Chapter 201 Mist.

Chapter 201: 201 Mist.

"In the end, the hero always wins."

"Not this time," I said, and jerked my hand upward.

Hundreds of jagged steel shards, sheared bolts, and torn car panels launched themselves off the pavement, swarming at him like a metallic locust storm.

Micheal didn’t even flinch. He just hovered there inside his alien shell. He raised a single hand, and the air between us violently rippled.

The storm of metal froze dead in midair. It was caught in the vice kinetic pressure, suspended inches from his faceplate.

Micheal tilted his head. He lazily flicked his wrist.

The suspended shards instantly reversed direction, spitting back through the freezing air directly at my chest like a wall of shrapnel.

I swept my arm in a wide arc, firing a raw blast of magnetic repulsion. The returning shards scattered wildly, flying into the ruined walls around us and vibrating violently as they bit deep into the blackened cement.

"You lack synergy, Polaris," Micheal’s voice didn’t seem to show panic. "Your tactics are predictable. Linear. You rely on sheer volume because you lack the processing power to optimize your strikes. These paltry little distractions will never touch me."

"Good to know," I said.

I swept my hand up again.

And I violently slammed the three-ton steel I-beam I’d been silently floating in his blind spot directly into the center of his back.

It hit him like a bullet train hitting a stalled sedan. The suit didn’t buckle—it was far too advanced for that—but inertia was a universal constant.

The kinetic transfer of the impact launched Micheal out of the sky. He flew forward, smashing straight through a surviving brick wall of the precinct and vanishing under a collapsing mountain of rubble.

I lowered my hand, catching my breath.

People who buy their way into power always forget the basic limitations of physics.

He’d spent so long puppeteering Mister Invincible from the safety of a heavily guarded desk, he’d forgotten that he wasn’t actually invulnerable.

You can wrap yourself in all the alien metal you want, but the squishy, middle-aged bureaucrat inside that suit still takes the G-force of a sudden stop.

But he was still an S-class telekinetic.

The mountain of rubble suddenly exploded outward. Chunks of pulverized brick and mortar shot into the air, hovering around the crater like an asteroid belt.

Micheal levitated back out of the dust. His suit was scuffed but completely intact.

Inside, however, I could hear his breathing through the comms—heavier, slightly ragged. The whiplash had definitely rattled his skull.

"You’re making this longer than necessary," Micheal lectured, though his voice had lost a fraction of its smoothness. He pointed a finger at me. "But still entirely sustainable."

The orbiting chunks of concrete and shattered glass suddenly accelerated, firing at me like artillery shells.

I immediately dropped out of the sky, letting the heavy concrete fly over my head.

I hit the asphalt, raising my hands and ripping the doors off a nearby squad car to form a V-shaped shield just as a barrage of glass spears shattered against it.

I peeked over the dented metal. Micheal was slowly advancing, floating effortlessly over the ruined courtyard.

"This isn’t gonna work the way you think it is!" I yelled over the din of shattering debris.

"I think the world requires structural realignment!" Micheal shot back, firing another invisible kinetic blast that crumpled my makeshift shield. "You are not even a real villain, Polaris! You’re a clown! A jester! The stand-up comedian people pay to insult them. A man in a suit. You have no grand vision! No dedication to the architecture of society! You treat this entire ecosystem like a job!"

"Damn right I do!" I retorted.

I dropped the crumpled car doors and began to sprint in a wide arc around him, my boots crunching over the glass.

"My job is to make the heroes look good! To give a public with the memory of a goldfish a theatrical reminder that the capes are here to help! And you? You’re no hero, Carter. You’re just a middle-management jackass with a god complex. But fine! You want me to stop treating this like a job? You want to make this personal?"

I threw both my arms out to my sides. "Let’s make it personal!"

Every remaining scrap of iron, steel, and tungsten in the plaza soared into the air, ripping out of the wreckage to violently swirl around me.

I formed a localized, high-speed metallic hurricane, wrapping myself in layers of spinning armor plates.

As soon as the vortex was up to speed, I engaged the magnetic coils in my boots and launched myself directly at Micheal like a human missile.

The telekinetic bureaucrat snarled, his composure finally cracking.

He thrust both hands forward. Massive blasts of force slammed into my hurricane, violently ripping my orbiting shields away in deafening explosions of sound and pressure. He was tearing my armor apart layer by layer before I could even reach him.

I let the metal go, shedding the outer rings of the vortex to increase my speed as I closed the gap.

When I was less than twenty feet away, I whirled the final, thickest layer of steel plates directly in front of me to absorb his next hit.

As soon as my line of sight was completely obscured, I cut my levitation and dropped straight out of the sky.

It was a good thing I did.

Micheal’s next blast smashed through the steel plates like a shotgun blast through an action movie door, completely vaporizing my cover.

I saw his puzzled look as the metal scattered, failing to reveal my ruined body in the air.

Then he looked down.

He saw me sliding across the asphalt right below him, my magnetically augmented fist driving straight upward like a piston, and he actually gasped.

Very few things in my entire professional career had ever felt as viscerally satisfying as plowing my knuckles directly into his smug faceplate.

The punch caught him right under the chin. I flooded the strike with a massive pulse of magnetic repulsion off the street itself, amplifying the physical blow with raw physics.

The momentum slammed his jaw shut and threw his entire body backward with enough force to lift him completely out of his telekinetic hover.

I didn’t stop. I rode the magnetic updraft, following him into the air.

As his faceplate tipped back down, I twisted my hips and buried my left hook directly into the side of his helmet.

The punch whirled him in mid-air like a top.

But as he violently spun around, panic and pure, unadulterated fury overtook him. He threw out both his arms, not as composed anymore.

An omnidirectional, invisible shockwave of force erupted from his suit.

It hit me square in the chest before I could raise my guard. It felt like being kicked by a Centaur.

The blast launched me backward across the battlefield, my heels violently skidding and sparking across the ruined pavement until I finally managed to dig my boots in and stop.

Gah! I doubled over, coughing violently. There went at least three ribs.

Black spots danced in my vision, the pain making my knees buckle. I staggered, wiping a fresh line of blood from my chin.

Micheal Carter rose back into the air. The pristine, untouched aura of the managerial god was entirely gone.

The air around him shrieked with static rolling off his suit in chaotic waves.

"Enough!" he roared.

"Did you really think that would stop me?" he demanded, the air pressure dropping so drastically my ears popped. "Do you genuinely believe you can win this, Polaris? Do you think you can beat me?!"

I stayed doubled over, clutching my ribs, my chest heaving.

"Honestly?" I admitted, my voice rough.

From the corner of my eye, I caught a flicker of movement emerging from the ragged hole of the ruined underground lab.

A flash of pink hair and studded leather, escorted by a trail of freezing mist.

"No. But I’m hoping this can."