244 Hands Off
244 Hands Off
I was going to kill them all.
The thought looped in my head like a broken recording. I was going to kill them all. Every last one of them. I was going to—
Silver’s hand slowly rose from beneath the desk, fingers wiggling nervously.
“Heya~! Sorry about that.”
I froze.
The camera angle shifted slightly, revealing her crouched under the table. I forced my voice steady. “What happened?”
She blinked, and her appearance shimmered. In an instant, she looked exactly like Nicole.
“I took the original’s appearance,” she explained quickly. “Sorry about that. Abner gave us a heads-up just in time. Mira managed to warn us too. Her main body’s safe. She switched positions with a clone before Paleman got to her.”
The pressure in my chest eased a fraction.
“The problem,” Silver continued, “is we’ve lost contact with the rest of Mira’s capes.”
Of course.
The reason Nicole had walked off earlier clicked into place. She had switched with Silver, her psychic construct. A contingency. As for Mira, she operated with three principal bodies, the future self acting as the core. As long as no one reached that core, she would survive.
I exhaled slowly. “I’ll get them.”
Silver shook her head firmly. “No. Your time’s better spent elsewhere. The GDF said they’ll handle extraction.”
Gunshots echoed in the background. Energy blasts followed. The fight was still ongoing.
Silver pulled the camera lower and crouched further under the desk. “We’ve got it handled. Don’t worry about Little Ron. He’s got the best bodyguards money and influence can buy. Abner’s doing well as a commander too. Nicole said you don’t have the luxury of wasting time on something trivial like this.”
Trivial.
The word tasted bitter, but she wasn’t wrong.
I nodded reluctantly. “Fine. If things get rough, call Guesswork. He’ll connect you to the SRC.”
Guesswork leaned closer to the mic. “I’ll leave this line open. Don’t expect too much from us. We’re stretched pretty thin. But I will leave local SRC resources for the Company to handle.”
Silver nodded. “I guess this is it. You can do it, Nick. I believe in you.”
The signal cut abruptly.
For a split second, panic clawed up my throat again. I forced it down. Breathe. Think. Prioritize.
Guesswork broke the silence. “So. The hit list, then?”
“Wait,” I said. “I have another idea.”
He gave me a wary look. “That’s never comforting.”
“The NSD has a powerful cape. The Führer, right?”
Guesswork stiffened. “You two are a bad matchup. He has more experience than you at your current rating.”
“I want the NSD.”
“You can’t.”
“I can.”
“Please, think logically.”
“I am thinking logically,” I snapped. “Send me to a high-density NSD base. High ratings. Preferably connected to the invasion on my home world. Better yet, the staging base they used to deploy forces there. Give me ten minutes. Negotiate the aftermath for me.”
Guesswork dragged a hand down his face. “There’s no arguing with you, is there?”
“If you won’t do it,” I said evenly, “I’ll go myself. I was told I’m free to move as I please.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know my place. I’m your chaperone.” He sighed, leading the way to the portal room. “Ten minutes. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“Yeah. Ten minutes,” I said.
Guesswork handed me a small earpiece. I fitted it in place, adjusting it until the faint hum of connection stabilized. I did not have my porcelain mask. I had left that with Chad. Still, my current gear and control were enough.
The portal opened.
I stepped through.
For a brief second, there was nothing beneath me.
Then I was falling.
Wind roared past my ears as the skyline rushed up to meet me. Below stretched the ruins of a massive city, its skeleton blackened and fractured. Smoke curled from distant craters. Fires burned in pockets like infected wounds.
Guesswork’s voice crackled in my ear. “To your left, concealed between two collapsed towers, there’s a portal signature. Likely the one linked to your world. Heavy cape presence in the area. Average rating around eight. Strongest reading approximately fifteen. Stay sharp.”
“Copy that,” I replied.
My descent did not go unnoticed.
Anti-aircraft systems embedded in the rubble whirred to life. Missile trails streaked upward. Energy flak detonated around me.
I did not dodge.
I simply let them pass through.
Below, NSD soldiers had already formed ranks, weapons raised. Bullets and concentrated energy discharge tore upward in a synchronized barrage. When they entered my effective range, I made eye contact with the front line.
They phased down with just a gaze.
Their bodies slipped cleanly through the asphalt as if it were liquid, swallowed by the earth without a sound.
I slowed my own time just before impact, chronokinesis wrapping around me like a sheath. I touched down lightly amid cracked pavement and drifting ash.
A concentrated laser beam snapped toward my forehead.
It was precise. Fast enough to kill most speedsters. Powerful enough to pierce reinforced defenses.
My empathic danger sense flared before the trigger fully depressed.
I shifted intangibility a fraction of a second ahead of impact.
The beam passed through my skull harmlessly, carving molten lines into the rubble behind me. It adjusted, recalibrated, and fired again at different vectors.
None connected.
They observed that I remained stationary while intangible.
A massive brute launched himself from a half-standing skyscraper, descending like a meteor with a roar. His impact cratered the street where I stood.
The instant he made contact, I phased him downward.
His body sank into the earth up to his shoulders.
He responded by digging.
The ground split open as he tore himself free, swinging at me again and again with enough force to shatter concrete. Every blow passed through empty space.
Meanwhile, the terrain beneath me softened.
A geokinetic.
I sensed him above, perched on a slab of stone suspended midair. He had been hidden by a photokinetic woman bending light around him. They believed concealment would mask their coordination.
My psychic senses outlined their positions clearly.
The brute leaped backward as the ground beneath me gave way entirely, forming a deep shaft. I allowed myself to drop a short distance before suspending midair, telekinetic tarot cards manifesting beneath my boots to hold me aloft.
The geokinetic was not finished.
Massive chunks of buildings hovered above him, wrapped in a distortion field of strange barrier-like null properties.
The photokinetic had cloaked them with invisibility until release.
They dropped the structures onto me in a cascading avalanche of reinforced steel and concrete.
At my current level, that could still hurt me.
I applied the technique Two-D had once demonstrated.
My body flattened.
Dimensions folded inward until I was a razor-thin plane, slipping between microscopic gaps in falling debris. The null barrier clung to the buildings themselves, not the air between them. I slid through the collapsing mass and re-expanded behind the brute.
Two tarot cards formed in my hand, shimmering between dimensions.
They sliced forward.
Semi-three-dimensional edges cut through his invulnerability as if it were fabric. Flesh separated. Bone parted. His roar became a wet gurgle before he collapsed into severed pieces.
In the distance, laser fire continued to rain down on my position, but they just passed through me harmlessly.
More NSD soldiers flooded the ruins.
I shifted fully into a two-dimensional state and ran along fractured walls and shattered streets like a living shadow. Capes converged from multiple vectors. Their coordination improved instantly, likely directed by someone higher in the chain.
Two massive shapes crashed through a remaining façade.
A shifter.
He split mid-charge, flesh tearing and reforming into twin dinosaurian forms, a tyrannosaurus and a brachiosaurus, both towering, both plated in a shimmering null barrier that crawled across their scales like a second skin.
The barrier was strong.
Too strong for something projected locally.
Was that the Führer’s work?
Judging by the potency and stability despite his absence, it had to be. I noticed similar signatures embedded in the bracelets worn by nearby soldiers. They had industrialized his protection, woven it into their technology.
The dinosaurs thundered forward, limbs glowing faintly under the null field.
They stomped directly over me.
I flattened further, slipping between the microscopic imperfections in the barrier where it did not perfectly seal against itself. Two-dimensional movement granted angles most defenses did not account for.
I rose behind them in a ripple of shadow and extended two tarot cards.
The edges bit.
Null slowed them, but did not stop them.
Flesh separated in clean geometric lines. Both massive forms collapsed into segmented ruin, their weight shaking the broken streets.
I did not linger.
I raced toward the portal signature Guesswork had indicated and sank three advancing tanks into the ground along the way, their armored hulls slipping beneath asphalt like toys in mud.
When I reached the portal apparatus, I stopped.
The NSD soldiers formed a perimeter around me. Capes hovered at range. The geokinetic remained elevated on his stone platform, now flanked by two photokinetic women. Their light-bending fields shimmered vividly to my psychic senses, which were sharpening with every spike of danger.
I spoke in their native tongue.
“Du bist in meiner Welt nicht willkommen.”
You are not welcome in my world.
Before they could respond, I flooded the portal core with electrokinesis.
Energy surged.
I did not simply overload it.
I forced it into catastrophic cascade.
The reaction dwarfed what had happened at Mirch University. The structure screamed in frequencies beyond sound as containment failed. Space buckled inward, then tore outward.
Fear rippled across the faces of soldiers and capes alike.
Then the explosion consumed them.
I remained intangible as the detonation expanded, letting the violent distortion of space-time pass through me. I leaned into the danger instead of retreating from it.
I wanted the pressure.
I wanted the resistance.
For a moment, reality peeled like fabric caught in a storm.
My senses strained.
Slowly, something shifted. A subtle click deep within my core. My power swelled a fraction. My hypothesis had been correct. Extreme exposure under controlled intangibility nudged my ratings upward. When the distortion finally settled, the ruined city was gone.
So was the base.
I stood on gray regolith under an infinite black sky.
The Earth hung before me, blue and fragile, wrapped in cloud and light. A familiar satellite orbited nearby. I recognized its structure instantly. GDF.
Below my feet stretched an enormous crater, freshly carved.
The moon.
I regulated my breathing with biokinesis, adjusting internal pressure and oxygen efficiency. The vacuum pressed silently against my intangible form.
The portal’s destruction had displaced us here.
A miscalculation.
Or perhaps an unintended anchor.
Thankfully, the blast had not fractured the moon enough to send debris toward Earth. The crater was vast, but localized.
Movement surrounded me.
Dozens of NSD soldiers in sealed outer-space armor formed a ring at cautious distance. Energy weapons glowed in their hands, calibrated for vacuum discharge.
I almost laughed.
They had built a base on the moon.
The invasion of my world had likely been cover. While the GDF focused on terrestrial conflict, they established infrastructure on the dark side, shielding it with concealment arrays and null technology.
Clever.
Very clever.
The ground trembled.
A massive figure descended into the crater opposite me, boots cracking lunar stone. He was twice my height, shoulders broad as armored vehicles. A thick mustache framed his mouth, merging into a styled mullet that flowed behind his helmetless head.
His presence alone bent the surrounding dust.
“Who are you!?” he demanded in the common tongue of the multiverse.
I let my intangibility recede just enough to stand solid before him.
“The name’s Eclipse,” I said calmly.
I pointed toward the distant Earth suspended in black.
“And that’s my world.”
I met his gaze without blinking.
“Hands off.”