Chronal Leap transported me just behind my target. Not Shadow Girl, who had proven to be the most offensively powerful of the supervillain trio but the other woman, the one I was ninety percent sure was the source of the slowing field. There was no sound, no flashy lighting; one moment I was standing over an unconscious Big Guy, the next I loomed over the smallest supervillain's back, already reaching out in the annoyingly slow speed the field allowed.
Somehow, despite the darkness her partner had been creating, despite being apparently taken by surprise, the smaller woman dodged. She ducked under my arm without having to look, then moved around me in a burst of speed and agility that would have left the Big Guy in the dust and left me grasping at nothing. The moment I turned around, my upper body muscles suddenly found no resistance to their movements and exploded forward, only for my lower torso to fail to keep up and the difference to hammer my spine with a spike of agony as my own full-body strength was turned against it.
On one hand, I now knew how someone with such an apparently passive power could be a seemingly equal member of a team with a physical powerhouse and an energy manipulator; she could choose to exclude things from her field, at least at close range, including herself. Since the field limited everything to peak human speed and she was superhuman, she could always be faster than her opponents no matter how fast they were. On the other hand, I now lay on the ground with a damaged spine, unresponsive legs, and an energy beam trying to shorten me by a foot even as the air around me was turning liquid.
"GO!" a voice that hadn't come from anyone's throat appeared directly around the third villain's head, the energy manipulator using a tiny fraction of her redirected energy to create the sound without needing to speak. I immediately committed the trick to the list of things to try with my own powers in the future, then tracked Slow-Field Girl through Force Awareness. She was darting deeper into the military base now that I was apparently incapacitated, which spoke of some sort of goal other than blowing it up. Interesting. The burn at my neck chose that moment to intensify, pulling me back to my more immediate problems.
Another Chronal Leap put me right next to Shadow Girl, already up and kicking. My regeneration might still be fixing some self-inflicted spinal damage but, unlike most people, I was not limited to physical muscles to move around. Proximakinesis already held me up during flight, after all. The villainess frantically backpedaled even as the air around us suddenly became thick as molasses. No, not thick; she was draining all kinetic energy from it, essentially holding it still, on the thought that I needed to go through this new obstacle to get to her.
BOOM!
The explosion of disintegrating air molecules in her face disabused her of the notion and knocked her on her ass. Making an effectively solid object out of the air when your enemy's powers worked on solid objects? Dumb. On one hand, maybe the bad guys hadn't known who the government could call upon for reinforcements when they planned the attack. On the other, far be it from me to interrupt said enemies when making a mistake. Before Shadow Girl could recover, I extended my Proximakinesis through the ground, the same ground she now lay on, ripped a fifty-ton piece of asphalt and concrete then flipped it as hard as I could with her upon it.
Kinetic energy drained from the imminent concrete sandwich like a river, slowing everything down considerably. Unfortunately for Shadow Girl, once the ground she stood on had been flipped she no longer had to fight just my powers but Earth's own gravity as well and while her power had vastly greater reach than mine, it was nowhere as intense. All attacks on me as well as her attempts to spread out the wildfires to have more energy to draw upon stopped, as she was forced to redirect all her efforts on saving herself. Caught between our powers, the Earth's gravity and its own inertia, the piece of asphalt imploded before scattering into red-hot, sizzling pieces pelting everything nearby.
The ground shook again, a beam of energy powerful enough to flatten a city block focusing directly on me from above, hot enough that even the secondary effects were vaporizing stone. My abilities rose in response. For the first time in months, power flowed through my body like an oceanic current as I faced an enemy even close to my weight class. Most people underestimate just how much power a wildfire can give. It's just fire that can be put out with enough water, right? If you could throw around rivers, maybe, because a square mile worth of blaze unleashed the energy of a small atomic bomb every second.
It was clear that my opponent had never really tried to redirect that much energy before. Her reactions were sluggish, the only reason they could keep up being the slowing field limiting everyone's mobility. The effects were largely unfocused and inefficient, using only a fraction of the energy she had available... or maybe that was just the shock from being hit by a truck-sized lump of concrete. I doubled down on this way of attack, using Force Adjustment and Proximakinesis to rip a mass of bedrock the size of a house and throw it at the maximum speed the field would allow, then teleported in her way when she started to dodge.
Having seen that a melee engagement would be an instant loss, she blasted a narrow path through the boulder instead, then shattered the rest into a thick cloud of choking dust. At the same time, half a dozen muddy lumps took roughly humanoid shapes and rose off the ground. Within seconds, seven decoys with an outward shape identical to the original formed, then they copied her emissions across the whole electromagnetic spectrum; visual light, thermal, ultraviolet, bioelectric field, even the trace levels of natural radiation. To any conventional sensor or even comicbook x-ray vision they would have been indistinguishable... unfortunately for her my awareness relied on more than just electromagnetism.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
That was not to say the decoys were useless; moved around through direct addition of kinetic energy they could block my path, try to grapple me, or even punch and kick convincingly enough, while being effectively invulnerable to physical attacks because she could simply reform them. More delaying tactics while she built up? Perhaps. On the other hand, her latest stunts have left nobody alive for several hundred feet, all the remaining survivors being in the deepest underground layers of the military base... the same places the other villain seemed to be moving towards.
"Time to end this charade," I said and from how my opponent braced several layers of debris and condensed air around her I was certain her powers had picked up my words just as mine would have. It did her no good, for the very next second every bit of solid matter in contact with me became unstable.
Nearly a ton of mud, rock, molten asphalt and powdered concrete had all electromagnetic binding forces reduced by a factor of twenty. Molecules burst apart, atoms spontaneously ionized down to the last electron, a ton of normal mass becoming a ton of literal lightning. Knowing what was to come in advance, I'd traded Chronal Leap for Invulnerability to the initial, titanic discharge. Less radiant and explosive than the equivalent nuclear bomb, the literal shockwave was more disruptive and disabling and had only so many conductive targets to ground itself in.
The world flashed a brilliant, eye-searing azure, then faded into normal daylight for the first time in minutes. The surrounding area looked less like a military base and more like the surface of the moon, a dark grey, cratered, blasted wasteland for a good quarter mile radius, thick grey dust falling from above like the snows of nuclear winter. Beyond it, the wildfire was still raging in a ring of red and black that would cut off mundane access but barely faze superpowered enemies.
Of said enemies, two were unconscious, not even close to all right, but alive. Their body-concealing costumes were more scorch marks than not, even melted on top of damaged flesh in places, and if they ever had any tools or other gadgets with them they'd all been reduced to slag. Normal people would have been nor merely dead but reduced to blast-shadows from the energy release, but supers were made of sterner stuff. Even grievously injured as they were, their enhanced physique alone already had them slowly healing. From what I could see, Big Guy would be fine in a couple of hours. Shadow Girl would be down for a couple of days, postponing the inevitable question of containment.
Big Guy was not much of an issue; a tough enough prison, possibly enhanced with my help, would suffice. Shadow Girl though was a problem. Had she had any less broad and versatile powers, I'd hand her over and have her be General Rinaker's problem... but Energy Manipulation? There was no environment devoid of energy, or barrier that could passively resist it. But that was still future-Maya's problem; I still had the third supervillain to deal with.
xxxx
Slow Field Girl got out of the depths of the base three thousand feet away, through a small service tunnel to the facility's water and sewage pipes. She and her cargo thus bypassed the ring of burning forest and all ways of conventional pursuit. She briefly scanned her overgrown surroundings, hefted her load to a less awkward carry, then made to disappear in the Alaskan wilderness.
A split-second later she was frantically dodging a series of teleport-attacks. Under normal circumstances, her slowing field would have let her easily outpace any opponent, but carrying two still-living, cuffed, and very thoroughly bound people around her size slowed her enough it became a struggle.
"So that was your target," I mused, sending a shockwave through the ground that made her stumble. I'd had several minutes to prepare for the chase, thinking of ways to counter her mobility advantage while securing the two other supers. "I assume the kids have powers, like us?"
Not that I had to assume; the enhanced durability in both the boy's and girl's bodies was a dead giveaway. Keeping the fact that my senses could be used as a radar for supers on the other hand was worth some dissembling. From the extent of the teenagers' durability, they either were less toughness-focused than most supers or had below-average powers. Not as weak as the large number of soldiers that gained powers during the Invasion, but not as tough as a tank either; that made them vulnerable to collateral damage and problematic hostages if a fight lasted for long.
"Stand back!" the last villain threatened, speaking for the first time. "Stand back or I'll kill them!" Her voice sounded strangely empty, almost without inflection beyond anger or aggression.
"No, you won't," I said, cutting off her retreat via teleportation. "Your operation included attacking a secret military base, leveling a square mile of forest, and indiscriminately killing dozens to hundreds of personnel to get to your goal. You even left your own companions behind to get to those two, so I doubt you'll kill them out of hand."
"You're willing to stake their lives on that?" she hissed menacingly.
"I've seen people captured by mass-murdering supervillains before; dying would be an arguably better fate." Especially if the worse forms of mind control and sacrificial powers got involved. "Besides, are you willing to stake life, limb and more on the result?"
"I left some surprises back at the tunnels," she tried to threaten in a different way. "You could fight me... or you could save more than a hundred survivors back there."
"They're soldiers and this is war," I shot back making another teleport-grab she barely dodged. "Give up the hostages, surrender and I will not kill you."
"What manner of- AAH-" she slipped, crashed through a tree and almost dropped the teenage boy "-hero are you?!"
"The effective kind."
I blinked before her, making her leap back, then punched at the ground, grabbed the root beneath it and spread my Proximakinesis to the tree beyond. Then with a tremendous pull I ripped the forty-foot pine tree out of the ground, complete with roots and swung it at her like a baseball bat. If she expected it to shatter like wood usually did against supers, she was sorely disappointed, emphasis on "sore", as Force Adjustment made it tougher than it had any right to be. The impact threw her in the air and a teleportation took me just ahead of her and within reach while she had no ground to stand against. She only managed to avoid being grabbed by throwing the hostages at me.
"Fuck this shit, I'm out," she growled and disappeared into the woods. Without the hostages to slow her down even using teleportation to keep up would not let me actually catch her so I did not try. I teleported back to the base instead, scrambling to disarm her "surprises" while a hundred and fifty-nine survivors slowly made their way through the partially collapsed, smoke-filled tunnels...