May 8th​

“This is stupid. You even said yourself that they’re terrorists. Which is why we’re here,” the officer in the black uniform argued. “Now you want to talk to him? I’m perfectly happy to let you do that after their group is no longer a threat.”

I stood up with a sigh, wandering towards the conference room entrance and looked out over the interior of the building.

I hadn’t realized how many people now worked for or with the Dantian Seekers, until the old Menard’s building was nearly empty again and near silence rang throughout. The separation between sections meant I didn’t see everyone all at once; only the people in the gym if I was working out or when I noted a good portion of the breakthrough rooms were in use when I went through there.

Now, only a handful of people were in the building today and all of those were either sitting in the conference room except for the six SWAT guys on the roof keeping watch.

I turned back. “He wants me to stop working on this. Obviously I’m not going to, but if they have a different method that helps people drawing power externally do so faster or better? It’s something everyone needs to know.”

“Miss Firen, you’re asking to negotiate with someone claiming to be a terrorist. Very little is going to stop them from lying to you because you’re putting them in a position of power,” the officer answered back.

“And you guys aren’t the answer to that?” I asked. “I saw one of the guns your guys took up the ladder. I’m fairly certain that makes our side equal.”

“You’re still putting yourself basically within arm’s reach of them, Nicole,” Brent responded. “And you’re not trained to deal with hostage situations or anything similar. Especially if you become the hostage.”

“You guys aren’t above the Earth’s level, right?” I changed tack. “Karen and Ash are. Trying to get another breakthrough above the Earth is stupid hard for external energy according to them. And the fourth one is even harder from what I could tell when I did mine. If they’ve got a better way to do it, wouldn’t it be better for us to know it as well?”

“You’re insane.” The officer rubbed his face. “Fine, but we’re not letting them into the building. You get to have your conversation outside where my men have plenty of range.”

“Thank you.”

~~~

The compromise had me sitting on a desk we’d pulled outside into the parking lot and a few chairs a good eight feet away. Enough space that the SWAT team on the roof had the ability to aim beyond me. I’d still been asked to not make any sudden moves though.

It was almost two hours of sitting out there playing on my tablet before an older model electric car quietly pulled into the parking lot. By the time I’d set the tablet aside and stood, the same two men had gotten out of the car and from across the parking lot I could just about make out their confused looks. I didn’t say anything, just stood up behind the desk and waved them forward.

Once they were close enough, I gave them a half-smile. “Looks like I win the bet. Everyone else assumed you guys would come skulking in from the woods to the north. I bet you’d just show up without a care.”

“You did not renounce yourself and your alien’s methods. Do you intend to instead defend them here and now?” Barry asked as I could feel his energy start cycling faster.

I took a deep breath, cycling my own power. “No, I expect you both to sit down and talk. Because we’re all adults. And you’re not bulletproof.”

“Wha—” Barry started.

I didn’t let him answer, but instead continued talking to try to keep him off balance like Brent had suggested. “You claimed to be part of a terrorist group, caused damage, and left after giving us a day you’d be back. Did you think the cops wouldn’t believe us?” I paused, looking at the two. “You seriously didn’t expect a SWAT team?”

“So, you’ve duped the police into doing the alien’s bidding as well then.” Barry scowled, not sitting but also no longer approaching. “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Jesus, you’re the one claiming to be a terrorist. You know what they wanted to do? Shoot you and be done with it. I ended up in a forty-five minute argument just to get a chance to talk this shit out.” I threw my hands up in frustration for a moment, before taking another breath to calm down again. “Shouldn’t I be the young, stupid, impulsive one?”

“Believing alien is stupid. Heh. So yes you are.” Joe grinned at me. “Give up alien ways? No longer stupid, impulsive.”

I leveled a glare at him. “I had zero assistance from the alien. Anything I learned, I learned the hard way.” I then looked at Barry again. “If you have a better way, don’t just tell me to quit what I’m doing. Prove yours is better, because I’m not forcing anyone to use my method.”

“Joe. Call on the land.” Barry looked over at the crazy one. Joe’s energy immediately started rising as he cycled, and now it fully felt like wood energy whereas two days ago it had been neutral. It quickly crested to at least a third breakthrough too. “Joe integrated the pieces of the land you had stolen. Not as powerful as the earth itself, but what grows on the earth is strong as well.”

“You ate the bush and berries,” I deadpanned, still watching Joe’s energy play. “We had someone eat one of the berries with energy already and it gave them a temporary bit of wood energy. You figured out how to make it part of your own power then?”

“It is not our power! It is the power of the Earth, escaping the grasp of the alien. We are harvesting it to fight the alien and his minions such as yourself!” Barry spat at me.

I sat back on the desk, looking the two of them over. “Did you at least leave the main blackberry bush still with energy? If you ate it all, you don’t have anything to prove your method is repeatable and works better than mine. And we’re out our entire project growing those things and trying to make them stronger.”

“Berries were soul fragment. Need more than that. Heh. Or broken souls. Beat you to prove Earth right. Alien wrong,” Joe chittered, eyes cutting over to Barry.

“So you did eat the entire thing.” I sighed.

“No, he took the soul of the plant into himself,” Barry disagreed, shaking his head at Joe. “It’s unfortunate it didn’t give him the same strength I gained from drawing a fragment of the Earth into myself.” Barry looked past me at the building. “That building represents everything you do on the alien’s behalf. Which is why we wished to tear it down and have you renounce the alien.”

He made a fist, looking down at it. “But even if we destroy it now, it won’t stop you. You’ll continue to do the alien’s work, turning the Earth over to the alien.” He looked over to Joe, tossing him a set of keys. “Go to the car and leave. If there’s one point she made, it’s that we’re going to need to grow the souls of the Earth, not just take them. And,” Barry looked at me watching warily, “you’re not stronger than her yet.”

“Barry? Barry?” Joe looked between the two of us. “Fuck.” He turned and ran.

I half expected the guys on the roof to shoot him, but they didn’t. Guess they weren’t going to shoot someone running away when they hadn’t actually done anything yet.

I was glad. I didn’t want to see anyone shot. “So what, then? You prove you’re stronger than me? Beat me up? What does that really do?”

“It proves the power we can gain directly from the Earth supersedes the power the alien showed you how to get. It proves he isn’t all powerful and we can beat him, because he needs to subvert people to do his work for him.”

Barry brought his fist up and looked at me. “When the lava came up in California, I was on one of the fault lines. I glimpsed something there, the soul of the Earth. And an alien energy choking it. The Earth was fighting back against him. And an infinitely small piece entered me, tearing through me.”

He pulled the neck of his shirt down, showing the scars that ran further down his body. “These scars are from the heat of the battle I watched. I bear these scars on behalf of the planet.”

I felt his energy cycling up in his entire body, unlike last time when it only cycled into his arm. The scars went from white to earthy brown, before the color began to bleed into his skin. Behind him, the little car was peeling out of the parking lot.

“The Earth answers me in my moment of need. I cannot kill this snake by crushing its head, but you are the alien’s strongest link to taking our world. I can remove you!”

Barry started to charge me, fist raised high. I started to stand back up from leaning against the desk, not sure what I was going to do other than defend myself when Barry was suddenly thrown back forty feet, landing on his back and not moving.

I screamed in surprise, looking at the flung body then back to the building, where I could now see someone with a rifle of some kind. I blinked at them.

“Hah. Haha. Hahahaha,” Barry’s voice laughed behind me, straining and pained. I turned, expecting to see blood pooling around his body as he lay there, only to see him slowly rolling to his side and getting up to his knees. “I told you. The Earth answers me in my moment of need. A single bullet fired into the Earth isn’t even noticeable.”

His hands gripped into the concrete as more bullets fired at him and I could feel the depths of the energy he was pushing out. Was it as much as my own? More? Less?

The hail of bullets stopped after a moment. “You asked if I was bulletproof. With the Earth’s help it appears I am, though Joe couldn’t have asked the Earth for its defense.” Barry finished climbing to his feet, the ground around him shattered from his grip and the pressure of holding against the bullets. His shirt tattered and torn. “Now, where was I?”

I flung Tasha’s desk at him. If bullets could throw him back, he could still be affected by the weight of things. Too bad I didn’t have a barbell this time.

The desk hit, but stopped as Barry caught it and threw it aside. And then almost faster than I was expecting, Barry was in front of me swinging a haymaker. My smaller stature worked in my favor as I tumbled backwards, coming up onto my feet several paces away as Barry didn’t quite catch his own balance from the run and then not connecting.

I took up the basic karate stance Danny had shown me, fists up and ready. Jab, punch, and try not to get hit.

“I’ve got probably half a foot of reach on you, girlie. Don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be.” Right fist cocked back, he ran at me again swinging.

It was my sense of spatial awareness that helped, moving to the side as his fist whistled by. I didn’t know how to move in the karate stance though, so I had to abandon it as I ducked under his arm, trying to punch out with my own fist as I cycled and pushed my own energy out.

My lack of reach was apparent too, as my fist barely hit against his right side before I was fully extended. I could feel the energy in his skin resist my own, repulsing me. He did grunt from the impact though.

Barry’s elbow then crashed down against the side of my head and I crumpled backwards from the blow’s force, though it didn’t truly hurt.

“You’re weak, girl. The Earth provides more than your alien master does.” Barry looked down on me, before we both heard the retort of the rifle again and Barry was sent flying off to one side again.

I jumped up to my own feet as Barry got up, staggering, holding up his hand in case he was shot again. “They will run out of bullets eventually.” Whatever he’d been shot with this time at least left a huge mark across his chest, visible even through the scar discoloration.

“The alien gives me nothing. I don’t work for him, I’m not a pawn of his, I’m not a dupe of his. Jesus Christ, why can’t you get that through your head?” My cycling of energy was too generalized to easily get through whatever he was doing to his skin. But it wasn’t making him any stronger, just tougher.

Barry charged me again and no bullets fired, so I ducked and dodged. I threw punches when I could, barely tapping against him as I tried to figure anything out about his power or my own. “Float like a butterfly, but damn I can’t even sting like a bee,” I breathed to myself. Each punch though, the power cycling through me seemed to surge outwards at my own efforts. Maybe I could commit and throw the hardest punch I could. Could I force the flow?

I took another hit to get around Barry and swung at him from behind, coming with a back fist of my own, twisting at the hips to add as much power and swing as possible.

That punch connected against his back as I cycled, trying to push the flow through my arm instead of just in general into my body. I felt the resistance again, but it didn’t completely negate me this time.

Barry stumbled forward a few steps. “Fuck, what the hell?” His hand went to his back, holding it.

I noticed my knuckles had left a pretty deep impression in his back, actually. He turned towards me once more.

However, I took a few steps back myself. “You don’t have as many breakthroughs, do you? Heart, chest, neck. One or both shoulders?”

“How many places I’ve been connected to the Earth is no concern to you.” Barry rolled his shoulders, eliciting cracks I could hear. “One good hit isn’t going to save you.”

I shook my head. “You’ve only ever hit me with your right arm. So I’m going to guess just that shoulder. It’s stronger, isn’t it?” Barry didn’t answer. “This is going to come down to attrition. I’ve made it public I have five breakthroughs. The moment you don’t have enough energy to support whatever you’re doing to your skin, it’s over.”

Barry moved to keep me between himself and the building. “And then what? You kill me? Or your little minions up there going to shove a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger, see if I’m weaker going directly to the brain?”

My stomach roiled a bit at that thought. “I’d rather not. What can I tell you to make you believe I’m not part of a conspiracy with the alien?”

“Nothing short of killing the alien,” Barry spat. He looked up at the building, then back to me. “But you are right about one thing. I’m doing the Earth no good here.”

He turned and ran, and with more distance between us the SWAT team on the roof took a few more shots but he was running erratically and fast enough they didn’t hit him.

He was out of the parking lot and almost out of sight in under a minute. I dropped to the ground myself.

“Damn it.”

After a minute, Danny and Brent came out of the building as one of the guys on the roof came down carrying a medical kit. “You OK?” Danny asked, even as the SWAT guy started looking me over.

“A little sore,” I replied. “What are we going to do?”

“There are several men following the car, so we’ll know where Joe goes,” Brent answered. “I assume Barry is going to meet up with him, then either Rolla’s SWAT team will go in after them if I can’t get an anti-terrorist team pulled here fast enough.”

“We’re going to lose information though. He had something like my Art, but for his body. It’s what made him more bulletproof. And Joe managed to fully convert his energy to wood in two days, along with what was probably another breakthrough.”

“With all due respect ma’am, your actual fight was maybe a minute long with what I assume was a few dozen punches. The reason we couldn’t give better cover fire is you were both moving fast enough we couldn’t pull a good shot on him except when you were majorly spread apart or had paused to talk,” the SWAT medic said. “That’s not the sort of thing we’re going to go against with anything less than everything we have too.”

I stood up, looking to where I’d last seen Barry. “Stubborn asshole.” My hands shook a little. But he’d been trying to kill me. And I wasn’t trying to kill him.