Chapter 271 Stop.

Chapter 271: 271 Stop.

That wasn’t fucking good.

"Sir!" Glacia cried, instantly dropping her theatrical poise and floating back to pull in close beside my armored shoulder.

"We are Legion!" the swarm of stony clones growled, their overlapping voices sounding like boulders grinding together at the bottom of a fault line. "And we are your doom!"

"Everyone get back!" I shouted. I took a heavy step backward, putting myself between the girls and the rapidly spawning horde.

I swept my iron cape back, my powers snapping onto my tactical belt.

I magnetically jerked four heavy fragmentation grenades off my webbing, ripping the pins out in mid-air.

I flung my hand forward, launching the explosives into the charging, howling mob of nightmares like a shotgun blast.

The grenades detonated in a deafening roar. High-velocity shrapnel ripped completely through the front line of clones, shredding them into glowing gravel. But it didn’t matter.

There were dozens more climbing over the wreckage. And worst of all, the ones I had just blown apart were already actively pulling the shrapnel and slag back together, rapidly re-knitting their dark stone skins.

"Glacia! Wall!" I barked.

Glacia didn’t hesitate. She threw both her hands up, unleashing a blinding flurry of absolute-zero wind.

A massive, thick barricade of solid, cloudy ice erupted from the floorboards, perfectly sealing the gap between us and the mob.

But it was only a temporary patch. The intense, volcanic heat radiating off the swarm of demons was already flash-melting the barrier.

Freezing water poured down the front of the ice, and heavy claws began frantically tearing chunks out of the other side.

I had to think fast. We could not win a war of attrition against an enemy that literally multiplied when you blew it up. I had to play the geometry of the building.

Ah. I had a terrible idea.

"Glacia! Vanessa! Grab Psyren and get the hell out of the building!" I ordered. "Psyren! Piss them off! Flood their heads. Make them hate me! Make them chase me!"

"What about you?" Vanessa demanded, her glowing eye wide with alarm even as Glacia grabbed Psyren firmly under the arms and lifted the psychic off her feet.

"Just do it!" I snapped.

Psyren pressed two fingers to her temple. I violently winced as a sudden, sharp spike of a migraine stabbed right through the iron plating of my helmet, but the psychic pulse worked perfectly.

A deafening, scream of absolute, unhinged fury erupted from the horde behind the melting ice wall.

"I got this! You three run!" I shouted.

I channeled a massive burst of magnetism into my boots, violently pulling myself backward through the air.

I blew the heavy, reinforced double doors of the gymnasium completely off their hinges, tearing into the narrow main hallway just as the ice wall finally shattered.

The horde of Legions poured through the breach, a frothing, burning tide of molten rock and hatred.

I whipped myself around in mid-air, hurtling backward down the dilapidated, narrow corridor of the abandoned high school. Legion’s fragmented horde howled, scrambling over each other like rabid hounds from hell to get to me.

"Rhea!" I shouted into my encrypted comms. I swept my hands outward, sending a heavy wave of raw magnetism crashing into the rows of rusted steel lockers lining the walls. The old metal rattled and shrieked in response.

"Miles! The thermal scanners are going crazy! There are dozens of those bastards! What do we do?"

"Get everyone far away from the perimeter! Right now!" I ordered.

I clenched my fists, violently jerking the heavy metal lockers completely out of their concrete moorings.

I hurled the crushed steel backward, battering the vanguard of the horde with heavy, hollow thunks.

It wasn’t doing any permanent damage, but a two-hundred-pound metal box to the face was excellent at slowing the bastards down.

"What are you going to do?" Rhea demanded, her voice bordering on panic.

"Do not worry about me! Just clear the blast radius! Make sure the girls are out!"

"A-alright, boss!"

I heard her frantically yelling at Glacia over the comms, but I couldn’t spare a single ounce of attention. My entire focus was strictly dedicated to not getting ripped apart.

A massive blast of concentrated hellfire scorched past my helmet, superheating the air and burning a massive, smoking gouge into the bank of lockers to my left. The flames completely incinerated an old, peeling mural of the school’s lion mascot.

Shit.

The confined space of the hallway was a great choke point, but it also meant I couldn’t dodge.

More fireballs were hurtling down the corridor directly at me. I stretched out my hands, violently ripping the heavy doors off a dozen lockers.

I fed them into a tight, swirling magnetic orbit around my body, forming a makeshift, floating riot shield array to catch the incoming fire.

"You cannot stop us!" Legion’s overlapping, chaotic chorus of voices howled in a discordant scream of pure rage. "We are many! We are countless! We are doom!"

I flicked my wrist, sending a jagged, spinning locker door slicing aggressively down the hallway. It hit the lead clone directly in the neck, cleanly splitting the demon’s stone skull in half.

"You’re one less!" I shouted back.

But it was pure bravado. I desperately needed to buy distance, and I wasn’t getting it.

A heavy, concussive explosion erupted further down the corridor. One of the larger clones used the blast to launch itself forward, violently bursting straight through my floating steel barriers. The demon slammed directly into my chest plate.

We hit the linoleum floor incredibly hard. The demon’s four jagged, rocky arms pinned my iron plating with unholy, crushing strength.

Its jaw cracked open right in front of my visor, white-hot fire actively licking around its rows of jagged teeth as it prepared to melt my face off.

No thanks.

I couldn’t out-muscle a demon organically, but I wasn’t relying on biology. I fed a massive surge of power directly into my armor’s magnetic servos.

The iron gauntlets forced their way inward, easily overpowering Legion’s infernal strength. My iron fists slammed violently into both sides of the demon’s head, completely crushing the stone skull like a dry clay pot.

The demon went limp instantly. I kicked the crumbling slag off my chest and scrambled up.

But the brief delay had cost me my lead. The rest of the howling horde was less than thirty feet away and closing fast. I glanced up at the ceiling.

I really hoped the city hadn’t shut the water mains off to this condemned building.

I threw both arms up, sending a magnetic pulse ripping through the ceiling tiles, violently crushing the metal caps of the fire suppression system.

The old fire alarms immediately shrieked to life. Every single sprinkler head down the entire length of the corridor popped simultaneously, spraying a torrential downpour of cold, stagnant water directly onto the horde.

Agonized howls of rage erupted from the charging clones. The second the cold water hit their thousand-degree molten skin, it flash-boiled.

In less than three seconds, the entire hallway was plunged into a blinding, suffocating whiteout of thick, hissing steam. I could hear the demons stumbling, aggressively knocking into each other in the sudden, chaotic fog.

Now.

I stretched my arms out to either side, violently yanking every remaining locker door off its hinges for forty feet.

I slammed my hands together. The heavy slabs of steel instantly crushed together in front of me, forming a massive, incredibly dense metal wedge—like the cowcatcher on the front of a locomotive.

I dropped into a heavy crouch. I locked my magnetic powers onto the thick structural steel I-beams buried deep inside the brick wall behind me. Then, I violently reversed the polarity.

I shot straight down the hallway and directly into the blinding steam cloud like a mag-lev bullet train.

Demonic shrieks split the air as the massive metal plow thudded and crunched.

Legion’s bodies slammed violently off the wedge, shattering against the walls as I plowed mercilessly through their startled ranks at highway speeds, completely blind to the carnage I was causing.

And as I carved my way through the horde, I unclipped the last string of grenades from my belt.

I let them drop onto the flooded linoleum behind me, magnetically pulling every single pin on the way out.

"Get him!" a demon roared from the fog.