Chương 41: 36: Battlefield

The world slowed to a crawl. Both my friends had been bracing for what was to come; now they looked almost like wax statues, the only evidence giving the lie to that impression was Jerry's involuntary blink taking what seemed like seconds. Dust motes all but stilled in the air, bits of ground brick and concrete falling from overhead slowed to less than a feather's descent.

Sounds became deeper and duller and the only reason colors didn't shift was my new senses already perceiving the full spectrum of light directly. New information and understanding clicked and I had to resist the sudden urge to slam my head into a wall. At full Forced Acceleration, everything from my muscles to the electrical impulses in my brain to chemical reactions within cells were "overclocked" enough to get two and a half times faster.

Being a force effect, the full use of Force Adjustment magnified the increase by a factor of eight; the combination made one second of time stretch out to thirteen even as a superhuman baseline made me a lot faster than a normal human to begin with. Or at least they should have. Would have, if my brain hadn't been subconsciously certain human bodies can't move that quickly.

Proximakinesis pushed me at the ceiling at speeds that would have seemed like blurs before; now it was only a brief upwards fall before slamming into the mass of rubble at half the speed of sound. Three hundred tons of demolished concrete and brickwork shifted, pushed upwards by the entirety of my momentum yet lifting only about a foot before beginning to drop. Losing cohesion by the impact and cracked even more, they would collapse inwards and crush Mandy and Jerry with absurd ease.

There was no time to pull back, and slamming at them again would only delay the inevitable. But I was no longer as limited by the fourth dimension as I'd been before. With an act of will I was where I'd been a twentieth of a second before, just at the beginning of my acceleration. With another I was where I was slated to be in a thirtieth of a second, fully accelerated and an inch from hitting the collapsing roof.

As soon as that second impact was realized, my momentum transferred, I reversed then accelerated my personal time frame through that double Chronal Leap and caused a third impact. Then a fourth and a fifth and more that followed as quickly as I could click that mental button, turning Yours Truly into a superpowered jackhammer. A quarter of a second - objectively - and fifty impacts later, three hundred tons of rubble were slowly exploding upwards as I forced my way through the sluggishly expanding cloud.

Bricks, blocks of concrete, pieces of rebar, broken pipes and more bounced off my costume and shattered as I bodily cleared a relatively safe path for the others. As soon as I blinked back into the tunnel though, I realized I'd seriously miscalculated. Mandy's face was stretching into a grimace, caught between a wince and a reflexive recoil, her skin, lips and cheeks pulled in what looked like wrinkles but were actually the result of superimposed blast waves. Jerry was worse.

His eyes were already looking bloodshot, blood was coming in a spray of tiny drops out of both his ears and his lungs looked like someone was in the process of kicking them from within. Shit. Reaching out to both my friends, I burned almost an hour's worth of effort to anchor two lasting force-fields to each of them. One of Force Adjustment to reduce further physical shock and a fine film of Proximakinesis layered over any internal wounds that would prevent bleeding and physically hold things together.

Mandy didn't seem to need the latter but Jerry certainly did. The workings were unstable and would fail in a few hours, but we simply didn't have time for anything better... and trying to force it would have left me feeling like I'd run a dozen marathons rather than just one. Simply pulling out the two of them wasn't going to work.

Besides the issues carrying someone through a rapidly shifting narrow corridor through what was basically a slow explosion in process would have, people were not built to handle hundreds of gravities of acceleration or the air pressure of supersonic speeds... and in the time it had taken to stop the shock waves from further hurting them the path I'd opened through the cloud of rubble had partly collapsed. A push followed by Chronal Leap saw me outside the expanding debris cloud, a new path carved behind me.

Force Awareness both seeing my friends through the ground and letting me track the trajectory of rubble within the cloud, I reached with Spatial Leap. In a blink of an eye, Jerry was twenty feet in the air. Another, and he was in a momentarily safe part of the path through the explosion. A third and he was just at the edge of the blast wave. A fourth, fifth and sixth and he was safely on the ground, standing behind me.

Mandy followed in shorter, less straight leaps as I had to adjust for the rapidly changing situation as rubble fell, hit each other and shattered, were deflected by larger pieces and pulled down by gravity, any pockets of safety becoming deadly areas in hundredths of a second. With Spatial Leap having not nearly enough range, navigating the red-headed sorceress through the chaos was hard. Then I cursed myself for an idiot and used Spatial Distortion. The doubled distance in relation to myself?

The range of Spatial Leaps. It was my power; its range was always in relation to myself. That made pulling Mandy into safety a breeze, which allowed me to sit back and catch my breath. The next time any Batman fans told me Superman had it easy because powers made saving people no big deal I was so getting a power to punch people through the internet. Naturally, before I could savor such dreams of righteous payback, we were attacked by monsters.

xxxx xxxx For the first time in over a week, Jerry wondered whether he should have remained a dedicated wizard rather than picking the engineer dual class on his fifth level-up. Sure, he could build cool magitech weapons and armor that could cut through a small army of monsters or tank hits from artillery and do so in a cave with a box of scraps in only a few minutes when he went all-out.

But when he was caught out of his armor, without any tech at hand, he might as well be just a normal kid for all the good all his powers could do... and he kept finding himself in such situations alarmingly often. A fireball almost blasted him in the face before being drained away by the resident red-haired sorceress and shrapnel from shattered armor and broken weaponry pelted his harness every so often from a blonde flying brick's clashes with the enemy's undead knights.

Fortunately, the light exoskeleton was armored enough to protect him from that much so as long as he stayed off the line of fire he might - might - last a few minutes in this blasted, crated-filled, ruin-strewn hellscape. Abrupt coughing reminded him that the jury was still out on whether it'd be the oily cloying smoke from all the burning buildings or the concrete dust still drifting down from above after the recent bombardment that got him first, even if the monsters didn't.

With his armor still damaged and at the bottom of the collapsed tunnel, his mana mostly spent and his chest - most of his body really - aching as if he'd fallen down a couple flights of stairs, hiding in a corner and letting the girls deal with the monsters was all he could do. A younger, more naive Jerry Norris would have hated it, struggled to hold on to his fantasies of being the chosen hero, saving everyone and getting the girls fawning all over him.

The experienced monster-hunter smiled self-deprecatingly and shook his head. He'd seen how Amanda intuitively grasped magic and could manipulate it as easily as she influenced people, or Maya shrugged off wounds that would have left most people curled up on the ground and crying. The older, less childish Jerry would admit, if only to himself, that he lacked the empathy for the former or the sheer guts for the latter but that did not mean he was useless even if it would have been easier to pretend he was.

With beauty and brawn right out, it was time to get his brain working again. After all, why play against type? Name: Jerry Norris, HP: 67/130, SP: 74/208, MP: 9/182 Class: lvl 26 Arcane Engineer Skills [1/8 pts] Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Academics lvl 4, Assessment lvl 14, Deception lvl 2, Energize lvl 13, Energy Weapons lvl 11, Enhanced Armorer lvl 16, Enhanced Electrical Engineer lvl 14, Enhanced Roboticist lvl 14, Fabricate lvl 16, HEMA lvl 12, Instant Repair lvl 15, Language: English lvl 3, Language: French lvl 1, Persuasion lvl 5, Ceramics Creation lvl 3, Fuel Creation lvl 2, Metal Creation lvl 9, Piloting: Battlesuit lvl 10, Programming lvl 7 Stats [15/130 pts] Strength 14, Dexterity 26, Constitution 20 Intelligence 80, Wisdom 24, Charisma 14 Before the brunet could go through the changes to his character sheet, he found himself forty feet from where he'd been a split second before and the left half of one of those fireball-throwing demonic aliens slamming into his old position.

Green-black blood splattered everywhere, a few droplets falling into his eyes and making them hurt as if it were chlorine.

"Watch where you're throwing those things!" he shouted, blinking furiously and trying to get his sight back.

"Don't throw bloody alien bits at me, they're icky yet acidic!"

"Sorry J," an unfairly melodic voice called back from somewhere above his head, "but it's a mess up here; tracking everything is hard!"

"Just don't do it again," he said with a sigh then groaned when his vision remained blurry. It would come back soon enough; he healed as rapidly as most video game protagonists after his Constitution hit twenty but that didn't mean vision impairment wasn't a dangerous nuisance.

Before getting through multiple setbacks and nasty injuries he could have been crazy anxious and afraid but now his stats could tell him exactly how much worse his chances became if he panicked and gave him enough of a boost to resist doing so. At least he could still see his character sheet clearly somehow and he'd leveled again during the big fight so maybe he could do something about it.

First things first; every available point into Constitution, raising it to thirty-five and his maximum hit points to three hundred and twelve, with proportional improvement to his current health. No reason to die while searching for a more long-term solution if he could help it. Then onwards to the single new supernatural skill he could get. It would only be at level 1 to start with and he would only have enough mana to use it once if it had any cost similar to his other skills. It would have to suffice.

The problems with wizard classes in most games was that they lacked any great healing skills. Specializing in magitech made the overall theme of his powers even more narrowly focused. Finding skills to fix machines, granting them low-levels of self-repair, or even a limited ability to reconstitute after getting destroyed was possible. Getting Enhanced Medicine, Biotechnology, or Medical Cybernetics was also possible.

None of those things could help him mid-fight or were usable without the proper resources; very few skills within his theme were. His blatantly supernatural skills like Fabricate, Energize or Resource Creation were strictly engineering themed and wouldn't work on his very biological body... or would they? He quickly thought through hundreds of potential options, discarding them all while closing in on an inkling of an idea.

If there was only so much "give" in his skill system then the closer associated a new skill was with both his theme and what skills he already had, the more leeway it should have elsewhere. With that thought, Jerry looked into options that both restored energy like his Energize and created resources like his various Creation skills plus were further restricted in other ways. The less free it was to use, the stronger the skill's effect should be.

If it just happened to be exactly what Jerry needed in this situation, well, that should be a lucky coincidence with no bearing on the skill's scope... xxxx xxxx A last glance at Jerry's direction to ensure that accident didn't put him in any more danger than all of us already were was all I could spare in the chaotic mess our surroundings had become.

The military's bombardment had flattened all my hopes of our home city ever recovering as much as it had blown up the city's buildings; except for the invaders' black metal fortifications the entirety of the town center had become a wasteland. Not a single building still stood, the streets were more craters than not, busted water mains were leaking everywhere and the sewers had collapsed. Out of the ruins, hundreds of monsters climbed, crawled or leaped over, approaching our location from every direction.

From beefed-up skinless ghouls, to heavily armored undead warriors, to even a few demons and wraiths. Mandy was having a field day stealing the enemy's fire-magic to fuel titanic blasts that shook the ground and blasted enemy formations apart. While she did that, my job was to engage the enemy head-on, shatter enemy formations and preventing her from getting ganged upon and overwhelmed. Unfortunately for us, the enemy was proving smarter and more coordinated than they ever had.

An "executioner" wight swung its ultra-sharp magical halberd at my legs while two of its fellows kept harassing me with overhead swings that blocked my flight path and would cause more damage if I tried to fly through. These three and several of their fellows had snuck up on me under a wight's cloaking magic right after I'd slammed into a pair of demons and were now playing for time while the survivor of that pair blasted me in the back. Unfortunately for them, we'd all of us gained some new tricks.

A Spatial Leap took me out of the wights' encirclement instantly. The demon blasted me with its fireball... but fireballs, even magical ones, didn't weigh much. They certainly came well under a quarter ton so I quickly relocated it on top of its caster with a Spatial Leap while I swung the narrowest Proximakinesis-infused force field I could make at the wights. The artillery-like blast hammered the demon a full two feet into the ground while the wights were hacked apart by an invisible glaive.

A loose formation of skeletons came over what had once been the Mall, shooting magical thermite arrows at my best friend's back. They'd finally learned not to bunch up against Mandy's fireballs or my charges and their tactics would have been sound... if not for their use of projectiles infused with so much heat and fire magic.

They bounced off a dome of magic around Mandy only visible to my sight; while my senses couldn't pick the details of the magic itself, its general purpose was to push back anything with sufficient heat or magical power to fall within Mandy's thematic sorcery. Before the enemies could adjust their tactics to something that might pose a threat, I accelerated enough to outrun any of their flyers while still maintaining high maneuverability.

Then I flew around the battlefield going from skeleton to skeleton and crashing into them, using Chronal Leap to make the entire maneuver take far less time than it would otherwise have. One second at Mach 1 was two dozen skeletons scattered to bits and I could now do it as quickly as an eyeblink. BOOM! The lightning bolt struck me straight in the chest, sending burning pain through my every nerve. I tumbled uncontrollably, fell into a pile of rubble twenty feet high and scattered them like an artillery strike.

It was much less damaging than the first time I'd been shot out of the sky, but still left me a twitching, uncoordinated, really painful mess like a too-close encounter with the business end of a cattle prod. Then it did it again and again, because of course I'd dropped where the tower still had line of sight. A demon arrived to join in on the fun while more executioner wights started poking me with sharp metal bits.

While the tower kept basically tasering me, the demon's foul breath immediately started draining my stamina and the wight's halberds kept delivering nasty paper cuts even through my costume. A few hours ago, that would have already had me on the ropes and in a very real risk of dying. Now, things didn't go nearly as well for the bad guys. The wights were first to fall, hacked apart by invisible blades after about fifteen seconds of stabbing.

Not much later the tower stopped firing, the distant pillar red-hot and smoking. That only left the demon who was now frantically blasting me with more of its draining breath. The shakes faded quickly even as all my body burned as if from whole marathons' worth of exhaustion. But that wasn't enough to keep me down, not any more. A kinetic lance speared through the demon's eyes in quick succession; its pained roar brought a nasty smirk on my lips as repeated strikes blew holes into it until it died.

I caught my breath for thirty seconds - almost seven minutes, objectively - then took to the skies. Higher than the piles of rubble. Higher than the metal walls in the distance. High enough that all the Lightning Towers had clear line of fire to yours truly. Nothing attacked me as I stood there hands on hips, a challenge to the enemy. Because what had destroyed the wights, what had quickly silenced the tower that attempted to electrocute me to death was no direct action on my part or anybody else's.

It was just the consequence of Retributive Defense applied to Force Adjustment, reflecting all harm stopped by that defense back to the source. Force Adjustment reduced harmful forces by a factor of eight; nearly ninety percent of most attacks' damage would be dealt on the attacker instead of me and the enemy proved unwilling to sacrifice his Lightning Towers in an attempt to kill me. Showing the distant fortress and its owner my back, I turned my attention to the situation on the ground.

There, I found Jerry building a tower of his own...