The dozens of guns spread over the dome Glassmetal had hidden himself away whirred as they charged up.
“Buckle up” LED yelled just before the guns spat out their loads.
Glassmetal had made the rail-gun variant of his gun, I noticed as I felt the bearings impacting me. The shroud Swordjuice gave me diminishing considerably even as I commanded it to just slow down the attacks.
The rest of the team withered the attack as well, mostly because of the shroud that absorbed most of the impacts, and Glassmetal didn’t target any of the mechas, of course.
Spotlight was the first to opt out of the fight, after fighting with the constructs hand to hand using Swordjuice’s shrouds until he was too tired.
Victor was destroying large portions of the mechas, rapidly firing away at them, keeping a lot of the constructs at bay as Glassmetal couldn’t fix them as quickly. His energy soon run out though because the intensity he was attacking at.
He cursed, but kept going, using the rest of his shroud’s energy to fight the mechas which quickly ran out between attack and defence.
They had endured for much longer than they would’ve just a week before. The new muscles they all were sporting really helped with their newfound durability. Case in point, the ones who trained more were still going.
Swordjuice deployed all her bombs during the fight. They destroyed mid flight most of the time and she didn’t bring ones with the strength to destroy the entire room, so when detonated in the air, the mechas avoided most of the damage they would cause.
Even then she fought fiercely against the marble maybe robots, smashing and slashing them away, but the army that Glassmetal had created was an endless wave. The ground absorbed the destroyed pieces we smashed from the mechas that then flowed back into the constructions.
Not to say that there wasn’t any progress, as the mechas would gradually get smaller and Glassmetal would eventually dismiss one of them at a time, infusing the remaining constructs with more marble.
The limiting factor was his concentration. We had reduced Glassmetal to controlling only seven of the constructs, three to fight me and two for LED and Swordjuice each. In exchange for the few numbers, each moved much faster and was better controlled by Glassmetal’s direct input.
It was like fighting me. As long as my mind allowed and my energy lasted, I would keep going.
As long as we stood in this marble room, Glassmetal constructs couldn’t be brought down.
Of course, there were probably a lot of powers that could circumvent most of the defenses he had put into place or just obliterate everything with pure power, but as it stood now, to us, he was an immovable wall.
And eventually, after hours of intense fighting, LED and Swordjuice were fighting only one mecha each. The mechas kept a good amount of finesse in their movements. Because of being so few, Glassmetal still could control them very well, even with his concentration degrading from exhaustion.
I was still fighting three of the marble robots, pummeling them and being pummeled back. doing this for so long had streamlined my transformation, increasing its efficiency, so I wasn’t spending much energy even after fighting this long. The repetitiveness of the fight played very well to my strengths.
While I was receiving almost no damage and only had to heal bruises from time to time Glassmetal had to keep reconstructing his mechas, and some of the material wasn’t recuperated, noticeable by how the ground was a couple centimeters lower where we were fighting than in the rest of the facility.
LED and Swordjuice couldn’t fight anymore and Glassmetal dissolved their mechas into the ones he was using to fight me, bulking the three equally, so now I was fighting some heavy hitters.
He went all out, noticing that we were simply in a stalemate, and while that was fine, the idea of training was to push everyone.
The mechas started changing, their claws turning into heavy balls covered into spikes as the cannon in their arms disappeared, growing back from over their shoulders. Even a lens akin to an eye appeared in the middle of their round faces.
They weren’t for seeing; I discovered when the lasers hit me, while the mechas still tried to gouge me out with their fists.
My skin scorched and then healed back with the reflective mutation I had made against Glassmetal’s firing a laser at me not too long ago. It scattered the attack back at the marble giants, who stayed unfazed, only a black mark where the laser passed over to indicate it had happened.
The mutation implemented the light absorbing matrix from Dan’s power, but I quickly used the little energy it gave me to keep me whole. The lasers stopped as the guns fixed on the constructs shoulders started spewing bullets at me in rapid fire.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Our battle progressed in an alternating array of adaptations and modifications. I created tougher armor; he changed the guns to blasts of fire. I created a cover of freezing energy copied from Victor’s power to cancel out the flame attacks.
When he attacked with electricity, I got a boost of energy back, hitting him back with a whip of shocking shadow. He learned to not use that particular element.
The fight went on with him changing the weapons at every moment, forcing me to do minute adjustments each time, but I was adapting to switch between the particular transformations I needed quicker.
His mecha’s were slowing down, as I felt myself get tired, my energy depleted to about half, one mecha dissolved into the floor and he didn’t even bother increasing their size again, they kept firing at me, never using the same type of weapon between them.
Our fight dragged on some more, and I adapted to defend any two types of attacks that he could throw at me at the same time, it did spent my energy every time I had to change the interpretation I was using or recreate my defensive skin that kept getting blown apart.
Glassmetal was forced to go down to just one mecha, it was fighting as well as a person would, even as it sometimes missed attacks or took too long to act, a sign of his mental energy being almost completely spent, fighting just the one enemy was easier to me though, as I had to adapt to only one type of attack at a time.
I had been fighting for around two hours, and wasn’t spending much energy before having to start changing and adapting, my body was always in peak physical condition and refreshing my body only of tiredness took little energy, about the same as maintaining a transformation after it happened, and in energy reserves I had come a long way from when I got my powers.
Now with the constant changes though I had only been fighting for at most another hour and my energy reserves were already dwindling, I don’t think I could stay transforming this much for another fifteen minutes, maybe if I pushed I could go for a full half an hour now that I was fighting just one mecha.
I was contemplating changing to an evasive strategy, which would work really well against only one opponent, and I wouldn’t need to mutate nearly as much, but Glassmetal got exhausted first. The Mecha stopping mid swing.
I had won, but I could see that against an enemy stronger or one that I had to change constantly, my limit would be about 1 hour.
A whole hour is pretty good. Most fights don’t normally go for that long, but that’s me in a purely defensive position. If I can’t take down an enemy with my strength, then every time I would need to wait for my enemy to tire themselves before I did, or for my team to arrive and save my butt.
Yet again, I reinforce to myself the need to work on powerful and destructive mutations to go along with my good defense. My aim is the top of the powered food chain, after all.
----------------------------------------
Glassmetal’s constructs could have advanced functions without his input, but basic shapes stayed the same, so he stayed in his defensive dome until he himself woke up, getting out of it groggily some 15 minutes after the fight.
I went to talk to the others and wait for him to get out himself; we got a good laugh about him staying locked in his ball but it would be a good thing if he was in an actual fight, although we imagined anything that could force him to spend all his mental energy like this probably could get though the dome, it had taken hours of fighting after all for him to pass out.
Glassmetal stumbled our way, massaging his head, and gladly accepted a bottle of water.
“Oof, my head is killing me.”
“At least you aren’t all sore.” Spotlight whined from where he lay sprawled on the ground.
“You barely fought,” Payback said, giving Spotlights boot a light kick.
He watched us fight after hearing about it. Spyglass was here too. I noticed.
The two of them also trained with the serum as well, even only so that they had an advantage over other people, as long as they kept training they wouldn’t lose muscle mass it was practically permanent, as the changed cells would multiply into modified cells.
“This was a great session,” LED said, clapping Glassmetal on the back.
“It really was. It even pushed me. I really want to finish those mutations now.”
“I need to work on my powers as well,” Victor said, making a fist. “I’m sure I could destroy those statues with some more Fire-Power.”
“That’s the spirit,” Swordjuice said, bumping the fist Victor made with hers.
----------------------------------------
During the fight with Glassmetal, my matrix had used the freezing energy and the pure fire from Victor’s power, but instead of creating them as the materials themselves, it instead could act like those materials.
It was a part of Victor’s powers, it basically worked with modifications to the silver metal and one of those modifications was to interpret a material that it had analysed.
It made it possible for me to increase the amount and versatility of my transformation without compromising the actual form I had taken. The ones I had access to were plasma, freezing energy, a liquid that caught fire violently and a field that gave a magnetic charge to close by metals.
Sadly, my matrix could only use them together with my transformations for now, as it focused on defending only, and only when I was attacked with fire that it thought it proper to cover me in freezing energy.
But there was something that I had been testing recently, creating mutations that would contain powers I couldn’t normally use.
I had stashed in me a copy from LED’s power to manifest matrixes, Rebeca’s serum creation, and then Victors powers of interpret, revert, enhance and delay then integrated in my matrix I had a plethora of ways of identifying other powers and how they worked, from energy types to concepts and the powers I had copied along the way.
I could form connections to other powers copy their matrices without painstakingly studying them in their entirety, I could passively detect attention that was directed to me, I had my cells transformed permanently into a better version of themselves and I had access to LED’s buffs permanently. That was it if I wasn’t forgetting anything, of course.
From Dan’s power, I took the light as a new energy type that I could identify and absurd and is where I’m got these ideas about mutations from.
I want to create a mutation that will use diverse energy sources while being connected to my biology and allow me to activate it at will, firing some manner of attack.
What I’m thinking of trying to do, as a long-term goal, is to use LED’s manifestation of matrix and somehow combine it in a mutation that lets me manifest my matrix in the real world.
If it would be as extra limbs or not, I don’t know yet, but what I want is to put different powers into that externalised matrix and use them that way.
That would be the ideal, but while I discover if that will be even workable, I’ll be planning and making physical mutations to carry additional powers.