An eight-foot-long, serrated blade swung through where my head had been moments before, cracking through the air like a whip as it broke the sound barrier. With a grunt of effort, I twisted away from the follow-up swing then blinked away. Just like every single time I'd tried the same thing, the grey-skinned, bald, grotesquely over-muscled humanoid came along for the ride. I tried to fly away next and the moment I got out of reach the demon was suddenly there in my way, swinging his sword. The blade rapped against my ribs, slicing through my costume and biting into skin; little more than a papercut, really. The latest Proximakinesis improvement had simply negated most of the bleed-through energy but as everyone who's ever gotten one knows, paper cuts still hurt.
Below us, a squad of soldier-types was assaulting one of the sword-wight summoning buildings. Line after line of sword-swinging, plate-armored undead stood between them and the building, blocking all approaches while the enemy brought in skeletal archers or imps from elsewhere to deal with the more mobile humans.
The demon tried to give me another paper-cut but got a fist to the face for his troubles. It spewed black blood and broken fangs as it reeled back but otherwise endured the blow and interposed its blade between my follow-up kick and its intended target. Using Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment, I came to a dead stop near instantly - quickly enough that I wasn't skewered on its weapon. And I would have been, durability or no; unlike lesser enemy warriors, the sword-demon's weapon was positively cackling with magical power easily half a dozen times stronger than that of the Executioners' halberds or the wights' armor; breaking it would take a minute and its wielder wasn't going to give it to me.
A tall, broad-shouldered, ebony-skinned soldier got ahead of the squad and raised a rifle in each hand. He was that too-intense guy that was almost as powerful as Dallas; I'd learned his name was Jack in our post-drama preparations. Jack Everyman. Weird name, but who was Maya Wennefer to throw stones? Despite both him and his targets moving across the battlefield and vaulting over obstacles, despite dual-wielding automatic rifles, or even the ridiculous choice of aiming at a different target not just with each weapon but with each individual shot at full auto, every single shot landed between a wight's eyes, as intended. There they proceeded to smash into and through the wights' magically-reinforced helmets through sheer speed, their fragments continuing to bounce within the helmet and turn undead flesh into mush. Sixteen wights fell over dead in a couple of seconds. More followed them to a final death as the rest of the squad discharged their own rifles with less perfect accuracy but similarly deadly results.
A second demon blinked into existence next to me, forcing me to block with my forearm and taking another papercut for the trouble. Despite this, I gave it and its partner a smile that was all teeth and no mirth, then blasted them both with kinetic lances. Weaker than my punches but narrower, invisible and effectively instantaneous, they cut shallow gouges into the sword-demons' bodies. If they wanted to play the attrition game I would oblige; the surge of energy as the line of wights below us was shattered more than made up for the exhaustion I was feeling. Sweat pooled and muscles protested under my suit as I sped up with Forced Acceleration, matching and surpassing both enemies at once blow for blow. Doing so was hard after enhancing over forty weapons, but the war was building up to a final battle; if we didn't give it our best now then when?
Seeing the much smaller number of living troops doing such disproportionate damage to their lines, the wights charged. Hundreds upon hundreds of undead in heavy plate swarmed out of their defensive positions and tried to overwhelm the living with a charge. It was exactly what Jack's squad had been waiting for, all of them opening fire with dual-wielded rifles. The others lacked Jack's impressively superhuman accuracy but with enemy infantry taking up most of their field of view, well, they didn't need to be accurate. Hundreds of rounds struck the advancing horde, severing legs, blasting off arms, opening holes the size of melons through torsos and even causing the occasional decapitation. Where before small-arms fire had either glanced off even low-grade enemy armor or at best drilled tiny holes unlikely to stop an undead foe, now they exploded with many times the kinetic energy on impact.
It wasn't the result of a sudden leap in everyone's power, though by getting enough kills the soldiers' growth rate had actually become faster despite reduced gains per kill from relying more on their weapons than their own abilities. No, it was the work of the weapon enhancements. As far as anyone on our side could tell, traditional magical enhancement relied on either making an item better at what it was, or applying a harmful effect for the weapon to deliver to the enemy. The swords these new demons were using belonged to the first category, being many times more "sword" than they should be and having magnified results on everything a sword could be used for.
That was not how we'd improved the guns at all. Instead of improving their "gun" concept for range, firepower, caliber or similar changes, or giving them special magical ammo, Dallas, Jack and I had come up with ways my ability to selectively adjust and apply forces could change the physics of the weapons' function to our advantage. The volume-wise tiny Force Adjustment field on each of those guns did several things at once. First, it reduced recoil thus making the rifles more accurate even in full-auto. Secondly, it magnified the cohesion of the gun itself while reducing any forces applied to it, granting a weaker version of my own toughness. Third, it magnified the kinetic forces exerted by gases other than nitrogen and oxygen, such as the gases produced by the ignition of the propellant. That would have made mundane gun barrels burst of course, but we'd just reinforced ours. Fourth, it reduced all forces exerted by bullets while within the gun while also increasing bullet cohesion. This meant less wear and tear on the barrel, less slowing down of the bullet through friction, less slowing of propellant gases from the bullet's reaction to being violently ejected but also less deformation on the bullet and less chance of it bursting to bits from the increased forces.
All in all, the kinetic energy of each bullet was magnified several times over without interfering with the soldiers' various enhancing powers because the bullet itself was, technically, not magically enhanced at all; the field was anchored to the gun. This also neatly sidestepped the drawback of enhancing ammunition, namely that you had to repeat the enchantment for each and every round fired. The compounded results of both the various force adjustments and the more standard enhancement abilities each soldier had developed spoke for themselves; a dozen men had made a frontal assault on a thousand previously problematic enemies and torn them apart in a minute.
A continuous surge of energy flew into me at the sight and I redoubled my efforts against the pair of demons. The drawback of enhancing items in any sort of long-term manner was that Lasting Force and Create Forcefield used in conjunction simply took enormous amounts of effort if they were to be ready in any sort of usable timeframe. Even with the volume of each rifle being twenty times less than a person and thousands of times less than temporary force-fields I use in battle, the need for permanency in only minutes of work made each enhancement the equivalent of an hour-long sprint in terms of efforts expended. To arm all survivors of sufficient skill and power to be useful, we'd need either weeks of work or taxing my body to its limits. I'd chosen the latter because at the rate the situation was worsening the Enemy would have stockpiled enough forces to overrun us in a couple of days, tops. Now, I was paying the cost of that choice.
I came out of super-speed panting for breath. The pair of sword-demons flanked me, one swinging at my throat, the other at my legs. Flying or blinking away would trigger whatever ability they used to catch up with me every time so I raised both arms to block the first swing, vaulted over the second and used the momentum the first demon's strike gave me to kick out at the second. Something crunched, a fleeting glance with Force Awareness showing me a snapped rib; good. The dual scrapes on my arms were nothing in comparison.
Enraged, the second demon lunged at the small of my back. Unwilling to test whether a piercing blow could deal more than surface damage, I rolled aside at top speed, leg muscles protesting. The lunge missed but the first demon's swing delivered a small cut to my right bicep. Regeneration took care of it, granting me a hair more strength and stamina in the process, but it was something that couldn't be relied upon when at any moment one of the demons could decide to hack apart the ground team while the other delayed me. Invisible blades of Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment formed a whirlwind of teeth around me, putting another drain on my stamina on top of the physical combat. Their effect on my attackers were mere scrapes, like a herd of cats trying to skin them alive. Largely non-lethal, but very, very distracting. As they tried to parry blows from intangible force that no physical sword could stop, I speed-blitzed them, shattering bones and reducing them to bloody wrecks in a few seconds.
"Done with the big guys, then?" Jack Everyman asked as I landed heavily and rested my hands on my knees.
"Yeah," I huffed and puffed and was probably too worn out to blow apart any houses. "Give me a moment, will you?" Too bad this was exactly what needed to be done.
"Here," the big soldier said, passing over a flask. "One of Aunt Sarah's remedies." A single gulp of the tasteless, odorless but incredibly refreshing liquid and I could have kissed him. I shot him a glance without turning my head via Force Awareness, as good as sight at this distance. Well, with that kind of body I could have kissed him anyway in a situation without ongoing battles; even his insides were perfect and far less disgusting than a normal person's. The thought was filed for after the war.
"Thanks," I told him and tore my eyes away and towards our target; the iron and stone bulk of an enemy barrow loomed behind the shattered undead lines. No amount of small arms, however enhanced, would bring down a structure tougher than battleships in any reasonable time. I pulled out a bead of dense grey-black metal and considered. One of many suggestions for heavier weapons that had been bandied around had been attaching one of my plasma-making fields to a really tough anchor and throw it at anything less tough. After making the prototype had cost more than a dozen conventional weapons despite it being single-use, I'd put my foot down and shelved all such suggestions.
"Stay back, I want to try something new," I told the troops and they did. If I was already following them around to draw in threats they could not face, I might as well deal with the targets more efficiently. Placing both hands upon the building, I let my Force Adjustment extend through it. It was a single solid mass of iron and ceramics, so thick and reinforced it would have taken a bunker buster to deal with it; a nuclear one. Even a plasma field would take time to melt through, time enough for more monsters to swarm us and someone to simply remove the field with magic. Adjusting internal forces could make it softer despite magical reinforcement, soft enough to eventually punch my way through.
That was the key word, wasn't it? 'Eventually' was the one thing nobody in war could afford to, except for possible time-travelers. But what about amplifying a force instead of weakening it? Such as the forces sound propagated through, one vibrating atom transferring energy to the next. A similar field applied to the air could magnify its internal energy and turn it into plasma, but what would it do on metal and ceramic? Time to find out.
At first, nothing seemed to happen. Even after nearly a minute, Force Awareness could only detect minor vibrations. Scowling, I looked deeper, trying to find why nothing was happening. It turns out atoms of metal are far less mobile than molecules of gas and vastly more conductive. With the barrow mostly underground, it would leak excess energy fast enough to keep with the amplification, if barely. Thinking about it for only a moment I kicked the building, making it ring like a giant gong. Instead of tapering off, the lingering ringing very quickly multiplied. However much energy it lost to its surroundings, metal was still denser, more conductive than them so enough waves were reflected back into its mass where the Force Adjustment amplified them faster than the building could leak energy.
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The ringing changed in tune to a higher and higher pitched whine, the surrounding bedrock turned to dust, then powder, then a quicksand-like slag, its walls reddened with heat and little sparks danced on their surface. The ringing became deafening, louder than the turbines of a Jumbo jet attempting a take-off. Finally the building simultaneously melted and shook itself apart, mixing with the surrounding slag into a lava pool that was a blindingly bright orange and giving off metallic steams that could flash-burn unenhanced flesh. The temporary field having collapsed the moment contact was broken, I walked away rather pleased with the results.
"Pack any magic weapons you can carry," I told the troops. "We need to travel light so no more than one, but the crafting people back at HQ would definitely want to check out the bad guys' magic." Earth needed every bit of magical knowledge we could take by force, loot from corpses, or discover by experimenting on said corpses.
For myself, I claimed two very nice demon swords.
xxxx
The three barrows that followed were more lightly defended. We all wondered where the enemy's massive army was; given the nature of the enemy's powers, the more the war lasted the greater their magical resources would become. Instead we were seeing a slow, grinding reduction of monster numbers as we got better and better at taking them out.
Only a few days before, a dozen fire-demons would have stomped over any of my efforts to stop them, obliterated our people on the ground, then overwhelmed me with enough firepower. Now, leaving their fireballs in the dust with Chronal Leap was barely an effort. Spatial Leap combined with Spatial Distortion could be used to hurl their own fireballs back to the source, which I used to thin the initial dozen to ten before they changed tactics, and Retributive Defense meant melee attacks from anyone that couldn't tank their own offense was doomed to fail.
That left the surviving demons attempting to get into melee range of our ranged infantry. I put a stop to that by teleporting around and using my new, newly-enhanced sword to hack them apart the moment they turned their backs on me. It was the work of maybe thirty seconds to go through all of them then back to supporting the ground offense.
Instead of bothering with individual wights, executioners or ghouls, I pushed my flying speed as high as it would go then flew through their ranks. Each swing from left to right took about a second an obliterated dozens, often hundreds of enemy infantry in mile-wide corridors. Even the tougher, most heavily armored base infantry could be cleaved through at those velocities simply by using the sword as a ram, force-fields to weaken their defenses on contact and enough sustained momentum to scatter the pieces like bowling pins.
Twenty-one people followed in my wake, raining down hell on disorganized enemies that couldn't overwhelm them without a massed charge and couldn't do a massed charge while huge gaps in their formation kept turning up. Each half of the offensive equation wouldn't have done enough damage to advance on its own and the ground element would have been slaughtered while I'd have been forced into retreat once enough numbers were brought in. Both acting together however compounded our effectiveness and advanced faster than ever before.
Then the enemy tried something new; skeletons took the field. Those were not the skeleton archers Mandy had been sent to root out with the other half of the survivors. For one thing, they did not have bows. For another, their hands glowed and crackled red, green, grey and black. The differences were conclusively proven when the dozen or so newcomers waved their arms and fire rained from the sky all across the mile-wide battlefield.
With great effort, I stepped outside time. Orbs of fire the size of my fist had already filled the sky as far as a human eye could see, like a massive wildfire dropping from above. I had no idea whether killing the casters would stop a spell already set in motion so I didn't try. With every second of action costing the equivalent of minutes of effort, I blinked from soldier to soldier with Chronal Leap and applied Create Forcefield and Lasting Force to them.
Going for even one long-term barrier would have been too costly. Even in pre-battle preparation the most I could have offered without becoming completely exhausted would be shields to a few people that wouldn't last overnight. With everyone about to get reduced to cinders I gave each shield a three-minute duration and called it a day. By the time they failed we'd either be victors or ashes and the minimal duration meant that even twenty-one force fields didn't leave me about to pass out.
Time resumed and all Hell broke loose. Not orbs of fire but miniature meteors dropped almost as fast as I could fly, each impacting with the combined effects of a small demolition charge and an incendiary. Car wrecks were slagged. What buildings remained were reduced to rubble. The ground shook as if from an earthquake and craters feet deep were blasted just about everywhere... except for narrow bubbles of force around the soldiers. It was a good thing I hadn't skimped out on shield strength to reduce the creation costs; if they had been even a hair weaker, everyone but me would be dead.
Looking around, the scale of the devastation was closer to a tactical nuke than a conventional bombardment; nearly a square mile of land had been completely flattened and set on fire, parts of it reduced to rapidly cooling glass, even. Despite my shields saving the ground-pounders' lives, their position was still very, very bad. That became clear enough when the remaining undead advanced into the devastated area, iron-booted feet sinking an inch into half-molten soil with every step but barely slowed. Most people on our side could do no such thing of course; until the ground cooled sufficiently, they were trapped into the tiny islands of safety in the force-fields' blast shadows. To do otherwise at their level of enhanced durability would risk third degree burns and too much pain to remain effective.
The fire-mage skeletons needed to go post-haste. If a dozen could bring that much firepower to bear, letting the enemy build up greater numbers was suicide. Unfortunately, with several more skeleton-mage types in the field still with unknown capabilities stepping outside of time had to be saved for emergencies. I zipped around with Proximakinesis and Chronal Leap instead, going from fire-mage to fire-mage and blasting their bones to bits. Spread out as they were - the enemy had proven to be anything but stupid - it took me seven seconds. In those seven seconds they had brought down three more firestorms, and while each subsequent one had covered a smaller area, all of them had proven just as intensely destructive. A single skeletal fire-mage seemed capable of flattening an entire football stadium with one casting, which spelled bad things for any defenders outside the city of Destiny who were by no means ready to face such opposition.
The green mages were the next to cast. Instead of some terrible mass destruction they shot spheres of emerald energy about a foot across, which reached their target in three seconds or so. Half of them hit me like punches in the gut, going through Proximakinesis as if it wasn't there and barely interacting with the outward portion of Force Adjustment. It only did something against them at all by holding my body together when they tried to tear it apart from the cells up, but it was mostly Immutable Force that blunted their effects.
The soldiers on the ground had no such defenses; the other half-dozen orbs went through my shields, their armor and any defensive powers they had like hot knives through butter, instantly reducing five people into pinkish goo dripping through their clothing. The sixth target was Jack, who somehow partially resisted enough to only be knocked on his ass. Then the skeletons sent another dozen orbs solely at them.
The world blurred as I flew as quickly as I ever had before, barring the times I stepped outside of time. Since neither force effects nor physical objects could stop or prematurely detonate the magical missiles, my only option was to interpose myself, take the blows onto my own body. It worked but left me with more phantom pain, bone-deep aches that only slowly went away through regeneration.
Yeah, screw holding out for future emergencies. I moved outside of time then flattened the magic bullshit skeletons as fast as I could. The first half-dozen were easy. The next few I had to work at it. Moving on to the black-sparkling ones on the thought that black magic was more dangerous than grey magic, I had to strain more and more for each subsequent kill. They had been reduced to merely three by the time I was forced to let go of Instant Action or risk exhausting myself entirely, but that also left me sweaty, gasping for breath and with my every muscle threatening to cramp at any moment.
As soon as the world was in motion once more, grey tendrils of silvery smoke lashed out in grasping swings from the last group of skeletal spellcasters, their purpose obvious. They seemed capable of moving anywhere nearby almost instantly; I found that out the hard way when I tried baiting them away from the casters only to blink close when they were focused at a distance. A good idea on paper, quite bad in the field; only one of them died before there was a noose of grey smoke around my throat.
The bad news was, the magical tendrils packed a wallop; any one of them could have thrown a bus with ease or punched through a vault door with enough blows. The worse news was that the silvery smoke they were made of was completely intangible; they could touch me but I could not touch them. More like magical telekinesis with the tendrils being special effects rather than reality. Force Adjustment didn't work on them at all because somehow they weren't actual force; they directly caused motion on contact somehow. Proximakinesis on the other hand could negate their effects just fine... for the first four. That left the other five free to act, and contact with them made space slippery, impossible to grasp for a Spatial Distortion or Spatial Leap. The good news? There weren't any.
Chronal Leap still worked, but it could only send me where I was slated to be, not where I wanted to go. If I could not break through the "tendrils" then it couldn't move me forward and by the time I tried to go backwards I'd been grabbed for longer than two seconds. On a good day, at full strength, I would simply have snapped through them with moderate effort. Near-exhaustion, after hours of battle and even longer burning through my reserves to empower weapons so we could win the war I could only stretch them for about a hundred feet. It was like being bound in industrial rubber bands.
The three surviving undead black mages aimed for the obvious target. Maybe that had been the plan from the beginning, maybe the enemy had something else in mind with how they'd divided their mages and changed their mind after they saw the opportunity, the result was my getting hit by three black beams like reverse searchlights. Slow to turn and aim, where they passed flames died and the seared ground cooled, the smoke from countless fires stood still, sound turned to silence and bullets stopped in mid-air. Getting hit by them was like being on the receiving end of three garden hoses' worth of freezing water.
Oh, there was no actual cold for me to feel but I was still losing the same amount of heat; it simply vanished without passing through my skin to be felt. Beyond just heat, momentum and kinetic energy were drained away too. The force I could exert wasn't reduced at all, but the kinetic energy and momentum were gone as if transferred to a thick syrupy substance I'd have to swim through if I wanted to get anywhere. Then came a shortness of breath, the sensation that despite breathing faster and faster there was simply no oxygen for me to find, followed by the kind of bone-deep, hollow exhaustion that was the hallmark of starvation.
Magic was fucking bullshit, but if the enemy thought they'd won, they had another thing coming.
A barely visible silvery line came from south of the ruined city, crossing over a dozen miles in a near-instant. It struck one of the black mage skeletons center of mass with the force of a small artillery shell and blasted the undead to bits. The second silvery line came moments later, decapitating the second to last black caster with such force its skull tumbled half a city block into the air before falling out of sight. Warned by its fellows' destruction, the last black mage diverted half of the energy from his beam into a half-dome of the same strange black light. The third beam slammed into it and slowed, revealing a banana-sized shell that had been moving at hypersonic velocities. It came to a stop a foot from the skeletal mage's chest, unable to penetrate its shield.
The grey tendril casters had no such defense. So from the distant vantage point at the edges of my sight and beyond the remaining lightning towers' reach, a certain beanpole sniper kept firing. Carried there by yours truly before the fight against precisely such an eventuality, he was held aloft by a single small delivery drone one of the tech heads had produced. The drone had been capable of lifting six pounds, but altering its capacity by a factor of eight had only taken a moment given its tiny volume. Reducing Larry the beanpole's weight by a smaller factor had taken dozens of times more effort but it had just paid back the effort may times over.
The moment the first tendril-caster died, I got ready. When it was followed by a second, the useful tendrils reduced to a mere three, I strained, stretched and broke them in three seconds flat. Blitzing every maze I could find before they could pull another trick out of their non-existent ass after that only took half again as much. The mop-up that followed was more tedious grinding against dwindling numbers of enemy infantry than a risk of life and limb, but we did it with professionalism and efficiency.
Naturally, that meant I dropped flat on my back in the middle of the group and did not rise up for anything short of a major demon.