Chapter 258
Hostile Reality
Alexander blinked. Once. Twice. The blood in his left eye wasn’t clearing. The helt made it worse. No way to wipe it. No way to reach his own face. He closed the eye and relied on the right.
At least their fight would be fair.
Technopathy pulsed and the HUD compensated, shifting targeting data to account for the reduced field of view.
Sort of.
Flashpoint hung in the air above the inferno, watching him. The snarl had faded. The flas around his body had settled from chaotic to controlled. His remaining eye was focused.
Then he grinned. Ugly and wide.
“I saw your conference. The one where you told the whole world the truth.” Flashpoint tilted his head. “How’s it feel knowing you gave the Lost Prophet the chance to unleash horror on every continent?”
Alexander shrugged. He wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
The grin widened. “That’s what I thought.”
Flashpoint swept his good hand in a wide arc. “Fla Vortex.”
The fire answered. Flas tore from the burning trees below and spiraled upward, twisting into a column that thickened as it climbed. The vortex grew. Twenty ters across. Thirty. A tornado of fire rotating fast enough that the wind alone would have thrown him off course. It began to move, tracking toward Alexander, consuming everything in its path. Trees uprooted. Soil scorched black beneath it.
Alexander launched sideways, tallokinesis pulsing hard. The vortex adjusted course, slower than a direct attack but relentless, the sa way Keda’s beam had tracked him. Flashpoint guided it, keeping it close.
Alexander drove toward Flashpoint, circling constantly toward his blind side. The eye Annie had taken.
Flashpoint’s head turned to track him, compensating for the dead spot in his vision.
Alexander put on another burst of speed.
Flashpoint’s Domain pulsed.
The heat vanished. All of it. Instantaneously. The air around Alexander went from furnace to void. The OACS atmospheric systems cycled, compensating, but the temperature outside plumted faster than the suit could adjust. Ice crystals blood across the exterior of the armor. The overlapping plates and articulating scales froze together where moisture in the air flash-crystallized in every external gap. The visor fogged from the outside, frozen air coating the faceplate.
Not even Animachina protected against it. It wasn’t a powered attack. It was simply the complete and sudden absence of heat.
Alexander continued forward but the suit fought him. The servos were fine. The tal was fine. His Will saw to that. But every movent had to crack through the ice bridging the exterior joints, and that fraction of a second mattered.
Flashpoint sidestepped in the air. He let Alexander’s punch sail past, then reignited. Heat slamd back into existence. The ice on the OACS cracked and stead. Thermal shock rippled through the plating. tal groaned where the sternum had been damaged.
Flashpoint drove a knee into Alexander’s midsection. The bent chestplate buckled further. Alexander folded. A heat-wreathed elbow caught the back of his helt and sent him tumbling toward the ground.
The vortex was still coming.
Alexander caught himself an inch from the forest floor. tallokinesis reversed hard, arrested the tumble, and launched him sideways between the trunks as the vortex churned behind him. Heat washed across the suit. He didn’t look back.
The mace drones hit Flashpoint from four directions simultaneously.
The first bounced off his shoulder. No damage. Just tungsten against superhuman flesh. Flashpoint barely flinched. The second glanced off his hip. The third he batted aside with a pulse of heat.
Alexander flooded Animachina into the fourth as it closed.
The empowered drone caught Flashpoint in the ribs. The impact folded him sideways. His flas stuttered.
He felt that one.
Flashpoint snarled and accelerated hard, pulling away from the swarm, arcing between the burning trees. Alexander matched him, pulsing tallokinesis in waves, and the chase threaded deeper into the forest.
The forest beca a blur. Sparks danced into existence and vanished around Alexander. Trunks ignited as Flashpoint passed, his trail scorching everything behind him.
They spiraled around each other through the inferno, neither able to pull away, neither willing to disengage.
Flashpoint’s good hand ca up. A red marble ford. He fired without slowing.
Alexander pulled hard to the right. The marble streaked past and hit a tree trunk. It detonated. The blast wave hit Alexander’s left side and shoved him into a spinning course correction. He straightened, kept flying.
Another marble. Alexander dropped beneath it. The detonation blew apart the canopy above him, burning debris raining down across the suit.
Droney kept up the pressure. Combat drones raced out from behind burning trunks whenever Flashpoint’s speed dropped, blades slashing at his arms and legs. They did nothing without Animachina behind them, no more than scratches against Tier 2 skin, but they forced reactions. Forced Flashpoint to adjust his flight path, to spend attention on threats that weren’t Alexander.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
The mace drones were simpler. A constant swarm, spinning, circling, trying to close from every angle. Flashpoint outran them easily in straight lines. But the trees forced turns. And every turn brought him closer to a cluster of tungsten.
Alexander’s second ntal thread burned. Swapping Animachina was the bottleneck. Only the empowered drones did real damage. The rest were distractions. He had to read the fight, predict which drone would reach Flashpoint in the next half-second, and flood it with power before impact. Pull the power back imdiately after. Push it into the next one. Constant cycling. Every empowered hit landed hard. Every unempowered hit bounced.
A marble ford in Flashpoint’s hand. He fired it behind him without looking. It streaked toward a cluster of three mace drones closing on his six.
Alexander shoved Animachina into all three.
The marble detonated. The blast engulfed them. All three tumbled out of the fireball, tungsten fras glowing, but intact. Empowered tungsten ate the heat.
He pulled the power back. Redirected it to a combat drone diving at Flashpoint from behind a burning oak.
The empowered blade caught Flashpoint across the back of the thigh. He roared. Fire erupted from his body in a sphere, incinerating the drone instantly.
One more down. But the cut was bleeding.
Alexander fired a lightning bolt from his right palm. It crossed the gap between them in an instant. Flashpoint twisted, took it on the shoulder instead of the spine. His flight wobbled. He recovered in a second and fired two marbles in rapid succession.
Alexander juked left. Right. Both marbles overshot. Both detonated behind him. The double shockwave caught him between the blasts and sent him cartwheeling through a burning trunk. Wood exploded around the suit. He kept going, tallokinesis pulling him through the debris and back onto Flashpoint’s tail.
They kept racing, spiraling, as the forest burned around them.
A spark flickered into existence just below Flashpoint. One of dozens dancing through the air wherever Alexander’s presence bled into the space between them.
Alexander seized it.
Electrokinesis pulsed through the connection. The spark beca a bolt. Lightning erupted upward from beneath Flashpoint and caught him across the jaw.
His head snapped back. His montum carried him forward, body arcing, and he backflipped through a burning trunk. The tree exploded. Flashpoint tumbled through the debris, flas scattering, limbs loose.
Alexander didn’t slow. tallokinesis flooded outward. Every mace drone in the swarm answered at once.
The first slamd into Flashpoint’s chest before he’d stopped tumbling. The second caught his hip. The third drove him downward. Flashpoint hit the forest floor and carved through the dirt, soil erupting in his wake, and then the drones kept coming. Fourth. Fifth. Sixth. Each impact drove him deeper. Seventh. The ground cratered. Eighth. Ninth. Dirt and rock sprayed upward with each hit. The impacts carried through the inferno around them.
“FLASHPOINT!”
The world went white. Then red.
Fire erupted from the crater in every direction. A sphere of destruction that swallowed the nearest trees whole, vaporized the soil around the impact zone, and tore outward through the forest in an expanding wall of heat and force. Drones died. Alexander felt them vanish from his awareness. Three. Four. Five connections severed in the space of a heartbeat.
The wave hit him.
The OACS scread. Every thermal warning the suit possessed fired simultaneously. Alexander poured power into the armor, tallokinesis reinforcing every plate, Animachina flooding the suit’s fra. The blast picked him up and hurled him backward. Trees shattered against the suit’s back. One. Two. He hit the ground, bounced, hit it again, and carved a furrow through the burning earth before slamming into the base of a trunk thick enough to stop him.
His vision flickered. The HUD died. Static.
Technopathy reached into the suit’s systems. Found the disrupted data streams. Corrected. Rerouted. Rebooted the sensors one by one. The HUD snapped back into focus.
A ball of fire was descending on him.
Alexander hurled himself sideways. tallokinesis bounced him across the ground like a skipping stone, the OACS scraping through dirt and burning undergrowth. Flashpoint hit the ground where he’d been. The impact cratered the forest floor, soil and rock erupting outward, the shockwave rolling through the earth hard enough that Alexander felt it through the suit.
Flashpoint turned toward him. Fire flared bright around his body. His remaining eye locked onto Alexander. His good hand was already rising, heat compressing at his fingertips.
Alexander threw out his left hand.
The cybernetic arm’s capacitors discharged in sync with the suit’s. Both systems in the sa arm, both emptying at once into a single coherent bolt that erupted from his palm with a booming crack that split the air.
The lightning hit Flashpoint center mass, where his armor had cracked and dented under the drone onslaught. His feet carved furrows through the dirt. His flas guttered. Then he managed to cross both arms over the chest, even as the bolt kept pushing, kept pouring, the sustained discharge shoving him backward through the burning forest. Trees splintered in his wake. His boots tore through roots and soil.
The capacitors ran dry. The bolt cut out.
Flashpoint coughed. Blood sprayed from his mouth, boiling as it hit the open air.
Droney chose its mont. Mace drones and combat drones raced from the trees in every direction.
Flashpoint staggered. His flas flickered. Then his gaze snapped upward.
He launched.
Straight up. The canopy exploded with his passage. Within a second he was a shrinking point of fire against the pale sky, accelerating hard, pulling away with the kind of explosive burst Alexander couldn’t match at launch.
But Alexander didn’t hesitate. tallokinesis hurled him off the forest floor and through the burning canopy after Flashpoint. The wind scread around him. The drones fell behind, hovertech unable to keep up in the open sky.
Flashpoint was fast. The gap widened for the first three seconds. But then his acceleration plateaued. His explosive launch had spent itself, and now he was maintaining speed rather than building.
Alexander didn’t have that limitation. Each pulse of tallokinesis layered on the last. The OACS cut through the thinning air, every wave increasing his velocity. The gap stopped growing. Held. Then began to shrink.
Flashpoint glanced back. The fire around him flared brighter. Then he rotated to face Alexander, both arms spread wide. Two points of light ford to either side of him, each one compressing into a red-white star.
A shadow fell across them both.
Flashpoint’s eye flicked upward. The forming stars faltered.
Alexander looked up.
A portal had opened in the sky. Geotric patterns traced its edges in lines of gold and silver that pulsed in a rhythm. Wizard magic. Scaled up to sothing enormous.
A ship slid through.
The hull filled the portal from edge to edge. Dark alloy plating covered in runic patterns that glowed the sa gold and silver as the portal’s fra. Angular. Armored. Built for war the way the fortress had been built for defense, except this was ten tis the size and it was still coming through. The prow cleared the portal first, then the broadside, turret housings running along the hull in rows that went on and on. The stern erged last, trailing engines that burned with a pale light.
The portal closed behind it.
The warship hung in the sky above the burning forest. Above both of them.
Dozens of turrets rotated. Each one the size of a building. Each one tracking independently. Geotric targeting arrays flared along the hull, rune patterns cycling through sequences that lit the underside of the ship in cascading waves.
Half of them locked onto Flashpoint.
Half of them locked onto Alexander.
They fired.
Reviews
All reviews (0)