Parkarka materialized a shield of physical light around her arm once she tumbled below the treeline.

Jana shot into the foggy forest, and as she did, smaller crystals of ice, shaped like bullets, began to form, hovering around the ground. As she nearly impacted it, she swerved to fly right along the ground, then commanded the rapidly forming crystals to pelt Parkarka from a distance.

The older woman grunted as the attacks colided with her barrier, but pursued and outsped Jana, overtaking her and thrusting down with her shield of light.

It impacted. Or so she thought, because instead, she saw the shield be pierced by a supersonic lance, which collided with her barrier. The attack’s sheer power was far greater than she anticipated, hitting her hard enough to cause the super-condensed ice’s tip to crack, and converting all its inertia into her mental distress. Jana, now clearly visible, reeled the lance back in her hands while Parkarka was tumbling away with her in pain, then overrun her to smack the other psychic toward the mountainside, using the lance like a bat, sending her tumbling on rock and dirt before stopping in the crater of a tree.

“Jana…” she said, “We don’t need to-”

Jana had pursued her, and clearly didn’t care to listen, because the lance was floating at her back, while a sharpened knife of ice thirty meters long appeared before her, aimed to telekinetically slice where Parkarka laid.

She easily flew upward, out of the way, and the knife sliced through where she had been, a groan of compressed air accompanying it. As Parkarka gripped on to several rocks around the mountain, she formed a sword out of her shield, finding the reforming shield to have been pointless. Light wasn’t suited for durability.

Jana’s knife had never been aimed toward her, though, and once she’d let go of it, the trees it had cut suddenly began flying toward Parkarka faster than she could render defenses, forcing the psychic to dash away, up and out of the treeline. Jana followed, creating more ammunition and flinging the trees back at her as she flew away.

Parkarka slashed at the trees as they approached, cutting then into seared halves one by one, but she was overtaken by them, not cutting quick enough to defend. Just then, her rocks caught up and crashed into the trees, sending the debris scattering violently. More ice followed, which she cut and defended, her rocks overpowering the relatively fragile crystals.

Yet the barrage never ended, the superior power of elemental kinesis evident in its sustainability.

“Jana, Please!” she said, amplifying her voice to be heard over the clashing.

“THE LAST TWO YEARS…” Jana yelled, before pausing to collapse a sizable barrage of ice and trees at Parkarka. She cut and defended herself, but one crystal surprised her, crashing into her her blind spot, sending her flying forward, toward Jana, who bared her lance, and thrust it toward her foe. “…my life has been built upon a lie.”

It contacted, sending Parkarka flying into the forest, collapsing numerous trees as she did.

Yet Jana flinched in pain as Parkarka’s counterattacking rock slammed into her barrier, sending her ragdolling through the air, and falling to the ground. They both looked back up at the same time.

“I’m sorry, Jana. I-” Parkarka pleaded.

Jana scowled, placing a hand on her heart as projectiles formed around Parkarka. “No, if you were sorry, you wouldn’t have made me base my ideals off your fucking dirty word. If you were sorry, you would have noticed how much we trusted that word of yours after everything. Instead, everyone who died to kill that boy…you’ve disrespected every last one of them, spitting on what we all fought for with a lie. What the fuck was all my training, all my sacrifices for if we had already won!?”

The ice converged on her from all sides, and Parkarka quickly ducked beneath the lowest-hanging one, tunneling through the shallow dirt, and flung toward Jana with her sword of light bared.

Jana held out her lance, ready to defend, however, their weapons didn’t contact. Instead, Parkarka’s sword sliced straight through it as though it were nothing, before striking her barrier. Jana stood her ground, taking the kinetic force head-on despite being surprised, and struck at the other psychic with the swift uppercut of an instantly forming gauntlet. Their weapons reverberated against their barriers in an unnaturally gonglike sound, which overwrote the enormous explosion of dirt caused by Jana’s convergence of ice, which had wrecked a dozen trees and injured others.

Parkarka gripped her head as she tumbled onto her feet a half-dozen meters away.

“I’m sure you’ve noticed,” Jana said with an almost growling undertone as she bared the gauntlet in front of herself. “But I haven’t been training my muscles without a reason. You didn’t want to train with me back then, and because of that, you haven’t become stronger at all. You barely even know how melee attacks work.” She reeled back her lance, then lunged and chucked it toward Parkarka.

“No, I just don’t want to-” Parkraka interrupted herself to sidestep the attack, only for Jana to follow up with a gauntleted left hook. The other woman crashed into the top half of a tree in her escape, sending it falling atop Jana, who froze it solid in an instant before recalling her lance and bashing the brittle wood into pieces.

“If you don’t train your muscles for it, they’ll rip,” Jana said as it fell back, revealing that the older woman had prepared a wall of rocks while the tree had obscured her. “They’ll tear,” she continued as they flung toward her, and Jana defended against the incredibly fast attacks with rapid, frantic punches and stabs, her power splintering the rocks, and the splinters clacking hurtfully against her barrier. “And they’ll hurt. Because we weren’t meant to have this power.”

Jana shot after Parkarka, into the air, and ripped trees off their trunks, hurling them at the other girl as more hypercondensed ice formed in the air around herself. As she flew closer to Parkarka, the other girl ran, picking her own assorted projectiles as she flew backward, cutting at anything that got near her with her sword. She was faster than Jana, but was overwhelmed by her attacks, enough for her to close the gap and strike with her lance.

Parkarka tried to block her with a large boulder, but the lance easily broke through, shattering it and piercing toward Parkarka’s barrier quickly. She retaliated with her own sword as it happened, but she pulled her arm too hard with her telekinesis, causing it to flare in pain, her strange sword instead flinging at Jana, colliding with her barrier at a slow speed, slightly annoying her as her lance send Parkarka tumbling into one of her own boulders.

Jana laughed, a half-to-snapping tension in her voice as she talked down to her peer. “HA! But I guess that makes sense now! You knew all along that he was dead, so it didn’t matter if you were strong enough.”

“Exactly…” Parkarka slowly said, rubbling her arm. “I couldn’t take him seriously enough when I didn’t even know if he could come back.”

Jana spat to the side. “Huh, wow, I guess you’re right. Now, we’ve all been preparing to fight someone in our world, when in reality, some random-ass civilization or whatever in another universe needs to handle that monster alone.”

“What are you talking about!?”

“Psychi’s trapped in another world with that fucker, and because you couldn’t warn anyone, he’s probably still alive and kicking, doing whatever the fuck he wants somewhere else while we desperately try to pick up our trash. Did you even think about what that green light was? Did you maybe wonder if the human collective could figure it out?”

“I already told you why I did it, Jana…” Parkarka said, her voice hoarse and dangerously low as she looked at the dirt below. “Nothing can change my decision, now.”

“I don’t even give a shit about my fucking promise at this point. The world needs to know what happened to him.”

“You wouldn’t…” she said, fury rising in the calmer woman. “You promised.”

Jana chuckled. “Promised? Where’s the legal statement? Who is going to blame me for telling the fucking truth? The other people you told this to? Oh, wait, they don’t exist. Everyone will be against you, Parkarka.”

“And you called me a bitch.” Parkarka let out a furious yell as she raised her head, then scowled as she said, “Fine, be that way. But I’ll teach you a bloody lesson and send you to the hospital before you get the chance.”

Jana mimicked her greatest enemy, outstretching her arms with a bold smile. “Then come at me, bitch! Let’s see if you even stand a chance.”

“I haven’t even tried until now,” Parkarka said coolly, before holding out a hand. In it, a weapon made of light began to form. The light, making an instrument thinner than paper, and only as wide as a few centimeters, trailed downward, affected by gravity, and continued to fall. An enormous, luminous whip appeared in Parkarka’s hand, which she cracked angrily. “Let’s rumble.”

Jeremy watched from the sidewalk as what had been a relatively self-contained battle turned into an all-out fight, the two combatant’s speeds vastly increasing. Whips of pure light lashed at Jana, who clashed against Parkarka as countless trees and rocks flew and scattered about the forest, flying about and causing incredible collateral damage. The town watched in awe and fear in the streets as the two’s petty, catastrophic battle sent debris faster than sound destroying the natural terrain as though the forest were a sandbox.

A battle between super psychics may have felt more methodical to the fighters, but as a non-combatant, it was threateningly fast. Jana and Parkarka could fly at double the speed of a bullet, and did. Their battle was sometimes too fast to see, their battles so far-reaching and mobile that it was easy to lose track of its center. Soon, they would turn the entire mountainside into a waste of ice and char.

At least they remained around that place.

“Such ferocity,” Blue said analytically. “Yet it’s clear who will win.”

“Don’t spoil it for me,” Jeremy said through the tension. “It’s just getting good.”

Yellow glanced at him from beside Blue, noticing how obviously false his bravado was.

A limo slowly rolled down the street, and the building crowd parted for it. Eventually, it made it to Jeremy’s side, and the window rolled down. “I’d say ‘like my car?’, but…” the person inside said. “This is no joke.”

Jeremy turned to the person inside, Madam Illuma. “Thanks, Macy,” he said.

“Not a problem. I had not anticipated this event…” she glanced at the battle. “It’s my fault, I contacted Parkarka…and yet…” she stared at Jeremy with a disbelieving expression. “Your psychic powers overwrote mine.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, walking to get into the passenger seat beside her.

As he got in, she explained, “Psychics’ precognition have…’priorities’. I can see the future of all those whose precognition lesser than mine, and similarly, your sister may be capable of seeing what my visions led to,” she explained, before driving off, wasting no time. “Yet you were capable of that same thing, as a budding psychic with no expirence.”

“So…I’m a better psychic than a Psychic Master?”

“Perhaps…” she muttered. “But we can discuss this later. Lead me to where we must be.”

Jana was immediately put on the defensive. Parkarka, whose attacks had appeared slow at first, became a maelstrom of strikes. Boulders flung at her faster than her hypercondensed ice could even begin to block, and even when she got a hang of Parkarka’s attack pattern, her whip lashed at Jana, somehow phasing through her barrier and searing her skin.

Had she been in a battle against Azad, she would already be dead many times over.

How pathetic.

Jana cried and sobbed through her yells of anger as she tried to launch a counterattack through the storm, only to be slapped across the face with blinding light, then thrown asunder by a rock.

Why…why am I so weak?

She smashed the rock into two with her fist, then commanded its parts to fling toward Parkarka, who easily evaded then lashed with her whip. Jana didn’t bother dodging the painful whip, thrusting her gauntlet forward and slamming it into Parkarka. She withstood the attack’s kinetic energy, and prepared another assault of boulders and trees.

I’ve done all I can to be the best I can be, but…again, my life’s crumbled.

Jana’s ice shielded her from the attacks as best they could while she attacked Parkarka with ice, but the other psychic evaded it again, then threw Jana’s own ice at her, finally overloading her barrier, and sending the weaker fighter careening away. Jana flew with the current, away from Parkarka as she prepared a new attack.

Everything I stand for…it was built on the premise that I needed to stop Azad. But he wasn’t ever there. Everything I’ve done the last two years…it means nothing anymore.

Glittering crystals of ice lined the air around her as Parkarka charged and lashed her whip. Yet, as it flicked through the countless, perfect prisms, it refracted. The light swerved through the air in a seemingly impossible curve, bending through the crystals into a rainbow of brilliant colors, which scattered across the forest, setting trees alight. Jana, in her anger, called upon all her strength, no longer holding back any of her psyche’s latent potential, which hid behind her reason.

In a burst of cryokinesis, a kilometer of the forest was frosted over, while countless human-sized, perfectly transparent crystals appeared midair, then flung toward Parkarka, too invisible for her to notice before they slammed into her, halting her pursuit toward Jana. While the crystals distracted her foe, Jana flew past her offensive wall, then began her own assault against the clearly stronger psychic.

Parkarka was left in a daze of surprise at Jana’s relentless ferocity, the two years of stress built within the walls of her heart which unleashed itself as psychic attacks.

Even as she began to evade the continued pelting of the nearly invisible ice, more and more built up, and Jana let go of her spear once she got in melee range, forming another gauntlet in her other arm before launching a combo of punches at her. First, a left jab with her right, which Parkarka dodged, into a surprising rock shooting up from below, hurting and disorienting her, then, Jana pulled the arm back with a rotation, using that rotation to give her other arm more momentum, crashing it into Parkarka, who tried to ragdoll to decrease the impact, but only got sent into ice that formed behind her, crashing into them.

As Jana approached, though, Parkarka stepped up. She lashed at the younger girl with her whip, searing her closing eyelids, then evaded and attacked as Jana was blinded. Jana tried to follow with her Recognition, but a rock to Jana’s back flung her forward, into the ground.

Parkarka let Jana stand, the psychic battered and barely able to do so after fighting for so long.

“You were never going to beat me, Jana!” she yelled, preparing an array of bolts made of light, like Jana had done with her ice. “I’m stronger than you.”

Jana said nothing as she stood, then did nothing.

In a sudden burst of energy, spikes of ice suddenly yet pointlessly jutted from the ground, the nearby trees being completely encased in ice as her psychic powers went wild.

“I…” Jana said, slowly, seemingly calmly, “I wanted to be stronger. I needed to be stronger, for everyone. But you don’t understand that. You can’t see what you’ve done, all the people whose lives have become…meaningless. I fought so hard to make people strong, to prepare us for catastrophe, but there never was a catastrophe. There would only be a dead one. And now…all I am is power without a purpose…”

More splikes of ice jutted out, and the earth trembled and cracked, just as Jana’s muscles twitched and shook in emotional outbreak. Trees broke like ice, feezing from the inside out. The spikes began to wave uncannily like water. The mist of the forest condensed into hail, suspended midair. Geyzers of orange flames jetted near Jana.

Something is bursting to get out.

Then a massive lance formed directly above her.

“I may as well use it.”

In a sudden crack, blue lightning sparked all around Jana, arcing against the spikes of ice, shattering them, then the hail fell, and the flames ended in an explosive bang.

Jana gripped the lance with one hand, then her shields of ice collapsed together, shuddering as they compounded into one, then protected her left side, and finally, a suit of armor, build of condensed ice formed on her body as she suddenly leaped toward Parkarka with unprecedented speed.

“Did you just-” the other woman began, before she was forced to block the lance with a boulder. The ten-meter long lance easily penetrated it, then deflected off her barrier, while Jana lunged past it, then threw a punch at Parkarka. It collided, sending her careening backward.

Jana landed on a tree branch, then as Parkarka lashed her whip at the stationary psychic, Jana outstretched her arm.

She grabbed the light, even when it phased through the gauntlets.

“Are you trying to mock him, or counter him?” Jana asked, as Parkarka tried to reel it back, Jana’s gauntlets sizzling yet the whip not harming her skin at all. “Either way, this is a joke.” She tugged it, and the whip was ripped from Parkarka’s hands, dissolving as it did. “It’s only a mockery of the people who suffered to kill him.”

Jana leaped from the tree, her psychical strength suddenly enough to cause her legs, unaffected by telekinesis, to break the trunk in her ascent.

She smashed her gauntlets into the other psychic’s barrier hard enough to make them crack, leaving her bare-handed, yet as rocks flew at her, Jana didn’t try to evade or block. She lowered her barrier entirely, then began punching Parkarka’s assault with her bare fists, her strikes so fast that she became a blur, shrapnel battering her skin without leaving so much as a scratch. As she focused on defending, Jana summoned five spears to assault Parkarka, which she began avoiding, pushed to the edge as they quickly turned back and speared toward her every time they were avoided.

Once Parkarka’s assault lessened, Jana took the opportunity to fly at her, and pursue, the tables turned through the emergence of newfound strength.