"This better be important, Agent Stone," I said in lieu of greeting while I reached for my powers. Since it probably was and a relaxing bath was no longer in the immediate future, Force Adjustment reduced friction and cohesion of everything in contact with my skin that wasn't clothing or a phone. The normally imperceptible layer of grime, sweat and less pleasant things all of us accumulate over our daily lives disintegrated and fell off, leaving my skin and hair perfectly clean... but it still didn't even come close to a bath in the relaxation and comfort departments.
"One of our bases is under attack and local forces are getting overwhelmed," he told me and I immediately took flight even as I used the one power that made me a superhero more than any other. Halfway to the nearest window my clothes were already melting and shifting. "How quickly can you fly to Alaska?" By the time Agent Stone asked his question, they had already shifted into a skintight, aerodynamic, full-body suit from my neck to my toes, hugging my every curve but leaving my head open to the air and my long golden tresses free to dance in the wind. A bit vain? Well-earned if it was.
"In less than a minute, but we need to be done with this call first. Anything else I should know?" I informed him even as I hovered half a mile above the ground already. Prior experience had revealed that cell phone networks started to have issues beyond this height, and flying at any speed made it worse. Any faster than a mile or two per second and the network simply couldn't keep up.
"The base is a testing facility for people with low-end powers but last week they found a pair much stronger than average. Our analysts think that's why the facility was targeted now." Gee, he thought? Eh, he was a government worker; stating the obvious was part of his job. In the meantime I'd brought up a few maps of North America in general and Alaska in particular and committed them to memory. I was still pants at Geography, but powers had improved my memory enough it might as well be photographic in the short term.
"Hostiles?"
"Four crystalline non-humans making weapons malfunction and capable of cutting through tank armor with effort. Two women and one man, all masked and hanging in the back, powers unknown." Great, more supervillains. If they were taking on a military base they weren't pushovers like that idiot in the Mall either. "The attack started three minutes ago, taking out the hangar by surprise, then cutting down both land vehicles and crews rushing to them."
"Then there's no time to lose. I'm off," I cut him off, put the cell under a small safety field in my belt and launched myself straight up. The pop of a breaking sound barrier came almost instantly, the rush of wind quickly turning into a roar even with Force Adjustment reducing air resistance as much as possible. In moments I was higher than most commercial airplanes would ever go. Just a few heartbeats later and the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere was forming a glorious azure dome beneath my feet.
For a moment it seemed as if I was standing still, the air thin enough at this height its resistance could be negated entirely at my current speed. Weightless in the silence of space, I took in a view that would never stop leaving me both in awe at the beauty of our home and determined to protect it. Then I really dipped into super-speed. Proximakinesis pulled me with a force of several hundred tons towards my destination. Forced Acceleration magnified the speed at which all forces produced results on me, effectively making my personal time go a few times faster. Force Adjustment magnified both effects by more than an order of magnitude.
From one heartbeat to the next I was pushing against a river of fire, friction and air resistance creating a sheath of heat more intense than the surface of the Sun despite all I could do to limit it. That Force Awareness could see thought it meant I would not be ramming any satellites at a hundred miles per second, but only just. From the state of New York to Alaska I wrote upon the sky a line of fire. Three and a half thousand miles crossed in under half a minute, the faster I'd ever gone without stepping outside of time entirely.
Could I go faster? Certainly. But the side effects were nasty enough I was not willing to risk it. Space, especially space near planets, was by no means empty. The thin atmosphere was already hot enough to leave me sweating but the real problem was debris. Dust, micrometeorites, even a small pebble could become dangerous if one went fast enough. How dangerous? At the speeds I was going a one-gram pebble would hit as hard as a cruise missile and while I could shield myself from some effects of those impacts, I couldn't do the same for others. My first deep space flight had proven that and made what I'd thought would be a short hop into something longer.
Twenty-nine seconds after my conversation with Agent Stone ended, I was already diving towards a snow-covered, forested hill, and explosions and fires large enough to be visible from space...
xxxx
The forest was on fire and it was the attackers' fault. If fighting in the invasion had taught me anything was that environmental factors like fog, smoke and temperature differences had a huge impact upon both normal humans and most technology. However advanced their gadgets, unless they had powers people were basically blind when near a large fire. Vehicles, military or otherwise, had similar issues because fireproofing them was bulky enough and expensive enough it would be all they could do, making them next to useless for actual fighting. Conversely, actual fighting vehicles were not fireproof, not to the level of driving through a serious wildfire.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Which made the raging inferno surrounding the hidden military base a smart choice for the superhuman attackers and bad for the rest of us; smart enemies were the worst enemies. Even as I slowed my approach to avoid killing people through an explosive landing, I could see groups of soldiers hugging any surviving cover religiously as they tried to shoot through a thickening layer of choking smoke. Good news? Most of them wore gas masks so the smoke was less of a danger than it'd otherwise be. Bad news? Every single weapon I could see kept jamming no matter what the soldiers did - and they did a lot.
What Agent Stone meant by "testing facility for low-end powers" was that many of the soldiers had powers that enhanced combat ability. Some of them were covered in force-fields about as strong as inch-thick steel plate. Others were strong enough to carry autocannon that weighed over half a ton if you included the ammo. Many could enhance their weapons with various energies, though my Force Awareness couldn't see exact details. None of that helped because the guns failed to fire, clicking uselessly again and again. Some were not working at all, others had odd things happening in the firing chamber. The result was the soldiers having to retreat again and again as four almost elephant-sized, bat-shaped things seemingly made of petrified amber went from defense position to defense position and tore everything they could reach apart.
Seeing one of the monsters reach through a pillbox, slowly tearing reinforced concrete open like unfolding a present to reach at the soldiers taking cover within, I aimed at the monster and charged... then a split second later crashed into an invisible wall that knocked me out of breath. No, not a wall; it wasn't anything physical. It was more like trying to fly through molasses, the air itself simultaneously being impossibly thick and viscous as well as perfectly normal. Force Awareness revealed nothing; there was nothing wrong with the forces trying to accelerate me, I simply seemed incapable of going faster than an Olympic sprint no matter the force.
The monster had ripped the pillbox open, already stooping low to dive through the opening and I couldn't fucking reach it! So I reached for Forcefield Creation, paired it with Proximakinesis, and lashed out with a beam that could core through a tank. Unfortunately, whatever strange power was slowing me down also kept the field from extending, reducing it to a crawl barely ahead of my position. The monster's arm was closing around a soldier's torso in slow motion as I put everything I had into moving faster, then the world blurred.
No, going faster had not worked. Using Chronal Leap to send me where I'd be a couple of seconds in the future however had, so I did it again and again until I was in arms' reach of the monster. Its enormous claw had engulfed the screaming soldier's torso but I came out of what was basically teleportation swinging, my fist going through its center of mass with such force the monster's amber-like body shattered into thousands of tiny bits... bits that moved through the air in unnatural slowness, like a bad bullet-time effect in a b-movie.
The soldier was trying to say something in slow motion and I realized my mind was still working as quickly as it should have; whatever was slowing everything down was only working on my physical position alone, not internally. That meant it wasn't a temporal effect, and it wasn't force or my senses would have picked it up. There was something akin to a shadow, a little film of interference between me and my surroundings, at the very edge of perception not in sight or hearing or smell, but something more tactile. The ghost of a pressure that was like force but wasn't a force... which powers being what they are, left too many damn possibilities open.
"Have everyone pull back to the main building," I told the traumatized soldiers once I dropped out of the no longer useful superspeed. "The attackers will be dealt with." Whether they listened because they knew who I was or they had been scared enough by the monster to take the first way out I did not know and did not have time to worry about. I blinked to the second monster, one tearing into the only vehicle hangar still standing. It either was no faster than a normal person or the slowing effect was non-discriminatory, because it didn't react fast enough to my appearance behind its back. Like the first, it went down to a single punch, shattering into yellow shards no harder than ordinary stone. If the defenders still had use of their guns the monsters would not have been a threat at all.
The remaining two monsters charged at me through the smoke, again moving no faster than normal men at a dead sprint. Their limbs were longer, their loping gain sent them further with every step. but their individual actions were slower than normal, as if moving underwater. A pair of Chronal Leaps and casual punches shattered them to bits... then a strange purple beam burst out of the smoke and struck me. Much like the slowing effect, it had been entirely invisible to my Force Awareness because whatever it was was not a phenomenon of physical forces. Unlike the slowing effect, it was intensely disorienting and unpleasant. Imagine going through insane, balance-destroying aerobatics as a normal person; your guts writhing, your ears feeling like they'll burst, your every sense feeling like it's been twisted around. To that add the worst migraine in your life and a military-grade taser and the combined result might approach the purple beam's effect.
It only lasted for a few moments, enough to knock me out of the sky but immediately fading as my superhumanly fast recovery got to work, cutting what would probably have been hours-long incapacitation to only a few seconds. When I got up, a trio of teenagers were walking through smoke and fire and rubble with not a care in the world. Two boys and one girl, still with the athletic slimness of youth under the skintight, matte black costumes that covered them from head to toe.
Unfortunately for their attempts at a secret identity, my senses cut through their costumes to reveal a broad-faced, blue-eyed boy with short-cropped hair the color of straw and a shit-eating grin, one more serious and narrow-faced brunette with a cute sprinkling of freckles, and another arrogant-looking brunette with the kind of superhuman beauty one often saw in those with powers, especially us girls. I immediately hated her smug grin, not that more reasons were required for the righteous face-punching she was about to receive.
With their minions out of the picture, the supervillain trio had finally entered the battle...