Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 165: Win Condition

Clack.

Clack.

A G-man stuck his head out one of the many doors, investigating why the gate guard had seemingly lost his mind. He saw a single old man limping along, whistling without a care, the hand-held radio dangling around his neck, stuck into the ‘on’ position.

He met Perry’s gaze, his eyes widening.

He wasn’t supermodel handsome, so Perry suspected superpowers.

He stepped fully into the hallway, pointing a nine millimeter at Perry, his eyes hard with determination.

Kudos to the G-man’s thought process: If an old man got that deep into their secret black site without an alarm, there was no sense trying to talk him down.

Just shoot.

Perry’s adrenaline spiked when he spotted the finger begin to squeeze on the trigger.

BOOM!

With a Body of thirty, Perry was able to interpose his cane between himself and the bullet’s path in the tiny fraction of a second that the finger was squeezing, and the firing pin was travelling to strike the primer.

Holy shit, I can’t believ-

The bullet itself exploded violently upon contact with his cane, causing Perry to stagger backwards.

An Infuser, huh? Perry thought as he stumbled back, his clothes shedding bits of lead shrapnel. Some super’s only ability was infusing a property into a normally mundane object. Making a sword white hot and sharp, cheating at cards…making bullets explode.

They were generally middle-lower tier, because of their strict limitations and reliance on a specific gimmick, which could be taken away from them. outside that application of their powers…they weren’t much.

BOOM.

Perry blocked another bullet, curving the Pernicious Prison around it to create a tube pointing back at the shooter.

The G-man didn’t even have time to be surprised. The bullet exploded, and there was only one path for it to go: Return to sender.

The wave of concussive force and shrapnel knocked the shooter off his feet and Perry crushed his gun on the way by.

By this point, G-men and G-women were flooding out of their individual torture rooms along with the security room to assault him with gunfire.

Now, Perry might be able to predict the trajectory of a single bullet, barely, but five or six was too much.

He let go of his cane, and Paradox’s Pernicious Prison formed a shield, covering his body from the gunfire while tendrils emerged from the edges of the spell, whipping out to break arms, legs, and faces.

Perry continued whistling as he delicately stepped through the growing pile of incapacitated G-men.

Let’s see.. room number thirty is ahead about-

Perry’s vision exploded in stars as something moving too fast to react to punched him in the face.

Perry caught a flash of blue out of the corner of his eye before getting smacked in the back of the head.

Speedster. Wearing blue because blue is a difficult color to see at low lights. Possibly not hypoxia-stupid.

Most effective tactic against speedsters: Area denial. Perry retracted the spell back to cover himself, skin-tight, then exploded it outward in a bubble, creating a honeycomb-shaped mesh to fill the entire hallway.

ZZZZ!

Perry leaned out of the way of a carpenter’s nail, thrown at supersonic speeds and hissing violently through the air.

“Really?” Perry asked, glaring at the speedster trapped on the other side of the inky black mesh, some twenty feet distant.

“Just doing my job,” the lithe woman said with a shrug. “You’re pretty quick for a mage.”

With a gesture, Perry moved the tight honeycomb mesh back the hall and around the corner, trapping the speedster outside the action.

Perry secured the spell tightly to the walls, reverting to its original function as Threads of Gintax before he cut his connection, allowing it to just hang there, keeping the speedster out until it degraded on its own.

It might be a while.

PPP.EXE

4/6 remaining.

Another glob of black tar sprinkled with the dogma of opposing gods carved in bone-white manifested in Perry’s hand, turning into a cane.

Clack.

Clack.

Okay, Serenity is waiting with Spangle six doors down, probably waiting in ambush, so-

A massive fist blasted through the concrete beside him, catching him in the side of the face as Serenity breached the reinforced wall like a pro wrestler in a ball-pit.

***Serenity***

Got the fucker, Karen thought, dusting the concrete off her shoulders. She’d punched the old mage through the wall into the empty room beside him, pasting him against the solid concrete outer wall, which was much thicker than the inner ones.

Looks a bit like what’s left of a mosquito, she thought idly, smirking at the ring of blood the suicidal idiot had left on the hole in the wall as he punched through it.

The mage’s mangled body was pasted to the exterior wall, almost posed like an exit sign, which Karen found highly amusing.

The chuckle died in her throat as she suddenly felt awful.

Like a Drainer had gotten a hand on her.

Karen glanced down and spotted the black and ivory goop wrapping around her leg.

None of THAT shit!

She hardened her defenses, pushing the spell away from her skin with pure willpower before slicing at it with the blade of her palm, coating it in the same telekinetic barrier.

The black and white ooze skittered away from her like a living thing, crawling toward the dead mage, who seemed to be swelling.

Like a stripper emerging from a cake, well-muscled young man with piercing green eyes erupted out of the corpse in a shower of blood. The black tar leapt up and formed into a cane twirling in his right hand while the other did ‘jazz hands.’

She glanced down.

Not bad.

He’d be her type if he wasn’t about to die. And if he hadn’t done jazz hands.

***Paradox***

“You want a minute to put on some pants?” Serenity asked with a raised brow, leering at him. It struck different when it was a seven-foot-tall bruiser doing it.

Perry glanced down at himself, wearing only the viscera of his previous disguise.

“That would be-“

The ground under Serenity’s heel shattered and Perry barely managed to put up the Pernicious Prison between the two of them.

The spell that had previously seemed unbreakable stretched like rubber around the bruiser’s fist, slowing her down just enough for Perry to lean out of the way.

She’s FAST!

Not as fast as the speedster, but close. Just a little faster than Perry.

Perry leapt backwards and pulled his spell inwards, wrapping the pernicious prison around himself from head to toe, creating a skin-tight covering to enhance his defense and speed.

Serenity turned on a dime and leapt after him, crowding his space in order to keep him on the defensive and prevent him from thinking of a counter.

She might have minor inertia control like a stunted Mass Driver, or perhaps she can redirect her own body a bit with Tactile Telekinesis. Could be how she defended against the Pernicious prison.

Perry had gotten a little bit of life-force out of her in that interaction, but it wouldn’t heal much more than a few bruises, and it hadn’t taken her out of the fight.

If she’s got a telekinetic field around her that she can use as armor and to self-redirect, then wrapping myself in the Pernicious Prison doesn’t do much more than even the playing field a bit. I’m gonna have to get creative.

Perry’s reaction time and thinking was faster, which proved evident quickly enough as he didn’t get confused or flustered by her flurry of attacks, so close he could feel her breath.

“Hold still you little shit!” Serenity shouted, her face beginning to turn red as she got rapidly more pissed.

“Hmm…let me think about that,” Perry said, ducking one way, then using the spell-suit wrapped around him to slide sideways without moving his stance or legs, causing the more experienced brawler to whiff twice in a row at his unpredictable movements. “How about no? I don’t wanna get the bug-on-a-windshield treatment again.”

“You’re about to get the crap-I-scrape-off-my-shoe treatment!” Serenity shouted, sending wild hooks his direction.

From what he could see, Serenity’s attack style was a bit sloppy and relied too heavily on her fists. This was common in Bruisers, since they really never needed to learn how to use their legs in order to win a fight.

Still, knowing her fighting style was sloppy and doing anything about it were two different things.

Perry stepped closer, keeping himself inside her guard and returning her own pressure back to her.

Between two wild strikes, Perry found the opportunity he’d been looking for. The Bruiser was reeling back for a punch, her head entirely unguarded.

Perry lashed out, enhancing the strength and speed of the strike with his spell, aiming for her jaw with a jab that could pulverize concrete…Accomplishing nothing.

The attack hit an invisible barrier a hair’s breadth from Serenity’s jaw and skittered off. Perry recovered an instant later and ducked before her vicious punch took his head off.

Okay, How do we deal with this? Perry thought, running through his win conditions.

He couldn’t beat her in a slug-match. He might be able to kill her, but the situation didn’t warrant an escalation quite yet. It was best if everyone kept themselves restrained to ‘capture’ rather than ‘kill’. Perry wasn’t na?ve enough to think he could beat the whole city by himself.

He figured he might be able to penetrate her defence by using the trick with magnifying the Light spell and making a laser out of it.

Telekinetic barriers often didn’t block light. After all, Serenity needed to see to fight.

In theory he could pull the same trick he did in Neuron’s lair and burn out her eyes or maybe even kill her.

If he did kill her, Washington would rain down on him like a ton of bricks, and if he didn’t kill her, she would be mad. Real mad. And eyes weren’t too hard to regrow for the right price. So he couldn’t win a stand-up fight, and he shouldn’t escalate.

Where does that leave me? Perry thought. My win condition is rescuing Spangle, not winning a fight. I can either remove Serenity from the equation or escape her with Spangle in tow, removing myself from the equation.

He glanced up at the red-faced woman whose fists were ripping the air around his head and neck.

Dragor’s Kinesis.EXE

(2/3) remaining

Perry mentally directed the spell to lift Serenity up and fling her away.

It worked for a moment, before Serenity tensed and the spell seemed to slip off her, dropping her back to the ground.

Well, I guess that means escape is my win condition.

“Hey, can you fly?” Perry asked, turning his footwork to lead the two of them past the room with Spangle in it.

“Eat shit pissant!” Serenity shouted, throwing a chunk of concrete at him, Perry batted it out of the way with his spell-reinforced hand and dodged the follow up that came from the blind spot caused by the boulder.

Chemestro might be weaker, but he was a much better fighter.

“Cuz you just slipped out of a gravity-based spell, and I was wondering if you could use the same technique to fly? Or, does this imply that there’s a component to the Dragor’s Kinesis spell, that, if avoided, terminates the localized control of gravity?”

“NERD!”

I see. Not gonna get a decent dialogue going. Shame.

Perry and Serenity stepped past the room Spangle was being held in, and Perry blocked an overhead strike with his forearm, sacrificing HP to shield his gaze from Serenity’s.

HP: 12

Perry glanced over at Spangle while his eyes were concealed, sending a bit of the Pernicious Prison out of his foot to cut the bonds she was already working on.

Snip, Snip.

The manacles fell to the ground, and Spangle sprang to her feet, watching as they struggled past the door.

HP: 11

OOF!

Perry felt the wind get knocked out of him as Serenity used his momentary distraction to land a blow to his side.

“You’re tougher than you look, kid,” Serenity said as Perry skittered backwards. “How’d you block that?”

“Trade secret,” Perry said, considering escape tactics.

He couldn’t go back out the way he came: There was an uncontrolled Threads of Gintax between him and the exit, as well as a speedster waiting to make his life miserable.

As far as Perry was aware, there was no other way to get out: security trumped fire hazards with black site design.

Flying up and punching a hole through the building’s ceiling was out. It’d make too small of a hole, turning Spangle into hamburger and possibly showering pedestrians with chuncks of concrete.

Lifting up the entire building out of the earth with Dragor’s Kinesis was also out.

The entire building shuddered momentarily as Perry turned his thoughts elsewhere.

Hmm.. I’ve got a better idea.

Perry had been refining Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation for the past six months, and it had gone from a crude, blunt implement to a sophisticated technique that could manifest highly complex buildings.

Just never used it in combat before.

Sliding Stats

Attunement 52 -> 46

Nerve 34 -> 40

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.EXE

(0/1) remaining

The telltale seering orb manifested in between Perry’s hand, flickering at a blazing through infinite possible landscapes.

Sophisticated software he’d introduced to the spell allowed it to sample his intentions, create general filters based off them, then self-filter out 99.8% of the infinite variations that he was given access to before even showing them to him.

Perry flickered through about a hundred and fifty different versions of the room around them before selecting one that he liked, slamming the spell to a close.

The seering orb winked out, finalizing the changes to their surroundings, and Perry received another punch for his inattention.

HP: 10

“The hell did you just do?” Serenity demanded, glancing around the room as he staggered backwards.

Nothing was obviously different.

“Who knows?” Perry said with a shrug, retreating further down the hall, his back slamming against the office at the end of the black-site’s hall, where the torturers took their coffee and chatted around the water cooler between waterboarding people.

Serenity gave a malicious smile as she realized he’d been cornered, stalking forward like a predator.

Crack.

The floor panel underneath her gave way, dropping Serenity into a pit filled with colorful plastic spheres and cheerful music.

“You’re in my house now!” Perry shouted as Serenity struggled to catch her balance in the ball-pit.

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