The Chimera roared, fifteen foot tall, and Giselle slammed into it like a line-backer.

“AUUUGGHHH!”

The abomination staggered, stumbling from the force of the impact, but Giselle was already moving, clamouring at impossible speed over and around stabbing flesh, stabbing eyes, stabbing everything. In the space of a second the creature gurgled and collapsed with a thud onto the asphalt, lava dripping uselessly from one of its many open mouths, a tower of bleeding wounds.

Behind her, three soldiers fired round after round at a twitching, shimmering Chimera with four legs at ninety degrees to one another and fingernail scales running over every inch of its mutated form. The bullets sunk into the creature’s body, leaving sinking bloody holes, but then the jaws on one of its heads lolled open and a flood of liquid metal spewed forth. The soldiers cried out, but the moment before the molten stream could hit it cut around them, diverted by an invisible force.

“Help!” One of the Acolyte telekinetics, a blonde seventeen-year-old, Gabbi, stood locked in place ten feet away, sweat desperately pouring down her forehead. Behind her, a crystal-clawed Deathless lurched towards her, swinging wild its glistening talons. Giselle blurred, slicing the bloodless corpse in a hundred places and hurling it back towards the bubble. The body skipped like a stone, landing a few feet from the retreating barrier – where slowly it rolled over and again began crawling forward, new ribbons of flesh flowing down the tendons Giselle had cut. The speedster swore.

“I can’t hold-!” Gabbi screamed, but at that moment the dreadlocked Acolyte Monique leapt over an upturned police car and bought her forcefields to bear against the molten metal stream. One of the soldiers plunged his hands into the earth, rising a barrier of stone, and together the three of them pushed the silver torrent back round onto the Chimera, coating it in the burning liquid, the creature continuing to vomit even as its body sizzled and screamed. In moments it was silent, a horrific hardening statue of grey metal and smouldering flesh.

Vwoosh. A shard of serrated steel shot past her but Giselle was already moving, snatching pieces out of the air, directing them away from her students as a hundred feet away a telekinetic Chimera hissed as it rended everything around it, laser beams slicing out in random directions from every one of a dozen body‑embedded eyes, cutting through stone and street and steel, cleaving everything nearby.

“BRING IT DOWN!” she screamed, and in an instant Giselle felt the order relay to Natalia in her position atop one of the buildings. Suddenly, the clouds above them darkened and the Chimera was pummelled by a blast of wind, pushing away its projectiles. There was a crack, a flash, and in the middle of the city streets bolt after bolt of lightning rained down, hammering into the creature, annihilating it in a meteorological artillery strike.

Thirty feet away, Helen’s mechanical arm hurled a tiny Malaysian boy towards a twenty‑foot Chimera behemoth, slowly advancing with rapidly whipping hard‑light tendrils, its fully steel body impervious to harm. The boy, Nour, shot underneath the titan’s bulbous legs, wrapped his hands around its foot, and phased the titan intangible ten feet into the ground, where it suddenly found itself struggling, encased and unable to move. A dozen stumbling, white‑eyed Deathless of myriad states and ages lurched towards the phaser, but Giselle was faster, skidding between the tentacles and scooping the brown‑skinned boy up into her arms and running him back to Helena.

“PUSH THE HUMANS BACK TO THE BARRIER!” she screamed, and she didn’t have time to think if the command made sense because suddenly she felt a scream of pain go up from a group of distant Acolytes and she was running, hurtling as fast as her legs could carry her, around the other side of the bubble, through a thousand disparate wars.

On the far edge of the city Giselle slid to a halt, breathless, taking in the scene. Fifteen or more Chimeras, a horror‑show of flesh and limbs and gnashing teeth, advanced upon a cluster of five Acolytes; one healer, Delores, kneeling over and whispering desperately to a new boy, Adam, whose crimson armour had been pierced through the chest by a three foot spear of bone. The other three, Cameron, Kane and Leticia, stood screaming, trying to hold off the advancing monsters. Cameron’s silver-stained hands scrambled for everything he could reach, rubble and asphalt turning to steel at his touch, and as soon as it was changed Kane ripped it up off the surface, bending the metal into thick conical spikes, dropping them straight into the hand of Leticia, who threw, super strong, the door‑length missiles flying at the advancing monsters like a belt‑fed machinegun. Some shots took out a leg, a head, all finding their mark somewhere, but it wasn’t enough. Because as each one of the creatures fell the abomination in their centre, a blob-like, flesh-toned beast some thirty feet wide, shot out a fleshy sucker and pulled pieces of its kindred’s corpses in, growing larger, growing stronger. Pieces of bone and steel began shifting out beneath the surface of its wriggling body, lightning sparking between one the teeth on one of its head, and every hit the Acolytes scored on it only glanced off its fleshy mass, swiftly regenerating, almost immediately repaired.

Giselle steadied herself and raised her daggers, praying to a clearly effing absent God, and bent low, preparing to charge. The second before she did, a figure in black leapt through in front of the students, putting himself between the Chimeras and their prey. Soft and lean, with thin dark hair, Charles Farrington advanced on the creatures with a curling snarl and as he walked flames spread from his fists, engulfing his arms, his entire body. In an instant he rose, a being of pure flame, and with a bellowing roar of ‘DAWN!’ he snapped his hands forward and unleashed cataclysm. Fire, a forty‑foot wall of fire, exploded from the burning figure, engulfing the advancing Chimeras, the sound of their screams swallowed by heat and howling winds. The fire spread in a tsunami, an unstoppable wave, slamming through everything before it and smashing against the dead zone wall. Giselle shielded her eyes, the tips of her hair curling as the flames rose hundreds of feet into the air, a towering, winged inferno. Finally, the fire faded, leaving only the still‑burning figure of Charles Farrington standing before the Acolytes, staring down a runway of annihilation and ash. Buildings on either the side dripped melting stone, the ground glowed molten, and of the regenerating Chimera there remained nothing.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Charles glanced at Giselle, gave her a curt nod, and they both ran on.

*****

Matt raced up the concrete staircase, the sounds of shouting and footsteps ringing out beneath and behind him, sprinting as fast as his legs could carry him into the upper levels of the building’s shell. Wind howled through unsealed walls and in the near distance the world shook with screams and explosions, twisted inhuman moans, but still Matt ran, unrelenting.

How did you-

You think you can see into my mind? Matt spat. He leapt over a block of bricks, sprinting inwards towards one of the few doors that had been installed. You think by now I’m winded or frightened or panicked, that my thoughts are starting to leak? That I can’t use you? You’re nothing. I beat Klaus Heydrich bleeding in the desert with bones broken through my thighs. You think you’re better than me? You’re NOTHING. And he believed it as he thought it with every fibre of his being, and on the other end of the connection he felt the telepath flinch.

This is impossible.

This is discipline, Matt sneered, This is talent. This is passion and fear and anger and knowing that I only have to outlast you useless idiots for a few more minutes. He paused. Do you fear for your life, you piece of crap? Can you abandon this fight whenever you want to? Because I do, and I can’t. So which one of us do you think is more motivated, going to push that extra effort to ensure they’re not destroyed? Fear me. He glared down the connection at her, a searing beam of rage, white‑hot. I want to live.

He paused, skidding to a halt in a narrow corridor, turning to face the door he’d come through. Matt’s hands rummaged in the bugout bag for what he needed and he waited, breathing heavy, thirty feet away from the entrance, as footsteps raced towards him.

“There!”

The door slammed open and through it raced first seemingly no one and then a split second later the cryomancer, a tan chisel‑jawed twenty‑something with movie star stubble and a cleft in his chin. Both of them yelped, flinching in surprise, as from atop the door fell the second bucket Matt had collected, filled to the brim with cooking oil. Their boots slid, but this was not a cartoon and the men, though momentarily off‑balance, did not fall, instead steadying themselves and swinging their guns around towards Matt, the invisible one now visible underneath a splattered coating of oil.

The bucket of oil was stupid, schoolboy nonsense. The stun grenade primed in Matt’s hand was not.

Matt had barely a second’s opening but it was all he needed. He lobbed the flash grenade, dived behind a corner and shut his eyes.

“ARGH!” The two attackers screamed, clutching their faces, and the tiny corridor suddenly turned deafening as they fired wildly, bullets ricocheting into the concrete and gouging chunks from the floors and walls. “Flashbang!” the cryomancer screamed, but though they both lurched and stumbled, clawing at their eyes, neither seemed truly harmed.

Matt twisted the top of the flare in his other hand, lobbed it round the corner and changed that.

Privately, Matt had been hoping the stun grenade might ignite the oil – the bright flashing stuff inside did burn hot and if it exploded in the right place could cause burns. But his aim hadn’t been perfect, or maybe the canola oil wasn’t as flammable as he would’ve liked.

The flare had no such reservations.

Instantly, flames erupted over the pair of soldiers, and their cries of discomfort became hysterical shrieks. The invisible soldier, suddenly visible, had the sense to drop and roll, wildly slapping at his shoulders, but the cryomancer had taken the brunt of the oil bucket over his head. The flames raced, and when in a fit of panic his hands spluttered with ice crystals the oil fire suddenly hissed and exploded, torching everything nearby in searing flames. Matt did not stay to watch, even as he heard the cryomancer gurgle and collapse, already racing towards the stairs, up another level, around and around and around. He leapt the last three steps and sprinted into a room of bare concrete, devoid of outer walls, with nothing between him, open air and a sixty-foot drop. The burning warzone of New York City spread out before him, meshes of exposed metal bars reaching like unnatural fingers through concrete floor and pillars towards the grey and windswept sky.

You’ll pay for that, the psychic whispered. Matt scowled at the nothingness.

Haven’t you learned to shut-

CRACK

A fist‑sized chunk of concrete exploded out of a support column five feet from Matt’s head. Matt yelped, leaping behind cover as he was showered in a hail of dust and gravel. He scrambled on all fours, clambering to push his back flat against one of the pillars, squeezing his limbs as close as possible to put the support between him and the outside world.

CRACK

A tremor raced through the square column, the bullet thudding into the other side and burying itself into the concrete and metal. Matt slid down into a crouch. Crap. He was on the east side of the building. The sniper.

Yeah, okay psychic, he had to concede, you got me on that one.

There came another distant CRACK of gunfire and Matt’s heart skipped a beat as another dent exploded in the floor not six feet from him. He was trapped. He couldn’t move. Even if the sniper was too far away for the bullet to go entirely though the concrete and steel girder, even if he ignored the threat of ricochet, one step out from behind this pillar and he’d get a brand-new hole in his abdomen. Crap. CRAP!

Matt breathed hard, his hands shaking, and in a rush of terror his heart leapt to his throat as behind him, from the staircase, there came the sound of more footsteps; of ripping fabric and of the invisible man slamming into the stairs below him and screaming incoherent with rage.