Solitaire POV: Day 78

  Current Wealth: 229 gold 37 silver 6 copper

  The cunt lunged for me, and I sidestepped. My fist came down for the base of her skull, but she was faster than me, rolling out of the way, springing back up to her feet. I could’ve tried to grapple her, would have done so a few weeks ago, but now I had better options. I extended my thoughts to the air, started feeling for bound molecules and particular elements, drawing them together.

  Her attack came fast, but I’d gotten a lot of practice at my power since first discovering it. The globule of nitroglycerine was already clinging to my fingertip by the time she came in. I flicked it off with one move, dove back with another, and there was no dodging the droplet at such close range. It caught her stomach and detonated loud and hard enough to cut timber in half, sending her stumbling, then falling as her balance gave. I didn’t check on the body, just tried to make more of the stuff.

  By the time she was up, I’d wetted my hands with tiny little patches of explosive condensation. Gathered them together again, making a larger drop this time, and flicked it just as the last. This one caught her between the eyes, and by the time the explosion cleared there was little left of her head.

  I turned, grinning, to see how Shango’s fight was doing. But life is a cruel bitch, and plans are made to be fucked up. I could see at a glance that we’d made a mistake. My friend was on the ground, scrambling back from our enemy, hands wide and jaw tight with pain as blood ran down his side. The bowman- now without a bow- held some big length of metal in his hands, something I might’ve called rebar if we’d been back on earth.

  The tedious matter of categorisation would have to wait, because it was about two seconds away from opening up my friend’s skull and spraying the surrounding area with the world’s second most remarkable brain matter. I closed in to keep that from happening, conjuring again.

  Nitro was a no-go, not with Shango so close to the enemy, but I racked my memory for a potentially suitable replacement.. It didn't take long for my horrible, awful, nasty, sexual hunting hound of a brain to think something up.

  H2SO4 + H2O2, all things I had in abundance around me, save the Sulphur. I fortunately had a bit of that on my person- some residue from working on the explosives, clinging to my clothes and patches of my skin. I’d meant to shower, hadn’t gotten round to it with everything happening with Velaharo. Now it looked like that slip-up might save us.

  I mixed my chemicals as I rushed the guy, conjuring and holding them in the air ahead of me, then splashing the resultant concoction across our enemy’s head. I missed his eyes, sadly enough, but his hair and scalp got doused. For a moment only confusion coloured his face, then I saw the pain start.

  Piranha solution. It’s a particularly strong kind of acid, the one responsible for how most kids think all acids behave, stripping meat from bone in under a minute, melting things into nothing. It didn’t seem to be working as quickly as I’d have thought, and its effects stopped after only a few layers of skin were removed. Did magical resilience help ward off the corrosion of acid? It made sense if so.

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  Either way, the man didn’t exactly look much better off.

  His head was a gory, bloody, soggy mess, hair clinging tight against a ruined scalp and slick with foamy blood, left bubbling by the gaseous products of the particular reaction that had stripped him of his flesh. With an expression of pain clinging to his face as tightly as steel clamps, his entire body spasmed with the agony of it.

  I would’ve killed to hit him with another splash, killed even more to get the next one in his face, but I’d more or less exhausted my sulphuric reserves, and he was recovering dangerously quick. I had to be realistic, compromise with the simple pragmatics of my situation. Besides, there was more than one way to skin a human.

  As I moved, I rushed past one of the fallen Fuckers I’d fought already, the idiot with the spear. I snatched the splintered tip of his weapon up off the ground next to him while he was busy bleeding everywhere, twisting it in my grip and holding it like a dagger. The bowman had recovered already, by then, but it didn’t faze me. I’d hurt him, now I just needed to kill him. I started work on another batch of nitro, exhaling the necessary ingredients out into my palm as I conjured it.

  He recovered before I could finish, lunging with his bar and thrusting it at my face like a rapier. I darted to one side, but the metal twisted after me, clipping my head and bouncing off with a dull clang. I felt the sound more than heard it, noise echoing around in my skull as I stumbled back.

  My arms rose with the nitro ready, then went wide as my legs gave out. A sudden dizziness took me, one I recognised instantly for the nausea of serious concussion, and I dropped to my knees as the explosive went wide.

  The bowman was on me instantly, bar raised high and ready to bring down. It was only the shimmering air between my head and the cold metal that spared me, the atmospheric barrier deflecting the impact and forcing a wince on the man’s face as his joints rebelled. He took a step back, thrown off-balance by the unexpected impediment, and I knew there’d not be another chance than that.

  Shango had saved me once, but I saw his shield fray and come apart before the next swing fell. It was all me now.

  My shoulder caught the bowman hard, but my tackle was ill-judged. Balance still escaped me, slipping through my fingers like something slick with oil, and he was clearly practised in holding himself up. We shifted for a few moments and filled the air with scraping leather as our boots scuffed and dragged against the stone, then my momentum ran out and we both stopped.

  I was practised in holding myself up, too, and I was practised in what came after you managed to do it. We’d stopped, he was free to shift his centre of gravity, and I was still hunched over leaning against his gut. That meant I had about a second before an elbow came down into the back of my neck. If he was as strong as me, that would be dangerous. If he was stronger it would be death.

  Well, I had about a second, and I’ve never been the sort to take injury well. I used my precious moments to lift the man’s shirt and sank my teeth deep into the flesh of his stomach.

  His body was lean and toned, barely an ounce of fat on it. That was good, it meant there was less in the way of me reaching all the delicate muscle beneath. My teeth ground together and my head thrashed side to side like a pitbull in an orphanage, vision turning red with adrenaline, hearing becoming so distant that the man’s horrified screams seemed like a shouted message from far below.

  The bastard couldn’t move, his body was being held tight and still by its own pained convulsions, and he didn’t have the strength required to dislodge me with whatever simple motions he could’ve made. Moment by moment I tunnelled deeper through his belly, drawing close to the more vital meat below.

  It was Shango’s voice that told me something was wrong, just an instant before it killed me.

  “Get back!” He cried, and I did, lunging away from the man on instinct- trusting my friend’s warning more than whatever sensory input my body had taken. The iron bar caught my right shoulder and broke it, turning me in the air, flipping me one way and the other. I rolled, jarring the limb and finding the world disappeared beneath a curtain of searing, hallucinatory pain.