209 Sudden Ambush
209 Sudden Ambush
I waited a few seconds longer after Cordelia’s departure, listening to the building settle from the concrete ticking, distant sirens, and the faint echo of battle finally dying out. When nothing else stirred, I turned and headed for the stairwell.
I didn’t make it far.
She was leaning against the wall as if she’d always been there.
A short denim jacket hung open over a tank top, faded jeans hugging her hips. Her hair was cut short, the front dyed a sharp blonde that framed her face. Thick eyeliner carved her eyes into something predatory, and a lollipop rested between her lips, rolling lazily from one side of her mouth to the other.
I couldn’t look away.
The realization came instantly that it was a result of a power. Some kind of compulsion, fixation, attraction, or whatever it was… it had its hooks in me deep.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice steady despite the tension coiling through my spine.
She smiled around the lollipop. “Funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.” Her eyes narrowed, curious rather than hostile. “How does someone like you walk away after meeting the Witch?”
I took a slow breath. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Before she could answer, something cold kissed my throat.
I caught the glint of silver in my peripheral vision. It was a rapier’s edge, thin and precise. Standing beside me was a little girl with silver hair tied neatly back, her expression flat, professional, and utterly devoid of hesitation.
“I am Rank Four Player, Rachel Chat,” she said calmly. “One of Urbanite’s four executives.”
The woman in denim clicked her tongue and finally pulled the lollipop from her mouth.
“Rank Three,” she added. “Selena Grind.” Her gaze bored into me. “Now answer the question. Why did the Witch let you go?”
Cordelia. Of course. That was probably who she meant… I weighed my options in the space of a heartbeat. I could lie. I could kill them. Or I could use this for what it was, a perfect opportunity to measure Urbanite’s upper ranks without restraint.
In the end, I decided to escalate.
I leaned forward.
The rapier slid into my throat.
Rachel gasped and swore as blood welled, but I was already moving. Biokinesis tightened, Eenhancer output spiked, pain dulled to background noise. I seized Rachel by the throat and slammed her back against the wall before she could even think to pull away.
My eyes never left Selena.
I wrapped my fingers around the rapier’s hilt, phased it free of my neck, and let it solidify again in my hand. With a smooth, almost gentle motion, I pressed its tip to Rachel’s throat instead.
Rachel froze, shock etched across her face.
Selena’s smile faltered for the first time.
I straightened, blood sealing itself as if it had never been spilled.
“My turn,” I said quietly. “The name’s Eclipse.”
I tilted the blade a fraction closer to Rachel’s skin.
“And from now on, I’ll be the one asking the questions.”
I only knew one Witch in my life, and she had been dead for some time. The fact that the same title clung to Cordelia told me everything I needed to know about the weight of her reputation. Names like that were not given lightly in any world I’d seen, and I wasn’t arrogant enough to think she couldn’t have killed me if she wanted to. Well, actually, it depends and I might never know.
Selena tilted her head, studying my reaction. “You know, powers work a little differently here in Urbanite. We don’t call them powers. We call them skills.”
She tapped the lollipop against her teeth, eyes never leaving mine. “And one player can stack a lot of skills. Way more than what capes like you are used to.”
Before I could respond, the body in my grip shifted.
Rachel’s weight changed abruptly, her frame elongating in my hands. Bone cracked and reshaped as the little girl became a fully grown woman in the span of a breath. I reacted on instinct, driving the rapier forward.
“Switch,” she said.
The world inverted.
I was suddenly where she had been, and she was no longer in front of me. A foot wreathed in blue flame slammed into my torso before I could fully orient myself. I tried to phase through the impact, but the blow still connected, pulverizing the wall behind me and hurling me across the room.
I twisted midair and answered with violence. Tarot cards fanned out from my hands, streaking forward under telekinetic control. She knocked a few aside with the rapier, but the rest struck home, biting into her shoulder, her knee, her side. Blood splashed the floor.
A voice whispered into my ear, intimate and amused. “You might’ve bitten off more than you can chew.”
Hands locked around my torso. Gravity multiplied as she dragged me downward, smashing us through the roof of the next building. We crashed into a coffee shop in an explosion of glass, steel, and screaming NPCs. Bodies broke under the impact, dissolving into pixels seconds later.
Selena landed nearby, eyes widening as she looked me over. “Not a scratch?” she muttered.
At the last possible moment, I had folded time around myself, compressing the impact into something survivable with Chronokinesis. Pain still rang through my nerves, but nothing vital was damaged.
This wasn’t like the Kingdom executives. That fight had been chaos, mismatched abilities, and numbers stacked against me. This was more manageable, having to deal with only two opponents, instead of three. Moreover, I didn’t need to hold back.
I reached outward with Empathy and snapped Electrokinesis into place, locking Selena’s muscles mid-motion. She screamed as the current tore through her nerves, and the compulsion dragging my gaze toward her shattered like glass.
A spike of killing intent flared from my Empathy.
I ducked just as a glowing blue rapier swept through the space where my head had been. The blade hummed with enough force to shear steel. I retaliated immediately, flooding Rachel’s mind with Telepathy layered over Empathy, forcing a migraine so intense she staggered.
I closed the distance and drove a roundhouse kick into her ribs, Enhancer, Biokinesis, and Electrokinesis stacking into a single decisive strike. She slammed into the counter and flew through it, skidding across the floor as NPCs fled in blind panic.
Selena broke free with a snarl and reappeared at my side. I swung an elbow where she should have been, but she vanished again. The pressure returned in my skull, subtle and insistent, forcing my attention toward her presence, except I couldn’t find her.
The hits came from nowhere.
Liver. Solar plexus. Lungs. Throat.
Each blow landed with surgical precision, too fast for my psychic senses to properly track. Even my instinctive empathic reading of killing intent lagged behind her movements. I gritted my teeth, enduring, analyzing even as my body absorbed the punishment.
Then it clicked.
Her teleportation wasn’t just fast. It was conditional.
When observed, she couldn’t move and would try to slip out of my line of sight.
The realization settled in my mind like a loaded gun, and despite the pain, I smiled.
I tried to phase through the next attack, trusting instinct over calculation, but Rachel was already moving.
She came down on me with an axe kick, blue fire roaring around her heel. I didn’t understand the mechanics of it, only that I had seen enough to know it would land. I brought my arms up just in time, electricity snapping outward as I discharged Electrokinesis point-blank. At the same time, I reinforced my muscles with Biokinesis, tendons tightening beyond their natural limits.
The impact rattled my bones.
Rachel screamed as the tarot cards still on her body began to vibrate.
I metaphorically twisted the knife further, commanding the tarot cards embedded in her body to move. They burrowed deeper, grinding through muscle and connective tissue. She collapsed to the floor, curling in on herself like a wounded animal, her scream breaking into wet, panicked sobs.
Then something punched through my chest from behind.
A katana jutted out of my sternum, its edge humming with wrongness. Null metal, layered with some esoteric property. It bypassed my intangibility as if it had never existed. My lungs seized. I coughed blood.
I grabbed the blade with my bare hand and pivoted hard, dislocating my own arm in the process to gain a grotesque range of motion. The pain barely registered. My elbow smashed into Selena’s face with a crunch I felt more than heard. Her nose shattered under the blow.
She tore the sword free and vanished before I could lock my gaze onto her.
I straightened, already anticipating the angle of attack. When she went for my back, I dropped low, her strike whistling over my head.
“Too easy,” I muttered.
I swept her leg as she reappeared, catching her mid-transition. She flipped into the air, and for a fraction of a second my eyes were on her, taking away her ability to teleport. I could see the panic in her eyes, probably not expecting her teleportation to have been made out.
Rachel, half-conscious and shaking, flung a handful of gravel and shattered glass between us. The debris phased harmlessly through me, but my line of sight broke. Selena was gone.
Fear rippled outward through Empathy, sharp and uncoordinated. It was panic, calculation, and a desire to retreat both emanating from Rachel and Selena.
A thought occurred to me.
I had felt eyes on my team’s fight with the Kingdom earlier, a distant, curious pressure I hadn’t fully placed. Now it made sense. These two had been watching, waiting, and they had come into this, probably thinking they knew all my abilities.
It was a gross miscalculation on their part.
I rushed Rachel.
She was crawling backward, dragging her useless leg, terror pouring off her in waves. I caught her ankle and yanked her toward me.
Steel punched into my shoulder.
The katana pinned me to the ground, its weight anchoring my body. However, my hold on Rachel’s ankle remained firm. Only her foot to her ankle was visible. The rest of her body was phased into the dense structure beneath us, reinforced concrete, steel lattice, and the kind of mass that if she lost cohesion for even a fraction of a second, gravity would do the rest.
In other words, it would crush her.
I laughed softly through clenched teeth.
“I’ve already analyzed your blade,” I said, forcing my intangibility to adapt, inch by inch. “Your nullification isn’t absolute anymore.”
She hissed in frustration. “So what?” she snapped. “Let her go.”
I tightened my grip on Rachel’s leg. She screamed.
“Do you really want to see her explode?” I asked calmly. “Every atom displaced, sliding into foreign matter, collapsing under cellular trauma all at once?”
Selena froze.
I turned my head just enough that she could see my expression. “Pull the sword out,” I said. “If you have even a shred of love for your fellow executive.”
Selena pulled the sword free.
The pressure vanished from my shoulder, and I finished the repairs I’d already begun, knitting muscle, sealing torn vessels, and rebalancing bone with practiced calm. Biokinesis hummed through me like a quiet machine resetting itself. I rose to my feet and dragged Rachel closer by the ankle.
The rest of her body was still merged into the concrete, half-phased. If I released her now, gravity and matter would finish what I’d started. She knew it. Selena knew it too.
“Now,” I said evenly, “terms.”
I tightened my grip just enough to make the threat undeniable.
“You answer my questions. You do nothing suspicious. If I detect anything I don’t like, anything at all, Rachel dies.”
Selena’s jaw clenched. For a long second, she looked like she might try something anyway. Then her shoulders sagged.
“…Fine,” she said, the word scraped out of her.
I tilted my head. “What do you want from me?”
She didn’t hesitate this time. “A way to meet the Witch. Without her killing me. Or Rachel.”
“The Witch,” I repeated. “You mean Cordelia.”
“Yes.”
That earned a pause from me. Cordelia hadn’t struck me as someone who killed out of impatience, or misunderstanding. If she wanted these two dead, there was likely a reason. Still, their history with her wasn’t my concern.
I nodded once. “Next question. Where can I find Gameboy?”
A voice answered before Selena could.
“There’s really no need to go looking for him.”
I turned.
A young man walked in through the ruined entrance as if the wreckage didn’t exist. Late teens, maybe. Blonde hair. Bare feet. Ripped jeans and a white shirt with the word ‘God’ printed across the chest in block letters.
His face glitched.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The features refused to settle, flickering like corrupted data, except for the hair, which remained perfectly intact.
“…because I’ve already arrived.”
Selena stiffened. Her hands began to shake. She dropped to one knee without being told, head bowed.
“I–I’m sorry,” she stammered, eyes darting. “We didn’t mean—”
The young man sighed, almost fondly, and snapped his fingers.
Selena screamed or tried to.
No sound came out.
Her mouth was gone.
Not sealed. Not injured. Simply… removed. Smooth skin where lips and teeth had been an instant before. She clawed at her face in blind panic, the katana slipping from her fingers and clattering uselessly to the floor.
Gameboy winced theatrically. “See? This is what I mean. So energetic. No manners at all.”
He turned his attention to me, head tilting with exaggerated apology.
“I’m very sorry about my girls,” he said. “They’ve been getting… feisty lately. Bold enough to move behind my back.”
His glitched gaze lingered on Rachel, half-fused to the ground, then returned to me.
“I hope they didn’t inconvenience you too much.”