Chapter 258
Hostile RealityAlexander blinked. Once. Twice. The blood in his left eye wasn’t clearing. The helmet made it worse. No way to wipe it. No way to reach his own face. He closed the eye and relied on the right.
At least their fight would be fair.
Technopathy pulsed and the HUD compensated, shifting targeting data to account for the reduced field of view.
Sort of.
Flashpoint hung in the air above the inferno, watching him. The snarl had faded. The flames around his body had settled from chaotic to controlled. His remaining eye was focused.
Then he grinned. Ugly and wide.
“I saw your conference. The one where you told the whole world the truth.” Flashpoint tilted his head. “How’s it feel knowing you gave the Lost Prophet the chance to unleash horror on every continent?”
Alexander shrugged. He wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
The grin widened. “That’s what I thought.”
Flashpoint swept his good hand in a wide arc. “Flame Vortex.”
The fire answered. Flames tore from the burning trees below and spiraled upward, twisting into a column that thickened as it climbed. The vortex grew. Twenty meters across. Thirty. A tornado of fire rotating fast enough that the wind alone would have thrown him off course. It began to move, tracking toward Alexander, consuming everything in its path. Trees uprooted. Soil scorched black beneath it.
Alexander launched sideways, Metallokinesis pulsing hard. The vortex adjusted course, slower than a direct attack but relentless, the same way Keda’s beam had tracked him. Flashpoint guided it, keeping it close.
Alexander drove toward Flashpoint, circling constantly toward his blind side. The eye Annie had taken.
Flashpoint’s head turned to track him, compensating for the dead spot in his vision.
Alexander put on another burst of speed.
Flashpoint’s Domain pulsed.
The heat vanished. All of it. Instantaneously. The air around Alexander went from furnace to void. The OACS atmospheric systems cycled, compensating, but the temperature outside plummeted faster than the suit could adjust. Ice crystals bloomed across the exterior of the armor. The overlapping plates and articulating scales froze together where moisture in the air flash-crystallized in every external gap. The visor fogged from the outside, frozen air coating the faceplate.
Not even Animachina protected against it. It wasn’t a powered attack. It was simply the complete and sudden absence of heat.
Alexander continued forward but the suit fought him. The servos were fine. The metal was fine. His Will saw to that. But every movement had to crack through the ice bridging the exterior joints, and that fraction of a second mattered.
Flashpoint sidestepped in the air. He let Alexander’s punch sail past, then reignited. Heat slammed back into existence. The ice on the OACS cracked and steamed. Thermal shock rippled through the plating. Metal groaned where the sternum had been damaged.
Flashpoint drove a knee into Alexander’s midsection. The bent chestplate buckled further. Alexander folded. A heat-wreathed elbow caught the back of his helmet and sent him tumbling toward the ground.
The vortex was still coming.
Alexander caught himself an inch from the forest floor. Metallokinesis reversed hard, arrested the tumble, and launched him sideways between the trunks as the vortex churned behind him. Heat washed across the suit. He didn’t look back.
The mace drones hit Flashpoint from four directions simultaneously.
The first bounced off his shoulder. No damage. Just tungsten against superhuman flesh. Flashpoint barely flinched. The second glanced off his hip. The third he batted aside with a pulse of heat.
Alexander flooded Animachina into the fourth as it closed.
The empowered drone caught Flashpoint in the ribs. The impact folded him sideways. His flames stuttered.
He felt that one.
Flashpoint snarled and accelerated hard, pulling away from the swarm, arcing between the burning trees. Alexander matched him, pulsing Metallokinesis in waves, and the chase threaded deeper into the forest.
The forest became a blur. Sparks danced into existence and vanished around Alexander. Trunks ignited as Flashpoint passed, his trail scorching everything behind him.
They spiraled around each other through the inferno, neither able to pull away, neither willing to disengage.
Flashpoint’s good hand came up. A red marble formed. He fired without slowing.
Alexander pulled hard to the right. The marble streaked past and hit a tree trunk. It detonated. The blast wave hit Alexander’s left side and shoved him into a spinning course correction. He straightened, kept flying.
Another marble. Alexander dropped beneath it. The detonation blew apart the canopy above him, burning debris raining down across the suit.
Droney kept up the pressure. Combat drones raced out from behind burning trunks whenever Flashpoint’s speed dropped, blades slashing at his arms and legs. They did nothing without Animachina behind them, no more than scratches against Tier 2 skin, but they forced reactions. Forced Flashpoint to adjust his flight path, to spend attention on threats that weren’t Alexander.
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The mace drones were simpler. A constant swarm, spinning, circling, trying to close from every angle. Flashpoint outran them easily in straight lines. But the trees forced turns. And every turn brought him closer to a cluster of tungsten.
Alexander’s second mental thread burned. Swapping Animachina was the bottleneck. Only the empowered drones did real damage. The rest were distractions. He had to read the fight, predict which drone would reach Flashpoint in the next half-second, and flood it with power before impact. Pull the power back immediately after. Push it into the next one. Constant cycling. Every empowered hit landed hard. Every unempowered hit bounced.
A marble formed in Flashpoint’s hand. He fired it behind him without looking. It streaked toward a cluster of three mace drones closing on his six.
Alexander shoved Animachina into all three.
The marble detonated. The blast engulfed them. All three tumbled out of the fireball, tungsten frames glowing, but intact. Empowered tungsten ate the heat.
He pulled the power back. Redirected it to a combat drone diving at Flashpoint from behind a burning oak.
The empowered blade caught Flashpoint across the back of the thigh. He roared. Fire erupted from his body in a sphere, incinerating the drone instantly.
One more down. But the cut was bleeding.
Alexander fired a lightning bolt from his right palm. It crossed the gap between them in an instant. Flashpoint twisted, took it on the shoulder instead of the spine. His flight wobbled. He recovered in a second and fired two marbles in rapid succession.
Alexander juked left. Right. Both marbles overshot. Both detonated behind him. The double shockwave caught him between the blasts and sent him cartwheeling through a burning trunk. Wood exploded around the suit. He kept going, Metallokinesis pulling him through the debris and back onto Flashpoint’s tail.
They kept racing, spiraling, as the forest burned around them.
A spark flickered into existence just below Flashpoint. One of dozens dancing through the air wherever Alexander’s presence bled into the space between them.
Alexander seized it.