Working myself up to the point where I was willing to fight and kill and actually being able to do it were two completely different things. As I closed in on her, the Exhuman’s attacks became more and more dangerous, changing from dodging individual flying rocks to waves of earth flowing forward like a tsunami.
I ran in, moving as fast as I could and trying to orbit her to keep her spinning and throw off her aim, but instead found myself needing to bounce away, as daggers of earth and solid walls erupted without warning all around me. I could barely get a couple feeble swipes at her before I had to fall back, which she dodged easily.
It seemed that like me and Saga, this Exhuman also had a range to the distance she could control the earth. Outside that range, she was stuck throwing things at us or setting off rumbling cascades which would erupt like spikes from the ground, but near her, she could affect the earth directly under my feet, which was simply a death sentence.
The worst part was that her range was longer than mine. My swords could extend a maximum of maybe a dozen feet from my fingertips, while before I’d gotten within that distance to her is when the ground started exploding.
Still skirting around her, but at a safer range, I created bulbs of lightning in each hand. As soon as she saw them, walls of earth erupted between her and me, blocking my shot. I went the other way, but the walls shifted with me, staying exactly between us. From inside her earthen fortress, I heard her punch and grunt, and one of the walls exploded into shards the size of hubcaps slicing through the air at me.
Four blades out, I rooted myself for a moment and cut them down, flinching as the exploding pieces of rock pelted me. There was only a moment’s reprieve before I felt the earth moving under my feet again. It was harder to predict her attacks when she was hidden behind her little walls.
I jumped to the side, but no spikes came. Instead, it looked like she was going to crush me again, floating a hunk of rock the size of a bus above her head and slowly bringing it in line to bear down on me.
Before I could even get my feet under me, there was a blaze of blue from the sky, and then the Exhuman went flying, Karu’s bare foot planted in her face. I hoped this time Karu showed some restraint and didn’t shatter everything again, and based on her smooth ascent back upwards, she seemed fine. The Exhuman rolled and reeled on the ground, blood pouring from her nose.
I fanned my fingers and readied a spread of lightning bulbs between each of my fingers like a ninja with a handful of shuriken. With a snap of my wrist, I threw the whole fistfull of lightning at her, and the whole area around her danced with sparks and arcing strands of electricity. She screamed as one tendril snaked down her leg, causing it to blacken and shudder beyond her control.
Karu was moving back in again, but pulled up at the last second as another stone wall appeared from the earth. I only had time to pull another fan of lightning before a second wall stopped me as well.
This time I had a plan though. With her vision blocked, I could advance freely, and from the far side of her wall, I could still swing my swords around it. I was crouched low but moving fast, keeping the wall firmly centered in my sights as I dashed in. Only a few feet away and she hadn’t yet seen me–
The wall grew spikes with explosive force and then came rushing straight at me. I couldn’t stop myself fast enough, and it was all I could do to grab at the spikes while it plowed into me. One of my feet miraculously made it through the tangle of spikes and landed on the flat of the wall, arresting much of my momentum, but another spike had pierced my shoulder and I’d badly scraped up my arms trying to grab anything before it went through my body and face.
“I can see you, dumbass!” she shrieked with ecstasy as the spiked wall carried me away. I pulled myself off of it and jumped clear before it smashed through a wall behind me, feeling my arm burn with my own spilled blood.
Karu was doing her best to buy me time to recover, now carrying a small bundle of metal posts that had once been attached to traffic signs and was now hurling them like javelins. Every time she threw, she repositioned to a new angle not yet covered by an earth wall, but the Exhuman responded by throwing up more and more walls. In moments, she was completely enclosed in a fortress of stone.
I ran parallel to her, and she responded instantly by firing a volley of stone at me through the earthen wall.
So she could see me. But how? Was x-ray vision something in her powerset? That didn’t seem very tied to the rest of her powers. I focused on dodging more rock spines and then fled as a literal freaking meteor shower began to rain down on me. Karu, meanwhile, kept doing what she could, but was getting stonewalled at every turn. Curiously, the Exhuman never seemed interested in attacking her anymore.
Perhaps because she couldn’t see Karu anymore? But the only difference between her and me…
I threw a lightning bolt straight into the air and Karu, recognizing my signal, appeared at my side instantly.
“She can’t see you,” I said. “And I think it’s because you’re not on the ground.”
Recognition dawned on Karu’s visored face and she nodded at me before the two of us had to split to avoid another surge of exploding rock. I was getting tired and bruised from all the dodging and running around, but she had to be feeling the exhaustion of shoving all these rocks at us, even if it was just her powers.
I wanted to tell Karu more, but the damn Exhuman kept me moving, and any plan we could formulate would be useless if we shouted it to each other right over her. Karu finished attacking the last remaining holes in the stone fort, getting her truly walled in there, and then flew away somewhere, I had no idea where, but trusted she had something in mind.
My job then, was to survive. I could fall back and wait for Karu, or so I thought, but the second I began to run away, I felt a shock go through the ground under me, and the world in front of me trembled.
“Oh, no you don’t. It’s too late to leave now. You need to learn, like all the rest!” Her voice echoed from her earthen fort.
The ground in front of me vibrated and quaked, bits of rock bouncing on it like they were ping-pong balls, and the earth shuddered so loudly I felt it in my lungs. I backed away, my heart racing at this new terrifying attack.
Suddenly the ground just wasn’t anymore. With a final breaking crunch, the broken street in front of me fell away into nothing, like there was a monstrous cave under the battlefield the entire time. I took one hesitant step away and then I raced towards the Exhuman, scrambling over the loose stones under my feet as the earth continued to implode behind me. I couldn’t enter her radius without being at her mercy, but the way the rest of the world was dissolving, I wasn’t sure I’d have a choice.
As soon as I thought it, the earth opened to my left and right as well, racing forward with me as I ran towards her at full speed, trapping me in and herding me towards that death zone.
I put my bruises and the tear in my shoulder out of my mind and pushed myself to run as fast as I ever had in my life. My feet slammed the pavement and rocks bounced and danced, from the force of my steps or from the apocalypse only feet behind me. I was gaining on it, fractionally, slowly pulling ahead of the pits on my sides trapping me, even as the distance between me and the kill zone disappeared with every one of my frantic steps.
I heard manic laughter, and it sounded like it was coming from the earth itself. From inside her little shelter, she was watching me through the earth, feeling my frantic footfalls as she tore the ground away from under me, both of us knowing I was running straight towards my doom. Her laughing reached a crescendo, and earth spikes and flying rock joined the fray and flew at my face to slow me down and block my path.
Without missing a step, my swords lashed out at anything in my path. The hail of rock crashing through my shield and scraping off my skin was constant, but I couldn’t stop running. The chasm was only feet behind me, and I was only a couple dozen feet from her now. Another vicious pillar of rock, covered in spikes exploded from the ground in front of me, and I ran around it, shaving off some of the protruding spikes with my swords as I passed.
Not that running into them and tearing myself up would matter at all if I was about to fall into the crevice or die ignominiously as soon as I closed on her.
I was almost there. I had no plan but to hit her with everything I had and hope that somehow, lightning beat rock. I wiped sweat out of my eyes, it felt chalky from the dust covering me and everything else. My feet kept moving on their own and everything felt like it was slowing down, even as I sped up. There was nothing left but me, her, and the sound of my heart pounding in my ears, the rest of the world literally and figuratively falling away.
And then I was on top of her. As I crossed my best guess at her range, I took a flying leap. For one tranquil second, I soared towards the crude earth fort, and then my feet touched ground.
Instantly she was on me. Without hesitation, rock spires burst from the ground directly under me, and it was all I could do to keep moving and jumping, having them scrape against me and cut up my legs instead of impaling me completely. In just a couple of seconds, her fortress began growing a moat of bloodied spikes as I tried to pass.
There was still ground on her other side, she’d made the collapsing hole go around her rather than falling into it herself. If I could just get over there, I might have a chance. I had to go around her, but as soon as I turned one way, a wall rose in my path. I turned the other way, and a matching wall rose. Sadistic, really, she could have just killed me, but instead decided to block me in.
“Have you learned yet?” she jeered from behind her earthen fortress, a tiny slit appearing and showing me nothing but a pair of darkened eyes. “Have you learned of my power?”
“You won’t win.”
“Like you would know. You’re just a corpse.”
I flung a handful of lightning at her, but the slit in the fortress slammed shut as soon as my arm moved, leaving nothing but a plume of dust.
And then came her ultimate attack, a disc the size of a bus made of solid rock, hovering slowly into position above me, until it blocked out the sun. In front of me, the sheer wall of her little fort. On my left and right, stone barricades. Behind me, a bottomless pit. And now, above me, a floating island big enough to turn me into a pancake. I sliced at it with no effect whatsoever.
“Any last words? Care to tell me any lessons you’ve learned today?”
“Yeah,” I said gritting my teeth.
“And that is?” Sadistic glee filled her voice. The rock island hovered ominously above my head.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
“You’re a real piece of shit.”
She roared in outrage and I fell backwards, her retort lost to my ears with the roaring of the wind as I fell headfirst into the bottomless pit. Above me, an explosion as the floating island came crashing down and shattered against what was left of the ground, the shrinking blue sliver of sky turning grey with the cloud of dust.
I closed my eyes, half because I didn’t want the last thing I saw to be the rock that would bury me down here, and half to make whatever peace I could find before I hit rock bottom.
I’d almost died a few times now, but this felt like a much more inevitable end, and I found a lot of the things people said about dying were true.
Things did slow down; as the inevitability of death closed in on me, my mind flickered over everything which had brought me here, the shock etched onto Brick’s face behind the school, my dad’s rage and my mother’s despair. Blackett’s calm loathing, AEGIS’ yellow, distorted holo-tears. Karu’s holy exultation, Saga’s succulent savor. And Lia’s jealous melancholy.
I could only whisper a silent goodbye into the rushing wind to those I’d left behind. With any luck, they had each other, and I hadn’t disappointed them too much. I opened my eyes and found my tears floating around my falling face like I was in zero-g. It was surreal and beautiful. The gash of blue which was the sky looked so distant now, the size of a credit chit.
Through my tear-filled eyes, the sky seemed to pulse and tear, and a tendril of the blue shot down towards me with a sonic boom which echoed through the crevice like a firing squad. It was beautiful, like the sky itself was reaching down to pick me up and carry me into heaven. I wasn’t sure I deserved that, but I appreciated the gesture.
Until I slammed into something solid and both I and the thing I hit made a pained grunt. I was still falling, but instead of feeling weightless, felt heavier than I’d ever been in my life. Whatever I’d slammed into stabbed me in the back with such force I felt my spine popping. I heard a machine nearby whir and scream in protest, and my tears caught up with my face and trickled against me like rain.
It took me another few seconds to be able to look around and see with any clarity, but when I did, I found the face of Karu, red visor blazing at my side, holding me in her strong arms as she slowed our descent.
“Karu?” I had to ask. It felt surreal, being alive after all the peace I’d just been making.
She grunted and strained, as her and my inertia and the pack on her back pulled her in two different directions, but her grip was iron and her will adamantite. Slowly, the blue gash in the distance stopped shrinking, and then began to grow.
She inhaled with a gasp, finally, and allowed herself a glance at me. “You do not die on this day, Ashton.”
I held onto her like she was the only thing in the world as we ascended, faster and faster. As we neared the top, chunks of rock rained down on us constantly and she darted back and forth with amazing alacrity, making me feel like I’d left my stomach behind every time we moved, but for her, these random hazards were child’s play, and we breached the surface, beautiful hazy sunlight filling my entire world again.
Blind to us in the air, the Exhuman nonetheless could hear the rising and escape of Karu’s jetpack, and blindly fired rocks all through the sky in our general direction. The ones which came close popped effortlessly against my shield as Karu pulled the two of us away towards a rooftop a block away from the now utterly obliterated warzone.
“I left to procure this,” she said, not pausing for a moment even though she was panting for breath. She unclipped the spare harness I’d been strapped into from her regular harness and started clipping it onto me.
“I’m going to fly?” I asked as I lifted my arms and she ran the harness around my back. I looked up at the sky because my other option was to look down her tank at her sports bra and now was really not the time for that.
“Yes. You discerned that the Exhuman was using tremors in the ground to sense your presence and be able to strike while still fully protected…a poor situation I should not have left you to handle alone. If she must see us to strike, then she will have to lower her defenses, and that provides us an opportunity.”
She finished and began tugging at each strap to check I was securely in, pulling me into her with every yank, even though I tried to stay on my feet. It was very hard not to stare at some part of her through this process, from the thick black band of her bra visible under her arm, the enticing peek of boyshorts under her long tank, or her long and now very dusty legs and bare feet standing on a rooftop overlooking a battlefield.
She really did look like some kind of mythological angel, with bare arms and legs, loosely draped in white, adorned with wings of blue plasma and a halo of glowing red.
“A warning: I may be much less maneuverable carrying you as well, but devoid of my armor and weaponry, the jetpack should carry the both of us without issue, as it did on our way here. However, if she does lower her defenses, her aim will be true and her attacks as deadly as ever, but we shall be sitting ducks, as it were. Be ready for jarring evasions and defend the two of us as best as you are able.”
I nodded as she got behind me and strapped our harnesses together. Gingerly, she lifted us, and in a moment the tips of my toes left the ground and I was held aloft by the straps wrapped around my chest, legs, and shoulders, Karu’s warm body pressed all along the length of my back.
We hovered for only a second, and then another volley of rocks arrived, aimed at the sounds of us taking off. Karu lifted us up, jarring me deeper into my harness and giving me a good idea what kind of chafing she had to deal with, and the rocks went below, levelling the building we’d just been standing on.
“Let’s go!” I shouted, the wind in my face up here much more full of excitement than dread.
“Habere Caelum!” she shouted, and down we went, into a steep dive, heading right for the earth enclosure. I drew my swords and angled them in front of us so they would rake through the fort as we passed. We’d have to get really, really close for them for me to manipulate lightning inside of the fort, but unless she opened up, it was all we had.
It felt like the first drop on a rollercoaster as we rocketed downwards, the wind whipping tears out of my eyes and flapping my skin and clothes all over, and Karu pulled us just above the earth shield, passing me only inches from it. We moved so fast, I only had moments where I was in range, but I was ready, and for the instant that the shell was wholly within my range, I spawned my swords within it, slashing wildly and blindly at anything inside.
And then we were away, and the screams of the Exhuman, in pain and in indignation followed us as we soared skyward. All around us, chunks of rock exploded, pelting my shield which protected Karu and me both. I looked back and saw the arms of the jetpack making constant micro-adjustments so that each arm would avoid shards of incoming rock, only for the rocks to vaporize before making contact.
We petered out high in the air, and Karu reared back for another dive, even faster this time. I felt like an owl, or falcon or something, roaring from the blue down on my prey. Except this was no fluffy bunny rabbit, this was an unrepentant killer who filled the air around us with explosions, even as we raced towards her. We swooped again, Karu steering the two of us with lethal accuracy again, and me deflecting any shots which came close and my shield covering the rest. As we streaked past, again I raked at her blindly with my swords, eliciting another scream, more pain than shock this time.
As we accelerated again into the sky, the fortress exploded, huge chunks of rock flying in every direction. The Exhuman sat crumpled on the ground, one of her legs twisted and blackened under her, and electrical burns like spiderwebs and blackened veins covered much of her body. Teeth bared, eyes bulging, she snapped her head back and forth unnaturally until she spotted us in the sky.
With a gesture like she was grabbing us from there, rocks exploded around us, and Karu began to dip and weave frantically to avoid the airbursts. Much of it bounced off my shield and disintegrated, but some shards were large enough to penetrate and riddled me with shards of stone which sliced all over my body. I protected my face and Karu and trusted in her to get us out of danger.
We were way slower with the two of us, that much was obvious. Whereas Karu had been able to avoid most of the fire on her own, we were now tanking most of it, and while the damage was mostly superficial, I only had so much blood to lose, and I’d been fighting and running so long already that total exhaustion hung over me like a dread spectre. Karu wove one way and another, changing directions seemingly at random, but succeeding in making most of the worst blasts go off nowhere near us.
But now that the Exhuman had sight of us, she didn’t need to fire in all directions anymore, she could focus all of her battery on us. The assault became more intense with the second volley, and I could feel fistfulls of rock slamming into me and pinging off Karu’s visor and jetpack.
There was a clang, and we dove. I looked back and saw Karu’s head drooping against my shoulder, rocking with our momentum, a new pit in her visor where a hefty chunk of rock had just whacked her in the forehead. We plummeted only a dozen feet before her head snapped back up and our descent began to slow.
But the damage was done. For a few precious seconds we were predictable sitting ducks. On all sides, boulders hurtled towards us. We had two options. Down, or up. Karu chose down.
Feeling my stomach in my throat, we dove even faster than the uncontrolled descent of a moment ago, rocks crashing into each other and exploding above our heads like fireworks. My feet nearly skimmed the ground as Karu pulled us out of the dive at the last possible second, sending us parallel to the ground with unbelievable speed.
In front of us, rock spires erupted one after another, a forest of stone. Without slowing, we wove left and right, zig-zagging through the hazard with such finesse, she was dodging obstacles I couldn’t even see, much less react to. Her visor had to be giving her extra information, or maybe she was just that damn good.
Finally, we were in the open, flying out over the huge empty cave which used to be a city street. Karu dipped us down, and we flew just beneath the surface, just out of sight of the Exhuman. Attacks kept raining down at us, and the walls themselves launched spikes and boulders at us, but Karu precisely flew us over, under, and around every obstacle.
“Final run!” she shouted, her voice distant in the racing wind. I nodded, knowing she would feel the back of my head against her chest. She put on a huge burst of speed which made my vision constrict and the world to streak into colorlessness.
And then we were up and out again, racing that speed directly towards the Exhuman. She was looking around wildly, like an animal trying to sniff us out, and spotted us a moment after we’d burst from the ground.
She drew her arms back to thrust some final attack at us but it was too late. I had two handfuls of lightning and fired volleys at her, saturating the whole area around her with arcing orbs of lightning. She didn’t even scream, just collapsed onto her bad leg, her mouth wrenched open as her body writhed.
Karu closed in and my four swords slashed true. Her skin blackened and boiled, her blood erupted and evaporated, one of her arms fell completely off, severed above the elbow, both ends of the wound completely black from where a lightning blade had burned completely through. And mostly, she writhed and shuddered as electricity saturated her body and sent every single muscle and nerve spasming.
It was exactly as horrible as it sounded. I was glad Karu kept us moving so I didn’t have time to watch, but still knew the image would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life. I was prepared to take this person’s life, but I had no idea what that really meant until I did it.
In a way, in that moment, I was jealous of her. Earth was a clean killer compared to lightning.
And then we were gone and she was still. Karu didn’t turn around, we simply left. It felt…disrespectful, or ignominious after all that we’d been through with this Exhuman to simply leave her the second she was dead…but what else was there? Some final words? Bury her? Pose her in some dignified position for the XPCA to find?
I didn’t want to do any of that. I wanted to be far from here and to treat my wounds and sleep for like, a week. I couldn’t see Karu’s face behind her visor, but could tell just by the way she was holding herself that she was just as beat as I was, if not more. And besides, seeing exactly what I’d done to her was the last thing I wanted…
“XPCA are coming. They can’t find you there. I will take responsibility, claim I used electrical-based weaponry,” she said, seeming to read my mind.
“Yeah. Thanks.” It was all I could say. Thanks for killing someone with me?
We flew in silence for what seemed like forever, Karu sometimes making half-utterances to her visor or adjusting our course in gentle sweeping arcs. Outside of the immediate battlefield, the city had survived mostly intact. The Exhuman had put a lot of rocks through walls, and walls through buildings, and buildings through other buildings, but it was mostly localized to a few blocks. As we flew, the air became clearer and it just looked like a quiet town under us.
I nodded off several times, the world seeming to jump under me when I woke up without realizing. Karu maintained her composure the whole flight, and it was only when we were touching down and it was approaching evening that I woke up and realized where we were.
Lia came barrelling at me and didn’t even give me time to dismount before she pulled me into a painful embrace, reawakening all the wounds I’d forgotten about. Karu touched down moments after my feet hit the ground and stumbled, fumbling with our harnesses. DOG was there, and did a little happy wiggle to see me, and then his light came on, and AEGIS put him through an entire backflip.
“Where have you two been? You’re almost as hurt as when you left,” Lia said with a frown.
“We’ll tell you later,” I said with a wry smile and messed up her hair.
“You need to stop using that line. It sucks, and you suck when you use it.”
“Well I’m serious this time. Karu and I are beat and need to sleep like, now. Can you put up a bed for her, AEGIS?” I asked DOG, who responded with a weird full-bodied nod and the red light flickered away.
I don’t remember stumbling through the elevator into my bed. As I laid there feeling sleep grip me like a riptide and experiencing all my aches and wounds throbbing as one, my last thought was of the Exhuman woman’s face, bruised and burned and scarred, her eyes unfocused, bloodshot, and staring into eternity.
Exhaustion was a gift which gave me my only night of restful sleep I would have in many nights.