Chapter 257

Fifteen seconds. Maybe less.

Alexander dismissed the fireball from his mind and threw himself forward.

Metallokinesis seized three mace drones and hurled them ahead of the swarm. Tungsten bludgeons crossed the distance to Keda in under a second, converging from three angles.

Keda’s staff flashed. The first mace drone curved off its trajectory, caught in the redirection field, its momentum warped sideways and flung back the way it came. The second followed. The third Keda caught with telekinesis and drove straight down, sending it tumbling toward the treetops below.

But the swarm was already on him. Fifty drones bearing down, combat drones leading with blades extended, mace drones following in clusters.

Keda’s staff blazed. He vanished.

Alexander was already rotating. The world spun as Metallokinesis flipped him, sky trading places with ground, and his senses found Keda behind him, exactly where he’d expected. He fired a single lightning bolt from his right hand. Quick. Low power. Just enough to trigger the response.

The bolt warped around Keda’s body in that tight spiral, amplified as it went. The staff tilted and the return shot screamed back across the gap.

Alexander caught it with the right gauntlet of the OACS. Current flooded the arm’s capacitors.

Free recharge.

The swarm caught up. Droney had redirected them the instant Keda reappeared, and now they closed from every direction. Keda’s staff fired bursts of concussive force in rapid sequence, each one swatting a drone aside. His telekinesis worked independently of the staff, catching two combat drones that flanked him and crushing them together.

Two lost.

Keda’s good hand came up, fingers tracing runes that snapped into existence in the air in front of him. He muttered an incantation under his breath, symbols burning with a dark light and layering over each other faster than anything Augustus could do.

Alexander didn’t recognize the pattern or the attack. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a teleport.

He pulled the two shield drones forward. They snapped into position ahead of him, barriers activating, overlapping into a curved wall between him and Keda.

A beam of black light erupted from the tip of the staff. The thickness of an arm. It crossed the distance in an instant and hit the left shield drone’s barrier dead center.

The barrier rotted. Both energy fields darkened where the beam touched, the corruption spreading outward from the point of contact in fractures that ate through the barrier’s structure. The drone behind it shuddered, its emitter cycling frantically.

Alexander dropped. Metallokinesis wrenched him straight down, hard enough that his organs pressed up against his diaphragm. The shield drones split apart, their failing barriers dissolving, and the black beam swept through the space he’d occupied a half second ago.

It tracked him. Keda’s staff followed his descent, the beam carving a line through the air. Alexander pulled left. The beam adjusted. He reversed right. It followed, slower than his directional changes but relentless.

He juked upward. The beam overshot below him. Adjusted. He pulled hard to the right. The beam tracked, cutting across his path. He reversed left before the correction completed, rolling over the beam close enough that the hairs on his neck stood up inside the suit.

Alexander pushed Metallokinesis harder, hurling himself directly at Keda. He could see the concentration on the wizard’s face. The strain of maintaining the beam and tracking a target that refused to move in a straight line.

The beam cut out.

Keda vanished.

Annoying.

The fireball filled Alexander’s peripheral vision. Brighter now. Closer. Five seconds, if that.

Keda reappeared below him, falling fast toward the treeline. The drone swarm raced past Alexander, giving chase without pause.

Droney beeped.

Alexander spun and shot after Keda.

“I know. Run simulations. Feed me the results.”

Data poured into his mind. He shunted the stream into his second mental thread, letting Droney and that half of his brain solve the problem while the rest of him fought.

He was closing. The wizard was below and sinking fast, the trees rushing up beneath them both.

Keda turned. His good hand snapped out toward Alexander, dozens of runes storming around his forearm. In his palm, a cocoon of white silk. Small enough to fit in a closed fist.

Alexander’s eyes widened behind the visor. Keda had hidden the casting with his back.

The cocoon exploded. Tens of thousands of threads sprayed upward in a widening cone, each one catching the light, filling the air between them in a wall of white that spread faster than Alexander was falling.

Drones shot through the small gaps, tearing at threads on their way out. But there were too many. He couldn’t stop it. No time to reverse course. The cone was too wide. Too fast. Already filling his entire field of vision. Reaching past him.

Alexander reached into the spatial ring.

The Skipper appeared in his palm. He flooded the device with power, no time to calculate. Reality folded. The sky inverted. Righted itself, and inverted again in the space between one heartbeat and the next. His vision went white, then snapped back with a jolt that hit him behind the eyes.

He was higher. Above the cone of silk threads closing beneath him. The threads snapped inward, collapsing into a sphere that contracted with crushing force. Several drones caught in the webs crumpled, their frames buckling as the silk tightened around them.

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The shift had cost him. His reserves dropped hard enough that he felt it in his chest.

Alexander shook his head. The disorientation clung to him, his sense of up and down lagging a half-second behind his eyes. The HUD flickered, recalibrating. He needed a moment to—

The sun hit him.

That was what it felt like. A wall of heat so intense that the OACS temperature warnings didn’t flash so much as scream. Then the impact. Something hit him center mass at a speed his senses couldn’t track, and the world became noise and fire and the feeling of his body being driven backward inside the suit.

His head snapped forward. The visor cracked against his forehead, splitting skin. Blood filled his left eye. The OACS bent inward at the sternum, servos shrieking as the chestplate absorbed an impact that should have caved in his ribcage.

Metallokinesis failed. Every wave he’d been maintaining, the flight, the drone coordination, all of it cut out in the same instant his concentration shattered.

Alexander fell.

The sky spun. Fire trailed above him in a long arc where Flashpoint was already banking wide, pulling away from the impact point, heat rippling in his wake. A ball of orange and white against the pale sky, curving back for another pass.

The treetops rushed up at him.

Somehow he’d maintained hold on the Skipper.

Fucking System tech. Can’t trust it. In what world was it his intent to appear right in Flashpoint’s path?

Alexander returned it to the ring. Then he stabilized his rotation, but allowed himself to continue falling.

Droney had split the swarm in half. Taken the combat drones and their blades in pursuit of Keda. Sent the mace drones chasing after Flashpoint.

Good.

Alexander reached out with Metallokinesis and Animachina simultaneously. The mace drones answered. Twenty-two tungsten bludgeons flooded with power, their formations tightening around the ball of fire descending toward him.

Flashpoint fell through the sky in a column of fire. Black and crimson armor. Gold-trimmed pauldrons. Red cape streaming behind him, edges burning. The black helmet with its painted flames. The phoenix eyepatch. He plummeted toward Alexander with both hands forward, heat warping the air into a shimmering column beneath him.

Alexander blinked rapidly, trying to clear the blood from his left eye. He flicked a finger. Then another. Orchestrating.

Two mace drones broke formation. They fell into a single line, one behind the other, and snapped toward Flashpoint on a collision course.

Flashpoint saw them. He pointed an index finger. A red marble flashed into existence at his fingertip, pulsing and compressing.

Alexander recognized the attack. Remembered it destroying Frank’s store.

He grinned behind the bloodied visor and pushed the drones harder.

Flashpoint fired. The marble streaked out and hit the lead drone.

The detonation was enormous. Fire and pressure erupted outward, engulfing the drone in a sphere of white-hot destruction. The shockwave hit Alexander’s chest even at distance. Smoke and flame billowed across the sky.

The lead drone tumbled out of the blast, spinning wildly, tungsten frame glowing cherry-red but intact. Knocked off course. But its hardened systems had survived, exactly as designed, even if it was out of the fight for a moment while its systems rebooted.

The second drone punched through the smoke directly behind it.

Flashpoint’s eyes widened. He tried to pull his hand back.

The tungsten mace drone hit his right hand at full speed. The sound of bones breaking carried through the air. Flashpoint’s raw scream followed half a second later, his fingers bending at angles that fingers didn’t bend.

Alexander thrust both hands forward. Right, palm forward. Electricity dancing down the arm of his suit. Left, fingers clenching into a fist.

The lightning bolt erupted from his right palm. It closed the distance instantly, catching Flashpoint in the chest with a crack of thunder and enough force to send him tumbling through the air. The remaining mace drones surged forward as one, converging on Flashpoint from every direction.

He didn’t stay to watch. The drones would buy him time, but the superhero wouldn’t go down that easily.

And he still had unfinished business with Keda. He couldn’t afford to let him slip away. That would leave him stranded in the wizard’s reality for thirty days, unless he could locate another gateway.

Metallokinesis pulsed hard. Alexander spun and accelerated downward, plunging into the treeline. Branches shattered against the armored suit as he punched through the canopy. Then he was in the forest, snapping into a sharp curve between the trunks, the world becoming a blur of brown and green.

He dodged left. Right. A trunk flashed past close enough to scrape the shoulder plate. Another appeared dead ahead. He pulled hard to avoid it, clipped it with his right shoulder, and the trunk exploded into splinters. The tree groaned and began to topple behind him, crashing through its neighbors.

Alexander pushed faster.

The wizard was close. Weaving between the trees ahead, staff glowing, still trying to reach deeper cover. The combat drones harassed him from every angle, blades slashing in coordinated passes that forced teleport after teleport.

Droney beeped. Then a final stream of data flooded Alexander’s mind.

The pattern. Every teleport mapped. Every destination plotted. The math was clean. The prediction was simple.

Ninety-three percent of the time, Keda appeared behind the threat’s direction of travel.

Alexander grinned.

He burst forward. Metallokinesis pulsing at maximum, straight at Keda, closing the gap in a heartbeat. The wizard’s eyes went wide. His body tensed with the telltale stillness that preceded every teleport.

Alexander was already reversing.

Metallokinesis spun him around and wrenched him backward. The same jarring, bone-rattling directional change he’d practiced on the beach a lifetime ago. His organs slammed against the inside of his chest. His vision blurred.

Keda materialized directly in front of him.

The wizard’s mouth opened. His eyes found Alexander’s black visor, reflected in his pupils.

Alexander’s left hand snapped out, fingers closed around the staff. Electrokinesis erupted from his palm. Metallokinesis tightened the grip.

The magic in the staff resisted for a fraction of a second.

The wood shattered.

Keda’s flight cut out. The wizard’s eyes went blank with shock as gravity took him, fragments of his staff tumbling around him in the air.

Alexander caught the longer half before it fell. Reversed his grip. Drove the shattered end through Keda’s chest and pushed.

They fell together. Alexander on top, one hand on the broken staff, driving it deeper as the ground rushed up toward them. Keda’s mouth opened and closed. No sound came out. His one good hand pawed weakly at the wood protruding from his sternum.

They hit the forest floor.

The impact cratered the earth. Soil and rock erupted outward. Keda’s body folded around the staff, then fell back. Still.

Alexander stood.

Then he brought his boot down on the wizard’s head.

He stood there for a moment. The forest was quiet, except for the hum of combat and shield drones slipping away between the trees at Droney’s direction.

Light erupted above, ending the silence. The canopy directly overhead burst into flame. Every leaf, every branch, every trunk in a widening sphere ignited simultaneously as something dropped through the burning ceiling of the forest.

Flashpoint descended through the inferno. Armor glowing. One hand cradled against his chest, fingers ruined.

Flashpoint’s Domain settled over the forest like a hand closing around his throat. Heat and fire, claimed absolutely, bending to his Will.

Alexander exhaled slowly. His Will curled outward. Sparks danced through the air between them. Technopathy ran through the suit, adjusting the settings to manage the heated atmosphere. It wouldn’t hold up forever, but it would be enough.

Alexander tilted his head back. The mace drones were circling wide, keeping their distance from the competing Domains for the moment.

Flashpoint hung in the air above him, his mouth pulled into a snarl beneath the helmet. His remaining eye was wide, flame flickering within.

Alexander laughed.

“What’s wrong, Flashprick? You look mad.”