Gotta' go FAST

I didn’t spare a second bursting out the cafe doors back onto the streets. From a quick glance, everything seemed to be in order. People were laughing and having a good time as they perused about collecting more treats from kind strangers.

But as time passed, more and more people turned their gazes up to the sky with mixes of wonder and confusion. Tiny little particles of light rained down on our heads like a patchy drizzle of hard candy. I opened my hand to receive some of the falling debris and saw it was a mix of tiny treats and pumpkin seeds with orange runes across the surface. The seeds were warm, countering the cold of the evening.

A few people just joining the scene mistakenly thought everything coming down was snow, almost like I had from inside. But a child pointed out that snow was a Christmas thing, and we were a few months out of season for that story special to happen yet.

“It’s a Halloween miracle!” One child shouted as he lifted his bucket to collect the falling treats.

“I bet this is a gift from the Eighth Star!” another kid said. “She’s in the city tonight, did you hear about that? I hope I can get her autograph!”

I had absolutely nothing to do with this, and with the darkness I was sensing, there had to be some demon involved. But for some reason there was an alarming amount of people who wanted to say I planned this whole thing.

“So, when this all goes south, they’ll blame me…” I grumbled, scanning around for any traces of the true culprit of this likely soon to be calamity. “Hmm…”

Whatever was causing this, it clearly was establishing a domain. Otherwise it wouldn’t be able to cause candy and pumpkin seeds to rain down from the sky.

“You feel something too, yeah?” Yamin said as she and Jessette came outside to reinforce me. “Is that a pumpkin seed?” she asked, plucking one from the ground.

“Looks like it,” I confirmed. “But why's it raining pumpkin seeds and candy?”

Jess took one and looked it over very closely, especially curious about the elemental fire runes scribed onto them. “Hmm…” she hummed, curiously. “No…” she said softly, almost as if a silent thought escaped her head. “This can’t be it…”

Speaking up would have meant she knew I was eavesdropping on her, which probably would have made her uncomfortable with me as if I were reading her mind. But I was the guardian angel of mankind. And if she knew something about this, it was my job to learn what it was.

“Jess, what is…”

My voice was interrupted by a strike of azure lightning blasting down the road. Cars were disturbed from their resting spot and became airborne.

The people walking the streets didn’t have time to register the danger about to topple over their heads.

-Combat mode; Active-

My power level increased several fold, enhancing my speed and reaction time to heights beyond their limits.

With newfound swiftness, like time was sitting still, I flew down the road and quickly collected every last human soul in harm's way over my shoulders, dropping them away from the soon to be chaos.

Mere milliseconds passed and the action finally caught up with me. Those cars struck both the ground and several buildings, creating tremors and explosions that would have been a crippling catastrophe had I not been here.

The blue ball of lightning that had been the source of this was even faster than me, and speedily turned around to head back from whence it came.

I intercepted its path, only barely catching it in my arms like an electrified football thrown by a pro. Whatever this was, it had stiff quills that hurt at the touch, and big shoes too.

“Gotta’ go very fast!” said a little boy’s voice. “Fast fast faster-fastest!”

In the seconds I had to get a grip on this kid, I managed to uncoil his body from a wheel-like state to see his morphed human face. Something between a blue animal and a person. Not like any demi-human I’d ever seen.

“Slow down, sparky!” I grunted as I put more strength into stopping him. His speed was so overwhelming that it was shoving me down the road, dragging me through the asphalt.

“You're too slow!” he rejected my order with a taunt, his whole body twitching like he’d had way too much sugar for the night. “Gotta’ go faster! I’m the fastest in the Universe! I am speed!”

He rolled up again and really spun, completely fighting my control and pushing me even faster down the road toward the river.

For some reason, the longer I held him, the heavier he was getting, as if my strength were rapidly decreasing by the nano-second.

Suddenly, Jess surprised me by flying around on her bouzouki like it was a broomstick and landed several meters back where I was heading, then dismounted her stringed instrument and held it ready to strum.

Her hands brushed across the strings, a violent, yet melodic energy rippled through the air, emerald in colour, like her eyes and the runes that suddenly sprawled any of her exposed skin.

The ripple of green condensed around me and I was prompted by my system that she’d provided a speed boost that tripled my normal pace, which countered the decline in my own abilities.

I was stunned at her power for a moment, but couldn’t let the opportunity she’d given me slide.

“Move over, sparky!” I said, putting all my strength into my legs to halt the boy. “I’m the fastest in the universe now!”

The ground below me exploded as I pushed on it, like a super powered runner gunning it down the track. I easily overcame this blue lightning ball of a kid, with plenty of mileage to spare.

He was caught off guard and stopped moving completely in shock. I took the moment to slam him right into the ground. There was a ringing sound, followed by little silver rings bouncing out of him.

“Blah!” the boy uttered. “I was too slow!”

Now that sparky was down, I took a moment to scan his condition. My hand pressed against his chest and surely an all too familiar dark energy was seeded in his core. A lot more than I was expecting.

I primed holy solar energy to aid me in cleansing that darkness out of the boy, but I couldn’t draw up nearly enough to brighten his soul completely clean for some reason.

“Yamin!” I shouted. “Exorcism, now!”

“O-on it!”

She came running over, preparing to supplement what I lacked at the moment. The two of us pressed hard on the kid's chest. Sparkling energy radiated around the two of us like a rainbow fire.

“May The Lord have mercy on you!” I declared.

Upon those words, a pulse of stardust energy exploded from our hands and entered into the boy, forcing all the darkness that had warped his very flesh out of him.

He twitched and convulsed violently, unnaturally. But within seconds his unusually morphing reversed. He was now just a kid in a blue mascot costume. A pretend of the creature he had been turned into before.

Just when I thought the exorcism was complete and the boy saved, a black flame rimmed with hot blue light phased from his chest and hovered in the air. The boys mana, plus the curse forced upon him.

It warped and crackled, similar to water boiling in a ketal. Then with a few more crazy motions stiffened into a candle like wick and shot to the partially cloudy sky, heading right toward the newly constructed Satellite Industries tower.

“What in the world…?” I uttered as I saw the flame join a lanky form of hot blue blaze at the very peak of the technologically unique structure.

I just stood there, trying to process the budding energy I was sensing coming off long blue fire. It was certainly dark in nature, bolstered by some demonic power… But there was a hint of divinity in it as well.

There were explosions that echoed through the city. I spread my wings and took to the skies to see similar magical chaos all over. People were flying around like superheroes. Swelling in size like body builders dipped in colourful paint. Surfing waves of cloudy roads spawned under their sky boards… The powers exploding to life around people were nothing short of terrifying to see in real time, as if some pandora’s box to supernatural abilities had suddenly been opened to humanity.

“What is happening?” I uttered to myself, watching as things descended from bad to worse. “If this doesn’t get in check soon, the whole city's going to burn down… And that’s if we're lucky.”

I had trouble with that one kid alone. Unless I could figure out why my strength was dying fast, this was going to be one heck of a night.

Something was telling me that the fire at the top of Satellite Industries had something to do with this. But before I confronted that, a particular friendly witch needed to be interrogated…