Chapter 38: Interactions With the Locals 16
Luck was already writing his own obituary in his head when her eyes flickered, as if some private calculation had just concluded.
"You are not worthy of that weapon," she said, not as a question but as a verdict.
She raised her arm lazily, and purple flame smoked up from her palm. "Nor the power it contains."
Luck already knew she wasn’t about to use it for show—he ducked left on pure reflex, sprinting for the courtyard.
The inferno howled upward, so hot it singed the damp hairs on his arm and baked the resin off a nearby railing. He could see, now, the pattern: every time she conjured her power, the temperature spiked, just a little before the blast.
’I need to draw her away from the motel.’
The structure itself was older than most ruins, the kind of place you could torch and the black mold would only get stronger.
Still, he didn’t want to make the insurance claim more complicated than it already would be
He zigzagged, always staying a step ahead of her line of sight. With each attack, the air thickened with ozone and the bitter scent of roasted grass.
Luck lobbed a smoke bomb. It popped and blanketed the area with a chemical fog so dense it choked out the color from the world.
She paused, momentarily blinded by the sudden whiteout. Luck fired again.