Chapter 272 Knees.

Chapter 272: 272 Knees.

"Get him!" Legion roared from the fog. "Stop—"

The four fragmentation grenades detonated in the narrow hallway behind me, an overlapping, deafening roar that packed the enclosed space with shrapnel.

I knew it wouldn’t kill them, but it chewed through the vanguard and definitely pissed them off. Both outcomes worked perfectly for me.

Because by the time the smoke billowed, I had burst back into the gymnasium.

I whipped around, channeling a massive burst of magnetism. I violently flung the compressed, multi-ton wedge of crushed steel lockers directly into the gaping doorway, plugging the breach.

I didn’t stop there. I swept my arms upward, grabbing the heavy, shattered remains of the ruined Tesla coils and hurling them into the pile, fusing the scrap together into a heavy, reinforced barricade.

No sooner had the metal locked into place than the entire pile violently shuddered.

The horde of demons slammed into the other side, heavy claws shrieking against the steel. The barricade was already buckling. It wouldn’t hold for more than thirty seconds.

I landed on the hardwood, breathing hard inside my helmet. Okay. Time to finish this.

I rapidly crossed the floor to Rhea’s massive industrial generator.

Even though the coils had been smashed, they had barely chewed through a third of the juice stored in the heavy battery bank.

The massive metal box was still entirely live; my powers could physically sense the raw electricity aggressively vibrating through the thick copper wiring.

With a violent jerk of my wrist, I magnetically ripped the heavy steel siding right off the generator, exposing the tangled, glowing guts of the machine.

"Miles? What are you going to do?" Rhea panicked in my ear.

"Theoretically, this will work," I said.

"What?"

I didn’t elaborate. Mostly because I only had a working theory, and I had never been stupid or desperate enough to actually test it.

Well, desperate times.

"Is everyone entirely clear of the school?" I demanded. My armored arm was physically vibrating as I cranked my localized magnetic field to its absolute maximum output.

"Wha—yeah?" Rhea stammered, her comms signal already starting to degrade into heavy static from the interference.

"Good. Time to have some fun with electromagnets," I said.

I jammed my armored arm directly into the live circuitry of the generator.

If I hadn’t wrapped my suit in the most heavily condensed magnetic field I could possibly generate, the raw industrial voltage would have instantly flash-fried me like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Instead, I just caught the shock of a lifetime. Every single muscle in my body violently locked up, my teeth grinding together as a massive, agonizing influx of raw power surged directly into my suit.

Gyaaaah! God, that hurt! But I couldn’t hesitate.

I aggressively channeled the electrical current straight into my magnetic field. The voltage hit my powers like a shot of liquid nitrous into a combustion engine.

Every single piece of metal in the entire gymnasium began to violently creak and hum, vibrating with intense sympathetic resonance.

The heavy, ruined chunks of the Tesla coils scraped across the hardwood, physically drawn toward my boots. They began to slowly rise into the air, orbiting my body like a asteroid belt of scrap metal.

Then they spun faster.

Faster!

Heavy steel support struts buried deep inside the ceiling violently bent and groaned.

The long, silvery ventilation shafts buckled, shrieking as they were ripped completely out of the drywall and pulled into the swirling orbit.

Nails. Screws. Brackets. Everything metallic, no matter how deeply embedded in the architecture, was violently ripped free. Massive chunks of the cinderblock walls were torn out as the rebar inside them answered the call.

And I was flying.

Not just hovering. I could physically feel the raw electricity singing through my veins like a chorus of unhinged angels.

The massive electromagnet I had just turned my own body into was still building terrifying momentum. I rose higher into the air, my head buzzing, swimming in the absolute, unfiltered rush of the current.

Hoooooly shit. I felt incredible.

More of the walls tore completely free, collapsing inward. Right at that exact second, Legion finally burst through the barricade.

His identical copies literally boiled through the doorway. Half of them were the molten, liquid-metal variants I had fought at Intergate. But as they flooded the gym, they all skidded to a dead halt, staring up at me in absolute shock.

Just in time to die.

A massive chunk of reinforced concrete, dragged along by a web of rebar, plowed violently through Legion’s front ranks, instantly reducing a dozen demons to a fine paste.

The surviving clones shouted something, but I couldn’t hear a single word over the deafening, howling hum of the magnetic tornado.

The entire roof of the school ripped completely off, disintegrating into thousands of pieces of lethal shrapnel that joined the swirling vortex around me.

It was a hurricane of steel, copper, iron, and brass. Blinding bolts of blue lightning actively arced off my iron plating, violently spitting and detonating against the larger chunks of orbiting debris.

The entire high school was being aggressively torn apart and fed into my grinder.

The molten Legions screamed in agony. The intense heat of their bodies was completely useless against the crushing gravitational pull of my powers.

Thick gobbets of liquid metal were violently stripped right off their bones, joining the storm and whirling like glowing lava around me.

The stone clones finally forced themselves to move, desperately trying to close the distance.

They fought through the blinding storm, but the hurricane-force winds instantly snuffed out the hellfire burning on their skin.

Massive chunks of debris and flying metal smashed their rocky hides to powder. A few tried to use their heavy wings to take to the air, but they were instantly sucked into the vortex and shredded into dust.

"You! Will! Not! Wiiiiiiin!" Legion screamed. Dozens of his remaining clones tried to dig their claws into the floorboards and crawl toward me.

But the unified demonic chorus quickly lost all cohesion, dissolving into panicked shrieks as more and more of them were ripped apart by the tornado of scrap and steel.

"Then stop me!" I roared back, my voice physically vibrating with the voltage surging through my chest.

Legion howled. Three of the stone clones had somehow managed to fight their way through the debris field and into the eye of the storm.

But even as they breached the center, a massive, stray arc of lightning blew right off my shoulder, striking one directly in the chest and blasting him backward into the whirlwind, where he was instantly pulverized.

The last two clones leaped at me simultaneously, using their ragged wings for a final, desperate boost to reach my hovering form.

I lowered my arms.

I reached out, letting the heavy iron of my gauntlets clamp directly onto their rocky wrists.

Legion screamed as every single volt of electricity currently stored inside my armor was channeled directly into their bodies in one massive, catastrophic surge.

The two demons writhed violently in mid-air as the raw electricity literally ripped them apart on a molecular level. It flayed their stony flesh, flash-boiled their demonic blood, and atomized their bones.

Within seconds, the final two clones dissolved into nothing more than fine ash, blowing away into the dying storm.

The battery was dead.

I panted heavily, my lungs burning as I slowly descended out of the air. The massive, surging magnetic field rapidly faded from my armor.

The violent vortex immediately began to slow, heavy chunks of cinderblock, crushed lockers, and twisted desks dropping out of orbit and rolling across the flattened plateau that used to be the gymnasium floor.

My heavy iron boots hit the concrete foundation. The last fine dust of the pulverized metal twister settled, rattling against my armor in thin, magnetic filaments before settling into a perfect spiral pattern around my feet.

I looked around at the absolute devastation.

There was not a single, solitary wall of the high school left standing. The entire property had been leveled down to the concrete foundation.

It looked like a F5 tornado had touched down and thrown a violent bender. Well, at least Lacey wouldn’t have to cut a check to a demolition crew tomorrow.

"Sir!"

I slowly shifted my gaze. Glacia was flying toward me, carrying Psyren securely under her arms. Vanessa and Mystic landed closely behind them.

Thank God. They actually cleared the blast radius in time.

"Hey, girls," I gasped, my voice rasping heavily inside the helmet. "How’s it... how’s it going?"

Glacia gently dropped Psyren onto the concrete and both of them rushed forward, grabbing my heavy iron plating in a massive, dual hug.

"Sir! That was absolutely incredible!" Glacia gasped, her ice-blue eyes wide.

"Holy shit, boss," Psyren breathed in pure awe, looking around at the smoking, completely flattened ruins of the school. "I had no idea you could actually do that!"

"Indeed. This is quite the destructive display," Mystic observed stoically as her glowing eyes scanned the leveled battlefield.

Vanessa didn’t say a word, but she was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t quite identify. It looked like equal parts horror and deep, foundational respect.

"Yeah. I’m just... full of fun surprises," I managed to wheeze out. "But, uh, before we celebrate, Psyren? Can you do a deep sweep? Are there... are there any more pieces of Legion anywhere in the grid?"

Psyren blinked, then quickly tugged her heavy headphones down around her neck and pressed two fingers to her temple. She cocked her head, her eyes tracking something invisible for a long, tense moment.

Then, she grinned. She shook her head.

"Uh, nope, boss man. I am not hearing a single active thought out there but ours," she confirmed brightly. "Looks like you completely wiped him."

"Great," I said tightly. "Good. Then, uh, could someone please give me a lift back to the chalet?"

Psyren blinked. "Why? Suit out of juice?"

"No," I sighed, staring straight ahead through my visor. "I think the power literally welded every single joint in my armor completely shut. I can’t bend my knees."