Chương 51: 45: Reflections

I put one foot in front of the other, dragging a not-so-dead weight behind me with every step. The fight had left me battered, bloody, exhausted and so mentally spent even moving around was a chore. Worse, every so often one or more of my powers would flicker and shut down, only to come up after several seconds. With my Old Man knocked out, his power-nullification struck blindly at the last target he'd used it against... or perhaps the greatest threat... or just the closest.

Powers followed intentions, and he had made his about me pretty clear. On the other hand... the whole world since the fight felt lighter. Everything looked a shade more vibrant, sounds were sharper and clearer, even exhaustion and pain didn't seem much of a toil. It was not a change in reality but in perspective. I'd not fled, I had not ignored him, I had not struck too weakly to matter in the long term, all three things that had happened before.

This victory, for all its difficulty, was the most free I'd ever felt in... years, probably. The conflicting emotions were... not nearly as bad as I'd been expecting, really. Looking at them with the benefits of hindsight, the entire encounter had felt less intense than some of the earlier life and death encounters of the past ten days. Certainly less world-shaking than my, Mandy's and Jerry's first few hours of fleeing from zombies or our first zombie kill. That thought made me stop, blink once, then look back.

Behind me and barely fitting the dark, damp, cramped sewer tunnel lay bruised and bleeding the monstrous mountain of muscle that had once been my father. Try as I might, I could see neither the tall, wiry, graying soldier that had been dishonorably discharged nor the alcoholic yet driven taskmaster in those tree-like limbs and almost truck-sized torso. There weren't even grey hairs or bloodshot eyes, the magical transformation into something more somehow making him seem less.

Without the anger and spite, the interest in turning me into a wind-up soldier that followed his orders, the all too familiar pride and perfectionism... it didn't look much like my father at all. In the gloom of the tunnel the bruises already looked days old, the cuts no longer bleeding and slowly getting smaller. A glance through Force Awareness saw broken bones coming together bit by bit, burst organs reforming and reminded me all the ways my father and I had been the same.

We both were persistent to a fault and both had developed regeneration. We both wanted to be strong, and both our core powers revolved around strength. If that idea held, what did it say of our differences? I sighed, then ripped a few steps of a ladder that once led to an exit above but now had been filled with debris from collapsed buildings. Force Adjustment made the iron malleable, reducing all forces holding it together by an order of magnitude.

Proximakinesis was then applied in fits and starts, the occasional power disruption making the work harder than it had to be but not impossible. Soon, the iron steps straightened into bars, then split into strips of metal, then lengthened and rolled into wires. Force Awareness revealed breaks, cavities, hairline cracks in the metal itself that human eyes could have never seen and guided Proximakinesis into fixing them.

Minute by minute the metal warmed up until it glowed a very dull red at the edges of human perception. The work was calming, almost meditative, letting me distance myself from the recent fight, the load of emotions that tangled uselessly. The wires had to be braided properly or they wouldn't support each other, had to be malleable enough not to break but not so soft they'd stretch and thin into uselessness.

It was a very physical puzzle that wasn't a metaphor for anything but it could have been; piece by piece it was solved until everything fit together neatly into a cable nearly as thick as my wrist; similar cabling to that used in suspension bridges. I tied the Old Man's wrists behind his back with one length of the cable, merging the ends seamlessly together into a figure-eight shape that was slightly too tight, then did the same for his legs.

Force Awareness and the recent improvements in my Vigilance and Reason made calculating forces, including the durability of objects, almost instinctive and turning the flickering power on the bindings revealed promising results. It was the kind of bindings that should safely hold thirty tons worth of load through mundane durability alone, stand up to a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty with barely any deformation before snapping. Given the awkward angle and lack of leverage they would maybe suffice...

but I was unwilling to settle for a maybe. Forcefield Creation, Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment were never affected by the nullifier at the same time, so I worked into infusing the bonds with fields that reduced any forces exerted by the prisoner to them several times over, increased the bindings' durability by the same margin, and added Proximaknesis to the strength of the bonds.

The fields could still be nullified, but nullifying them all at the same time was going to be hard, even harder for each strand of wiring having its own separate field. Then it was done and my last few doubts and uncertainty were gone. The monster was not just beaten but captured for good and not getting out with his own power. Given how the bindings had been made, he was not getting out at all without outside assistance from superpowered individuals or an industrial-scale plasma cutter.

He was certainly more secure than he would have been even dead at the hands of enemies with powerful Necromancy. And with that accomplishment for my own peace of mind an invisible dam broke and a torrent of energy filled me almost to bursting. xxxx"Welcome back," the midget greeted me when I got back to the resistance headquarters, not taking her eyes from the interactive map tracking enemy and survivor movements across the ruins of the city.

"Was your hunting as fruitful as expected?" The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. I didn't verbally respond to Verity's bullshit; I simply punched the ten year old in the back of the head. But the tiny terror was on the other side of the table, leaving me to wonder why I had just punched empty air. Or maybe not; maybe that was more of her bullshit.

"Yes, it is," she admitted and the only reason I didn't deck her was that it wouldn't work.

"Did you know?" I demanded.

"Did you know that he would be there, waiting, when you sent me in blind?" I threw off my load and he slammed head-first into a brick wall hard enough to crack it; it was an improvement to both his head and the headquarters' ambience.

"I could have died!"

"Yes you could have," she nodded in agreement and I suddenly felt vindicated in my anger "but it would have been your choice."

"... what?" Seriously, what? Was the midget just crazy or...

"You just escaped a sorcerer powerful enough to engage a large army and win, to level whole city blocks with minor efforts, to teleport around through lightning, or generate it far more strongly than those towers." She fixed me with those eyes that were no longer black orbs but fields of stars against the night sky swirling in empty sockets.

"You can move outside of time and fly faster than a speeding bullet; if your life was at risk when facing your genitor you could have left at any time."

"But... he would have killed those refugees!" is what I said before looking away. It was not the only reason I'd stayed and we both knew it.

"Yes, he would have. For that and other reasons you chose to stay. To face a threat both physical and, to you, mental." She flicked a finger and the map of the city shifted to show a blocky building with thick walls in the North that I did not remember seeing before. It was being swarmed by vast numbers of red figures - monsters - while a handful of blue figures - humans with powers - were trying to fend them off.

"For that alone you have my respect as both a warrior and a hero. No," she added with a chuckle "they are not the same thing, no matter what many people across history thought."

"Does this respect come with more information, plainly spoken?" I shot back sourly, not exactly happy with being supposedly 'respected' while being given the mushroom treatment.

"As much as can be spared." A few touches at the virtual representation of the battle, on a red figure in one place, a blue figure in another, set depictions of arrow-fire from the red figure hitting at the blue dot and missing only to strike a second blue figure in the back and bouncing. But that figure dodged in apparent panic... a split second before the depiction of a fireball went through the space the figure had occupied.

"You see, I sent you out not just because you were the only fighter on our side that was immediately available but precisely because you would be the safest given your new acquisition of various mobility powers. Given the sheer numbers disparity between us and the monsters, setting things up so we can have the maximum impact for a given amount of losses is not just my job but the only way you will all survive."

In the map, the building that had been struck by the fireball finally collapsed, cutting off the advance of a great number of enemies and reducing the open space the defenders had to cover.

"Often this includes sending people to do things that are not quite what they appear to be, usually doing things they would prefer not to, with or to people they do not like." She gave me a raised eyebrow that shone like a rainbow over the star-clusters that were her eyes.

"This is part of growing up, by the way."

"Hilarious." It really, really wasn't.

"Couldn't you have warned me about him, told me what to expect?"

"Would you have really gone if I had?" The map shifted. A lone figure was holding a street against a tide of monsters, slowly overwhelmed by their numbers. Verity touched a building nearby; seconds later, stray fire from some of the monsters hit something critical and explosive inside it and after shaking for a moment the building collapsed. That created an opening to another street where enemies had amassed.

I jumped up to do something, anything but a tide of monsters were already coming in from the side, reaching the lone defender's position and I had no idea where that place even was. A moment before it was overrun, the defender's figure dropped through the ground, vanishing in a tunnel before the ruin of a nearby car turned into a fireball that filled that corner of the map, swallowing both enemy forces.

"No." I looked at the map, then at Verity, then back at the map.

"If you'd told me my father was there I probably wouldn't have gone, or I would have evacuated the survivors while avoiding confrontation."

"Thus not removing one of the enemy's best pawns..." the map changed again, this time showing a small group of what looked like soldiers sneaking through an area that had been reduced to rubble.

"... but also losing some great personal resolution." A small but still more numerous group of monsters was heading in their direction. Verity tapped far to the side of the map... and some barely-standing ruin collapsed then and there. The soldiers froze, hid. The monsters moved to check out the cause of the collapse and were seen by the smaller group. Thus warned, the soldiers snuck around the distracted enemy patrol in relative safety.

"Sometimes a minor, seemingly irrelevant action can bring about great gains elsewhere."

"So I see..." In some ways, I still thought being sent blind into the breach was bullshit. But I could also see where the midget was coming from.

"... can you really manipulate the battlefield through a magic map?" So sue me, it sounded like a relevant question in my mind.

"No."

"But then..." I pointed at the map, which was again showing the whole city.

"Was all of that fake then?"

"No." She smiled, showing way more teeth than a human should have. Way more pointed, too.

"Now you're being deliberately obtuse."

"The truth often is that, yes." I really felt like strangling her then and there, despite the... understanding we just had. But then she relented... and I liked that even less.

"I do not actually need a map to see the city, or nudge chance one way or another." She shrugged.

"It's just a prop. People just tend to believe more in a map made of illusions, however factually accurate, than someone simply telling them what they're doing. Especially if said someone looks like a midget to them." I did not set the whole room on fire going out, but it was a near thing.