Chương 59: 51: Forced Exchange

The big ugly demon's blade descended with a crack as it broke the sound barrier, brimming with magic that made it tougher than it had any right to be and immense force put behind it to slice everything that dared stand up to it apart. Then a second, identical-seeming sword rose to meet it and they clashed edge-first to better grind at each other.

Instead of the grinding it expected, the first blade's demonic wielder took a faceful of sword as his own weapon bounced off the other in a shower of sparks almost as well as a rubber ball off a wall. Caught entirely by surprise, the green-grey skinned monster got deep slices into his face as his abused blade shattered into jagged shards against him. While he was distracted I swept my own blade through his midriff, bisecting him with ease and throwing black blood and viscera everywhere.

Thanks to Proximakinesis, none of it stuck anywhere on me as I paused to inspect my sword. The clash with the other demonic blade had left not a single scratch, had not even dulled its edge. A Force Adjustment effect layered over and permanently infused into its material reduced all forces applied to it several times over, unless they came from me. The same effect magnified the forces the sword applied to everything else by the same factor, hence the demon's attack bouncing off far harder than his own swing.

It was not the only effect the sword had, though. A pair of skeletal mages shot purple and green projectiles at Jack's back while he was busy fighting another sword-demon. A spatial leap took me there an Forced Acceleration gave me enough speed to bat at the magical projectiles with the flat of the blade. Where before much of their magic had gone through both shields and physical objects, this time they shattered into showers of sparks, scattering uselessly across the room.

A violet-hot beam sliced through the undead attackers, causing bone and petrified ligaments to explosively sublimate then going on to carve a finger-deep line in the chamber's black wall. Several more mages shot projectiles at the beam's origin, but Mandy didn't even bother to dodge. The enemy magic caught fire mid-flight, turning into a conflagration that spiraled into an accretion disc then disappeared into the tip of her staff. That energy was returned with interest, obliterating those enemies as well.

The demon sneaking on the redhead sorceress caught a glowing gold shotgun slag to the back of its head and stumbled. It recovered quickly and turned around to face its attacker; that gained it a second explosive slug to the face which actually improved both its nose and its dentistry by blasting off the uglier pieces. It raised its sword to parry the next shots and got both its knees and genitalia perforated.

Why a construct meant for war needed to be anatomically correct raised some questions about the Mavethans' intentions and/or sanity. Whatever their answer, Dallas winked at both Mandy and me before pointing Bertha at his next target, the silvery beam coming out of the huge gun's muzzle vaporizing a demon's eye across the room. Trying to find Jack didn't work, even with my enhanced senses. There were signs of his passage, though.

A demon charging me suddenly getting both its eyes shot out to stumble and impale itself on my sword. A skeletal mage stumbling as its knee cracked, its black beam missing Mandy and being reduced to ashes moments later. A hail of bullets appearing out of nowhere, disrupting a charging imp formation just long enough for Dallas to reload. A dozen more momentary contributions that had completely disproportionate results to the force put in because they happened exactly at the right time and place.

My senses finally caught up with the guy flitting around a corner, his form barely disturbing the air as he walked and indistinguishable from a patch of shadow in most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Both his movements and the firing of his weapons were entirely silent and mostly insubstantial, the projectiles solidifying a split second before impact.

He was near-intangible himself but not invisible; I would have seen him if I hadn't been relying on my Force Awareness too much but once I had seen his shadowy outline, sensing through his phasing out of normal space was a matter of adjusting focus, looking sideways through another vector... and a reminder not to get complacent.

"That... seems to be... all of them." My best friend leaned heavily on her staff, still not fully recovered from having to burn a path through the tower's outer wall. Her clothes were more blood, bone dust and ickier things than fabric at this point and her face was pale, with dark circles under her eyes.

"How many more floors you reckon there are?" The constant fighting across six vast chambers each filled with a small army worth of opponents had not helped.

"The chambers have consistently been a hundred and forty-five feet high. Given the thickness of the ceilings and the invaders' love for the number six... I'd say we are a third of the way up." What I did not mention was the number of rooms left did not correlate to difficulty. The first floor had just been full of zombies - possibly every single normal zombie left in the city, since we hadn't seen any of them in the streets for days now.

The second and third had had thousands of imps flying overhead and pelting us with tiny fireballs and even more sword-wights, skeletal archers and executioners on the ground trying to distract us in melee until we'd killed them all. Floors four and five had been mostly skeletal archers screened by some of the larger and uglier corrosive ghouls. This last one had been the first time the new, more dangerous enemies made an appearance in small numbers but had otherwise been full of low-tier enemies.

"Found the exit!" Dallas shouted from the top of a winding staircase.

"Same deal as last time; trap door blocked by huge weight, couldn't budge it a hair." He leaped off, fell forty feet to the floor and landed with all the grace of a cat. Well, any mundane cat would have broken bones after a forty-foot dive ending on solid metal but you get the idea.

"It was glowing too. More of them symbols than last time and they were shinier." We all groaned at that. It sounded like another stupid alarm. With a weight blocking the path even I would have to put in effort to move, we could neither surprise the enemy nor sneak through. We'd tried opening the passage normally and blasting our way through the floors before.

In both cases it had taken long enough for the enemies on the other side to be arrayed around our arrival point and ready to hit us with everything but the kitchen sink - but only because Mavethans did not seem to have kitchen sinks.

"Screw this! I'm not going through another fight where we'll have to slug it out for fifteen minutes before it gets anywhere." I said, picking up a sword-demon's blade and weakening its cohesion until I could slowly reshape it with Proximakinesis.

"I thought you got stronger over time?" Jack asked. Then he gulped down half a flask of what was definitely not water and passed the rest to Dallas. Neither Mandy nor I got offered any, ostensibly because we were teenagers and shouldn't drink but hey, we could still kill enemies if we wanted to. Eh, they probably wanted to keep the good stuff to themselves.

"Doesn't last long after the fight, or I could have blitzed this whole place already. Stupid fantasy dungeon shit..." If I didn't know better - and I didn't - I'd say this whole thing was designed to delay us specifically, just so the big bad could finish his doomsday plot. In my hands, the sword had already taken the shape of a disc two feet across.

"Dallas, start blasting through the ceiling on the opposite side of the room, will you? I got an idea but it'll take more disks and thus time. Plus if it works, I want the enemy to be caught by surprise." As the old hunter's enormous gun started shooting beams of golden energy that normally turned things to dust, I started on my second disc. With each blast digging a fraction of an inch into the super-tough metal the tower had been made of, I reckoned there was time to make forty or fifty of the things.

The enchantments on them were much simpler than on the guns I'd improved, with simpler shapes and even smaller volume so the base cost would be significantly less. Given our time limit, they didn't need to be permanent either, only to work for a few hours at best. But first...

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y3m16d Word of Force [41 pts] Force Adjustment III, Force Awareness II, Forcefield Creation II, Forced Acceleration III, Greater Proximakinesis IV, Immutable Force II, Lasting Force II Other Powers [24 pts] Chronal Leap I, Empowering Regeneration IV, Focused Invulnerability I, Instant Action II, Retributive Defense I, Super Suit I, Spatial Distortion I, Spatial Leap I power points: 8/73 Attributes [1/73] Might 36, Agility 18, Reason 6, Vigilance 9, Ego 18, Luck 2 The enemies on the lower levels had been barely enough to push me at all, so not getting much from them was to be expected.

The stronger enemies on the last level had been enough to gain another power and attribute point each though, which meant I could finally get the next tier of Force Adjustment. A moment before committing to the purchase though, a memory arose in my mind; skeletal mages blasting me through most of my defenses and suit because their magic was entirely non-physical. For the second time ever, I was uncertain about the direction my powers should go.

More raw force was the whole point of having so many synergistic abilities in the same theme, but it wouldn't do much if enemies could simply ignore it. OK, I could still bash in their fleshless skulls and if I did it quickly enough things might work out in my favor... but that was relying on getting lucky that the enemy wouldn't have too many minions specialized in countering a physical attacker which as seen in our last big battle had already failed.

Unbeatable power and nothing else worked only if it was, you know, actually unbeatable. Unbeatable power except for a narrow vulnerability the enemy knows about and can exploit isn't nearly as good; just ask Achilles, or those guys on the Death Star. In the interest of not joining the overconfident dead, I spent half my hard-earned power points on raising Immutable Force to the next rank. And because one never knew what tricks the enemy had come up with, the other half went into improving Instant Action.

Finally, my sole attribute point went into Agility. At a rank of nineteen, I didn't quite feel like Spider-man but both my balance and proprioception had increased to the point that orientation and survivable levels of acceleration didn't impair my physical actions beyond the grossly physical interference; I'd feel as comfortable fighting sideways or upside-down as on a level surface.

As for my flexibility, accuracy and grace, if it could technically be done with stop-motion filming or indefinite repetitions by a human, it was routine for me. No dodging lightning or batting bullets out of the air without boosts but dodging bullets or jumping out of a speeding car and through the window of another speeding car going the other direction... maybe I'd have some fun trying some stunts once we all got out of this. xxxx"You guys ready?"

I stood on top of the spiral staircase leading to the next level, a depression in the ceiling leading to the so-called trapdoor, a twenty-foot-wide cylindrical screw that fit into the opening. To open it you not only had to lift it but rotate it while doing so to unscrew and remove it.

It was sufficiently thick, tough and magically protected that bashing through it would take even longer than unscrewing it unless Mandy put in the effort to burn through; my own powers could not affect more than a couple inches into it for some reason. Not for the first time I wondered just why the tower had been designed this way. Wouldn't it be easier to simply have no entrance at all and force us to blast our way in every time?

Not that it mattered just then; the seventy-fourth disc stuck to the obstacle's underside with a very loud clang of metal on metal and Dallas was about ready to blast through on the other side. He'd actually had to stop and wait for me when I ran out of demon swords to reforge and had to rework all the discs I'd already made into thinner ones. More of a delay but if it worked...

"Go!" The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. The old hunter blasted the last inches of metal while at the same time I pressed a bit harder on the discs with Proximakinesis. Their enchantment was simple enough; a Proximakinesis effect that echoed what force I applied to the discs... at the full power of what the enchantment could do. That was only about half of my full strength and the same effect applied on the same object did not stack.

Each disc was a different object however and while I split my power to seventy-four discs each disc only cared about itself. Metal groaned and squealed, the rotating door pushed by a total of thirty-eight times my maximum strength. Metal grooves as thick as my arm bent then shattered, the metal cylinder pushing through them with the force of a speeding train. It popped off like a cork from a bottle of champagne and I followed it to the level above.

Thousands of monsters took up most of the seventh floor, the weakest and most numerous of them skeletal archers backed by shades. Those I ignored; my targets were the skeletal mages first and the sword-demons second. Conveniently enough, all of those had been arrayed in the perfect formation to ambush the group... across the room and completely out of position to handle me. Faster than a speeding bullet, I descended on the rear ranks of skeletal mages, an empowered demon blade on either hand.

Just flying through them completely gutted their ranks, two hundred of them hacked apart before they could react. For the first time in several battles waves of energy flowed through my veins as my magical power kicked up a notch, then another. I tabled the information for after the battle and charged into the second rank of mages, where I slew dozens more. They were slowly reacting to me however, many of them halfway through spells already.

Undead did not feel confusion, surprise or fear, I had learned; they reacted both quickly and methodically to the situation. The mind directing their moves however could be surprised, so it was after a good third of them had been destroyed that one of them triggered a shield of black magic that ate a good portion of my kinetic energy and momentum before the caster was decapitated by my blade.

I juked under and rolled over black beams that would have done much the same offensively but could not do the same against the dozens upon dozens of grey tendrils reaching out to ensnare me. More and more tied themselves around my limbs and waist, dozens instead of the nine that had stopped me before. When the enemy deemed me sufficiently ensnared they pulled back... and burst to mere smoke without slowing me down.

Immutable Force III: Resistance to all alteration except through physical means, immunity to supernatural negative emotion, disease, or entrapment.

"Yeah bastards, how did you like that?" Completely ignoring the now ineffectual tentacle mages, I proceeded to destroy any dark mages that revealed themselves. The sword-demons were scrambling to get to me through their annoying "teleport-in-the-target's-path" power but they were being blocked by their own allies all around me and the fact they could not teleport inside anything solid.

Twice they managed to find a gap only to discover too late that anything over a hundred pounds moving at Mach five is more an artillery shell than they are a target. Incendiary arrows fell like rain. Even at the ridiculous speeds I was moving, even turning half a dozen times a second, there were simply enough skeletal archers around to land hits by sheer volume of fire.

The burning liquid metal mostly splashed against me ineffectually, dealing scrapes only because of me ramming into it at those speeds rather than the enemies weapons. My regeneration easily kept up with those minor irritants as it did with the occasional cut from a blade demon so I ignored them and reveled in the slowly but steadily increasing power it gave me. Slowly from my perspective, the monsters got organized.

They got those sword-demons up to my face to slow me down, set up mages to fire green and black projectiles at any opening in melee and generally made a nuisance of themselves. Then, after they'd all focused on me properly and were pushing me into a corner, a beam of violent destruction cut through their vulnerable ranks. It was followed by the booming barks of Bertha that exploded anything skeletal outright and burned deep gouges into the demons with disintegration shells.

And when monsters started turning around to the force that flanked them - again - shots coming out of a near-invisible shadow pierced through eye sockets or other critical locations. Assaulted from two sides by foes they couldn't really contend with, the monsters folded like cheap props in five minutes of battle. After the incredibly annoying slog of the past six layers, it felt awesome to just cut loose on opponents that didn't have time to prepare.

"That... was easy," I commented with a broad smile when the last enemy fell.

"Let's do it again." xxxx The revolving door blocking passage to the sixteenth floor shattered as easily as the previous eight, pushed forward by the discs and its own momentum until it slammed to the ceiling above hard enough to shake the tower. My boost from prior battles having yet to fade, I burst in all keyed up for another fight. What awaited in the room was something far, far worse.

"Ya okay, lass? I'm not hearing any-" Dallas and the others came in from the Bertha-made tunnel, jumping in to see if something had finally gotten to me. I had, after all, stayed silent for a good two minutes.

"Those... are they really..."

"Yes... yes they are. I checked." Over a thousand catatonic men and women lay naked and bound in chains on the ground of the dark chamber, tied up by a single chain around their throats so they would be forced to lie face up and stare at nothing. Not that any of them appeared to pay any attention whatsoever to their condition. They just sat there, barely breathing, or doing anything at all.

Force awareness revealed that their hearts still beat and their lungs still took in air properly, but lacked the acuity to reveal physiological details so I couldn't tell what was wrong with them... if anything except the shock and horror of being captives of monsters was wrong at all.

"We got to get them out of here," Mandy said, no, demanded.

"If we leave them and more monsters come up they might die."

"They will die anyway if we fail," Jack retorted with a growl and the two stared daggers at each other.

"Think, girl, think! The only reason anyone would keep prisoners chained like that in a place that is more superweapon than base would be to slow down anyone trying to stop their plan to blow up the whole state." He looked at both Dallas and me.

"You know we have to leave them behind. What would we do for them anyway, take them with us? No way we can protect them. Escort them back down the tower? It would take hours."

"You want to leave them like this?!" Mandy screeched and her eyes literally lit on fire.

"Look at them. Look how miserable they are! We need to help them somehow!" Jack shook his head and stared intently at both Dallas and me again.

"We can at least set them free," I spoke up while the old hunter decided to keep his silence.

"It wouldn't take more than a minute to release them all so at least they can flee if something happens." Not that they looked capable of doing even that on their own. Hearing no other argument coming up either for or against, I started flitting around with superspeed, snapping chains like cotton strings with Proximakinesis and giving the captives a good prod in the hope it would knock them out of their stupor.

Maybe it did something or maybe seeing their bonds broken gave them new hope because in ones and twos they stumbled to their feet and started milling aimlessly about. Not quite like zombies; more like drunk or drugged people. Wishing I could do something more for them without jeopardizing our success, I flew back to the others.

"Anybody seen the stairs to the next level? Just having to see them like this is depressing."

"Haven't seen one," Jack informed me with a disgruntled growl. And he had been looking for it; in all previous floors it had been easy to find.

"Yo boys and girls, do you smell something weird?" Dallas asked, carefully scanning our surroundings.

"Not bad, just odd. Like fruit left out in the sun that haven't gotten bad yet."

"No, nothing." It was official; the old hunter had a much better nose than me despite those points I'd put into Awareness. Then again, he probably had some scouting or hunting related power and tracking by scent would fit the theme.

"Me neither," Mandy added. Jack just gave us a negatory grunt.

"Well, it's a bit of a funny smell." The old man sniffed.

"Coming from all around us, too." I frowned. Something in the back of my mind screamed that this whole situation didn't smell right, pun intended. There was something we were missing, something we couldn't see that seemed a bit familiar about it. I checked all around with Force Awareness again. If it was something on the air maybe I could find where it was coming from? The attempt did work - in part.

It did not reveal what was in the air around us as it didn't have nearly enough sensitivity for it, but it did notice something did exist. Something that wasn't a gas as anything gaseous would have been completely beyond its abilities to detect by more like... dust?

"Guys, I think I need to sit down," muttered and did just that, slipping a little as she did so.

"I think all those fights left me more tired than I thought, what about you?"

"Only a bit sleepy," Jack grunted.

"Guess we could rest for-""No!"

"No!" Both Dallas and I had spoken as one, staring suspiciously at everything. The old hunter raised his portable cannon but there was nothing to shoot at, no enemy to fight.

"We need to get out of here now, all of us." I wholeheartedly agreed, but didn't quite know why. Dallas gave me the answer.

"Room doesn't have an exit, bad guy wants us to stay here. We came in looking for a fight, to get through the last couple of rooms. Now there's an odd smell and ye start wanting to sit and rest?" Yes, that was just it. That was what my gut and/or paranoia had been trying to tell me. I stared harder not at us or our surroundings but the only other thing in this place worth mentioning; the captives. They hadn't been in cages difficult to free them from. They hadn't been guarded.

They hadn't even been trapped as we'd half expected them to be... or so we'd thought. As I strained it to its limits, Force Awareness picked up some tiny little bits of denser mass amid the exhalations of the prisoners. Either mist, or dust, or something else, the only reason I noticed was how many of them were there before they dispersed in the air. Then tentacles shot out of every single prisoner's mouth, searching for something to latch on to.

Several hundred tongue-like things wrapped me up in the instant of surprise, forming a cocoon from head to toe. They didn't feel like tongues, more like flexible wires of tough fiber coated in a thin layer of oily flesh. With them exposed and practically up my nose, the cloying sweet stench of rot was obvious. We might have caught it sooner but exposure to human corpses and mass death for two weeks straight had inured us all to the foulness.

The tendrils tightened against my first attempt at escaping and to my surprise held pretty well. Right, Immutable Force only prevented entrapment by supernatural means and they were obviously physical as their disgusting, worm-like wiggling against my everything reminded me. I flew up and was bogged down by weight.

Through the thin cocoon Force Awareness saw the hundreds of fake prisoners that were trying to hold me down had tied themselves together in a carpet of pure ugly as more tentacles sprouted from their flesh. I was almost certain I knew what they were; the improved versions of those plant-zombie things I'd fought before. Faster, stronger, tougher, with tentacles much more resilient than the originals. Unfortunately for them, I'd also grown stronger since our last encounter - by an order of magnitude.

The tendrils were more akin to strings than ropes and while enough strings could hold someone down in the absence of leverage, Proximakinesis meant I always had both leverage and a way to apply it; the cocoon was torn through in seconds. Those seconds had been enough for the rest of the group to be similarly captured, though the loud booms and tears that appeared in one of said capture pods was a sign Dallas was still fighting.

I was halfway to it when Mandy's pod exploded, a fire-wreathed, enraged sorceress floating out of it.

"You dare lay your filthy limbs on me!?" Her clothes were torn, even burned through in places, but not from her own flames that somehow were reversing the damage done to them. Her long, crimson hair was in disarray and she was crying.

"DIE!" Apparently, she hadn't taken the prisoners being very touchy-feely monsters very well. A green conflagration swept out of her in a ring, withering every tentacle it struck instantly and setting their owners on fire. Dallas had blasted himself halfway out already and I pulled him the rest of a way in a jiffy, but Jack was silent... too silent.

I ripped into the last cocoon to find the man bleeding from a thousand gouges where the tendrils had tried to grow into him and both his arms broken where they'd torn his guns away.

"Told you..." he gasped, coughed blood and failed to get up, "... should have left them alone." Then his eyes closed and his head fell back. A touch and a glance was enough to find every bit of internal bleeding, of which there was more than a little. I started working with proximakinesis, stretching it into his body to pinch wounds closed, set broken bones and pull blood away from where it had no place being.

It was much easier and faster than any equivalent surgery would have been, but still neither easy nor quick. It took me fifteen minutes to stabilize him so he wouldn't die and I could only hope his superhuman resilience could deal with any poisons. By then Mandy was done setting fire on everything and Dallas had sat down to rest. When Jack didn't die immediately after I'd finished patching him up I lay on the ground with a relieved sigh. Then the old hunter reminded me we didn't have time for rest.

"Lass, I'm done," he told me; laying Bertha across his legs.

"And that's old man speak for..." I shot back less patiently than I should have. In my defense, well... no, I had nothing.

"Damned tentacle zombies got me good. Right leg's broken, I'm feeling too sleepy fer it to be natural and Bertha's too bent to shoot straight." He took out his ever-present flask and emptied it as he'd done at least half a dozen times since our mission started.

"Don't think I'm coming with ya to repay what bastard's leading this lot for his hospitality."

"His name's Mot. The one time I met him he sounded like some posh noble prick." Losing Dallas' support hurt. His gun and powers were deadlier against single enemies against anyone but Mandy and we'd yet to find an enemy he couldn't wound just a little. Jack's loss on top of that, with the man fighting for his life... it was up to us and my best friend was far from fully rested.

"Heh, funny name. Pretentious though," Dallas mused and emptied his flask once more. Forget about where all the booze came from, how did he put it away? Did he have an endless stomach superpower?

"Pretentious how?"

"Well, if you know Hebrew... it means 'Death'." He shrugged.

"Oddly fitting.

'Maveth' means death too, by the way. Guess his people were bad at names."

"More like terminally goth." We both chuckled, his turning into a deep laugh and trailing off to a cough.

"You and Red give him a few blows for the rest of us, hey?"

"Will do," I promised. It was a promise I intended to more than fulfill soon enough...