Chapter 256
Mistakes Were MadeThe dust settled between them.
Bodies on the ground. Wands scattered across the metal floor. The wizard stood with his back to the sealed gateway, staff floating at his shoulder and spellbook turning pages in front of him. His broken arm hung limp. His good hand was raised, palm out, fingers spread.
A gesture of parlay.
Alexander left Droney above the fortress. He’d felt the anti-flight ward tugging at him before passing through the roof. Sustained flight was out, unless he wanted to split his attention.
He didn’t need to fly. Throwing himself worked just fine.
“I am Keda. You must be one of—”
Metallokinesis seized every plate of the OACS and hurled him forward. His body left the ground, rotated mid-air, and his feet swung ahead of his center of mass as the courtyard spun around him. The acceleration slammed him against the inside of the suit. Feet forward. Arms tucked. Bodies and debris blurred beneath him as he crossed the distance in a fraction of a second.
The wizard vanished.
One instant he was there, hand raised, mouth open around the word he’d never finish. The next, the space ahead was empty.
Alexander hit the gateway feet-first.
The impact rang through the courtyard. The sealed surface held, dark and inert, but the frame shuddered. The OACS absorbed most of the deceleration. His knees took the rest. Pain stabbed through both legs, sharp but brief, already fading as he pushed off the gateway’s surface and landed. He raised his head and took in the courtyard.
Keda stood at the opposite end. Exactly where Alexander had been standing a second ago.
His staff still hovered at shoulder height. The spellbook still turned its pages. The wizard’s eyes had narrowed, shoulders tense. But his posture remained upright and controlled.
He opened his mouth again. “Are you not Flashpoint’s—”
Alexander raised both hands and fired.
Electrokinesis poured from his Core into the arms of the OACS, the ionization pathways aimed at the wizard’s face. Twin bolts of lightning crossed the courtyard in parallel, the air between them splitting and crackling, ozone flooding the enclosed space.
They reached the wizard and bent.
Both bolts curved inward as they entered the space around him, pulled off their trajectory by something Alexander’s senses couldn’t identify. The lightning slowed. He could track the leading edge of each bolt as it warped around the wizard’s right side, coiling behind his back, the twin streams merging into a single helix that grew brighter as it wound tighter. The power was building. His own power, twisted and compressed and amplified by whatever the wizard’s enchantment was doing to it.
The staff tilted forward. The merged bolt erupted from the wizard’s left side and screamed back across the courtyard.
Alexander was already moving. Metallokinesis hurled him forward, closing the distance, the return bolt racing toward him at the same speed he was crossing the gap.
He raised his left hand.
The combined bolt hit his palm. Current slammed through the gauntlet, through the cybernetic arm beneath it, and into his body. His teeth clenched. The power was his own, but doubled, compressed, carrying a secondary resonance that buzzed against his nerves. The arm’s capacitors drank what they could hold, as did the OACS, but the rest flooded into his body.
It stung.
He kept moving.
The wizard’s eyes widened. His good hand came up, fingers already tracing a symbol in the air, but Alexander was closing at a speed that left no time for whatever he was casting.
The wizard vanished.
Alexander’s momentum carried him through the empty space and toward the far wall. Metallokinesis reversed hard. His boots scraped across the metal floor, carving furrows through the dust and debris, bodies shifting in his wake. He arrested the slide an inch from the wall and turned.
The wizard stood where he’d started again. By the gateway. His staff settled back to its resting hover. He straightened, and his chin lifted a fraction.
Alexander studied him. The teleportation was fast. Maybe instantaneous. And the redirection of his lightning had been automatic, requiring no incantation or visible effort.
The wizard watched him as well. Waiting. Confident, despite the broken arm. Despite being cornered in his own slaughterhouse.
Alexander reached out a hand. Metallokinesis flooded the floor, reaching into every panel, every seam, every structural joint.
He ripped it upward.
The floor erupted. Metal screamed as sections tore free. Keda catapulted toward the ceiling as debris and bodies slid off.
His second mental thread noted that the anti-flight ward ignored both the wizard and the panels chasing him toward the ceiling.
Keda vanished mid-tumble. Metal panels slammed into the ceiling hard enough to embed themselves into the structure above. Keda reappeared on the ground, exactly where he had been.
Alexander was already running. Metallokinesis propelled him forward across the torn floor. Then he leapt, hands clenched, ready to bring them down with maximum force.
But Keda’s good hand was already sweeping sideways in a wide arc.
Bodies moved.
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Six of the dead wizards shot from the floor, robes dragging, limbs slack. They tore toward Alexander from multiple directions. The first two crashed into him head-on, their limbs snapping into action, wrapping themselves around him.
They blocked his vision.
He felt the others slam into his side and legs, limbs coming alive to grab him. Then a force pulled him downward, and he crashed to the ground.
A burst of Metallokinesis tore through the downward force, spinning him upright, back to his feet.
Dead eyes stared into his through the HUD.
Enough.
Alexander closed his eyes and exhaled. Will followed by power. The same way he’d done it earlier, when the anti-flight ward had been his target.
This time he kept it simple. The Machine God stood here. And everything that was metal belonged to him.
The floors, walls, and ceiling, of course. But everything else, too. Including the buttons sewn into the dead wizards’ robes, held there through some form of telekinetic control. Jewelry. Coins in pockets. Wands in holsters.
Filings in teeth.