“Right,” Amy said, “except they’re terrified of blood magic and that means they’re terrified of me because I’m connected to the most powerful blood magic-based construct they’ve ever heard of.”
I thought about that, “I’m surprised they didn’t go after you when we were done fighting The Thing That Eats.” Continue reading Enforcers: Part 10 →
On the freeway, an SUV had stopped and three teenage girls stood by the concrete railing, all of them pointing their phones in our direction. I wondered how long they’d been there and my implant flipped back to when Prentkos and the Cabal soldier landed in the road. They’d seen everything they could.
I wondered how all of that looked to an observer. I hadn’t done anything I regretted, but that didn’t matter. I needed to get the footage to Kayla so she could get it to the League’s marketing and public relations team. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 9 →
It was one of those slow-motion moments that work better in films than in real life. When you’re watching a film, on some level you know that no matter what happens, you’ll be able to walk out of the theater with no consequences. In real life, you might know that Amy’s spear consumed souls, lifeforce, essence, or some other substance that science couldn’t detect or measure.
It had nearly consumed mine when Amy was hurt and needed healing I couldn’t give. The only thing that stopped it from killing me was that Lee had shown up, stopped it, and somehow restored enough mystery substance that I could live. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 8 →
Thanks to the Rocket suit’s enhanced vision, I could see South Beach Surfer’s eyes widen as I aimed myself in her direction. She’d been in too many fights not to guess what I was planning.
If only I knew. The smartest choice would be to aim the laser at her and just burn her. Her probably armored “wetsuit” might help a little, but I’d likely send her to an emergency room. If it turned out that she was mind-controlled or that her perception of the League had been subtly altered, she wouldn’t deserve it. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 7 →
One nice thing about allowing the Rocket suit to be controlled through my implant is that I didn’t have to move to try to contact South Beach Surfer. Before my implant, I’d have had to tap my the gauntlet’s palm with my finger or worse, use the Rocket suit’s mouthguard and tap with my tongue.
For the record, texting with your tongue is tedious beyond my ability to explain. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 6 →
I caught a glimpse of the Cabal soldier and Prentkos gaining altitude and then hitting the top of the arc and beginning to drop. He’d been traveling the same way the strongest of the Cabal’s soldiers always had—jumping half a mile or more at a time.
It made me regret that we couldn’t cover the entire city with spybots. I placed the ones we had near roads where you could run at hundreds of miles per hour on outskirts and located them thicker near my parents’ house—with the effect that this guy could avoid notice until he got close purely by accident.
Prentkos had probably called him in somehow. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 5 →
At the same time that I blasted toward him, I pulled my arm back as if I planned to punch him. Even if I couldn’t move as quickly as he could or fully take advantage of the speeds that I could now observe, I could pull the arm back as I might if I had no special tricks and then fire off killbots as I closed with him.
The speed of my punches was limited by my body, but firing off the killbots was done at the speed of thought plus electronics interfacing with alien technology in my brain.
The killbots shot down toward the ground, curving upward to aim for his leg. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 4 →
I didn’t know who’d figured out how to dissolve my goo, but knowing that this was connected to the Nine, my first thought was Rook. The guy seemed to have weird hero worship of my grandfather going despite being an example of everything my grandfather stood against.
I wouldn’t have put it past him to make a point of figuring out how to dissolve the glue after the last times we’d fought him. Cassie had disintegrated his leg. In the fight before that, I’d exploded his hand. He had every reason to hate both of us—except he’d been weirdly admiring both times we’d met. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 3 →
Giving myself as much speed as I could while still having a hope of stopping close to my house, I asked myself what the best way to handle this was. Coming to the conclusion that the best place to fight the guy was far enough away from my house that he couldn’t burst inside before I could react, I checked his position.
He was still heading toward my parents’ house. If he traveled at the same speed, he’d run through a park a few blocks away—which struck me as a better option for fighting him than the other options: home, an elementary school’s playground, or a church parking lot. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 2 →
The next day I found myself in the last place I wanted to be when almost everyone I knew was in danger—work.
Chris and I had rented an old, one-story building in an industrial neighborhood in Grand Lake that consisted of old factories, dirt parking lots, a railway, and weeds. I didn’t know when the building we were renting had been built, but it had last been renovated in the 1960s. Made of red brick, dark windows, and a flat, slanted roof, its only sign of life was a small sign above the door that said, “Cannon & Klein Engineering.” Continue reading Enforcers: Part 1 →
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)