Chapter 28 - 27 — Back Where We Started I
**POV: Jace**
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Output: Combat.]**
>
> **[Mana: 210/210 → 208/210.]**
I kept it at the lowest sustain that would still let me burst, because two a second adds up fast and I did not know how long this was going to take.
"That’s Nolan."
"The SSS kid?"
"Kid’s the important word."
I did not answer them.
I was not standing there to arrest four Players. I could not have done it, and pretending otherwise in the middle of a street was the kind of thinking that gets civilians killed.
What I needed was for these four to stop being able to reach the barricade, and for the police to get a firing line that did not have me or four hundred people in it.
I looked back once.
There was nowhere for the crowd to go. The front rows were pressed flat against the rails with the whole weight of the plaza behind them, and the woman who had gone down was still on the ground with somebody crouched over her.
Behind me and to the left, three police rifles were tracking across, following me rather than the robbers, because I had just walked into the middle of their shot.
The vibration user moved first.
His hand went down toward the broken road, and I already knew what that did, because I had watched it turn a police vehicle onto its side.
I did not try to stand in it.
Aten went through both legs and I was moving before his palm landed, and instead of aiming anything at him I put a compressed burst into the asphalt six metres ahead of the wave.
The road opened.
The pulse ran into the trench I had just made, lost its line, and came apart into the broken edges instead of carrying on into the barricade.
> **[Additional Mana consumed: 18.]**
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> **[Mana: 208/210 → 190/210.]**
The street still jumped. People screamed and went down behind the rails, and chunks of asphalt sprayed against the metal and rattled off it.
But the wave itself stopped in the trench.
That was the whole shape of this fight, and I understood it in that first exchange.
Everything I threw had four hundred people behind it, so I could not miss, I could not throw wide, and I could not use the one thing Aten is actually good at.
The four of them stopped talking about me and started working.
---
The telekinetic did not waste a second on his own attack.
He took what the vibration user had already made, caught six or seven pieces of broken road out of the air before they landed, and threw all of them at me from different angles at once.
I burned the first one apart in front of my face.
I ducked the second.
The third came in low and made me step, and the step went sideways, and that was where they wanted me.
The barrier came across the street.
That pale curved wall had been between them and the police since the doors came down, and now it swung around and put itself behind me.
The officers had four robbers and one Nolan on the wrong side of it and no way to fire through.
Then the man with the bags dropped them.
Both reserve bags hit the road, and I finally understood why he had been the one running toward a crowd instead of away from one.
Mana came up through his arms and across his shoulders in a hard visible line, tightening the fabric of his jacket, thickening him through the forearms.
He was not the money. He was the fist.
He came at me with a plain straight punch. No Ability behind it, nothing showy, just a man closing distance and throwing his hand at my head.
I parried it on the gauntlet and put a short solar punch into his ribs.
His jacket went black where I touched him and he grunted.
Then he hooked me across the side hard enough to take my feet off the road.
> **[Health: 320/320 → 279/320.]**
I skidded four metres on my shoulder and came up on one knee, and while I was getting there I worked out what he had just done to me.
He had eaten that body shot on purpose.
He had taken a burn to find out how far my arm reached and how fast the fire came, and then he had waited for the exact half second where I was pleased about landing it, and he had hit me in that.
He did not have anything close to Aten. He probably was not above C rank.
He had also been fighting people for years, and I had been fighting monsters for three weeks.
That is the part nobody says out loud when they read a licence. SSS is the grade of the thing that woke up inside me. It is not a statement about whether I know what I am doing.
He came again before I had my feet properly under me.
I let him get inside six metres.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
Nothing changed to look at.
What changed was that the living bodies near me stopped being guesswork.
Him. The vibration user drifting around to my flank. Two officers repositioning behind the barrier. All of them arriving as position and motion, and none of them able to move without me knowing.
He feinted high and drove his knee up at my middle.
I felt the weight go through his hips before the knee started, turned my hip off the line, and jammed it on my forearm.
Behind me, the vibration user shifted three steps left to put himself over a solid stretch of road.
I moved before he set his feet.
For about fifteen seconds it was better than even.
I stopped missing by metres and started missing by centimetres, using little heel bursts to be somewhere else after he had already committed his shoulder, which is the thing my father had made look easy while standing still.
Then something took me across the shoulder from outside the field.
> **[Health: 279/320 → 244/320.]**
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> **[Androphagos Duration: 00:43.]**
A parking bollard. Ripped out of the pavement, dragged through the air, and put into me at head height by a man standing eleven metres away.
Androphagos never said a word about it, and it never will.
The moment that bollard left his control it stopped being a living thing moving, and it became an object in flight, and objects in flight are somebody else’s problem.
I rolled with it instead of standing there being confused about why my Ability had not helped.
And on the way up I finally saw the actual machine they were running.
The bruiser occupies me so I cannot leave.
The vibration user punishes the ground so I cannot stand still.
The telekinetic hits whichever direction I escape toward.
And none of that works for ten seconds without the fourth man, because the moment that barrier drops, all three of them are standing in an open street in front of police rifles loaded with rounds specifically designed to take Abilities apart.
The barrier was not their defence. It was the formation.
So I stopped trying to win the fight in front of me.
---
I gave the bruiser my left side.
Not subtly. I let the shoulder drop and the ribs open, and I let him see it, because a man who has been punching people for a living does not think twice about an opening that obvious.
He committed to the hook.
Androphagos told me the exact moment his shoulder finished turning, which is the moment a punch stops being cancellable, and I put a burst through my heel and went inside instead of back.
His fist went past my ear.
I did not counter him.
I ran past him.
The barrier user saw me coming and swung his construct around to meet me, which is what I wanted, because he had been holding that wall up against disruption fire for three minutes and I had been watching where the rounds were landing.
There was a section low on the left where the white fractures had stopped fading between hits. The same patch, over and over, never getting the chance to close.
I did not try to break the wall.
I compressed everything I had into the right gauntlet and put it into that one patch.
> **[Additional Mana consumed: 24.]**
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> **[Mana: 190/210 → 166/210.]**
The barrier caved inward around my fist like a sheet of ice with a stone on it, and held.
Then the police worked out what I had handed them.
Somebody with rank shouted a firing order I did not catch, and eight or nine rounds went into the same square metre inside a second and a half.
The construct came apart.
Not dramatically. It simply stopped existing, and the pale light went out of the air, and the barrier user staggered like a man who had been leaning on a door that opened.
The street belonged to the police again.
They spread their fire immediately, and every time he tried to gather light around his hands another round arrived and broke it before it could set.
The telekinetic saw all of that happen and dropped the four bags he had been carrying in the air.
They hit the road flat, six of them across the asphalt now, and he grabbed the nearest thing that would buy him seconds.
Ten metres of police barricade came up off the ground at once.
People who had been leaning on those rails fell forward into the space where the barrier had been, and the front of the crowd surged and stumbled.
Then he whipped a whole section of it across the street at them.
Not because he wanted to kill four hundred people. Because he knew I would have to choose, and while I was choosing, he would be at the car.
I had him. He was standing in the open with nothing in front of him.
I turned around.
The section came in spinning and I caught it on both gauntlets, and it drove my boots backward across the asphalt with a noise like a train coming apart.
I burned through one of the joints, and the far half came away and went down onto the road instead of into the barricade line.
> **[Additional Mana consumed: 12.]**
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> **[Mana: 166/210 → 154/210.]**
The bruiser hit me in the back while my arms were still full of it.
> **[Health: 244/320 → 191/320.]**
I went into the side of the overturned police vehicle and down onto the road, and my ears rang, and for a second I could not work out which way was up.
The nearest protesters saw all of it.
They saw me turn my back on an escaping robber to catch their own barricade, and they saw what it cost, and they were close enough to hear me hit the vehicle.
Nobody cheered.
A man who had been shouting at Players outside the doors an hour earlier stood with his mouth half open and nothing coming out of it.
A woman pulled a child in against her hip and stepped further back, away from me, while I was the only thing between them and four masked Players.
One of the signs had come down in the crush and was lying bent against the kerb about a metre from my head.
**NO POWERS ON HUMAN STREETS.**
I got up.
> **[Androphagos Duration: 00:24.]**