Chương 65: 56: ...the harder they fall.

Lasers are loud. Even a skin-cleaning laser is as loud as small firecrackers, its beam explosively superheating the air in its path. That's for a device no more powerful than a flashlight; when the best energy weapon we could build with our combined abilities fired, the ground shook, bones were rattled, the eardrums of those with less reinforced bodies burst. Unpowered people standing next to the massive weapon as it fired would have been killed by the shockwave. The beam itself was brighter than a thunderbolt.

It was brighter than the midday sun in a clear midsummer sky. It was so bright that half our group was blinded through their closed eyelids. Under the dome of black, magically intense thunderclouds that had cast the whole state in near-darkness, a patch of Florida fifty miles long saw more light than it ever had for a fraction of a second. Then the beam cut off leaving a steaming turret behind, a thousand tons of metal rapidly cooled by enchantments struggling to contain the heat.

Fifty miles away, the weapon's distant target took the blow to the back of its neck. Much of the beam's energy had been absorbed by the intervening atmosphere; the shockwave and brightness had to come from somewhere and air was neither entirely transparent nor a vacuum. In fact it became less transparent in some ways the higher the intensity of the beam and the energy of individual particles.

Jerry's design had accounted for that however; the photons from the immensely powerful laser part of the beam physically blasted atmospheric gasses out of the beam's path, creating a highly conductive corridor of near-vacuum through which the even more powerful beam of electrons flowed through unimpeded. Those electrons collided with the neck of Mot's immense form, delivering force equivalent to a small nuclear weapon focused down to a few square yards.

The explosion made the ones from the cruise missiles and artillery shells that still pelted the two-miles-tall demonic avatar look like firecrackers. Enhanced senses gave me a clear view of over a hundred cubic yards of black, steel-hard flesh instantly vaporizing with enough force to further damage its surroundings. The mountainous form of the enemy stopped in its tracks, as it hadn't done for any other attack less than a nuke.

Barely two seconds later the turret fired again and another impossibly bright beam speared through the heavens. Two seconds after that, a third strike caught Mot to the side of the neck as his immense bulk ponderously turned around to look at us. Lightning crackled over those tree-like horns, bolts almost as thick as houses formed then sliced through the air with the same kind of intensity and lethal purpose as the weapon's own beams.

For all his immense, unstoppable physicality, for all his mind-warping aura, for all the terrain and weather altering powers or the countless monsters sprouting in his wake, it was this lightning that was the most dangerous of the enemy's powers. With it he could instantly strike at any target up to the horizon, a horizon that was a hundred and fifty miles away for someone his height.

He could blast any defensive strongpoint, obliterate anything that dared challenge him from individual soldiers to warships, intercept the more dangerous attacks such as nuclear missiles if he needed... and now it was turned against us. Immensely powerful magical lightning came within three hundred feet... and was intercepted by the perimeter of silver pillars Liz and I had set down. Silver was the most conductive known metal and the pillars were thicker than any power line ever built.

Enhanced by my powers, not only was said conductivity greatly amplified but the silver's melting point had been increased even as its temperature had been greatly reduced. The pillars drank in the magical lightning, grounded it out, then cooled to subzero temperatures before the second barrage of lightning could hit them. Then our weapon hit Mot in the face.

"It's working!" the goth boy who could create magical runes shouted in triumph. If memory served, his name was Tim and his contribution to the weapon had been... memory failed me. Had I ever see it?

"Take that, you overgrown imp!"

"No, it's not," I countered before everyone could get their hopes up.

"He is taking damage, certainly, but it's closer to cigarette burns than serious blows." They'd hurt like a bitch, assuming that body could feel pain at all, but we'd need a lot of cigarette burns to actually stop a very angry demon-wizard from blasting all our faces off.

"Increasing output to fifty percent," Jerry announced and the next beam was no more powerful... but it lasted twice as long. It burned into the avatar's cheek, carving through dozens of cubic yards of nigh-invulnerable flesh but even that tremendous wound which could have killed me several times over was not really serious for someone the size of a mountain. And now that mountain was turning around, taking steps in our direction.

More lightning bolts blasted at our position, the avatar's horns lighting up like a crown of storms but the perimeter of giant, magic-enhanced lightning rods was holding... for now. Mot's demonic form took another step closer even as the beam cut into his neck, raising a forearm the size of the Empire State building to block it. As his foot touched the earth, a forest of iron spikes grew in every direction but that would not become a problem until he got closer than five miles.

No, the main problem was that he grew... as he had grown with each and every step he'd taken upon our planet. He'd already gained nearly a third again his original height and more than doubled his bulk and, presumably, physical strength and durability... gains he would have doubled by the time he got close enough to simply step on us.

Half an hour since his appearance, most of it toying with those poor soldiers giving their lives to stop him, and he'd already grown enough Jerry's initial projections of the weapon's effects were wrong. If he grew much more... Except we wouldn't see him grow to laugh at our best efforts because he was no longer toying with us.

His constant barrages of lightning had forced everyone except Liz and me behind a dome of Tim's glowing runes to protect from the flashes and rapidly rising heat while the enormous avatar's steps were longer than before. At the faster rate Mot was going, he'd be on top of us in a few minutes instead of the half-hour he'd taken walking away.

"Maximum power!" Jerry announced, somehow audible over the literally eardrum-bursting cacophony. The weapon's beam was firing in one-second bursts, leaving only another second of cooling time between them as more and more steam came out of the turret and the barrel was beginning to glow.

"We must reduce power before the weapon melts!" Mandy cried, already using her magic to suck heat away from the turret and sending it deep into the ground.

"If we stop we're dead!" Tim countered and runes started crawling up the turret's sides and wrapping around its barrel.

"Low power shots are not doing enough damage!"

"We can't cool it quickly enough!" the redhead sorceress argued.

"You think the outside looks bad? There's enough heat in the power core to melt steel now!" She was right and I told them so. Full power shots would not be sustainable for more than a minute or two and that wouldn't be nearly enough to kill the demon. It would have certainly killed an army of monsters. It could have done the same to monsters merely Godzilla-sized. But a now three miles tall demon? He was just a single... too powerful... target...

"Liz!" I shouted, the realization kicking me into action.

"I need you to make me another metal rod!"

"Don't you think we have enough?" the metallokinetic senior-year asked with a long-suffering sigh.

"They seem to be holding for now."

"No, not a silver one! I need one made of tungsten." She stared at me. I stared at her.

"You know, the metal used in light bulb filame-" The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"I know what tungsten is!" she huffed and crossed her arms under her breasts, her face twisting with the same distaste as when we'd worked together earlier.

"Why do you need it?"

"So that all of you won't be stepped on by a giant demon," I hissed. Like, what was her problem?

"Because if it was just me, I could always go live on Mars, or something." Honestly, some people would still hem and haw during the Apocalypse.

"Fine! Just tell me what size you need it." However she argued, the black-haired girl worked quickly after she got the design specs. It turned out that Tungsten being far more abundant than silver made conjuring it a lot faster, though still slow in comparison to iron - but iron would not do for this, for more than one reason. In only two minutes, we had a rough cylinder a yard thick and twenty yards long, with a conical cap at one end.

"Seriously? This is never going to work," the black-haired naysayer insisted.

"Even you can't swing a weapon hard enough to wound a demon the size of Pikes Peak. Not even if the weapon weighs a hundred tons."

"Two hundred and thirty, actually," I quipped, then grunted as I picked the giant-sized bullet off the ground. It was only about a quarter of my maximum lift with Force Adjustment, less if Proximakinesis was added in but it was still an awkward load.

"And I don't plan to swing it." I glared at the monster coming down from the North, the one responsible for this invasion, the murder of hundreds of thousands, the destruction of my home city and end of life as we knew it. Even if we beat him today, our world would remain irrevocably changed in ways most of us could not even imagine. It might not be tomorrow or next month or even the year to come, but the existence of powers alone promised to wreak more havoc long-term than Mot had in his two weeks of destruction.

But to see those coming days and deal with those future problems, we first needed to have a future. So I glared one final time, hefted the giant bullet and flew away from the monster. Flying at him would not achieve either of my goals. In the two minutes it had taken us to make my new weapon and properly prepare it, Mot's towering demonic avatar had already walked twenty miles closer.

The closer he came the more powerful the cannon's beams became because less energy was lost in the atmosphere, but the same applied to Mot's titanic lightning bolts. Our efforts had wounded him; his black skin was full of dozens of craters oozing red magma instead of blood, more and deeper ones added with his every step. To a man they would have been penny-sized weeping welts, extremely painful, debilitating, possibly even crippling.

To his body they were only flesh wounds he could endure more than long enough to step on his only opposition and as Liz had said not even I could swing a weapon hard enough to really change that outcome. Two hundred and thirty tons of tungsten were pushed by my full strength plus Proximakinesis, both boosted through Force Adjustment while the grip of gravity and air resistance on both me and my load were largely negated.

We accelerated faster than any plane, faster than most missiles, shattering the sound barrier in a few seconds then kept going. The ruins of the city fell below us, the true scope of Mot's devastation becoming visible as we rose miles into the air.

A fifty-mile-long scar had been carved upon Florida, ruined earth overturned and scorched as if from a series of major earthquakes followed by nuclear bombardment from Mot's titanic steps alone, thousands of square miles of jagged metal spikes tearing the countryside, millions of monsters milling around like a vast army of ants.

Further away, as much as a hundred and fifty miles from the northernmost reach of his course, hundreds of great fires marked where his lightning had struck military convoys, bases, small towns, refugee camps, even cities. In half an hour a single bastard had used his power to deal more damage to humanity than the average war. The air was thinning rapidly now, air resistance fading before it could superheat me and my cargo despite us moving at two miles per second and getting ever faster.

It wouldn't be fast enough; at this rate, by the time the avatar would be stepping on my friends I'd be more than a thousand miles away. But without atmosphere more options presented themselves and I activated Forced Acceleration. Between one moment and the next my time rate sped up by a factor of thirteen and with a tremendous shockwave the tungsten rod was forced to adjust.

My fingers sank into its base as if one of the toughest metals on earth were soft clay and the only reason it didn't burst apart was Force Adjustment holding it together. From the height of fifty miles the worst Mot did in his temper tantrum seemed but a single, relatively small scar against the majesty of the planet. Almost all of us have imagined ourselves as astronauts at least once and the view I was now getting was better than any astronaut ever got.

The sheer, awesome freedom of traveling across the heavens under my own power was truly beyond words and while it did not make up for the horror of the last month it was a hell of a down payment. For a few seconds that seemed as minutes under my adjusted perception I just enjoyed the view but in the end there was still business to attend to. World-shaking and just maybe, hopefully, world-saving business too.

Behind me, the flashes of actinic light battling sorcerous lightning were clearly visible from orbit and I suspected they'd be still visible from the Moon, though my cargo and I wouldn't be going nearly so far; there wasn't enough time. In fact, even with Forced Acceleration there was only time to go less than halfway to our target.

With the tungsten rod too massive to carry in a leap through time and too fragile to suddenly push as a consequence of such a leap without my powers holding it together directly, there was only one option. Instant Action activated and the entirety of the universe seemingly stood still for three seconds, three seconds of stolen time I could push my cargo further and ever faster. We left Cuba behind and with a few more activations we were crossing two hundred miles above Panama.

Not much later, the coast of Ecuador stretched below us. More and more of the acceleration was taken up by curving our trajectory. Force Awareness was the only reason I knew how to adjust our course properly because we'd never done a single lesson of orbital mechanics in Physics class; that was in the senior-year syllabus. At least my high marks in Geography class meant I didn't get lost as we flew over Chile and a bit of Argentina then a few hundred miles of sea before skipping over Antarctica.

I wondered what those labs and observatories near the South Pole thought of our path. The rod and I made for a pretty cool unidentified flying object in my not so humble opinion. Not only did we have an awesome shape, not only was our acceleration profile entirely nonsensical, but we got to seemingly skip parts of space whenever we wanted.... well, not exactly. However superhuman my endurance had become before my encounter with Mot, each three-second timeskip was as tiring as fully five minutes of peak exertion...

except with another subjective thirty-nine seconds of peak exertion during the timeskip itself for pushing the tungsten rod as fast as it would go. The only reason I hadn't collapsed into a tumble was Empowering Regeneration. Exertion at this level did bad things to the body and I'd been pushing my limits for most of the past half hour. As long as Empowering Regeneration had something to heal, all of my abilities grew stronger and stronger.

It might be a trickle compared to the boost from serious combat damage but it kept piling up; without this I'd never have even considered this plan. Australia flew by to my right then another couple fast-forwards later I was flying over Thailand. Through Burma, most of Tibet and Mongolia, going far too fast to really enjoy the sights. Halfway through Russia it occurred to me that my cargo looked exactly like a nuclear missile, so I maintained consecutive Instant Actions until we were flying over the Arctic.

Maybe some international incidents and global geopolitics would come from this little trip around the globe in eighty real-time seconds, but giant-ass, world-conquering demons took precedence. Mars was looking a likelier post-invasion vacation spot by the moment. Canada was and had always been awesome, but I was struggling too much to reorient my cargo to really pay attention. I'd to repeatedly burn stamina to turn the damn thing because it kept getting off-course.

Word to the wise; do not try to eyeball low earth orbits unless absolutely necessary.

"Whoops" is not an acceptable outcome when going over fifty miles a second. I burned half of my remaining stamina to layer multiple short-lived protection fields on the rod to prevent it from burning in the atmosphere and used all of my Force Adjustment and Proximakinesis to hold it together as we hit the atmosphere.

In only a few seconds the temperature went from "freezing cold" to "boiling fucking iron", the sheath of compressed air around us first catching fire, then turning into a fierce opaque red-orange before creeping dangerously close to yellow. Our descent was much sharper than any space shuttle and our velocity was an order of magnitude greater, but it was worth it.

The last things I did was set my Focused Invulnerability to negate damage from the impact while setting Force Adjustment to magnify it by a factor of eight. Then we struck the back of Mot's fugly, horned head with the force of a two-megaton nuke concentrated in a single square yard...