Trillion times stronger

Toki’s footsteps faded as she disappeared up the stairs to the next floor.

She promised me a future. She had better deliver it.

For now, though, it was time to play my part. I had faith that she’d put that bitch in her place, so long as she wasn’t interrupted. And to make sure that stayed the case, I’d have to hold off whatever they sent up those stairs until she finished the job.

For a moment, I considered going down to where we had left Nabiki, see if she was still kicking, but I was stopped by something. Namely, by the sound of a tonne of footsteps making their way up the floors below me.

Her too, huh?

Don’t worry, girls. I’ll avenge both of you.

It didn’t take long for the gaggle of MPs with their little peashooters to burst through the doors to the 190th floor.

If they were smart, they’d have fired at the one source of cracking light on the whole floor the second they saw how dark it was. Fortunately for me, they ain’t hiring the bastards based on their brains.

For a brief moment, the only thing you could hear in that room was the sound of buzzing from my sword and rattling from the chains on my skirt.

The next moment, you could hear a man being cut in half.

I don’t know how many there were when they first came through that door, but I know that by the time they realised what was happening there were less than twenty of the bastards. Each slice took out two or three at once, and I was fast enough that my moves left no space for reaction. By the time the first shot was fired, it was already a wrap.

I held my sword above my body and kept my head low. As I had expected, they fired at the only light source they could see, my sparking sword. Every bullet flew well over my head as I continued cutting down soldier after soldier.

“Fire at will, men-!”

Some bloke who I guess was the commander started mouthing off for a moment, but I split him in half before he could get another word out. Hearing their top dog undergo my instant weight loss surgery, the rest of the idiots started unloading their clips every which way. And yet they call me “bailiff of blindfire.”

I had to play just a bit safer, blocking my body with my sword as I continued my onslaught. All of the rounds used were metal, so they stuck to my electrically charged sword and became completely inert.

Honestly, it was almost embarrassing how shit they were at killing me. Step your game up, losers.

Still, I wasn’t stupid enough to think this was the real force they were sending after me. These two-bit assholes couldn’t have gotten Nabiki, and they especially couldn’t have gotten past Ryou. Nah, someone else was coming.

If I had to guess, she was coming.

That’s why, with every bastard I split in half, I made sure to hit their cybernetics. I had to steal as much energy as possible.

“Fire in the hole!”

One of the few surviving idiots fired a rocket launcher right at my feet, forcing me to leap backwards and desecrating the corpses of all of his colleagues. What a dick. Can imagine he’s not getting invited to any funerals. And not just because he was also gonna be buried in a tin can soon enough.

The idiot had the audacity to fire a second one.

Big mistake.

Now that there was distance between us, I had time to react. The outer shell of the rocket was ferromagnetic. You know what’s really fucking magnetic? A sword-shaped lump of iron with a billion volts of electricity running through it.

I dodged to the side of the rocket and swung my sword in a wide angle. Just as I expected, I was able to redirect back the other way by using the magnetic pull as a slingshot. The rocket picked up insane speed and returned right back to sender.

Body parts, organic and cybernetic, scattered to the air in the explosion.

The whole back wall by the staircase was blown to pieces, and took the last few remaining MPs with it. Stupid bastards, it’s like they don’t know what a fucking magnet does. Christ.

Then again, I was controlling my magnetism better than I ever had before. My electric current too. I’d never held one so strong before, yet I felt like I could go indefinitely without needing to discharge.

Whatever power Electron had given me, it was incredible.

And if the sound I could hear steadily approaching was anything to go by, it was about to be put to the test.

“Graviton…”

Same bastard sound I had heard the last time these fuckers laid a trap for me. That haunting ass singing that sends shivers down my spine. It sounded like it was coming from every direction, but always getting closer. And every second, my body weight felt like it increased more and more.

“Dammit all…”

I took to a run towards the door, but was quickly brought to my knees by her force. She was overwhelming. Overpowering. Too strong for me to possibly beat.

…The hell am I talking about? Am I a coward? There’s no one that’s too strong for me.

I planted my feet into the ground. These bastard metal legs were gonna be useful whether they liked it or not.

She finally showed her face at the top of the stairwell. I inched step closer.

I channelled the whole current stored in my sword into bioelectricity. I would force every muscle, every joint, every nerve in my body to fight against this power. Force myself forward, one step at a time.

The strain on my body was immense. But I was pushing forward. Inch by inch, I was pushing forward. That graceful singing bitch in the green dress was getting closer and closer by the second, I could feel it.

“Ha… I don’t even know… why I was so… afraid of you…”

I stood up slightly taller, my knees no longer brushing the ground with each step.

“Gravity… is one of the weakest… forces… in the universe…”

I dropped my sword. I wasn’t gonna need it anymore.

“You know… how strong… magnetism is?”

I trudged further and further.

“It ain’t… a thousand times… or a million… or even a billion…”

I crossed the threshold where there used to be a door.

“It’s a trillion…”

Her singing got frantic.

“Trillion…”

The force of gravity tripled. All I could do was reach my arm up

“Trillion… times… stronger!”

My fingertips just barely grazed her skin.

Hundreds of millions of volts of electricity discharged on contact. The force was more than any I had ever seen with my own eyes. Graviton disappeared through the wall of the skyscraper and into the stratosphere in the blink of an eye, the electrostatic repulsion overpowering her gravitational strength by orders of magnitude.

Of course, Newton’s Third Law just had to fuck me.

If she went up, I went down. The repulsive force was so extreme I didn’t even have time to feel it before I had crashed through about fifty floors. My senses went dark almost instantaneously, I only knew what was happening because I was banking on it in the first place.

The last thing I thought of before losing consciousness was Toki’s face.

Damn. Guess I’m gonna be the one breaking our promise.