirely unaffected and stomping through dozens of enemy troops incapable of standing up let alone fighting was only a matter of time.

It was not entirely one-sided; flailing glaives and swords still sliced into my suit or gave me nasty, bleeding cuts where my skin was bare but with me able to engage them up close and keeping them disabled while Mandy and Jerry blasted them from afar, our victory was a foregone conclusion.

"Finally!" Mandy exclaimed as the Stymphalian Chicken fell out of the sky as a lump of molten iron.

"If I didn't know better I'd say these things were getting tougher."

"Do we know better, though?" I asked, because a few days earlier the Executioners - that was the enemy's name for the armored wights, apparently - could barely give me paper cuts while the gash in my forehead I'd just taken was still oozing blood all down my face.

"Maybe the bad guys' leader is pumping more magic into them, if they aren't maintaining the mist."

"It's more complicated than that," the resident magical expert and/or redhead explained.

"Magic isn't like electricity or other forms of energy the caster generates and stores and expends to do certain things."

"Sure it is, it's called Mana," Jerry's mechanical voice boomed as the suit came closer.

"Mine is down to just ten points after all the times I'd had to repair my armor over the past hour."

"OK, magic isn't like energy unless the user specifically makes it like that," Mandy adjusted with a long-suffering sigh.

"But most mages don't do that, Jerry, specifically to avoid running out of power mid-battle." The shorter girl looked around, not really staring at the dead enemies bu something beyond. Not finding what she was searching for she turned to the two of us.

"Any bad guys in range? I'm not giving a magical theory lesson while the enemy tries to stab us from behind."

"Nothing except for a few stragglers two blocks to the West," I told her, which was weird. Or at least felt that way after seeing every street and most buildings full of roaming monsters until the day before. Now... now most of them had left, literally picked up and marched off to the North in groups of thousands.

"Well that makes things easier, I guess. Let's get moving; the next tower won't blow up itself." I saw Jerry rolling his eyes under that helmet of his and barely resisted copying him in the interest of avoiding more drama. For some reason, Mandy had become more and more irritable in the past day or two, the normally quiet girl exploding from smaller and smaller provocations. Neither Jerry nor I knew why that was and if it got any worse we'd do something about it, but until then it was best not to ask.

All of us had been under a lot of stress since the whole invasion began, it was a miracle we were even sane.

"Magic is not like energy in that it is created from nothing and can in turn create from nothing," the budding sorceress explained as we moved through ruined, empty streets devoid of both monsters and life.

"Think of it like an invisible slope towards a given direction. The more of each magical 'theme' there is, the bigger the slope. The bigger the slope, the easier actions going down that specific slope become, and the more intense the results of those actions are."

"Well, that isn't scary or anything," I huffed.

"Monsters are stronger because more monsters are around?"

"Monsters are stronger because more people got killed. Doesn't matter how many monsters or people are around now that the 'slope' was already set. And the more the fighting lasts, the steeper the slope. Not linearly and not quickly, I think, but it's still bad."

"We're adding to it, aren't we?" Jerry asked, even his robotic voice modulator somehow managing to sound solemn.

"We get stronger the same way."

"I dunno, we didn't get that far in Verity's lessons," Mandy answered, sounding uncertain.

"Doesn't matter if we can beat them quickly enough." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Yeah, it totally didn't matter. I was happy Mandy and Jerry were fully sharing things with me now but not so happy as to ignore what their new teacher was actually telling them. I'd have to learn more about this magic stuff when we got back to base, preferably through alternate sources. I knew who I wanted to ask but would they tell me? Guess we'd see soon enough.

xxxx xxxx Two pillars of black steel appeared out of the thinning fog, towering ominously over the surrounding park. One came out of what had once been a thicket of trees, the mangled remains of a playground strewn around it. The other had been built in the middle of the pond; either the enemy's builders could completely ignore environmental impediments in their construction or these towers needed to be in those exact positions for some arcane reason.

Unlike the huge, spike-tipped cylinder of the lightning tower in the center of the city, the new towers were half as tall, thinner, and terminated in flat tops upon which shaggy bipedal beasts the color of the night sky had been bound with chains thick enough for a large ship's anchor. The broad-shouldered, short-legged beings had bat-like heads, fanged maws and sported giant, curving horns. In short, they looked like classical demons. Unfortunately, they weren't our biggest problem.

That distinction went to the odd dozen of Stymphalian Chickens flying in circles above the park, though the more than a thousand executioners and skeletal archers could be just as much trouble.

"This is... considerably stiffer opposition than we'd been expecting," Mandy commented as the three of us came to a stop. Already several of the outlying archers were turning in our direction and soon the remaining monsters would also notice us.

"That's not opposition, it's a target-rich environment," Jerry joked. Then the magnetic straps at his armor's back powered down and with several metallic clicks the enormous weapon he'd strapped there came off. It was so big its roughly cylindrical shape looked like a rolled-up carpet and the only reason it wasn't an awkward load in Jerry's arms was his armor being large and bulky enough to wield it properly. It powered up with an ominous hum...

then shot a finger-thin, sustained beam brighter than a hundred arc welders. Jerry swept the beam left to right at the height of four feet, to devastating results. Telephone poles burst when hit, trees toppled and caught fire, dozens of parked cars instantly got cabriolet conversions... and several hundred enemies were decapitated by means of neck and shoulder explosive vaporization.

That was obviously noticed, the response as rapid and coordinated as only undead beings or automatons directed by a remote controller could have managed. Hundreds upon hundreds of explosive incendiary arrows rained upon us from the surviving archers. They stumbled into the dome of force I'd just erected, a twenty-foot-radius hollow quarter-sphere where Proximakinesis took hold of each and every arrow and reversed their course.

Hundreds upon hundreds of explosive incendiaries fell not upon us but upon the beings that had fired them. Not all of them hit but enough did that two hundred relatively fragile archers were blasted apart, feeding all the magic from that violence into me at once.

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y3m12d Powers [4/41 pts] Force Adjustment III, Force Awareness II, Forcefield Creation II, Forced Acceleration II, Immutable Force II, Lasting Force II, Progressive Regeneration III, Proximakinesis III, Super Suit I Attributes [1/41 pts] Might 20, Agility 11, Reason 5, Vigilance 8, Ego 11, Luck 2 The first time I'd improved it I'd hoped Reason would help me fight smarter.

It hadn't worked out exactly how I'd expected and in retrospect it made sense; people don't actually sit down and think mid-fight. They can't. The average person takes minutes to solve a simple geometric problem or go through several tactical options and make an informed decision. Even if someone was smart enough to think an order of magnitude faster, that would be dozens of seconds in a fight where a second made the difference between victory and defeat.

Fights weren't about informed, analyzed decisions; they were about instinctive or ingrained reactions and flashes of improvisation. Making those reactions faster, ensuring you didn't get overwhelmed by the huge amount of stimuli from your senses, that you noticed the important things you needed to react to; that's what made one better during the fight. While Reason helped with planning and preparing, once the monsters were up close and personal your wits and reflexes were what mattered most.

I added the point to Vigilance and my every sense sharpened just a little. Details once too small or fast to notice came to the fore; micro-expressions and tensing of muscles that happened split seconds before even undead and monsters could aim or fire simply because whole bodies had more inertia than individual limbs and digits. Adjustments of skulls and eyes as even monsters had to look before they moved or aimed, at least those without super-senses.

But more than that, the ability to take in all the details from hundreds upon hundreds of sources without them fading into the background or being impossibly jumbled. I could neither think nor react more quickly, but I could do both on more complete information, with fewer errors. Even as this new awareness was strained to the limit against the most enemies I'd ever faced, I got the next level of Forced Acceleration and the battlefield slowed to a relative crawl.

Handling the details became so much easier and I was finally aware of just how many things I'd been missing in earlier fights, how many mistakes I'd been making. A fifty percent boost in the power might not seem like much - except the difference between the typical high school track star and an Olympic medalist was smaller. I leaped, sped up all the way with Proximakinesis until I slammed into one of the Stymphalian Chickens hard enough to break its back.

Its body temperature suddenly spiked and its feathers glowed like molten metal, but I was already rolling with the impact and using Proximakinesis to drag the bird around too. I let go and it flew off like a missile, colliding with another flying monster just as its self-destruct turned it into a forty thousand pound bomb. Shrapnel from both blown up monsters blasted the whole park and pelted both my friends and me but at that distance they were little more than annoyances to any of us.

Mandy stole the fiery breath out of another pair of birds - literally. Torrents of fire were forced out of their beaks, collecting into blindingly-bright orbs in her palms. They swerved to attack her but in less than two seconds their wings stopped beating, their bodies grew rigid and dull and frost started growing over them s my friend tore not just the magical fire but every bit of heat out of them. They stalled, fell, and shattered to pieces upon hitting the ground without self-destructing in fiery explosions.

The pair of birds that had all that stolen heat forced down their throats did explode, even as Jerry's laser cannon reduced entire enemy formations to molten slag. Then the demons on top of the towers threw emerald fireballs the size of beach balls at us. One exploded against Jerry with such force that his two-ton armor was hurled half a city block away, with the burning pieces of his big gun scattered across half the park.

The other I tried to dodge then outrun but like a homing missile it followed and the faster I flew the more quickly it closed the distance. The artillery-like explosion burned way my suit from my knees on down and shattered both my ankles, giving me the first bit of major pain I'd felt in several days. Regeneration immediately kicked in, but the chained demons were already preparing more fireballs and the remaining half of the enemy ground forces were charging. This fight had just become serious...