Weapons of Mass Destruction

Retreating within my mind, we appear in my school this time.

Whitey is wearing the same clothes as my former P.E. coach. He’s got the classic look—plain gray tee, loose mesh shorts hanging just over the knee, white socks pulled up mid-calf and a basic pair of sneakers.

The worst part is that the damned demon still manages to look cool, even wearing that, in spite of his lanky form and taut, compact muscles stretched under his pale skin.

“Surprisingly comfortable,” he notes, taking a moment to stretch.

I let him live in his delusion, as we stare down on the scene from the top of a wall nearby, watching a group of four boys as they surround another. The boy in question is currently on his knees, patiently waiting while the largest of the boys pours a bottle of an unidentified soft drink over his head, causing his black hair to cling to his face, and even then, his gray and brown eyes refuse to display any hint of rage.

“He creeps me out,” one of the boys says, laughing as he reaches over to squeeze the bottle in his buddy’s hand, encouraging the beverage to flow and redirecting the stream such that it sprays into his victim’s face.

The kneeling boy doesn’t so much as flinch as the others continue to laugh.

Finally, when the bottle is empty, they throw it in his face.

“It’s no fun if he’s not gonna react,” the oldest boy complains, kicking the kneeling child in the belly for good measure. “Let’s go.”n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

The moment they get out of sight, the boy swiftly jumps to his feet and takes off his wet shirt, revealing a thin, bruised body. He squeezes as much of the beverage from his shirt as he can before putting it back on, relying on the hot summer day to dry him off on the way home.

“What happened to these four?” Whitey asks, seeming curious.

“What do you think?”

Whitey smiles, his eyes shining with that demonic look of his. “Good.”

“I wonder if I should look them up when I get out of the tutorial. You know, for old times' sake.”

“I would tear them to shreds, for old times' sake.”

“Yeah, that’s how demons like to do things isn’t it.”

“Limb by limb, I would tear them apart. I would hold them with kinetic energy to stop their breath, only to stop as they reach the brink of passing out, and then I would repeat that. I would send pulses of energy through their bodies and break their bones, leaving their flesh and organs untouched so they’d have some time to think as they died.”

“Sure. Want to try something?”

Whitey, curious by nature, nods and follows me out of the school stepping into the empty city, reconstructed from my memories without the faceless hoard of people. A number of cars stand parked in the lot, and I choose one at random before breaking a window and crawling inside.

Almost like a scene from a movie, I find a key behind the sun visor and turn it in the ignition.

After watching me sit down, Whitey follows suit, taking a seat by my side, closing the door with a bit too much force, causing it to buckle.

“All the car buff fathers in the world are going to curse you if you keep slamming the doors so hard. You probably just killed the paint job or something.”

Unsurprisingly, he tries to open the door and do it again, but he can’t seem to figure out how it’s done, so he reacts by piercing it with Needle Point while staring me down.

“So very mature,” I note, throwing the car into gear and pressing down on the gas pedal.

The car roars and doesn’t move.

Under the confused expression, Whitey gives me, I take off the handbrake, and the car finally moves, only for the engine to sputter and die.

“Is this what you wanted to show me?”

“Look, it’s not like I had too many opportunities to drive a car.”

I repeat the process, and the car, throwing and jumping, moves again. We even scratch against another car before we get away from the parking place and onto the main road. There, I shift the gears and add the speed, moving on the totally empty roads. There are no other cars, no buses, nothing.

“When do we lift off?” Whitey asks after a minute.

“It can’t fly.”

“What a terrible means of transportation.” Even so, he sticks his slim pale hand out of the window and cups it in the air as we start moving at higher and higher speeds.

Air flows into the car through the broken window, causing his long white hair to flow in the wind.

“I always wanted to try to drive around just like this,” I note.

“Is it as good as you imagined?”

“Not really.”

“It never is,” Whitey confirms.

Both of us reach for a source of kinetic energy at the same time. Whitey for the one inside of him, while I absorb it from the moving car, which comes to a stop, almost on a dime.

A blast from Whitey sends the door flying off on his side, as he jumps out of the car and I do the same, only to watch the entire side of the car crumple under Whitey’s next punch. The car flies into the air, forcing me to dodge as it smashes into the building behind me, as the sound of broken glass fills the otherwise quiet city.

Wraith Dance brings me in close as I avoid his Needle Point attacks, and both of us switch to Breaker Style, the shockwave from our strikes colliding, with no one to absorb it. Instead, he uses Wraith Dance, and I do the same, following him. Whitey enters a shopping mall, as I follow, exchange blasts of kinetic energy along the way, destroying the place around us.

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The entire time I track the movement and frequency of his heartbeat, trying to predict any change he might make in his stance. Even so, I know he can be tricky and likes to fake me out when he can, creating fake vibrations to cover his true intent.

I stop in place as Whitey unexpectedly switches to attack in Pulser Stance.

As always, when that happens, I give up trying to predict his movement. It’s just that impossible. There is no logic to it, no inertia to give away his movements. You can absorb it, you can redirect it. You can stop mid-air, you can halt your movement, and change directions at any point.

My instincts, honed in the hundreds of clashes we’ve engaged in, take over, and I deploy the hard won methods I’ve been developing while making sure not to fall into my habit of over relying on the moves I’m most comfortable with. Whitey is very good at predicting my movements based on the ways I’ve fought before.

Our clash gradually increases in speed, and the flooring continues to explode under my feet, placing my lack of control on display, as I release a bit too much kinetic energy.

Meanwhile, Whitey’s form is perfect. Without the slightest bit of waste on his part. His movement feels like it wouldn’t even move a falling feather as he jumps over the railings, using glass windows as footholds without damaging them. He then switches to Steelroot and stops, a clear challenge as his heartbeat begins to resound loudly, like a huge bell.

Once again, I switch to Breaker Style, and my body comes to a halt right in front of him. I twist my body, my feet burrowing into the ground, as kinetic energy explodes through my body, leveraged in an open handed strike.

With all the force I can muster, I launch a palm strike at his unguarded chest. He doesn’t even use Counter Flow to absorb or redirect the impact. Instead, he relies on Steelroot’s defense, causing the kinetic energy aimed at his body to detonate outward, tearing through everything around us.

A shockwave erupts through the area, shattering the glass on the floors above, which cascades down in a shimmering rain, drifting slowly downward like a downpour of falling feathers.

Whitey just stands there with his shirt torn and a big, blue bruise blossoming across his chest.

He glances down at it.

“Not bad,” Whitey says simply.

Knowing what will follow I immediately switch to a higher gear and prepare to use Counter Flow, I’m more comfortable with that than Steelroot. My heart beats, pumping kinetic energy through my body at much higher concentrations than ever before.

My eyes snap wide open, tracking his every subtle movement, watching for the faintest trace of kinetic energy.

"Not bad," Whitey says once again, a maniacal grin spreading across his face, his red eyes locked onto me. "My turn."

Dead once again I open my eyes, now free of my mind space.

As a few times before I find myself hoping that my minion doesn’t wind up like Whitey. Vega is perfect just the way she is.

Then I start replaying our entire fight in my mind. Every mistake I made, Whitey’s every move. All the ways I can improve and the habits I need to lose. This process takes twice as long as our fight did, and only then do I bother pulling myself out of the armchair.

My room is even more different now. An array of invisible Ley Lines connect to the inscriptions on the floor surrounding my new ax and shield, and the wall, heavily scarred where I clawed away the stone and replaced it with a metal alloy made from two highly conductive metals, which I simply melted down and poured into the freshly carved grooves.

I also check the escape routes I’ve prepared, there are three of them for the whole group to evacuate through and two more they don’t know about. Each one capable of taking all of us elsewhere.

There’s also a powerful [Ley Line] connecting me to each member of the group, straining the skill to the fullest and making it nearly impossible for me to create more lines without causing the others to dissolve.

A part of my mind, separated by [Focus], keeps them in check constantly, ready to pull on them and get us all out.

Then there is also Tess, who has her own escape routes, and even the twins have something they’ve prepared with Min-Jae’s help. Sophie is excluded from all of them, even now going through her mind, and trying to find any signs of lingering influence.

The Framework’s ignition is set for tomorrow. Whether it will remove the spatial locks is a question for later. Constructing the array to transport us away is another matter entirely.

There is also a chance that reinforcements or prison guards will show up once they notice a problem in an effort to relock them, but there should be enough time. At least according to the mind mages—at least a week if it works—to escape, giving us enough time to visit the vyssari Champion Tess and others met. The Mind mages even have their own plans to escape the moon after breaking the spatial locks and we’re currently trying to steal them.

But I’m almost sure of one thing. The Framework ignition would fail if not for me and Sophie.

During the maintenance, Sophie noticed a few things and came up with improvements. And I’ve been making some small changes of my own from the safety of my room, unnoticeable, even to the Framework’s owner, who is probably the Archon.

That confirms, for the most part, that this was always meant to be one of the ways out for any of the tutorial attendees capable of escaping.

I sense Sophie’s [Ley Line] shift as she nears the tower. However she rarely leaves now and never does so without Tess and Maya, and no one in the city seems to mind when she does. I suppose having a series of high-speed railways terminating directly at the heart of their towers just has that effect on people.

I hear a knock on my doors and let them open, allowing Sophie to enter, followed by Aaron and Dennis, who’ve come to help just as planned.

"I swear, this room gets more wrecked by the hour," she says, inspecting the wall I modified.

“Can you get any more Amberlace?” I ask in place of a response

“I tried. There isn’t more of it in the city.”

“This city sucks.”

“Nat, I’ve spent nearly all the money I have to get you as much Arcanadium, Amberlace, Voidsteel, Endurium, and Heartwood as possible, and more besides.”

“You were the one who said they owed me, not me.”

“Usually, people are less… shameless about it.”

“Don’t you consider your freedom more valuable than…”

“I’ve got it already! I’ll try to get you more, damn it.”

“Thank you, Sophie.” Then I turn to the twins. “Did you practice like I told you? And where is Lily?”

“We did, and she should be here soon,” Dennis confirms.

His brother smiles. “It was nice to do something better than you for a change.”

I let them bask in the glow, and in the meantime, I put Fracture on the densely inscribed table I’ve made entirely out of alloys composed of a number of valuable metals. The table alone took me days to fully prepare, but it was fun, and I came up with a few more interesting applications for a few of my skills, which has always been the main goal.

“That table is worth more than some of the towers around here,” Sophie notes.

“Not in the system shop. I think the system thinks it’s too specialized, after all, the only thing it does is help manage Fracture and connect it with the Logic Core.”

“Sorry, I’m late!” Lily cries, rushing in as I open the doors for her.

"Let’s get started, then."

It’s time to create and connect the Logic Core for this evil weapon—which I fully intend to study and refine later with Sophie’s guidance. Connecting it to Fracture will provide the perfect foundation for my future experiments.

My vision for the Logic Core extends far and wide.