‘Eff, eff, eff!’ Lightfoot thought furiously as she tried to catch the woman in the grey hoodie. She captured and expended momentum charges with every change in direction, barely keeping one long enough to push it higher before either swapping it out or absorbing it directly.

Soundwave, and most of the people in the Altered Crime Prevention Group, had a mistaken idea of what her power was. It wasn’t that she could absorb kinetic energy through quick changes in momentum, but that she could isolate and store momentum applied to herself, either directly through her body, or through an object that applied force to her. She could hold up to ten charges of momentum, but the more she held, the more wound up her body felt.

And while she was chasing after the hooded girl, Lightfoot’s momentum charges were barely enough to keep up. How could she move that fluidly? It wasn’t that hooded girl was that much faster than her, but she was much more agile. Her fingertips were but a hair’s breadth from touching the sleeve, but Lightfoot felt nothing but despair. She’d come close several times already, but each time, it was the same hair’s breadth that she missed by.

‘What’re you doing, Soundy?’ she muttered in her head.

A glance showed her that her partner was simply gaping at the dance. Neither of them had moved far from their original location, and from the way the ground was scuffed up, they were actually within the same five paces square that they began the chase in.

‘Do something!’

“HAH!”

There it was. Soundwave’s stunning blast. The vibration wasn’t visible, but she could feel the winds’ passage as it shot a couple of inches from her. The blast slammed straight into hooded girl, but what she expected didn’t happen. Instead of the hooded girl knocked back, or stunned silly, the ground under her feet exploded. The air around the girl rippled and for a long moment, Lightfoot thought that she saw an golden aura wrapped around the suspect.

Then, nothing.

The girl just stood there and slowly raised her finger, wagging it tauntingly at them. Lightfoot felt an oppressive air press down on her, and she almost vomited from fear. But then, instinctively, she used her momentum core and pulled at the pressure, which disappeared as quickly as mist in sunlight.

Hooded girl stiffened and Lightfoot absently noted that the girl’s sneakers weren’t exactly touching the ground. There was a halo of soft golden light around her feet.

The momentum she stole from the oppressive air tingled in her core. It was stronger than the momentum of the van suddenly decelerating from a hundred longstrides and hour to full stop. And with it, she blasted towards the girl, who jerked back. But Lightfoot finally caught her wrist.

“Gotcha.”

Almost at once, the hooded girl twisted her wrist to break Lightfoot’s hold, but this…this was familiar territory. How many times has she captured Altered criminals by holding on to them, sapping their momentum and venting it away immediately? The result was that the enemy she captured couldn’t move at all. Not unless they could chain their movements into different segments and she couldn’t vent the stored momentum fast enough. She’d trained for this for years. The seemingly arbitrary limit to her momentum capture was about a second. More than that and it was considered another charge. The magnitude of each charge also had a limit, though she was unsure what it was. She couldn’t catch a falling aeroplane since even if it stopped, its weight would soon crush her. She could stop a truck careening down the road safely, however.

The girl’s reflexive pull was stronger than normal humans, but that was what Lightfoot expected. She’d once taken a punch from Homelander, and it was definitely stronger than the momentum of a speeding truck. The girl was about…hmmm, a tenth? A tenth of Homelander’s punch strength.

That, in itself, was frightening. Homelander could only be matched by Shielder, and that wasn’t by direct strength comparison. Shielder could protect himself in the absolute sense, and other things around him with a little less power. But he couldn’t produce the same amount of offensive power. It was only the history between the two that stopped them from going all out.

‘

That the girl had power that could be considered a fraction of the strongest man in the known world was scary. Even at her best, Lightfoot could bear the Homelander’s punch ten times, before the speed at which he attacked overwhelmed the speed at which she could vent or return the charges.

The girl’s reflexive disengage had been the only thing she did before she stopped completely. And it wasn’t because Lightfoot drained her momentum. She just stopped. The hooded head tilted curiously, and Lightfoot felt the girl’s gaze focus on the contact point between them. Then she tugged, and it was at a fifth of Homelander’s power.

Cold sweat broke out of Lightfoot’s brow. She was shorter than the hooded girl and she was in a position to look up at the concealed face. That it was night and the moon’s light didn’t give much detail, but she had the impression of cold blue eyes, and perfectly formed lips that were upturned slightly into a smirk. As though what they were doing, the fact that she caught up and was holding the girl, was nothing more than an amusing game.

“Interesting,” the girl said.

Her voice held such a mesmerising quality that Lightfoot blanked out for a moment. Then, the girl slipped her hand out of Lightfoot’s grasp.

How?

She had the impression that the wrist she held thickened for a moment, then the limb was just retracted.

“Catch me again?” came the teasing voice.

‘Is she taunting or flirting?’ Lightfoot thought furiously even as she felt heat rise up to her cheeks.

She used the captured momentum to shoot towards the girl, but with a giggle, hooded girl spun around Lightfoot’s grasp, evading her by another hair’s breadth. She managed to preserve the captured momentum, losing only a hundredth of its potency because of her surprise. Building it back up shouldn’t be hard, but it was uncomfortably close to the maximum her perception could bear. At one point, her momentum charge would propel her faster than she could react and she’d be lucky to survive a crash.

“HAH!” Soundwave yelled a blast, but hooded girl was ready for it this time. She spun around the sonic burst, and the ground behind her cratered with the blast. Unfortunately, Soundwave couldn’t manipulate sound that didn’t originate from his body easily.

They danced around each other. There was no other way to describe it since even to Lightfoot, their movements felt as if they were choreographed. She was sure hooded girl reacted to her attacks a fraction of a second before theft happened, furthering that illusion. Ten minutes later and nothing else happened other than both she and Soundwave were winded. Hooded girl looked quite fresh, and it looked like she finally decided that the game was over.

“Well, that was fun,” Hooded girl said. “Ah, I didn’t kill that woman, just to be clear. There’s a daemonic ritual circle in one of the storage units over there. I tracked the body here and got rid of what came out. Bye, now!”

“Wait!” Lightfoot yelled, prompting the hooded girl to stop and look back. After that short speech, she’d already pulled nearly fifty paces away from her. “Who are you?” Lightfoot blushed at the inadvertent wistful tone.

The hooded girl tilted her head, and for some reason, Lightfoot could see the girl’s lips smile. “Yuriko.”

Yuriko jumped back, except her leap covered nearly a hundred paces. She landed easily, looked pointedly to her left, waved cheekily at her, then ran off so quickly that nothing was left except for a puff of dust.

“Well, that happened.” Soundwave grunted. He’d goneback to the corpse and pulled out his smartphone to make a call. “She said in the mini-storage place?”

“Yeah,” Lightfoot muttered, still dazed from the abrupt end of the encounter. “I’ll be back.”

She used the captured momentum to cross the distance, added to it by burning another charge she took from the abrupt braking of the van earlier. Only when she landed next to the spot Yuriko indicated did she take back the momentum charge. It regained the lost percentage she burned earlier, but had not increased beyond it.

She landed close to where Yuriko indicated and it didn’t take much to see the creature’s remains. Part of it was disintegrating into ashes, but the core part, the bones and tougher muscle she assumed, was still there. Lightfoot took her phone, turned on the flash, and snapped pictures from every angle she could. The thing looked like it would disintegrate soon.

“What have you found?” Soundwave’s voice reached her ear and she turned to him to reply.

“Alien corpse. A daemon, if what she said tracks.”

“Police detectives should be here in a few minutes,” Soundwave said. “I’ll look for the storage unit, stay here?”

“Alright.”

Lightfoot stared at the corpse for a long moment, before hearing Soundwave again. He had a sheepish tone to his voice and she couldn’t help but smirk, “The storage place is some distance away. Need a ride.”

“Then we should wait for the cops first.”

It didn’t take that long for the cops to arrive, and while they were photographing the corpses, Soundwave and Lightfoot snuck away to check the storage unit. They found it easily enough, though they had to hop the fences.

“She said her name was Yuriko?” Soundwave asked, “Hmmm, that seems like it’s ancient Aralian, isn’t it?”

“Maybe?” Lightfoot muttered. “Western Astoria, I think in Rigana, has communities with the same naming convention.”

“You think she’s from the far west?”

“Who knows?”

“Ah, there it is,” Soundwave muttered as they entered the open storage unit. It was empty save for the black circle in the middle. It was painted with runescript, but Lightfoot didn’t know what it said.

“How many of these have they found so far?” Soundwave commented as he took pictures and called to report to the detectives.

“Who knows?” Lightfoot said absently.

“Hey.” Soundwave poked her side.

“What?”

“Crushing? It thought you liked men.”

“I do!”

“Heh.”

“Shut up!”

_____________

Yuriko hummed as she returned to her scooter and drove back to her apartment. A smile graced her lips as she pulled her hood off and thought to stow her hoodie. They might have reported her attire, but she thought driving in the cold with only a crop top would draw even more attention.

The scooter helmet only covered the top of her head and left her face bare, so it was not enough to conceal, but hopefully, it shouldn’t really matter. She did keep an eye on the security cameras and made sure she didn’t run across them with anything other than human speed.

While the death of the woman had been lamentable, she had come across the daemonfyre whiff too late. There was nothing she could have done, and she wondered if the ritual had been conducted willingly by the victim too. That still left and unknown perpetrator, and she was slightly worried for Lilibeth’s friends.

That being said, that Altered pair looked cute and it had been fun to fight and flirt…

Ancestors, she was really backed up, wasn’t she?

It was time to return to Dragon Fall City and grab her lovers for some intimacy.

As her incarnation body travelled back to her apartment, her true body stood up from her meditative trance. Fluffington barked sleepily, but that was fine. She grabbed him and placed him back inside the backpack, leaving just his snoozing head out of the flap.

The tunnels were littered with evaporating antibodies as well as a couple of large Hunter-killers. Hmmm, the problem was that she didn’t know the way to get out. She’d been turned around, and some of the tunnels had collapsed behind her. Oh well.

She drew her Anima around herself, shaped it into a spinning drill, oriented herself to where she felt Heron and Gwendith were, then charged into the earth.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep