Chương 60: 52: Absolute Pin

There was only one last floor before the top and by our count we still were only a third of the way to the deadline. So instead of barging in like a pair of meatheads, we sat down with the last of Aunt Sarah's cookies, a flask of juice, a Mars bar that may or may not have beer recovered from a flooded shop downtown and a pack of bacon strips.

"Breakfast of champions," Mandy muttered, frying the bacon strips in mid-air with her flames.

"I would kill for some salad right about now." Unfortunately, except for a small amount grown through magic, all the perishables had long since, well, perished. I had no idea how the bacon had survived a couple of weeks of electricity being down more often than not; maybe all the weird chemicals its label mentioned had something to do with it.

"We can get some after it's all over," I suggested, calculating the logistics.

"Ice cream, too. I think I could fly to Savannah and back in five minutes?" I took a sip of juice and saw it was good. A use of Forced Acceleration to make the sip last longer subjectively didn't work but that was OK; I just took another sip.

"Bet you don't even remember where Savannah is supposed to be," Mandy told me, all doom and gloom. She poked the bacon through the flames with her bare finger, then licked it.

"You'd get lost and find yourself in Canada."

"What? No!" The red-headed traitor rolled her eyes at my protests and poked the bacon again.

"It's just up the coast, in Georgia. I'd literally see the city from above, no way I'd miss it!"

"Which one of us failed that Geography test last semester?" She snarked while cutting off her flames and floating down the bacon strips in two foot-wide, hovering, translucent red discs.

"You'd totally miss it, fly somewhere you shouldn't have and some idiot behind a fancy desk would panic and order missiles launched at you."

"It was one test! One! And I'd been dealing with Julia's shit at the time." I picked up the hovering disk. It was somehow made of a thin layer of plasma that made things float without burning them? No, there was magic draining the heat back into the disc as soon as it was transferred so only the pressure from infrared light was left. Huh, light could apply pressure. Neat! And I guess the bacon was good, too.

"Speaking of, what did you think of her 'twins' act?" Mandy's eyes lit with an energy I didn't like.

"Bet they made a pass at you."

"Ugh, don't remind me. My whole stay at the school was a disaster! Julia wasn't even the worst of it." Kind of the opposite, really, but I'd never give that girl the benefit of the doubt again.

"Should have left on the first sign of bullshit but I was desperate for any info about you and Jerry and the whole thing kind of escalated." To avoid thinking more about it, I called dibs on the Mars bar - all of it. Mandy was only picking at the bacon strips and giving it the evil eye, which proved that even in a magical apocalypse when people could literally choose how they wanted to look certain habits died hard.

The rest of the meal passed with more idle small talk and occasional bullshitting but it wasn't the only thing we did. Mandy fed streams of flame to her staff, an amulet and two bracelets made of silver, working at a slow pace that let her body relax just a little after all our previous fights. Since I'd enchanted my own gear ahead of time, I melted one of my force-discs down to make a set of eight rings for her.

Hopefully they'd help bolster her defenses now that the boys were out of commission and we had to go through what would probably be the worst battles by ourselves.

"I'd always dreamed of becoming a witch, you know," my best friend spoke up more than an hour later as we were getting ready to face whatever the Big Bad had in store for us.

"Was rather obsessed with fantasy books all the way through middle school." I didn't say it had been painfully obvious, because it had. Nor did I bring up all the times she'd dressed up as a witch during Halloween, or how much effort she'd put into those costumes. All of us had had impossible dreams growing up... and I could see where this was going.

"Now I have magic and it is every bit as awesome and fantastic as I'd ever imagined it would be." She put on the set of rings I'd made for her with quick, jerky, angry motions and her eyes literally shot fiery sparks.

"It's the rest of the world that's shit, other people who have magic too. They got this miraculous gift that could fulfill their every dream too and what do they make of it? Death and disgusting monsters and doomsday artifacts. Why?" She glared around, at the tower, its occupants, or even the universe, demanding answers.

"How dare they turn wonder into terror?"

"I guess some people can only enjoy things by breaking them." And wasn't this such a bullshit justification, or what? Everyone could always be better but chose otherwise.

"This Mot guy is like that. He leveled our city for power." Textbook supervillain, really. That whole magic system of his was shit and that we had to use it to survive was worse. But he had to be stopped and we got to be the ones to do it so there really was only one question left.

"How do you want to go about this? This guy's not a mindless monster so-""Screw him," she interrupted harshly.

"He killed most of the people we ever knew. You rip him to pieces, I feed said pieces into my fire and that's all the consideration he deserves." Not exactly what I'd been going for but OK. I'd been worried about my best friend because most people, good people, couldn't commit to something like that but apparently, it wasn't going to be a problem. It was a him or all the rest of us situation in any case... and I chose us. xxxx The two of us burst into the fifteenth floor, expecting a tide of monsters.

When we came upon a nearly completely empty floor we actually got even more tense and worried. The whole fake prisoners trap had only been the previous floor, after all. When six humanoid forms walked out of the gloom, we were actually a bit relieved to have a straightforward fight in our hands. Because it would be a fight.

"Humanoid" in this case meant human males built and clothed like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his role as Conan the Barbarian, except for their hair and eyes. Those were both glowing and color-coded; blood red, neon green, lightning blue, snow white, dull grey and utterly black. They wielded the same huge serrated swords as the blade-demons in one arm, a round metal shield strapped to their off-arm covering them from shoulder to knee.

If they were what they appeared to be, and the bad guys would totally fuse their demons and mages into one nastier whole if they could, this was not going to be an easy fight. Wordlessly but far more fluidly than any previous monster would have, they split to flank us; red, white and grey went around Mandy's side while green, blue and black aimed for me.

That they had been made with a countering strategy in mind would have been harder to notice if they hadn't been color-coded but maybe the bad guys couldn't hide it any more than we could hide the types of magic we had when actively using them. It made things a little easier, but I suspected a trap. In a world of magic always look the gift horse in the mouth; it might be a vampire horse only waiting for nightfall to horribly murder you. Instead of waiting for them to get closer, Mandy and I struck first.

She threw one of her violet beams of doom at the red guy while I charged at the one with the black magic. The world slowed down, everything moving more than an order of magnitude slower but still so quickly a normal human would have only seen a blur. Mandy's beam struck first, burning into the red warrior's chest while his shield moved around to block the blow. Incredible heat splashed off the metal as reddish runes glowed, actually melting into the floor it was deflected onto.

The warrior got out with a third-degree burn the size of my fist, so we got the better of that exchange. Then I slammed into a shield that hadn't been in my path a split-second before as the blue warrior teleported in a crackle of lightning. I struck the shield with the force of a heavy artillery shell, knocking the Conan-expy fifty feet back but at the same time got a mild sting as electricity arced up my arms. Then the green guy appeared to my left in a flash, already swinging.

My left arm rose to parry the blow, the metal bracer I'd added over my costume meeting the glowing green blade... which passed right through it as if it weren't there. It did the same with my costume and my arm, the swing continuing unimpeded into my side. My costume was ignored again but everything under it most definitely wasn't. I yelped as the phantom swing bit into my side with little resistance, stinging like a swarm of bees, yet there was no actual wound.

Turning to face him I kicked out, only for him to catch the kick in his shield. Like the blue warrior before him, green was launched back and I was fairly sure his shield had been dented at least a little, but my heel also felt as if I'd stepped on a nail. Then black magic guy shot a death beam at my back, which stole some of my momentum and a bit of stamina. On the other side of the room, Mandy was having similar problems.

The white warrior was surrounded by a whirlwind that seemed capable of blunting and scattering her fire-beams, denying her the concentration of firepower that could drill through those guys in a second. Big red seemed capable of tanking them more than the others through sheer physicality and was moving quickly enough to be a threat up close while the grey one was manifesting chains of all things.

Fortunately for Mandy, the moment both red's fists and grey's chains struck they shot back with multiple times the force. The red warrior was actually knocked down by the backlash and since he'd charged ahead of his fellows to get into melee he also happened to be out of mutual support range. A violet beam blasted him in the throat and by the time the wind-wielder teleported in to block it his throat had been turned into a smoking ruin.

Meanwhile, the chains guy was reevaluating his entire strategy because about half the rings I'd given the redhead sorceress were about preventing grapples and melee attacks. Mandy still wouldn't like being hit but melee enemies would like it a lot less. As for me, green and blue teleported in to double-team me while black stood back to take potshots - but two could play that game. Chronal Leap took me to where I was a second before or slated to be an equal length of time in the future...

but with Forced Acceleration and Force Adjustment used in tandem I could act the equivalent of thirteen subjective seconds in that span of actual time. I couldn't hack apart enemies or even move or change my surroundings because Chronal Leap took only motion into account and only for me, but planning to circle around the enormous room to pick up speed then arrange for the Chronal Leap to end with me an inch behind an enemy and about to ram at them at Mach seven?

The black magic warrior didn't just bounce; he came along for a ride that ended with him sandwiched between me and the tower's wall so hard his lower torso was crushed like an overripe tomato. Unfortunately, green and blue made me pay for that one. Teleporting in before I could get my bearings after roleplaying a cruise missile, they delivered a double shield-bash that squeezed me between the electrified shield from the front and the ominously glowing green one from behind.

My back stung like someone had taken a switch at it, while the electricity arcing down my front kept giving jolts like a weak taser. With both muscles and powers I pushed at the shield before me but the warriors braced with both arms, had a ridiculous leverage advantage and even relatively weak shocks were a little debilitating. Chronal Leap required that I be able to move in the first place and Spatial Leap had a weight limit the many items in contact with me easily exceeded and could not selectively exclude them.

My regeneration was already working to keep me healthy, if not pain-free, and more strength and power slowly trickled in, but I wasn't about to let these bastards have the upper hand. A touch of Proximakinesis triggered the enchantment on the chain around my neck and an invisible force-field weakened all forces within a couple of yards that weren't exerted by me.

This didn't do a thing for the pressure keeping me pinned; it was already being reduced by my stronger personal Force Adjustment like any other blow against me and stacking the same effect twice did not work. What it did work on was all the other forces that weren't directly affecting me and weren't inside living beings. Unfortunately, the warriors seemed to count as living so they didn't suffer critical existence failure from their bodies becoming unable to handle their blood pressure.

But the air pressure outside their bodies? That abruptly became negligible, forcing a great rush of air to fill everything around me... and also caused the unaffected air within the warriors' bodies to explosively decompress out of their mouths. Both of them were too tough to be majorly affected by either of those events but they were momentarily hurt and distracted, the equivalent of a punch to the solar plexus. That gave me the chance to renew my efforts, pushing them back easily.

Not because their strength had weakened so much, but because their feet slid as if the ground had suddenly become ice, robbing them of their leverage. Because friction? That was another of the forces that were affected. Then another touch of Proximakinesis on my new necklace simultaneously turned off the first enchantment and activated its opposite.

All the air that had rushed in to fill that volume where air pressure had become weaker now found itself at a hundred times normal atmospheric pressure with no barrier to keep it in. The equivalent of two tons of gases exploded outwards at the speed of sound, sweeping everything in their path. The shockwave kicked my two dance partners back and slammed them into the walls but they were only stunned. I was about to deal with them when Mandy's scream drew my attention.

My best friend was down with the red warrior pinning her. Somehow, he'd managed to grab her in melee despite the backlash and was now doing his best to force the rings off her fingers. Worse, the white warrior was standing over them both, sucking away every bit of flame Mandy conjured before it could more than make the red warrior's blood-coating boil, which didn't seem to be hurting him any.

A look was enough to realize how it'd happened; the red one just used a lot less than his full strength so the backlash was not enough to knock him back, but even a quarter of his full strength applied to Mandy was enough to have her struggling. But how was he even alive? Hadn't she burned his throat off? No time for solving mysteries; I teleported over there and kicked the white guy so hard he bounced off the ceiling twice.

Then I ripped the red warrior off my best friend and sank my fist into his solar plexus so hard my hand sank into his flesh to above my wrist. He spat out a cloud of red mist in my face and I staggered. No, it wasn't poison; quite the opposite, really. A good night's sleep none of us had seen for the past two weeks. A runner's high before breakfast in the morning. A warm, relaxing bath. The pumping of my heart as I killed monsters left and right with abandon. The rage at seeing my friends getting hurt.

My first kiss with a boy when I was sixteen, before he'd proven to be just an asshole. The storm of emotions and sensations hit me all at once, and for a split second I was very much out of it. But this was a battle of superhumans where a split second was enough for several blows, and the red guy's sword was already digging into my sternum when I shook off the mental sucker punch. There was a crunch, a lot of pain, then the sword caught against my ribs...

before my reactivated Proximakinesis blasted it and its wielder into the air. BOOM! A great explosion shook the room behind me and a warrior's headless corpse flew fifty feet before landing with a splat. Mandy stumbled forward, holding a shield with a blackened hole burned all the way through it and despite her obviously impaired condition the remaining warriors kept a wary distance.

"Are you OK?" I asked her, keeping an eye out for teleporting attackers. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"I just made that asshole's brain hotter than the surface of the sun so quickly it exploded," she informed me with a manic glow in her eyes. Correction, there was actual magic fire coming off them now.

"I feel a lot better than just 'OK'. Let's see him regenerate from that!"

"They can regenerate?" Well of course they could. The red one had recovered from an incinerated throat after all.

"No matter, we know their tricks now, we can take them." Just then a black mist blew in from where I'd thoroughly splattered the black warrior, seeping into the bodies of the surviving four. As they absorbed it they grew half a foot and proportionately bulkier and their weapons melted, changed. The shields became breastplates while the huge swords turned into spiked maces, one second crackling with each warrior's original color, the next turning completely black.

White mist from the warrior Mandy had decapitated came in next, his corpse melting away and similarly getting incorporated into our surviving foes, obviously making them stronger and spreading the armor over their limbs.

"Maya, the next time you feel like issuing an open challenge to the universe?" The redhead glared at me, her staff hissing as a continuous spiral of glowing runes were carved on its surface.

"Just shut up and keep punching. Things can always get worse." xxxx A metal chain thicker than my arm wrapped itself around my arms upper torso. Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment immediately blasted at it but it shone black, negating much of the kinetic energy and remained where it was. Then a giant mace crackling with both lightning and black magic slammed into my lower back, sending me around in a half-circle that ended at the nearest wall.

If the past five minutes had proven anything was that fighting the four enhanced warriors was proving to be harder than winning against the six had been. They had grown stronger, tougher, smarter and they could use two different magic types now. I tore off the chains with a bit of effort, then used a five-foot length like a whip to strike at the grey warrior's legs at considerably more than the speed of sound.

The length of chain came completely apart, exploding into shrapnel from the force of my blow and also breaking both the target's shin-guards and his shins beneath. Unfortunately he was already regenerating - another thing the empowerment seemed to have improved - while the lightning-wielder fired bolts of both electricity and dark magic. The attempt to weaken and maybe stun me was secondary; he was winning time for the other warrior to heal. Yeah, their tactics had gotten smarter too.

As I teleported around, I clicked my two armbands together, activating their secondary enchantment. Two invisible blades of Proximakinesis appeared around me and started rotating at great speed. They had opposite spins and since each rotated around its own armband, their rotational planes changed as I moved my arms around, making them incredibly hard to predict even if you knew they were there.

The next time the two warriors tried to flank me got a nasty surprise of the invisible blender type but with how they'd grown stronger and more armored, they only got sliced up a bit instead of hacked apart. I was growing stronger too thanks to Empowering Regeneration, but my previously enchanted items weren't... and neither did Mandy.

Half a room away a titanic battle between beams of incredible heat, gusts of freezing wind, a dozen constructs made of flames so hot and bright they were like miniature stars and blasts of neon-green radiation followed by waves of blood clashed.

The conflagration that had once been Mandy, now a fiery avatar a dozen feet tall wielding a mace of plasma in each hand longer than I was tall was actually winning the tower-shaking struggle, each clash leaving the warriors with a bit more of their armor melted off, another patch of flesh reduced to a blackened ruin. The problem was that she was going all-out and these last constructs were not the biggest threat.

The grey-black warrior's mace suddenly grew mid-swing, clipping my right knee with a spiked head that was more wrecking ball than a melee weapon. I winced as something broke with a crunch, but I no longer needed legs for either leverage or balance. I blinked at the warrior's back and punched him, simultaneously infusing his armor with the vibration-amplifying Force Adjustment that would shake anything solid apart.

Instead of doing just that the armor turned black and the enchantment started to weaken and flicker and in a few seconds it had simply died. The lightning guy blinked within my reach, headbutted me with a dark-magic-laced helmet that partially negated my kinetic defenses then took a step back as I reeled and hammered my solar plexus with a lightning-charged mace. The moment I caught my breath, he'd already blinked closer and was trying for a follow-up so I stepped outside time. Everyone and everything froze.

I breathed in deeply once, twice, then hammered an uppercut at lightning-guy's jaw. He was not pushed back and lightning didn't buzz my fingers; in the infinitesimal pause between one moment and the next none of that could happen. But I could still ring that stupid helmet of his again and again, two dozens of times faster than any martial artist that ever lived, for the few seconds' worth of actions I could take. Time resumed; the lightning guy's head exploded, helmet and all.

His body staggered, blood fountaining from the stump without slowing down. As it did, his neck was already regrowing.

"Oh no, you don't!" I paused time once more, this time for longer. I punched at his shoulders, hips, spine, the break in time stretching and stretching until I had to stop and catch my breath. The moment I did, his whole body was torn apart by all the blows applied at once, but so did nearly an hour's worth of exhaustion had I put in effort at my maximum normal rate.

Given my significantly superhuman abilities, it was more like a hundred-meter dash for an Olympic athlete; not completely exhausting but something I'd have to catch my breath before repeating. The mangled body turned to a black and blue mist. It was already splitting in three when the first explosion started. Deafening even for me, it would have instantly killed an unprotected human within two hundred feet. For those with my level of superhuman durability and extra defenses it was merely staggering.

Except it was followed by a second, then a third then... no, pairs of explosions were going off at the same time. Most of the floor we were in was engulfed in a widening conflagration, but Force Adjustment could see through it. Mandy was floating in mid-air, radiating enough heat to melt iron to slag at fifteen paces. She was also throwing fireballs of similar intensity with both arms, one at each of her opponents.

They attempted to teleport around but the fist-sized missiles were moving so quickly the air literally exploded in their wake, crossing distances of over a hundred feet in a thousandth of a second, so quickly even at my level of superspeed and awareness I could barely notice them. Each enemy got hit four times and when the conflagration abated, half their mass had been burned away. The blackened ruins of their corpses turned to mist but the clouds were smaller and weaker than blue's had been.

I launched myself forward with Chronal Leap, punching the last remaining warrior twice before he could blink away. I followed with a Spatial Leap, getting off more blows before he teleported once more, closer to the slow-moving mist. I got next to him, then strained to step outside time and started punching. One second, two seconds, three, four, five, six... after two combined uses of Instant Action I fell back into normal time, unable to sustain it.

His head had been crushed, all his limbs had been torn off, his rib cage had caved in and much of his torso was a bloody ruin. Yet he did not die. Anyone truly, really alive would have, at least without a regeneration power much stronger than mine. Maybe he'd have died had there been more time for him to bleed out, maybe not. The first mist reached him a split second later, and his regeneration skyrocketed. At the same time across the chamber Mandy's figure condensed back to human...

then she fell to the ground, utterly spent.

"This is bullshit," I complained to nobody in particular. Then all the energy I'd gathered in the upper half of the tower, all the points I'd been saving for the Big Bad that still awaited at the top floor, I spent all at once.

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y3m16d Word of Force [45 pts] Force Adjustment III, Force Awareness II, Forcefield Creation II, Forced Acceleration III, Greater Proximakinesis IV, Immutable Force III, Lasting Force II Other Powers [34 pts] Chronal Leap I, Empowering Regeneration IV, Focused Invulnerability II, Instant Action III, Retributive Defense II, Super Suit I, Spatial Distortion II, Spatial Leap I power points: 1/80 Attributes [0/80] Might 40, Agility 20, Reason 6, Vigilance 9, Ego 20, Luck 2 The changes of all those points hit me like a ton of bricks.

I wasn't passing just one threshold in Might, pushing it to levels of strength and durability that would rival most heavy vehicles even without power augmentation; I was also passing another by raising Agility to firmly superhuman levels and a third in Ego where my level of self-image, self-awareness, presence and physical beauty could no longer be faked with any sort of technological, medical or physical assistance. It was that last that let me recover from the other two by the time my opponent had fully formed.

Standing two feet taller than I did and weighing more than twice as much, he was not the most physically imposing enemy I'd ever faced. The power of multiple demonic warriors had been condensed inside him in a way similar to how my Ego stat kept me largely human rather than letting my physical stats explosively grow me into some giant monster.

His armor had been shattered from his new growth, the leather-like loincloth left straining to contain a body that was anatomically correct where the earlier models hadn't been. Since armaments from the warriors Mandy had utterly destroyed had not been incorporated, his weapon condensed as well until it became a three-foot-long, inch and a half thick rod that in his hands looked little more than a toy club. He teleported before me faster than I could have reacted only minutes before.

Extra strength made me a good deal faster though, superhuman agility let me bend around the jab of the glowing green rod with as much effort as for a moderately difficult stretch, and inhuman self-image let me own those abilities and use them with a kind of grace even a lifetime of training wouldn't have given. Then my knee and elbow smashed into his side with dull thuds. He didn't let up, teleporting behind me mid-swing.

The newly improved Spatial Distortion forced the blow to fall short, then snapped space back the other way, letting me deliver the kind of wind-up, full-body punch almost nobody in boxing ever used because opponents could see it coming from miles away and easily handle it. Except space and timing were what I said they were, so the blow did land square in his solar plexus. He took a step back, then another, flinching a bit but otherwise not showing another reaction to the punishing blow.

Then a lightning bolt struck me in the gut, grounding through my lower body and leaving me twitching. Unlike every single time either magic or a physical blow from one of these warriors had landed before, the improved Retributive Defense activated and sent a good portion of that lightning back to the source. He twitched too, less than I did but still promising. The Mavethans had seen my Retributive Defense before.

It had been why they'd never tried to blast me with one of their towers since, but they were a civilization with magical traditions centuries ahead of Earth; that they'd found a counter to a rank one skill was only to be expected. But counters tend to be specific so upon upgrading I'd chosen Immutable Force as the new defense to get the harm it blocked reflected, the defense specifically against magic.

It was something I'd been saving for Mot, yet keeping all the cards for later might mean there wouldn't be a later. At least for this fight I could rely on it to work to my advantage. The next few exchanges flew by so quickly I reacted on instinct. My instincts were supernatural now, but the big guy had actual skill; six warriors' worth of it.

A jab against my left hip with the rod glowing black stole momentum, heat and stamina, having a smaller impact on him not just because it wasn't fully reflected but also due to sheer size difference. That gave him a chance to slip a tripping attempt in a pause between spatial distortions, which was only a distraction for the lightning bolt that had both my arms cramping up for a moment. I teleported around, getting my own hits in while dodging his.

It was becoming increasingly clear my ranged kinetic attacks weren't of much use; he was tough enough to mostly tank them and regenerated quickly enough to heal up the damage as fast as they could deliver them. The trick with the bubble of altered force and air explosion barely fazed him and for some time we fought at even terms. Then another slip-up due to my inexperience had me covering my head against a feint, and a green-glowing, lightning-wreathed rod smacked solidly against my chest.

My lungs locked up, my heart skipped a beat, and every nerve ending in the contact area was overloaded. It didn't quite floor me but it came close. He took advantage by pulling my arms behind my back with one hand and ramming the rod in my solar plexus with the other. Then to his great surprise, I slipped through his grasp and started delivering a torrent of rapidly strengthening punches and kicks no matter how many times he jabbed me with that stick.

Focused Invulnerability; it was a tricky skill to use and you had to be specific; trying to negate blows by his weapon entirely did not work, neither did trying to designate 'attempts to incapacitate' with it as something to be immune to. But specific colors? Those worked just fine, so from now on I was immune to the lightning and green magic.

By the time he realized why his blows were doing so much less than he expected he was on the back foot, sported a dozen bloody bruises, my regeneration had taken care of most of the damage, and my overall power had grown a little more. So, naturally, he cheated.

Grabbing chains sprouted from the ground but I broke them before they could become too numerous or too thick then pressed him back until I saw an opening and struck him with a fist wrapped up in compressed air; the same trick as that bubble of force I'd used before except far more concentrated through my empowered innate abilities. Instead of dodging, he took the blow head-on and blew red mist in my face at the same time.

I found myself back in the school, punching Tobio until he was a bloody wreck broken under my might. I won a big fight in an impressive way for the first time, saving my friends in the process. I won a spot in the cheerleading squad after some very demanding tryouts. I got to second base for the first time in the bathrooms, after the school team won their first big game in my second year. The jock looked way more muscular than I remembered and fumbled a lot less and we were not interrupted by anyone.

Then I realized that arm around my neck definitely did not belong to a jock and was trying to choke me. Not thinking very clearly I tried to push it away, then agony shot up my right armpit. That broke through the delusion and though the emotional confusion lingered, it had nothing on the burning cold and dark magic draining my strength.

My right arm had reflexively clamped against the painful intrusion and was mostly useless and while the enemy was also reduced to one arm for the chokehold he had better leverage and wasn't coming off a mental assault. I struggled, tried to teleport away but the dark magic simply drained the low-rank power away. The big guy had to be hurting, but he was more resistant to his own reflected magic than I was and could afford to wait me out.

I shifted Focused Invulnerability to the black and white colors and for a split second there was relief, then he shifted the weapon back to lightning and that green light and the pain became worse. Then he exhaled that red energy at my face and for a few seconds I was back in the school's bathrooms, making out with a jock. The pain broke me out of it quickly enough but he used that foul red magic again. The third time I came out of it I'd dropped to my knees and he was already puffing out another crimson cloud.

Straining with every fiber of my being, I stepped outside of time. That didn't change the fact that I had an arm around my neck, a magical taser under my arm and that I was on my knees and close to passing out. I was too securely held to slip away and every few seconds another bit of my waning reserves burned to maintain the stopped time. Using Proximakinesis, I unlocked the chain around my neck. Unlike objects held by other people and since it has started worn by me I could still manipulate it outside of time.

Maintaining contact on one end, I slipped the other end into the giant's open mouth and down his throat as far as it would go. Then I did something I'd sworn not even to think about doing ever since Jerry had lit the city with that mushroom of his. I grabbed the Electromagnetic Force within the last third of the chain inside the warrior's throat with Force Adjustment and increased it by an order of magnitude. Only the Electromagnetic Force and all of it.

It was less than an ounce of metal, it was mine and previously enchanted, and adjusting forces within objects was something I'd done thousands of times by now; it only took an instant and costed next to nothing effort-wise. It also couldn't be taken back or controlled because of what it did. Time resumed and electromagnetic interaction among those couple dozen grains of metal was magnified... including the repulsion between protons.

It increased enough that nuclear interactions couldn't maintain most atomic nuclei, those little bits of metal exploding in nuclear fire...