It touched the plate, the silvery color wobbling at the edges and then I let more energy through, wondering how long I’d be able to keep it going and how large I could make it. It’s not that I hadn’t experimented, but there was a difference between expanding a mote to include a desk or sphere of air versus an object attached to a person who might choose to move.
What was disappointing though, was how the force field regenerated before my eyes in an instant. Noticing that, I swerved to the right, whipping around her toward the wall behind her with the idea that I’d be able to go around her back.
For a change, an idea that struck me as questionable even as I put it into practice worked. The force field generated a pseudopod and struck at me except this time it missed, possibly because she didn’t have as wide a perspective in her helmet or possibly because I’d moved too quickly. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 8→
As Ana ran for me, her suit’s color changed, turning silver—which told me a lot. First, that all of thesuits might be able to turn on stasis and second, that they didn’t do it all the time. If I had to guess, that would be because it sucked power—which meant that we might be able to outlast them.
It made me wonder if it was possible to power a plate of armor with a battery that was inside the plate. In theory, assuming it stopped time in the right moment, that could last forever. The fact that they didn’t seem to be doing it that way indicated that it was more complicated than I assumed. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 7→
Feeling the rockets throw me forward, I weaved through the air, doing my best to be hard to hit, knowing that the True could predict my moves before I made them—if they had enough information.
Half of the True ran forward, but only on this side of the room. It made flying across the room and following the far wall seem like the best option except that the True would be trying to trick me into a bad choice. Flying across the room would allow the whole group more time to fire at me and flying next to the far wall would do more of the same. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 6→
I didn’t need to explain the toxic waste comment, Daniel caught the gist of it from my head.
Got it, he said, but then I felt a pulse of worry from him. One more thing… They’ve got mental shields built into their suits, so I can’t get a read on what they’re thinking, but I did learn something. One of them jumped up and tried to grab me. I knew it was coming before he did, but still, I only barely got away. As he got close though, I got a flash of Rook talking about the armor. I heard one word, ‘stasis.’Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 5→
Looking at the group of mechs ahead of me, I had to ask myself the next question, “How?”
I didn’t have a pile of plastique bots and while they’d worked on one guy, they were designed with unmoving objects like walls in mind. I had a few killbots, but the last time I’d fought people in Rook’s armor, the killbots didn’t work. Plus, I didn’t want to kill them anyway.
So, I decided to target their faceplates with boombots, figuring that killing them wasn’t possible, but it’d at least be a distraction. The only problem was that I’d just done it and bearing in mind that I was fighting True, they’d anticipate it. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 4→
The True didn’t make it easy for me. Even as I swerved toward the far left table in the line, they started running for me—except for the one that was already there and waiting.
The bots hit that one first, exploding and throwing him backward. They hit the other two at almost the same time, whipping around them and shooting them not backward, but forward in a fiery explosion, generally in the opposite direction that I was flying. Continue reading Underground Tower: Part 3→
A look down at the floor below us told me what I need to know, the human-sized tubes had cracked all over, shattering one entirely and the top half of the one next to it. The platform the tubes rested on had also cracked with electronics and wires falling out of it, some of them still smoking from when I hit them with my laser.
Yoselin entered behind me, turning her head around as she entered, likely to make sure people weren’t following us. Seemingly satisfied, she turned her head back toward me, following me in.
It was bigger inside than I expected, not in the sense of being a timelord’s extra-dimensional space, but in the sense that a quarter of a big building’s basement turns out to be a large space anyway. That wasn’t all of it either. Continue reading Holes: Part 10→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
