Chapter 194

Blood on the Sand

The entire camp began to rise.

Vehicles first. Technicals and transport trucks groaning as they lifted off the sand, mounted guns twisting on their housings. Then the generators, cables snapping taut before tearing free. Solar panels. Tent poles ripping through canvas as they climbed. The prefab structures buckled and peeled apart, metal walls folding upward like pages caught in a wind. Machine gun emplacements.

Then the smaller things. Belt buckles. Armor plates. Weapons ripped from hands or carrying the hands that refused to let go. Camp beds rose with people still tangled in them, some screaming, others too stunned to make a sound. A man clinging to a mounted gun went up with the vehicle, dangling from the chassis until the metal beneath his fingers slipped free.

Most of those still on the ground froze, staring up at the impossible sight of their entire world lifting into the sky.

Alexander hung high in the air above the north side of the camp, arms still outstretched, and felt every single one of them. Hundreds of bioelectrical signatures pulsing below him like scattered embers. Hearts beating. Lungs working. Nervous systems firing with the animal panic of people who had just watched the ground betray them. People who might have families somewhere. Loved ones waiting for them to come home. Maybe even lives outside of this place that had nothing to do with cages and needles and children huddled in the cold.

He held that thought for exactly as long as it took to breathe in.

Then he clenched his fists. Everything metal began to crumple.

A distant corner of his mind registered the screaming panic. Felt the people fleeing. Sensed the superhumans responding. Too late.

He opened his fingers and dropped his hands. The real attack began.

Metal rained from the sky. Gravity and his power both accelerating it. Most of it fell indiscriminately toward the stunned militia soldiers.

Alexander narrowed his focus. He’d maintained his hold over a cluster of debris, including one of the generators, redirecting it with a powerful pulse of Metallokinesis.

The Tier 2 on the north side was sprinting across the open sand, finally awake and moving fast for a man who’d been asleep thirty seconds ago. He began to glow, burning bright against the night.

Alexander poured his Will into the generator using Animachina, empowering it as it tore through the air, trailed by hundreds of metal fragments. Whatever the Tier 2 had been about to do was interrupted when several hundred pounds of hardware hit him in the back. A single command through Technopathy, and the generator detonated with the impact.

The explosion threw sand in every direction. People nearby were caught in the blast and the debris that followed, crushed under falling metal or carved open by shrapnel. He registered them dying.

But the Tier 2 was still alive. Rolling across the sand, burning, trailing smoke and blood, surrounded by metal Alexander kept driving after him. He threw himself to his feet, slower now, limping badly, one arm hanging wrong, already glowing again.

Then a flash tore through the night and the man vanished.

He reappeared a fraction of a second later, on the far side of the camp. Near Annie and Felix.

Alexander turned away immediately. The man was injured, burning, and moving on what looked like pure adrenaline. His friends could handle it.

Of the five Tier 1s, one was already dead, signature gone dark, buried under a collapsed vehicle that had come down fast on their position during the initial rain. The others were scattered across the camp, and unlike the panicking militia, they were responding. Trying to organize and coordinate a response to the rain of death.

Alexander was already pulling streams of metal from the wreckage of the camp before the first bodies had stilled completely. It was easier now that his Control was higher, but he was still limited to wielding it like a sledgehammer.

So he did.

Wreckage lifted into the air, shaping into dense, snaking columns that twisted and accelerated as they moved across the camp. They tore through people without slowing down, tracking the bright signatures his senses had marked as superhumans. One of them had taken cover behind a sandbag emplacement. The metal punched through it like it wasn’t there.

Simultaneously, he targeted another who was running south, perhaps toward the trailers. Maybe toward where Annie and Felix were fighting. Alexander cut them off with a second stream that drove into the sand ahead of them before whipping sideways. The superhuman’s signature sputtered and died as their body broke.

The third trailer fell through a portal and disappeared to safety.

The sand around the command tent began to vibrate.

Alexander paused. The metal he’d been directing across the camp slowed as the hairs on the back of his neck prickled, every instinct sharpening at once. His focus narrowed to the center of the camp.

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The tent tore open. A man burst through the flap with sand already swirling around him in a tight, violent spiral, lifting him off the ground as he launched into the air. He screamed something at Alexander as he climbed, voice raw and full of so much hate that Alexander didn’t need a translation to understand it.

Behind him, two more figures emerged from the ruined tent. The first glanced south, toward the sounds of roaring and trumpeting and gunfire, and took off at a dead sprint. Fast. Inhumanly fast. Covering ground at a pace that would have left an Olympic sprinter in the dust.

The third crouched low, clenched his fists, and a pair of wings erupted from his back. Pristine white. Angelic. Wide as a small truck and catching the light of the fires burning across the camp. He launched himself skyward after the sand controller, rising fast.

Alexander had about half a second to process the sight of an angel ascending from the burning wreckage of a militia camp before the first grains of sand hit him. He registered the sharp biting pricks against his exposed flesh.

Power exploded out of him. Metallokinesis tore him backward across the sky at the same time he released the debris throughout the camp. Electrokinesis tightened within his Core, pumping energy across his senses as his reaction speed increased. The secondary thread of thought pulled away from the command tent, away from the trailers, and into the ring, releasing his drones.

Ten of them appeared before him, perfectly positioned, Animachina empowering them immediately. Reinforcing their quickly extending shield-blades, which were already pinging as sand ricocheted off the hardened metal alloy.

Just before the shield-blades fully extended, overlapping into a wall of metal between him and the camp, he caught a glimpse of something massive hurtling toward him. A ball of compressed sand, dense and dark, spinning fast enough that its edges blurred.

Alexander seized the drones and locked them in place.

The sand hit the barrier like a freight train. He felt the impact reverberate through the metal and deeper, a sharp tug somewhere inside his soul as he fought to hold the drones steady against the pressure. The sand ground against the shield-blades, shrieking across the alloy surface.

Then the pressure abruptly eased. The sand twisted and flowed left, streaming around the edge of his drone wall. At the same time, he sensed the winged man angling wide to the right, sweeping around to bypass the barrier from the opposite side.

Alexander sacrificed a full second to push his senses hard against both of them. Their Wills flared in response, rebuffing the intrusion the moment they felt it. Strong. Both of them.

But it was enough.

The sand controller was the more dangerous of the two. No question. But the winged man was moving too predictably to pass up. A wide, arcing approach with no feints, no variation. The kind of flight path that screamed inexperience in aerial combat. If Alexander could remove him from the fight now, he could focus entirely on the real threat.

Metallokinesis pulsed, rotating him slightly as both hands came up. Electrokinesis poured from his Core into the fully charged cybernetic arm and the gauntlet on his right, energy flooding both systems in the space between heartbeats.

He waited for one more.

Then fired.

Two lightning bolts erupted from his palms, crossing the distance in the fraction of an instant it took for the winged man to clear the edge of the drone wall. Too fast. Both struck him square in the upper chest before his wings had even finished the turn.

The blast from the cybernetic arm was the stronger of the two. It sent the man spinning, wings sparking and jerking, limbs locked in violent spasm as he tumbled out of the sky.

Alexander was already turning back the other way before the angel began to fall.

Something caught his left leg.

It wrenched him downward with enough force that his whole body jerked, his teeth snapped shut, barely missing his tongue. He instinctively released Metallokinesis before the opposing forces broke something. Wind whistled past his ears as he twisted to see what it was.

A tendril of sand. Stretching all the way from the desert floor, hundreds of feet holding shape and tension like a living thing. The range alone was staggering, but the fact that his enemy had plotted the attack while rushing into the fight like a charging bull was worse.

He focused, channeling Electrokinesis into his foot. Then, with a grunt, forced it to burst outward with a sudden flash of light.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. His Will, carried in the sparking burst of lightning, clashed with the enemy’s Will filling the sand, disrupting it enough to free him.

Metallokinesis flared. Caught his boots and gauntlet and chestplate, steadily slowing his fall.

Above him, the sand controller was descending. Riding the storm down in a sharp spiral, scarred face set with fury, tendrils of sand already peeling off in every direction. They spun out wide around Alexander’s drones, probing, testing, snaking past the shield-blades from angles the automated protocols struggled to track. The drones spun and repositioned, blades catching some of the tendrils and scattering them, but more kept coming. The man had the entire desert to draw from.

Droney’s absence made him reliant on their programming. Might even force him to manage them directly.

Alexander hung in the air, body half-horizontal, both hands raised toward the threat above him. Electrokinesis crackled between his fingers as he finished recharging the gauntlet, even if the arm had a long way to go before it was full again.

He tracked the sand controller’s descent while his drones fought to keep the attacks from reaching him, looking for an opening.

Something slammed into his back with the force of a battering ram. A point of white-hot pain punched through the muscle between his shoulder blades. Alexander’s vision went white. His concentration shattered.

There was someone behind him. Beneath him. He could feel them moving, the pressure of the blade still buried three inches in his flesh. But his senses read nothing. No bioelectrical signature. No heartbeat. No nervous system firing. Even enveloped by Will, he could still sense a vague presence from the man at the heart of the sandstorm bearing down on him.

Metallokinesis raged. Not with the controlled oscillations of flight, but a return to his original attempts at mobility. Power tore him free of the blade, wrenching him sideways and hurling him away so hard that the muscles in his own limbs protested at the sudden change in velocity.

As he spun through the air, he saw the attacker.

The angel. Except it wasn’t. Not anymore. The man was three inches taller than he had been, broader across the shoulders, and his skin had gone dark and leathery from the neck down to where his shredded shirt hung in strips around his waist. The pristine white wings were larger now, the feathers thicker, edged with something silver. Blood dripped from fingers that had fused together into hardened, sharpened bone.

Alexander’s blood.

The thing that used to be a man opened a mouth now filled with jagged teeth and screamed.

Alexander realized, almost absentmindedly, that the fourth trailer had disappeared.

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