Perry felt it.

That crackling energy that slowly suffused the air where a fight was about to take place. Stances adjusted. Fists tightened around weapons. Eyes narrowed.

“Before we begin…” Acolyte Karen Figgis said with deadly careful enunciation, cocking her head as if listening to something in the distance before scanning the three of them. “Would anyone who is pregnant take a safe distance?”

“Good luck with the diplomacy you guys,” Wraith said, kissing Nat on the cheek before turning away, her body walking off to the side while her wraith-form remained in place, casually growing ethereal knives from her hands.

“Blessings are illegal in the Eternal Empire without service in the Acolytes to train them how to use their powers safely and for the benefit of mankind. Those who run from service are just fumbling around blindly, unable to harness their powers properly…

If you’re truly the Blessed of another land, we’ll give you the opportunity to prove it. Show us a decade of training.” The armored figure said, crouching.

“Anytime,” Perry said, crooking his finger.

“Hold up,” Karth said, reaching into the back of the wagon and pulling out an oversized deer carcass before tearing off a leg and planting himself down next to Anya to watch the proceeding fight.

The guy on the left, with dark skin and a shaved head, -Let’s call him Baldy- started things off, whipping his hand out of a satchel at his waist and throwing a handful of miniature grenades.

Perry was planning on dodging, but he was momentarily thrown off by the wrinkle in dimensional fabric around the guy’s fingers, resulting in the grenades appearing in contact with his skin, bypassing the intervening distance.

Perry cupped his hands around the grenades an instant before they went off, aiming the explosion away from Nat.

BOOM!

HP:13

The shrapnel sprayed off to the left, peppering the surrounding wilderness and the infernal road itself.

“Well,” Perry said, shaking the stinging out of his hands before shrugging out of his shredded Amish long coat. “Good a way to start as any.”

Boomer’s legs emerged from the wagon, tearing through the canvas sides and emerging from the top like a spider molting. Nat got sucked into the cockpit before any more grenades came her way.

Baldy took a step back, and a rather large man with a megafauna-sword stepped up to the plate.

That’s interesting.

Giving Bruisers oversized weapons had been field-tested in Franklin city in the past, but results were inconclusive and the idea was scrapped, because prawn armor could shrug off most conventional metals, regardless of their size. Most tinkers would rather die than put their expertise into making what was essentially a Buster sword, and even if they did, they were high-tech, and ‘high-tech’ and ‘bashing things really hard’ generally didn’t co-exist. Most swords broke pretty quick.

Which was why Perry was surprised to be facing down a Bruiser with a sword bigger than he was, lined with crimson glowing runes of demonic origin.

That actually makes more sense.

“Hey, Heather, don’t try to let that thing go through you to look cool,” Perry said as the Bruiser charged. “Might be extradimensional in origin.”

“Pfft, I don’t need this guy’s sword to look cool,” Wraith said, charging forward to meet the bruiser.

She ducked low…real low, diving through the asphalt under the bruiser’s feet. Perry was afraid it was spirit-impermeable, but it probably was more energy than it was worth to guard against that highly specific issue.

The bruiser’s sword whiffed, but he kept going without missing a beat, charging forward to avoid standing around in the same spot like an idiot, where Heather could tag him in the back.

“His sword’s not made of a ferrous metal,” Nat’s voice said through Boomer’s speakers.

“Yeah, it’s probably some kind of chitin,” Perry said, holding out his hand. “Sword me?”

Boomer fired Perry’s obsidian blade into his hand an instant before the bruiser brought the demonic blade down on him.

CLANG!

The obsidian blade did surprisingly well, driving a small wedge of black volcanic glass into the opponent’s blade, winning the battle of supernatural sharpness.

Perry on the other hand, folded like an accordion.

“Blarg!” Perry groaned as he crumpled to his knees, straining under the sheer pressure of supernatural might, trying desperately to prevent the bruiser from forcing the other edge of his obsidian blade through his neck.

Perry’s own monoatomic glass edge hovered dangerously close to splitting his own sweating skin and all the juicy organs that lay beneath.

Six point seven times stronger than Perry Basic, and this is still more than I can take. Stupid Bruisers.

Perry scraped the asphalt with his toe and modified it, feeling his influence spread through the material in a fractal pattern, like a lightning bolt through wood.

That’s interesting. The only reason Perry was able to feel his Perk working, was because something was lightly resisting change, that being the road itself.

It wasn’t enough to stop him, just enough to give him a sense of feedback.

Interesting.

The bruiser’s eyes widened when his feet flew out from under him, the Eternal Empire’s road betraying him by becoming slippery.

Perry took the opportunity to throw the infernal blade up and away from himself, kicking the bruiser’s surprised face. It felt like kicking a lump of steel, and it did no damage, but it sent the oversized man tumbling away.

Perry regarded his pristine obsidian blade.

I really should sell these things, but It’d need some kind of safety sheath, because they’re DAMN lethal…actually maybe not. There’d be an immediate uptick in people getting cut in half. I don’t wanna be the guy who started that trend.

Perry glanced up and saw how the battle had been evolving.

One of the opposing supers was absorbing a torrent of gunfire from Boomer by using what looked like a picture frame as a shield.

Huh.

Heather was in a midair chase with a highly acrobatic fellow who was moving in midair with movements that were a strange mix between jerky and smooth, almost uncomfortable to Perry’s eye. He seemed to be gripping things with his hands and feet and flinging himself off of them, flying through the air like he was navigating an invisible forest. We’ll call him Monkey.

That gives us Karen, Flag, Bruiser with the sword, Painter, Baldy, Monkey, and…

Perry glanced over towards the seventh member of their squad and spotted the young woman gestureing to the side, where some of the giant sunflower seeds had fallen off the side of that farmer’s truck in the bumpy off-road getaway.

The seeds burst open and roots bored deep into the earth, a stalk leaping into the air, maturing in the blink of an eye.

Ah, a plant type. Probably shouldn’t ignore that.

Dragor’sKinesis.EXE

With a thought, Perry yanked the newly grown sunflower out of the ground, but not before it spit a half dozen massive, bullet-like seeds at him.

Thankfully, between Perry’s Body and Nerve, he was more than six times faster than a normal human. Perry increased the tackiness of the road under his feet and pulled himself aside faster than inertia would allow, dodging the shots by a hair’s breadth. The sunflower seeds dug furrows into the road, where they immediately began sprouting more sunflowers.

When the seed is both the ammo, and the thing that replenishes the ammo…Sometimes I have to admire how pragmatically effective plant magic is, when done well.

Unfortunately plant controllers struggled with a low maximum limit for destructive power that could be brought to bear, and this one was no different.

Perry flung the massive sunflower at the plant user while he parried a follow up attack from the bruiser, controlling the floor beneath both of them to equalize their respective strength.

“Okay,” Perry said, trading blows with the bruiser while the Plant-controller attempted to dig herself out from under the giant plant. “I’ll admit, I don’t have much training in sword-fighting, but if you give me some pointers, I could probably improve pretty fast.”

“Hah!”

A burst of power from Acolyte Karen scrambled Perry’s control over Dragor’s Kinesis, fizzling the spell. The bruiser’s toes burst out of his armored boots and dug straight into the demonic road, seeking purchase on the unreliable ground as he tried to press Perry back.

“He’s got multiple Blessings!” Karen warned their team. “And they’re really weird!”

Rude.

This is a trick, Perry realized as he noticed he didn’t see Monkey anymore. He mentally charted Monkey’s course, and interpreted the sensations on the back of his neck, leaning aside.

BOOM!

Monkey flickered past, a thin little metal chain preceeding him, swinging through the spot where Perry’s neck would’ve been.

Perry braced a foot against the bruiser’s chest and used him as leverage to punch the passing super in the face.

Monkey’s face took no damage, flying away like it was lighter than air…except his wrist, which stayed exactly where it was when he’d hit him.

Crack!

“Agh!”

Interesting. He must be shifting around his mass to generate force, allowing him to move like that.

Monkey went to the ground, clutching his broken wrist for an instant before he scrambled to his feet, bouncing back into the air, primarily with his feet and good hand.

“Where was the warning you were switching targets!?” Perry asked, ducking the bruiser’s swings.

“You didn’t hear it!” Heather said from where she was inserting her claws into the painter’s back.

“It’s true, you didn’t hear it.” Natalie said, Boomer smashing the plant down on top of the plant user while his turrets tracked Baldy, who ducked behind the flag user and Karen.

Must’ve been focusing too hard on the bruiser.

Perry hadn’t multitasked this hard in…ever. He was really putting his new stats through their paces, modifying materials on the fly, controlling a tempermental spell, trash-talking, and sword-fighting.

I wonder if I could take that crusty old duelist like this.

Baldy glanced up at Karen, who was tanking the turrets with some kind of magical wall spell. She gave Baldy a stiff nod, and he threw one of his grenades at Boomer.

Perry’s heart skipped a beat when he didn’t see the explosion.

“ACK!” Natalie’s voice emanated from inside Boomer.

“He can throw grenades past armor!” Natalie said. “JEEZ!”

Whew. I should’ve mentioned that. It was easy to see the problem in retrospect, but he’d been too focused on handling his own fight. Noted.

“Luke!” The flagbearer screamed as Heather inserted her ethereal claws into the painter’s chest.

“Don’t name him!” Heather said, affronted. “Now you guys should surrender or-“

Flag raised her flag high and began…singing in old manitian.

Painter – or Luke, Flag’s boyfriend, maybe? – suddenly became more real, twisting around and elbowing Heather in the face, sending the ethereal shapeshifter reeling backwards.

Heather phased into the ground to avoid a follow-up attack from Karen, While the Painter raised his hands above his head, the swirling void inside the bounds of his frame growing larger and larger.

That’s…probably not good, Perry mused as the frame widened, swirling paint blotting out the sky for miles.

PPP.EXE

Perry lifted a hand and sent a hardened nodule of the Pernicious Prison at ‘Luke’ to knock him out of doing…whatever the hell he was doing.

The bruiser pressed Perry’s defenses, and Monkey came around for another swing at Perry’s head despite his broken wrist. Perry dodged without allowing them to distract him from his target, who was looking to use his Limit Break to end the fight.

Perry urged the nodule of life draining tar to move faster as the mile wide canvas of swirling oil paints began to descend down on them.

Natalie noticed too and unleashed a focused blast of force at the painter, which was absorbed by Karen lunging in front of him.

Flag saw the nodule coming and hauled Painter out of the way.

Perry gritted his teeth and directed the nodule to follow its target before Karen had the opportunity to sever his control over the spell.

Come on, just get close enough to explode into webs on him. That should be enough to cancel it.

Right as the tiny sphere of black got close enough, a hand emerged from beneath the crushed pulp of sunflower plant, and a single broad leaf sprung up, slapping the spell hard enough to cause it to break and burst apart into life-sapping webbing….just not on ‘Luke’.

“Dangit,” Perry muttered as the painted canvas descended, swallowed them all up.