Mistrunner 4 - Chapter 29 - Over My Head (Patreon)

Mira almost never encounters something she can’t simply overpower, but when she does, it spurs her forward like nothing else can. She doesn’t like to lose, but I think it’s more than that. It’s about strength. And weakness. Her abject loathing of failure. That’s what makes her who she is, for better or worse.

Patrick Ward

I felt the foreign Mist writhing around me like living bands of iron that squeezed my chest until I couldn’t think, much less breathe. Somehow, I managed to flick my eyes in the direction of the voice I’d heard, and I saw the blurry outline of a person slowly come into focus.

She was a woman, but she was unlike anyone I’d ever seen before. Part of it was her physical appearance. In most ways, she looked human, and in fact, I expected that if she were to have presented herself in a different context, she could have passed for one. However, I didn’t have to flare Observation to recognize that everything about her was just a little off. Her shoulders were too narrow, her arms and legs too long. Her waist was too slim, and her lips too thick. From a stylistic perspective, her hair was the most normal part of her, but it stood out due to the sheer volume and blood-red color.

But even with all that, it was her eyes, which were like deep pools of milky white, that set her apart more than anything else. By comparison, her pink skin was practically commonplace.

She wore a thin, white dress that did little to hide her exaggerated curves – or anything else, come to that – and if I hadn’t been immobilized by her Mist, I would have blushed and looked away from some of her more obvious characteristics. On one hand, she wore a set of long and thin white-enameled claws. They rippled with Mist, and yet, I could tell they weren’t part of her.

“Do you like what you see, little pet?” the woman purred, circling around me. “I find your species disgustingly thick, but you aren’t so bad. Perhaps when I’m done studying you, we can have a little fun.”

Her aura flared, wild and roiling, yet perfectly controlled as well. It was a study in contrasts. Inside of her locus of authority, it moved unpredictably, but she refused to let it extend further than a few inches past her skin. It smacked of an expression of vanity, especially given that I had seen how tightly controlled Freddy’s aura was.

“I’ll have to politely decline. Thank you for the offer, though. It means the world to me,” I managed to grunt. “Now, if you’ll just let me go…”

She let out a chiming giggle before clapping her hands together. “Oh, how delightfully insolent!”

She stepped forward, then ran one of those white claws down the center of my chest and to my navel. And that was about all I intended to take of that. So, without further banter or discussion, I flexed Mist Authority to the fullest extent of my ability. And given just how much I’d been practicing, that was quite a bit.

For a moment, I thought I was going to escape. The bands of Mist wrapped around me cracked and shattered, and I started to slip away. The woman’s eyes widened, her lips parting into a perfect circle of surprise. It only lasted for a second before she reasserted her will. Instantly, the bands firmed, and whatever progress I’d managed to make in my escape attempt fell away like the useless trash it was.

Still, I fought against that grip, which further delighted the woman. She tightened her control, squeezing me to the point where I felt like my bones were on the verge of cracking. And yet, I did not yield. I refused to give in. And slowly, I started to see the cracks in the woman’s resolve. It showed in the gaps in her expression of Mist control, in the boiling sea of Mist that was her aura.

I couldn’t push any harder, but I could apply my effort more efficiently. With every passing instant, I threw the weight of Mist Authority against her grip, but with another strain of thought, I slipped my own aura into the cracks. And then, when I’d managed to fill every gap, I flexed.

Instantly, the bonds of Mist shattered, and I fell to the ground. The woman screamed, and I rocketed forward, yanking my Interdiction Blade from the sheathe on my back. I slashed downward, harnessing every bit of strength I possessed. But just before I made contact, she recovered. Without hesitation, she swept her claws out, knocking my blade aside. My hands stung from the sudden impact, and the sudden change in momentum sent me spinning. However, I was no novice to battle, and I used that to my advantage, aiming a round kick at the woman’s face.

And I connected.

It was like hitting a wall, I rebounded, feeling the bone in my heel crack as I landed ten feet away. And yet, despite her obvious endurance, the kick had sent her stumbling backward. I counted that as a win – right up until she lashed out with her claws. She was well out of range, but that didn’t seem to matter. Blades of Mist erupted from those claws, slicing through the air as they bore down on me. I was briefly surprised, but I kept my wits just enough to spring high into the air, avoiding the unorthodox attack.

But then she met me in the air, having jumped at the same time. Her foot connected with my jaw, shattering the bone and sending me tumbling backwards. I landed almost fifty feet away, rolling to a stop in the rubble of one of the village’s buildings.  It was far and away the hardest I’d ever been hit, and I didn’t even think she’d put everything she had into it. I pushed myself to my hands and knees, then spat blood and a couple of teeth. Then, I felt my jaw; it was broken. I knew that. But with every passing second, I could feel the nanites that comprised the Mist working to mend the cracks.

It would take some time to get back to normal, but my jaw would be functional in mere minutes.

In the distance, I saw the woman land lightly. Her aura had escaped her control, and she struggled to rein it in. As she did, I summoned my Stinger from my arsenal implant, used Explosive Shot, the opened fire. The first burst took her by surprise, knocking her backward in a spray of blood, but the next missed entirely when the Mist shimmered and she was suddenly a few feet to her left. I adjusted my aim and continued to fire.

It was useless.

Without the surprise of that initial burst, she was more than capable of dodging whatever shots I sent downrange. But that didn’t mean I was going to stop shooting.

I filled the air with a hail of gunfire as the clawed woman slowly advanced. My shots were perfect, but I didn’t land a single additional bullet. She didn’t even bother dodging. Instead, she repeated the first mystic’s tactic by extending her Mist aura to intercept any shots that would have hit her.

But even as I shot, one thread of thought searched for a solution, and by the time she came within fifteen feet, I only had one viable option. So, without ceasing fire with the Stinger, I summoned the ADS and fired.

The spray of norcite pellets slammed into her shield, same as all the rest. However, instead of being knocked aside, they bored their way through and tore into her exposed flesh. She screamed, but I fired again.

And again after that.

The woman staggered backward, but not from the force of the shot. Rather, her aura had gone completely out of control, fluctuating wildly as she clawed at her chest in an attempt to remove the pellets.

So, I fired again.

I kept going, filling her with hundreds of norcite pellets, until the ADS ran dry. At that point, I started commenced with Stinger fire. Only this time, I went fully automatic. The weapon wasn’t capable of the kind of fire rate associated with the HIRC or the Dragon, but its rate of fire was more than acceptable.

I tore her to pieces.

But to my horror, her flesh wriggled back together an instant after The Stinger’s rounds ripped her apart. It was a horrific and daunting sight, but I didn’t flinch. Nor did I blink. I knew there had to be some limit to her powers, and I was on a mission to find precisely where that lay.

With her control over Mist restricted by the norcite pellets, she was incapable of recovering completely, and I continued to pepper her with a hail of gunfire. At least until, at last, the spatial magazine ran dry. That left me with two options. I could either use Instant Reload, or I could change tactics altogether.

I chose the latter, and exchanged the Stringer for the HIRC. By my count, it still had close to half its store of available ammunition left, and I quickly engaged in a quest to put every single one of those rounds in the mystic’s chest. The world came alive with the roar of gunfire; it drowned out my screams of anger and frustration as well, but in the back of one part of my mind, I knew I was fighting a losing battle. If things kept going as they were, there was no way I could win.

My only hope was to exhaust her self-healing capabilities. And to do that, I had to keep up the pressure at a rate of a thousand rounds a minute.

But inevitably, the battle shifted, and not in my favor.

Because I hadn’t killed that first mystic. I’d hurt him, sure. And I’d knocked him clear across the island. But I hadn’t put him out of the fight. He made that abundantly clear when he came screaming back into the mostly destroyed village, his staff held high.

I began to shift my fire, hoping to ping back and forth between the, but then, something huge and metallic came barreling out of a side alley to collide with the staff-wielding mystic.

“Patrick!” I screamed, but he obviously couldn’t hear me. Not with the roar of the HIRC still heavy in the air. But even though I wanted nothing more than to help him, I couldn’t let the female mystic regenerate. So, I forced myself to focus on the only way we were going to live through the fight.

Meanwhile, Patrick rammed his retractable sword into the mystic with the force of his charge. At the same time, the Dragon added its own growl to the auditory mix as he aimed it at the still struggling female mystic. I hadn’t known he could split his focus like that, but I was more than a little grateful for it as he continued to stab the male mystic.

But it wasn’t enough.

That gray-skinned man had taken everything I’d thrown at him, and he’d come back for more. And regardless of how far Patrick had come, he couldn’t really compare to me. Not in combat. So, it was inevitable that the mystic would turn the tables.

And as it always did, the inevitable came to pass when he swept Patrick’s armored feet out from under him, then pummeled him with the tip of his staff. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see flares of Mist with every blow, but I had no idea if that was coming from Patrick or the mystic.

I was just about to sweep the HIRC in their direction when the weapon went dry.

“Goddammit!” I growled, yanking my pistol from his holster. I fired on the still prone female mystic, but I knew Ferdinand II just didn’t pack enough of a punch. No – I needed to get in closer. I started forward, still pulling the trigger as quickly as Ferdinand II’s rate of fire allowed. But then, someone grabbed my shoulder.

I wheeled around to see Freddy standing there. His white robes were ripped, and he was bleeding from a hundred different wounds. But he seemed healthy enough. “Where have you been?”

“There were others,” he said. “I’ll finish her off. Go save your friend.”

I didn’t ask any further questions, because I knew Patrick needed me. So, I raced in his direction, leaping over a pile of rubble before yanking the ADS from my arsenal implant. As I sprinted across what had become a battlefield, I reloaded the ADS, took aim, and fired. The norcite pellets hit the mystic in the shoulder, and before he could even think to recover, I shot him again. I emptied the entire drum of shells into him, and he stumbled away from the prone Patrick.

That’s when I fell on the alien with my Interdiction Blade.

I didn’t use any fancy techniques. Nor did I hold back. The invader was almost entirely incapacitated by the norcite rounds, and as such, he couldn’t even begin to defend himself. So, all I needed to do was hack him to pieces.

It was grisly work, and it took far longer than I would have expected. While the other mystic had possessed an incredible ability to regenerate from whatever damage I could dish out, the male’s gifts seemed more inclined to simple durability. As such, each hacking attack only shaved a bit of his body away.

But I was persistent. And the Interdiction Blade was capable of cutting him. So, it was only a matter of time before I put him down.

Even as I hacked away at the mystic, Freddy fell upon the female with his spear. By that point, she’d mostly recovered, and the fight that followed was brief but action-packed. Even with all my gifts – and I was one of, if not the most powerful person on the planet – I could scarcely follow their combat. They didn’t just move quickly. Their speed defied all logic and the laws of physics.

But even more disturbingly, the Mist danced around them like a well-orchestrated ballet.

I was in awe, and yet, I couldn’t spare more than one thread of thought to watch. Even that was enough to show me how little I knew about manipulating Mist. The fight between the two mystics barely resembled what I called fighting. They moved as if they already knew what was coming, and they effortlessly avoided attacks that should have killed them. And all the while, I hacked away like a gruesome lumberjack.

My way was effective. I could acknowledge that. But it certainly wasn’t nearly as elegant as the battle between the two mystics. That was fine, though. I wasn’t one of them. Sure, I would learn. I would try to take what I could from Freddy. However, at the end of the day, I had my own style. I had my own advantages. And I intended to use those to match whatever those two could do.

Eventually, Patrick managed to recover, and he lent his own efforts to the endeavor, and after a few minutes of that, we finally slew the male mystic. He died with a gurgle, and a surge of Mist told me that he was, at last, gone. I sighed in relief, but I knew I wasn’t finished. So, I turned my full attention to the other fight.

And now that I had a few moments to concentrate, I wanted to try something I was almost certain wouldn’t work. However, there was a chance that it would, and I was willing to give it a shot. So, without further ado, I reached out with my {Mist Warden} senses and initiated an infiltration. I didn’t have Misthack anymore, but that ability was included in Mist Authority. So, if she had a system, I intended to infiltrate it.

At first, it looked like she didn’t, and I was on the verge of giving up when I saw a dense cluster of Mist in her stomach, just behind where her navel would be. That was new, so I dove into it, and to my surprise, I found that it resembled a Nexus Implant’s system. It wasn’t a one-to-one comparison, but with Universal Language and my vast experience interpreting the building blocks of the system itself, I was more than capable of interpreting it.

But the equivalent of a Mistwall that surrounded it was absolutely daunting and virtually impenetrable. Virtually, though, was not completely, and I began my campaign to rip through her innate defenses. One after another, the nodes that held it all together fell. I hadn’t been idle during the past few months, and I’d spent more than a little time conquering every level of my Mistrunner training program I could.

The were stubborn, but in the end, they were overcome, and just like that, her system was laid bare. So, without further ado, I used Assassinate.

Immediately, she went rigid, almost as if she was fighting the inevitable effects of my ability. She had no way of knowing that it was pointless. Once I used Assassinate, there was nothing in the world that could prevent her death. That was the whole point. The only limiter I’d ever found was that I had to be able to infiltrate someone’s system before I could use the powerful ability. So long as I satisfied that requirement, I could kill anyone.

Once every few weeks, at least.

But there were so few occasions where I couldn’t solve my problems via my other methods that the ability was often overlooked. Not so this time.

A moment after her body locked up, Freddy pierced her through with his spear. But I knew from experience that that was incapable of killing such a monster. And yet, only a few seconds later, a rush of Mist crashed into me before she fell, dead before she ever hit the ground.

Freddy turned to look at me, and for a second, he seemed as if he wanted to ask a question. However, he quickly thought better of it, and instead, said, “Come. We must prepare for the second wave.”