Chapter 66: New Day, New Me~
Something was very right.
I lay there in the soaked sheets hunting for it, and it took me a good few seconds to work out that the thing I was hunting for was an absence, because the dull ache between my eyebrows, the soreness I’d carried into this bed barely five minutes ago, was simply gone, scrubbed out along with every other complaint my head had been filing since yesterday.
My skull felt quiet in there.
Not just quiet, but clean, and fast.
I reached for Telekinesis the way you poke a muscle the morning after a brutal workout, braced for the wince, and got a reading instead, an actual reading.
For the first time since this power moved into my head, I knew exactly how much of it I had, not just a vague feeling.
The tank was full. And more importantly, it was fifty percent bigger than it had been five minutes ago.
[...Oh... Oh, I like where this is going...]
I sent Awareness out on its usual lap of the apartment, and the lap was over before I’d finished deciding to run it, Tikki’s small warm shape at the foot of the bed, the cold dead shape of three bodies along the hallway wall, dust and dead air and a pipe dripping two rooms over, all of it arriving at once and arriving already sorted.
And more glaring than the clarity of it was the edge of it.
Twenty meters was the boundary I’d been living with; I knew it to the centimeter, and my reach was sailing past that line with room to spare.
So I pushed on purpose this time, counting the only way that made sense from a bed on the top of a tower, straight down, floor after floor of strangers’ apartments unfolding beneath me, couches and cold kitchens and one bathtub still full of water, until the reach finally thinned out and quit.
[Thirty meters... Enhancer’s a flat one-point-two... so the base sits at twenty-four now... meaning the chase alone pushed my TK hard enough that it bought me five whole meters and I never even noticed...]
And somewhere in the middle of that counting I caught the quieter thing, which was that I was doing all of it at once, the sweep, the gauge, the math, a running tally of minutes against Kara’s deadline, and none of it was elbowing any of the rest out of the way.
Thoughts kept arriving finished.
I’d start asking myself a question and the answer would already be standing there with its arms crossed, waiting on me.
So I put it through the only benchmark that mattered and pulled up yesterday’s fight, and the review ran itself while I lay there, my own mistakes flagging themselves one after another without being hunted for.
The corner where Tikki had damn near slid out of the pocket, the full half-second I’d stood flat-footed choosing the best way out instead of just going for it.
A review like that used to cost me an evening and a foul mood.
This one finished before I did.
And a laugh climbed out of me with nobody around to hear it except a cat and three corpses.
I remembered sometimes hitting a certain state of mind when shit hit the fan, remembered that razor focus, that absence of lag, and now that was my default.
I got up, and on the way up I put the dead man’s bed back together without touching it, sheets snapping flat while the pillow landed square, three objects moving in three directions at once and every single one of them landing exactly where I told it to.
Then I turned the grip on Tikki himself, the tension from my forehead settling around him feather-soft, softer than my own two hands could have managed, and floated all two and a half kilos of him a few centimeters off the bed, and got absolutely nothing for my trouble, not a twitch, not an ear, the little guy staying folded in his loaf mid-air, utterly certain the grip would hold, because it was mine.
I set him down on the table on the other side of the room and turned my focus onto the very heavy-looking oak bed, because at that point why the hell not, and lifted the whole bed.
And the bed rose off the floor before I’d properly finished deciding to lift it, mattress and all, a hundred-some kilos of oak still in the air like it weighed nothing.
Yesterday, that same lift would have eaten most of my lifting capacity.
"Look at it..." I muttered. "Should be one-fifty kilos at the very least..."
"Mea," Tikki observed from the table.
"I know, right?"
Setting the bed down without a sound, I couldn’t stop myself from grinning at a bed like an absolute idiot.
Yesterday my maximum lifting capacity was one twenty, but now, after pushing Telekinesis to the limit and the enhancer, I had to be above one fifty.
"That torture was totally worth it..." I told the ceiling, and meant every word.
The nightstand clock informed me I’d now burned twenty minutes of Kara’s hour lying in a stranger’s bedroom getting my brain renovated.
[Fifty-some klicks in forty minutes... yeah, I can handle it]
Helmet on, ear pro seated, SR-25’s sling cinched down across the plate rig, while Tikki flowed up my arm and into the shoulder pocket before I’d even angled it at him, earbuds still in, ready before I was.
On the way out, I stepped over the three tenants still parked along the hallway wall, necks all set at the same impossible angle, and made a formal note that I was to stay on the good side of the small guy riding my shoulder.
Didn’t take long for me to glide and zip my way up the little crest. And the moment I was on the road leading south, I pulled the Diavel out of Inventory into the cold morning sun, because I was in the mood and on a timer.
-VRRAAAAM-!
The Akrapovič woke the whole block, and I let it, because the northern half of this city had nothing left worth waking, its hordes long since drained lakeward, leaving nothing on the avenues except stragglers and the odd pack of ten that lunged at the sound and lost the argument with sixty kilometers an hour before it ever properly started.
Tikki settled into his usual racing posture, paws hooked over the shoulder, with his ears pinned flat, like a veteran carrying himself like he’d been born at speed.
And the whole ride south I held Barrier wide around both of us, except this time the holding it ran as a background job, working quietly behind the sweep, the route, the speed math, and the half-written apology I was drafting for Kara for being late, and for the first time since I’d unlocked the damn thing, nothing in my head felt crowded.
The city told me when the free ride was over, its noise floor climbing block by block until the avenues ahead started moving, and I rolled to a stop at an intersection with the southern half laid out in front of me, streets packed shoulder to shoulder, hundreds deep, all already moving towards me.
The Diavel went back into Inventory, while the grapple came up in the same motion.
[Alright... upstairs we go.]
-Thunk-!
The hook bit the top of a parking structure while TK wiped my weight down to nothing, and the line snatched us skyward in that stomach-dropping snap that used to take me a full breath of setup and now arrived the moment I asked for it.
I released at the top of the arc and shot out flat over the street, feathering the glide with touches so fine that I surprised even myself, my body held straight and steady through a crosswind that yesterday would have shoved me sideways.
"You know what this makes me, right?" I called into the wind between anchors. "I am vengeance! I am the night! I am-"
"Mea."
"...One day you’re gonna let me say it."
A construction crane took the next hook, then a rooftop water tank, then the bare steel bones of a half-built office block, and every anchor was simply correct on the first shot, no hunting and no adjusting, the timing solving itself whole blocks in advance while the route south kept assembling in my head three moves ahead of my hands.
And where the towers pinched together into a canyon, I quit protecting my altitude altogether and dove, trading four full floors of height for raw speed with the wind screaming off the helmet, then flared the glide flat at the very bottom of the drop and shot, moving fast enough that the snarling faces below never even managed to track us.
The old warning light, the dull ache that used to clock in around the five-kilometer mark, finally checked in somewhere past ten, and even then it idled so faint I had to go looking for it just to confirm it was there at all.
[Almost half the city on the meter and the needle’s barely off the peg... God, I could do this all day!]
The penthouse tower climbed out of the skyline ahead with Nora’s antenna glinting off its roof, and I put the last zip into the water tank of the 8-floor building across the road from it, before killing the leftover momentum on one feathered flare, and landed easy on the open eighth floor.
I straightened up, breathing hard and grinning, forty-some kilometers behind me and a faint hum sitting between my eyebrows where a migraine used to live.
And across the road, up on the penthouse balcony, Leo stood at the railing, already watching me.
Our eyes met for exactly as long as it took him to turn around, and then he walked inside, unhurried, without a nod or a wave or a single change in his face.
"Dude, what’re you... my wife?" And I couldn’t help but sigh, long and slow and white into the cold October air.