Chương 63: 54: Go into the Light

Thunderbolts as thick as houses twisted around in complete defiance of physics, burning paths through the air and homing in on me in an instant. They struck with the force of missiles, followed by enough energy to power an entire country for days grounding itself out in a fizzle. The electricity itself I was temporarily invulnerable to; the shockwaves still rattled my bones through all my defenses and burst my eardrums.

More than a little punch-drunk, I forced a moment of instantaneous flight to dodge a torrent of crimson mist the size of a river... then a hand as large as a football stadium was just there, blocking my way. Trying to leap through time, I simply didn't manage to use the power before the edge of that titanic slap just barely clipped me at our combined velocity of several times the speed of sound. BOOM!

When my inner ears both regenerated and stopped ringing my head still felt like it had bounced off a solid wall and the rest of my body felt like a single, solid bruise. Getting out of the crater I'd dug down to bedrock upon impact I found myself half a mile out of the ruins of Destiny, on the south side. A leap to the air showed the enemy's titanic, truly mountain-sized form several miles to the North. Yeah, letting him slap me around again would be bad.

Nothing but rubble had been left of our home city, the ground shaken and torn open by constant earthquakes, the cracks and ditches filling with rainwater, mud and red caustic slime from which countless writhing forms were growing. I flew over the devastation, twin beams of redirected, amplified photons slicing and burning into the swarms of unnaturally animate tendrils and partially-plant humanoids with no end in sight.

Just seeing what our homes had been reduced to brought fourth such a wave of rage as I'd never felt before, and I charged at them at full speed. Cutting loose in an open space felt great. Each bout of maximum acceleration brought either darkness or redness to the edges of my vision as I strafed left and right, the monsters turning to green-black mist at my passage going from the sensation of running through wet paper sheets to being hit by larger and larger water balloons as I pushed myself to go faster.

Something larger, rounder and more tentacly than the countless pod-people turned up and I burst it to bits by punching it so hard my fist ached. Then I laughed, heart hammering in my chest, whole body feeling warm and fuzzy, and I waded through the plant monsters again, tearing into them with my bare hands.... what was I doing? The thought intruded into my fun of wading through another cluster of pod-people, beams of force and energy slicing through their plant-like bodies as soon as I looked at them.

I was putting an end to monsters, and it was fun. But why? Why was it fun? What was it beyond just fun? The questions were... persistent, growing weed-like much like the plants; whether I tore them out or ignored them more grew to take their place. I paused mid-punch, the tangle of writhing tendrils just ahead spewing acid-coated thorns while my eye-beams idly burned into it.

Looking around, I saw two dozen such tangles growing out of the rapidly-forming swamp, greenish, almost glowing water pooling in the cracks the earthquakes had formed and feeding into new growth. New growth of spikes and maws and poison as far as the eye could see. I shook my head once, twice, something almost seeming to rattle within before falling off with the sound of breaking glass. And then I could think clearly once again. Compulsion magic! No, not compulsion.

It had been my emotions that had been tampered, not my thoughts. For a few moments, aggression was all that mattered. Fighting against the newly growing monsters with wild abandon, thoroughly enjoying the adrenaline flowing through my veins, wasting time engaging an endless horde individually while the source moved further and further away. The stench of rot and old blood hung heavily in the air and for all the ground was mostly green and black, the air and rain were blood red.

Crimson fluid stuck to me from head to toe, sizzling impotently against near-invulnerable skin... or so I'd believed. The enemy would not want to merely kill us. He never had. From the beginning, for all their slaughter of tens of thousands, the monsters had never been individually threatening. Looking back, they had not acted with coordination, or aggression, or any tactics I now knew they could have used. All of us would have died dozens of times over if the monsters had been fighting properly from day one.

It was only seeing the bloody rain, feeling it seep under my costume and twist my emotions, emotions that had become so accustomed to violence, that I saw the entirety of the enemy's intentions. Every survivor of the monster attacks had been killing monsters for weeks now. We had had to embrace violence to survive because killing monsters was the only way to gain enough power.

So what happened to teenagers used to violence, used to the power we got from it, when the bad guy filled the air with a drug that made us all hot and bothered about more killing, then made the ground sprout with endless acceptable targets? I rose to the air with a sonic boom, ignoring the monsters entirely. More than ten miles to the North, Mot's overcompensating replacement body was moving further and further away but that wasn't my biggest worry just then.

The only reason I had snapped out of my violent frenzy had been a high Awareness and Immutable Force, a power that made me resistant to such influence. Even then, it hadn't been easy. Would everyone else be able to do the same? Frantically, I looked around for signs of the other survivors. The crimson rain was not making things easy and everywhere both normal sight and my enhanced senses could see there was only rubble, pools of glowing green sludge, and growing plant monsters.

Enhanced Awareness, Agility and Reason shifted through the total chaos of my surroundings and slowly fit this new hell with what I remembered of the city. Matching the two mental maps finally gave me proper directions to fly with. In the meantime, my inner ears finally regenerated and a pandemonium of noises I could never hope to understand struck my eardrums. There! That light!

The silvery glare across the horizon in the West cut through the red rain in a way that natural light did not, refusing to be tinted bloody crimson or poison green and even leeching those colors from the area the closer to it I moved. The animated plant growth trying to grow in the same direction first dried and browned out like under a harsh summer sun, then began to sizzle, until patches of it that persisted in their encroachment burst into flame and were reduced to ash.

The rain lightened to a drizzle then stopped entirely until a patch of ruins within a quarter mile of the glow's source were left dry around that beacon of safety shining out across the devastation. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. A whole crowd of people filled much of the area not in ones and twos or even dozens, but hundreds of survivors huddling amid the ruins.

Even as I flew above them, flashes of light heralded the arrival of more and more people teleported in from distant corners of the city. Tendrils of malignant growth clinging to them turned to dust, madness and rage cleared from their eyes as quickly as red goop dried and flaked off their clothes and bodies, bleeding wounds scabbed over and slowly healed. Near the center of this miracle stood a pair familiar faces.

"Hey there, stranger," one brunette supermodel called out cheerfully and waved.

"Long time, no see," the second identical brunette said before the two of them got back to work. They were duplicating plates from the school's cafeteria, each loaded with enough burgers, fries and soft drinks for an entire football team. Every so often, one of the soldiers milling around would pick up as many food plates as they could carry then run off to distribute them to hungry survivors.

"Julia... or is it Double Trouble now?" How do you call a girl that has permanently duplicated herself?

"What's going on? Who are all these people?" Julia's presence was a hint about that, but information was better than speculation.

"Every survivor from across the city, apparently," the two inhumanly, and unfairly, good-looking girls said.

"Our group in the school got teleported in a flash of light as that huge demon was about to step on us." More food plates appeared in quick succession, the continuous matter creation not seeming to tire the two of them at all; quite the change since the last time I'd seen them.

"The moment we got here a little girl put everyone to work."

"Between seven and ten, black hair and eyes, enjoys meddling and being cryptic?"

"Oh, you have met her," Julia one said, then took a bite out of a half-eaten cheeseburger that had been laying on a table precariously balanced on only three legs.

"What's up with that kid?" She pointed at me with the burger; a fat drop of mayo sauce 'accidentally' flew off it and splashed on my costume.

"In the past half hour I've heard her being called Mayu, Vera, Tomomi, Satya and Makoto. Often by the same guys, who'd jump between names in a single discussion."

"My guess is she likes having many names." Not that it would be hard to mess with what people said or heard with her power of illusion, so why stick to just one?

"Have you seen the rest of the usual suspects?" Because as fascinating as seeing the Wonder Twins feeding nearly a thousand people might be, I was still worried about my friends and wanted to avoid further mayo bombardment.

"We saw them, all right. They all went into the light," the second of the Wonder Twins said and suddenly found herself dangling upside-down.

"I suppose you thought that sounded terribly clever," I cheerfully said as I flattened the first Twin under about a dozen extra gravities; she made a very satisfying squelching sound as she half-sunk into the mud.

"Now consider how some people might have fought for their lives today. How they might have been electrocuted, set on fire, poisoned, mentally assaulted, had bones broken more than once, or been bitch-slapped by six-thousand-foot-tall banal incarnations of evil. How they probably saw their fellow survivors wounded and nearly killed, how they might have had to leave them behind or trick them just to save their lives." With every sentence I took a step forth until I was looking down on Julia's upside-down face.

Then my fake grin fell into a scowl.

"Maybe, just maybe you should joke less and be more informative before one of those people who've had just about enough bullshit for a good long while decides to screw your head a few turns in to see if it'll work better."

"The little girl t-took them literally into the huge g-glowing beam, all right?" Julia Two stammered, her face pale.

"Said something about a last-minute project."

"Better," I grunted and let both their bodies go. Maybe manhandling them like that had been an overreaction, but after everything that had happened I found myself caring little. Or maybe that was the magical influence talking.

"And Julia? Next time you feel like being clever, don't." I flew into the pillar of silver radiance at the center of the survivors' gathering, the same light my senses insisted was a perfectly natural light source that did not need to be investigated further. The closer I flew the stronger this impression became until I had to struggle just to inch forward.

Somehow, I knew that if I looked away for a moment, took a single step back, I would be convinced that impression was the truth and would not attempt to get into it again. My fingers bit into my palms, my fists creaked from how hard I was clenching them and it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other. When had I stopped flying? No, not important; all that mattered was getting through this... whatever it was and finding what had happened to my friends and sister.

With Mandy's and Anne's faces firmly fixed in my mind, I took another step forward. It was like the wall you were leaning against breaking, the last step of a staircase you were running up blind, a door opening inwards the moment you tried to push your way through. The curtain of light taking up the entirety of my vision suddenly vanished to reveal a small plateau that had once been the rooftop of the city's one Mall.

Somehow still holding together despite the building's complete collapse, it held a dozen very familiar faces... and a ginormous gun. Around the hundred-foot-tall contraption that looked so much like a half-finished futuristic beam weapon it could have come straight off the pages of a science fiction comic stood Jerry and Mandy, but also Liz, Jake, Doctor Beth and old man Dallas. Anne was there too, standing next to a tangle of wrist-thick cabling and looking straight up.

From her eyes came out twin, blinding, silver beams of light that shot up to the sky before spreading out to form a silvery dome around the whole area.

"You're late," Verity said from right next to me.

"Was going through Anne's barrier so hard?" After everything that had happened her sudden appearance no longer surprised me but her new height did. The former midget stood only a foot shorter than I did, her body now proportioned for a fifteen-year-old rather than a preteen, her simple black dress having adjusted to fit. Her hair was now longer than mine, falling to the small of her back, and her eyes shone with such great intensity that looking at her face actually hurt, increased resilience or no.

"Anne is doing the light pillar thing?" I gasped, horrified.

"But for that kind of power she must-""Don't worry, I'm helping," she 'explained', her eyes flashing and giving me a literal headache.

"Your half-sister wanted to be safe from all the monsters so she got a sanctuary power. The less violent her intent and the more violent another's intent, the harder they'd find to approach or perceive her."

"... that would have been a life-saver the past few weeks," I muttered.

"Yes, it would have," the no-longer-Midget agreed.

"Curious how out of hundreds of people wishing for their own powers only one got anything like it. Do you know how hard keeping everyone save without revealing myself was without it?"

"Not really, no." Just trying to keep Mandy safe once had required specific preparations ahead of time. Then the other implications of Verity's words sunk in and I stared at her - or at least her from the shoulders down.

"Your new looks seem quite a bit more... revealing now, don't they?"

"Mot is no longer hiding, is he? That affords me quite a few more... liberties." Her lips widened to show twin rows of shark-like teeth beneath.

"How would you like to help us blow up his ridiculously spiked carcass?"