NOVEL WEB 06: Entertaining Guests
The moment my feet left the ground, I dropped Field Creation and Lasting Force off the roster of active powers and reached for two others. Being able to infuse objects or volumes of space with various applications of force was endlessly versatile and, if used correctly, very powerful but it was also both slow and costly. In a fight where the situation can change between one second and the next, I could not afford to be slow.
In the distance, the electromagnetic field twisted into layers of alternating vectors down the length of a cylinder in a very familiar way. Compared to the field intensity of anything nearby, the unknown attacker's weapon shone like the sun in my awareness, multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than even the electrical transformers in the city's main power distributors. It was how I'd noticed the stealthed sniper over the clutter of New York's electromagnetic emissions earlier, and having seen a similar effect before I did not wait for the weapon to be pointed at me to start dodging.
Moving myself via Proximakinesis was closer to free-fall than flight; I could just choose the direction to fall towards. With force evenly applied, the only sensation of acceleration came from the howling wind against my face, its pull against my clothes. The freedom it offered paired with the weightlessness, the sheer speed and the awesome view as the people in the streets diminished to the size of ants and the city sprawled out beneath my feet... it really was an experience beyond words, one that deserved all the time in the world to be appreciated.
Unfortunately, it was not to be; more than a mile away an electron beam was shot through a gauntlet of alternating electromagnetic fields, oscillated relativistically and shot out a beam of light that could have cored out a tank. The beam missed as I went through a supersonic barrel roll and I laughed, but it kept following me around, burning into the clouds above as it flickered to and fro. The briefest of touches disintegrated both my shoes and socks and left behind reddened, irritated skin... which was when the two powers I'd reached for finally got working.
The first was the most visually impressive as everything I wore near-instantly melted into a thin coating of mist. It was not real mist; for one, it was not blown away by the wind. For another, it did not stay a mist for long; just as quickly as it had appeared it spread to hug my every curve before solidifying into a skintight, red and silver superhero outfit covering me from the neck down. The next time the energy beam got a glancing hit the new fabric was barely singed, less damaged than my skin had been. Superheroic pro-tip: unless you feel like getting naked every time you fight a real threat, find some way to make a durable costume with your powers. It might take months to get it right unless you limit yourself to single-color, one-piece suits but it's definitely worth it.
The four-armed sniper held their telephone-pole-sized weapon a bit differently and the electromagnetic fluctuations cut off. The weapon was hotter now than at the start of the fight, hot enough that tendrils of smoke spoiled their visual invisibility cloak. I took this opportunity to charge straight down at them, pulling enough gravities of acceleration that I shot almost as quickly as an artillery shell out of the barrel of a cannon then kept putting on more speed. The air boomed as I broke through the sound barrier, then settled into a dull roar of violent compression and rapid superheating I could still hear through my bones. Then the sniper's weapon grew a void in my awareness, a narrow slice of volume in which no forces existed before shooting it in my direction.
I intercepted the null lance with my bare palm, gritting my teeth as it attempted to chew through skin and soft tissue like an acetylene torch. That was when the second new power triggered and new skin grew over before I'd even flown half the distance to the sniper. By the time I'd reached the four-armed monstrosity, the burns across my face were well on their way to healing too. As in the tests and back when I'd first fought with this power, the Regeneration took in the damage and returned it as a jolt of energy like a dozen hot chocolate drinks charged up with lightning. I laughed again, the sound carried away by the wind, and the sniper shot me full in the face; that did nothing to stop my fist from slamming into their weapon at Mach seven.
The weapon rang out like a giant gong, shattering windows within half a city block. More importantly, the shockwave broke whatever effect was keeping the sniper invisible, revealing the monstrosity in all its scaled, four-armed glory. It was the size of a bus and twice as heavy, a solid yet flexible mass of dull greenish scales, silvery semblance of flesh and glowing wiring. My awareness could not identify the materials it had been made of, but both their flexibility and durability far exceeded what was physically possible of normal matter, flexing to absorb the blow that would have crumpled battleship-grade armor.
Four clawed arms the size of tree trunks grabbed the metal rod that was the futuristic rifle and used it like an oversized baseball bat, with me being the baseball. That single blow actually hurt, which made it more powerful than a tank's main gun, possibly even as strong as my own diving charge had been. It also knocked me half a mile away before my own powers could adjust my trajectory. Then the sniper charged his weapon in a different way. Space itself seemed to bend within in, twisting like a coiled spring... or at least the three-dimensional projection of a more complex phenomenon looked like that. Echoes of that layered disruption of normal space spread through the weapon's wielder and the monster stood before me between one moment and the next.
The swing that followed seemed to take no time, the metal pole leaving afterimages in its passage as if it occupied the entirety of the space it crossed and when it struck my palm it was with the momentum of a speeding train. The surprised expression on the sniper's vaguely reptilian snout when their best blow came to a dead stop was hilarious.
"That's a cool trick and all but endangering the whole city to test your new toy is not." Grabbing both the weapon and its wielder with Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment I pulled us upwards and despite doing its best to resist the pull or even let go of the weapon the monster could do nothing but come along for the ride. "Don't struggle. There's no point trying to get this thing back," I told the remote operator controlling the mass of micro-scale cybernetics and staring at me through the hundreds of sensors built into the technological monster's bulk. "You misuse it, you lose it."
While I could see the control signal, it was quickly lost in the city's unbelievably tangled network of communications, both wireless and not, and wherever it was coming from it had to be far enough away that I didn't pick up any tech remotely similar to what the invisible monster had been made with. What compounded the problem was the amount of sensory devices built into the attacking machine. There was only one reason one would have literally thousands of different sensors, most of which did not seem to be working through conventional physics, and the longer this fight lasted the more the sniper's unknown creator learned about me and my abilities.
When we got so high up the air was no longer breathable for humans, I gripped and tore at the bus-sized monstrosity. Scales creaked but held, tissues that resembled both naked musculature and a tangle of piano wires bent, strained but refused to tear. The best steel wiring could handle three hundred thousand pounds per square inch and some materials could handle more; I was exerting ten times as much and the artificial creature's body was holding up. Conventional weapons and most superpowers that applied mundane forms of damage would not be enough to damage it, which spoke of a design meant to counter just such threats... or hunt them down.
The artificial creature strained again even as dangerous forms of radiation started building up within its body. In response I kept taking us higher and higher until the curvature of the planet spread beneath us and the faint blue of higher atmosphere gave way to the diamond-like clarity of space. The metal pole that was the sniper's weapon gleamed an eye-searing pale blue as it discharged enormous amounts of gamma radiation and exotic particles in a futile attempt to poison and kill me.
Finally, I decided we'd climbed high enough. At this point I could magnify my physical strength or reduce the structural integrity of my target and tear it apart without worry its irradiated insides would prove a threat to the city nearly three hundred miles below. I could similarly focus my Proximakinesis to narrow beams and drill it full of holes, or multiply vibrations in it until it melted from within. None of those or other similar methods were particularly quick though, which meant whoever had built it would get a lot of data on my abilities. With no idea of said creator's identity, intentions or skills, giving them anything not absolutely necessary was a bad idea. The answer to those issues was why I'd brought us both so high up.
The first step was to ditch Costume Creation as a power. My suit did not suddenly vanish, but without an application of Lasting Force I had no time to perform it did lose its exceptional durability and other special qualities. In the place of Costume Creation I brought up Focused Invulnerability. Becoming invulnerable to any one specific thing was extremely useful when you could choose what said thing was, even if it took an entire minute to charge up and solidify as an exception to physical laws as they applied to me. No, I did not pick anything the cybernetic monstrosity would do to be invulnerable to. Rather, I chose what I was about to do, or rather its consequences. Finally, I reached with Force Adjustment within the cybernetic creature I held captive.
The only reason this application of Force Adjustment worked was because the target was not, technically, a living being. Something about being both alive and aware prevented my own powers from reaching within enemies and, say, squeezing their hearts or scrambling their brains with minimal force, or messing up biology, chemistry or physics within their bodies. It was a barrier I'd been told would eventually be surpassed with enough power, but until them most enemies would only have to fear largely external threats from me... but the cybernetic drone had no such protection.
So I reached out to the strong nuclear force and begun to adjust it downwards. It was an application I'd tested mostly on rocks, with results ranging from violent disintegration to nuclear transmutation. Fun fact; the nuclear binding forces in atoms were roughly ninety-one times more powerful than the electromagnetic repulsion between protons. It was why nuclei with atomic numbers higher than ninety-one were always unstable, radioactive. It wasn't the sole factor but it was the most important... so what would happen if said binding forces were suddenly cut to half? To a fifth? By a factor of twenty?
Three tons of cybernetics and artificial flesh suddenly exploded. Every atom other than hydrogen or helium making up their mass suddenly found themselves incredibly unstable, with half-lives measured in picoseconds. For a few brief seconds a second sun shone in high orbit, a multi-gigaton explosion casting huge amounts of radiation out into space. Indestructible and immovable specifically to the effects of this explosion, my standing below said mass deflected a good portion of the blast upwards, creating a beautiful flare across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The Northern Lights made a brief appearance across much of the East Coast, bright enough to be visible under the late afternoon sun.
Then the lightshow was done and along with it my warning to other would-be supervillains.