Chương 47: 41: Old Practices

My ears and my supernatural senses insisted the trailer park was mostly silent. The cacophony of screams, wails, nails on a chalkboard insisted otherwise. One vaguely human-shaped cold spot flew in my direction, tufts of grass, fallen leaves, even a hardy little thorny bush blackening and rotting away under its looming shadow. Another humanoid cold spot approached, twin sparks of sickly green luminosity in a vague outline of a human head made of a cold haze and unnaturally stretching shade.

A third of these new enemies got closer still, almost within touching distance, stretching a twisted translucent limb that was made out of nothing at all until the world flickered just right and the image of a decrepit, rotting hand slipped through for a fraction of a fraction of a second. The tiny hair over my arms and at the back of my neck stood on end at a cold wind that could not be heard, could not be felt, moved not a single dust mote and yet still existed.

More shapes gathered at the edges of my vision, there but gone as soon as I turned around to look, standing still as long as they were seen yet having moved several feet closer every time my eyes looked away then back. The air dried out completely even as a mockery of the morning mist seeped in, shapes dancing between puffs of condensation that were people one moment and bones with strips of rotting flesh on them the next.

The closest figure's arm seemed to twist, one of its fingers stretching out and out and out until it was no longer knuckles of bone held together by dried ligaments but a thin, narrow blade between dagger and claw. It lashed out lazily, almost languidly, the blade ignoring my suit entirely to plunge under my ribs.

More things flickered in the stab's wake; more screams and rattling chains, a pool of blood splashed against the nearest trailer, a half-carbonized corpse staring with its empty, eyeless gaze and lipless rictus of a grin.

"Why do bad guys always resort to these banal incarnations of evil?" I asked conversationally, breaking the spell of frightful silence with a hammer of mundane disappointment.

"I don't know about where you come from, but here on Earth we've all seen the movies, read the books, listened to the stories and made our own. Your little display evokes no fear." I reached out at the shade that stabbed me with an arm of my own, wrapped it up in a field of force at a touch... and squeezed.

"Only contempt at the cheapskate special effects." The shadow-thing was barely material; unable to exert enough force to oppose my Proximakinesis it was squeezed down, condensed again and again until it was a little black orb the size of a pea. And then it was set on fire. As illusory wailing was replaced by the very real cries of the incinerated enemy, its fellows all attacked me as one.

They had no weight yet sought to push me back, wielded no weapons but their own shadows yet seemed to harm me, had no mouths and yet they screamed. Then they found out what purveyors of horror as entertainment had known all along; familiar, tangible things are far more frightening the unnatural and the alien. Or maybe these shadow-things were just weak and their attempts to influence me simply failed.

Whatever the case, more shadows were post-haste compressed and incinerated, their influence on the surrounding area diminishing with every one of them that died. The shadows could see it, too, and their group took a collective and figurative step back, whispers flying among them for a few seconds before they scattered all over the trailer park.

"Well, that wasn't that hard," I mused, shaking off the last of the shadows' unnatural aura. The last shadow vanishes around a corner... then a scream that none of those cut-rate ringwraiths could have made echoes for the same direction. Cursing, I push my speed to its fullest and in a split second I was already charging after it. I found a pale, wide-eyed Granny Flores laying on the ground and twitching oddly, mouth gaping and a bit of drool falling down one corner.

Approaching the old woman, I scanned her to ensure she was not wounded; other than scrapes, bruises, and the aftermath of several decades of abusive smoking she looked fine.

"Are you OK?" I asked one of the few neighbors I'd remembered even somewhat fondly from my childhood years.

"Just fine, dearie," the old woman replied with a cackle. Then she shot me in the face. xxxx xxxx That famous superman meme of getting shot in the eye and shrugging it off? Yeah, that's bullshit. Sure, shotgun pellets couldn't truly hurt me any more... but neither could some dust motes in a normal person's eyes yet still hurt, itched, and were supremely annoying. The follow-up shots as I blindly fumbled around and tried not to explode the old woman into chunky salsa did not help.

Long story short, these shadow things could possess people. Gathering up all the refugees and finding someone to exorcise them was not going to be fun, but we had no alternative. If we didn't round them up, a few otherwise undetectable infiltrators could cause horrific damage if they got at the wrong place at the wrong time. If we did try to round them up, well, we'd have to deal with the same problems I was tackling at that moment.

"Die, freakish ape! Die!" Granny Flores cackled as she unloaded round after shotgun round in my direction. She must have had a power - possibly more than one - backing her up because she had yet to run out of ammo and her every shot was both incredibly accurate despite my speed and packed a wallop. I tried getting closing in to capture her but her form went hazy, almost translucent, then vanished into the ground.

My super-senses were up to the task of tracking her intangible form as it moved underground, but that didn't make the ranged hit-and-run attacks much easier to stop. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"Fall, you trollspawn!" the possessed old lady shouted once more after a pair of solid slugs barely slowed my advance. I was beginning to think the possessing dark spirit might have access to her skills and power -rough language skill included- but couldn't access her actual thoughts and knowledge because those insults were really sub-par. Two more minutes of solid slugs that felt more like slaps and my patience was beginning to thin.

I needed to get this body-hopping wraith thing out of my old neighbor yesterday, but its powers of relocation and intangibility made that an exercise in futility. The only use of my powers that could hurt these wraiths was thorough incineration, but that wasn't a viable option with an innocent on the line...... or was it? First, I played keepaway with the possessed woman a little bit longer, letting the possessor get used to its apparent invulnerability, grow overconfident.

Then I burned a considerable amount of my stamina reserves to fuel three energy-intensive powers at the same time before the wraith could react. First, I activated Instant Action. In two subjective seconds that were not time my enemy could act in or perceive because they were no time at all, I reached out and touched the old woman without her possessor being able to turn her intangible. Secondly, I layered a field of Force Adjustment on her, making everything multiple times as durable.

And finally, I magnified the impacts of molecules of air around her, effectively covering her in a field of fire that would move as she moved and could not be snuffed out as long as there was air around. Then time resumed and the wraith found its possessed body wreathed in very real, very painful flames. It immediately tried to get rid of them by going underground and that worked... until the moment it surfaced again and the air ignited once more.

It ran around, it flailed, it stopped, dropped and rolled to no avail. Then it abandoned poor Granny Flores to the pyre and attempted to flee. I immediately captured it in a bubble of force while dismissing the force-adjustment field creating the flames. A smoking, unconscious, but otherwise intact old woman fell to the ground with not a single burn mark.

While the flames had been real and intense, the field of enhanced durability had allowed her to survive them for the brief moments until the wraith decided to abandon ship. Relieved that everything so far had mostly worked out, I incinerated the captive wraith and went after the others. xxxx xxxx A little girl with cute brunet ponytails leaped over the gap between trailers in a futile effort to escape my reach.

The ten-year-old was the last of the possessed survivors housing the last wraith still alive in the area, and seemed determined to lead me on a merry chase. A minor power made her slightly faster than the average Olympic sprinter, she knew this particular part of the trailer park better than I did, she was small enough to make use of even tiny hiding places and the possessing wraith's skills were stronger than the others' abilities had been.

None of that helped as my awareness penetrated physical barriers, my flight could get me around in literal bullet time, and the wraith couldn't or wouldn't remain hidden underground for long. It and its fellows that aped human personalities by hijacking the minds of other people could not help but stop to curse, brag or monologue like the stupidest Saturday morning cartoon villains.

After a brief chase the kid finally collapsed, having been forced to expend all her reserves to keep her rudimentary speed skill active. The wraith vacated the girl's body before I could bring out the flames and for that I was grateful. My method might not physically hurt the victims to any significant extent but they still felt as if they'd been set on fire. Knowing exactly how horrible that felt had left me furious and seething for some payback, because the wraiths had left me no other option but using it.

But I wasn't grateful enough to let the vile little ghost flee. It had chosen to hide underground as a last move of desperation, knowing that sooner or later it had to emerge and become vulnerable. Unfortunately for it, I was no longer willing to wait that long. Force Adjustment applied to the ground magnified all the vibrations, the infinitesimal movements caused by heat within the soil's structure to be magnified, thus creating more heat, which would cause more vibrations and so on and so forth.

The same trick applied to the air would create fields of plasma; on the earth it was much slower but in the end it turned everything into red-hot, boiling, hissing lava. The wraith fled once again, but did not go far. Before I could finish it, an enormous fist almost as large as my torso darted in from around a burned out trailer chassis, physically grabbed the incorporeal miscreant, then squeezed until the monster burst into what looked like ectoplasmic goo from one of those ghost movies.

That fist was followed into the open by a veritable giant of a man, one at least half again as tall as I was in my newly improved self and several times as wide, with muscles that bulged like sacks full of melons and strained with a raw, crude, meaty physicality that was almost grotesque. Familiar dirty-blue eyes squinted down a just as meaty and rough and painfully familiar face topped by short-cropped dirty blond hair.

"It's good to see these worthless things pose no threat to you, girl," a familiar but much magnified voice rumbled like thunder even as the giant flicked his hand in disgust, sending ghostly goo flying out in the darkness.

"It warms an old man's heart."

"You do not have a heart, Old Man," I shot back at him, all my good mood from saving refugees from evil and destroying a dozen very dangerous monsters already gone at the sight of him.

"You replaced it long ago with sheer spite, remember?"

"Watch out how you speak to me, baby girl," he growled threateningly, like he used to.

"You haven't grown beyond well-deserved punishments just yet."

"Oh really?" I mocked, my fists clenching at my sides as every muscle in my body went taut with rage.

"Why don't you come closer and say this again, Old Man?" Then my father punched me in the face.