by David Burke
When he released the spinning blades, the amount of force behind them was intense. The shield couldn’t stand up to so many attacks all at once and when Jay passed out, it was only because he could see that the cyborg was cut up into hundreds of pieces.
Chapter 26- Enemies from Within
Jay woke up as he was being jostled around by a number of hands. He felt healing energy striving to fix him and immediately pushed his own natural regeneration up to level four. Still something didn’t feel right. He kept his eyes closed and tried to breathe deeply. He needed to focus.
Turning his Life Sense inward he noticed the problem almost immediately. There was a gaping wound in his gut. At least he wasn’t feeling any pain. He had to assume that he owed that to Emma.
The wound was not just physical, but it was a disruption of the natural processes of his body. Worse, it was spreading, eating away at the edges of the injury like a cancer. Healthy cells were being drained of their vitality.
It was almost as though life force had a quantifiable energy. Whatever the weapon had done to him, it had not just disintegrated his cells but also accelerated the decay of the cells all around it. The other effect was that it seemed to interfere with the pathways of energy that he had noticed inside himself earlier. He was far from understanding any of this but knew it was bad.
The spread was being slowed by Huong’s healing. Her power attempted to regenerate his cells, but she was losing. Even after he ramped up his own regeneration up to maximum, it was still not keeping up.
Then he heard Jasmine’s voice saying, “Kenzie, I told you to get in there and help heal him.”
The icy girl answered back with true terror in her voice, “I told you I reached out to touch his wound. Whenever I heal, I pull out the harm. That is the only way I can describe it. It works best with anything inflamed. This is not like that at all. I’m scared that either my power won’t help at all, it will worsen his condition, or it will transfer whatever is doing this to him into me.”
Jay felt a swell of emotion coming off of Jasmine. She was clearly trying to push her will onto the other girl. He thought she was right and that it would likely hurt her to heal him based on the little he knew about her powers. So he opened his eyes and said, “No, don’t make her do it. She is right. It is more likely that she will either worsen my condition or injure herself.”
Jasmine’s voice sounded like she was lecturing a particularly slow child. “Jay, you aren’t thinking clearly now. We all owe our lives to you. She needs to do her part to help save our savior.”
“Well if she owes her life to me, then I don’t want her to waste it by doing something that may hurt more than it helps. I could use Daphne to amplify my regeneration rate though,” Jay retorted.
“As you wish.”
Suddenly, Amelia and the rest of the team were near his head and he heard them each asking what they could do. Mia said, “I’m sharing Kinesis with Huong to improve her healing.”
“It’s too bad you can’t shape change to heal,” Jessie said.
An idea ran through Jay’s mind at that point. “I could kiss you, Jessie.”
“Uh, I never wanna say ‘no’ to that, but maybe we should save your life first,” she said back to him.
“I think you gave me a way to save myself. But it is gonna take a bunch of us working together.”
Jasmine kneeled down by him. “Tell me who you need and I will get everyone organized.”
He didn’t have time to fight with her and even though she was still trying to take control with his life on the line, he decided she probably was the best for getting everyone organized. “Okay, I am going to need Huong, Daphne, Mia, Ava, Emma, and Madison. Oh and everyone else should back up. This may be slightly dangerous.”
Jasmine replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll save you.” Then she started shouting orders. The rest of his team moved away and those he had asked for were around him within a few seconds. Jasmine was nothing if not efficient.
“Everyone is here. Now what do you want us to do?” she asked.
“I need Daphne to augment Huong’s healing because I am going to have to turn my own regeneration off to conserve energy. Don’t try to regrow tissue as much as just try to slow the spread of the decay.”
Huong and Daphne both nodded as the former said, “Yes my love.”
“I am going to do the next part. I have a skill that I don’t use very often called Body Modification. I am going to use it to try to expand the wound. I will be trying to separate from my body as thin a layer of tissue as possible but it is going to require ripping myself up even more. So, I will be counting on Emma to stop the pain so that I can focus.”
“You could kill yourself, if you damage your organs too much to be healed,” Huong said.
“Yes, but if I lose the battle to this cellular decay, I am definitely going to die.”
None of them seemed happy, but they weren’t going to argue with him. “Then I will need Madison to lighten the mass of the tissue as much as possible. I am hoping that you can make it lighter than air, since it is a very bad idea for anyone to touch it,” Jay said.
Jay glanced from side to side until he saw Mia. For someone so tall, she could certainly disappear into a group. “Mia, I need you to share Formation with me, because that will boost my Body Modification skill. I need it to be as powerful as possible. I’ve never really used it like this before.”
An excited voice started speaking way too fast, “Okay, like what do you need me to do. They said you asked for me. Like I don’t see what I can do to help, but I came. How can I like help? I’d really like to be able to help. I mean you just saved us all, again. So it’d be like really cool if I could like help you out. Like saving the savior.”
Jay held in a sigh. From the little interaction he had had with Ava, she was just as beautiful as all the rest, but a little hyperactive. “You have the most important job of all. I need you to dispose of the material after Madison floats it up away from me.”
“How would I do that? Like, didn’t you just say that it would be dangerous to touch?” she asked.
“Yes, but you make extra-dimensional portals right?”
“Oh you mean my holes. Yeah, I can make holes in the air, but I don’t know where they lead to.”
“That’s fine as long as it isn’t here. Can you do that? Can you open one of your holes to catch the stuff?” Jay asked.
“Sure easy peasy. Happy to help.”
Jasmine spoke up then, “Okay everyone should know their job now. Let us know when you are ready to begin, Jay.”
Again, trying not to fight her, Jay just said, “Okay, on three. One, two, three.”
Jay felt the surge of connection with Mia as his Formation stat once again shot up by 40 points. He used a combination of Life Sense and Body Modification to start cutting away the strips of his own body. It was disconcerting enough that he almost lost his concentration. He tried to think of it as a body piercing but that didn’t help. Body piercings weren’t six-inch holes in your gut.
Then as Madison’s power took effect, and the pieces started to float up, it became surreal. He wasn’t in pain even though he was literally dissecting himself. As soon as he started to cut away tissue, it would float up into the air. He just had to focus.
The minutes dragged on and he felt both his concentration and his PSI reserves being tested. This was far from the flashiest thing he had used his powers for but it was definitely the most precise. That in and of itself seemed to place an exponential factor on the drain.
After checking for the third time without finding any more of the necrotic tissue, he started pouring his Stamina’s full power into Regeneration and combined with the efforts from Huong and Daphne began to watch the tissue literally grow back in front of his eyes. It was disconcerting but strangely fascinating. Perhaps it was due to the fact that Emma had his nerves so deadened that he might as well have been watching it happen to someone else.
He noticed a continued
drain on both his Stamina and PSI. To his vision under Life Sense he saw the network of channels through which the unidentified energy in his body moved. Everything was being restored to normal, but he was almost completely empty of all his strength. The last thing he heard before passing out again was Jasmine saying, “Everyone get back from him.”
When Jay awoke, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed but the area around him was in complete disarray. Everywhere that he looked there were girls scattered about on the ground. Some conscious but many of them unconscious. The ones who were awake sported a wide variety of injuries ranging from broken bones and jagged cuts to burnt or frozen flesh. Many were crying in pain.
He immediately jumped up to his feet. His drive to protect them taking over beyond any concerns for his own wellbeing. First, he had to locate his team members. His anger surged as he saw all the team but Meikiyo unconscious on the ground and clearly worse for wear. Even gentle Huong the healer was going to need some healing of her own.
As for Meikiyo, she was standing with her flame sword drawn and held out in front of her like a noble samurai of olden times. Her hair was a brilliant orange flame rather than its normal midnight black. Opposite her was a topless Jasmine holding up her hands and trying to reason with the quite literally fiery little Japanese girl.
“Isn’t that for Jay to decide? Do you own him?” Jasmine asked.
“No more than he owns me, but that doesn’t mean that you will lay a hand on him,” Meikiyo responded.
“It’s not like he wouldn’t enjoy It.”
“What you are proposing is tantamount to rape,” Meikiyo yelled back. Her back was to him, so she hadn’t seen him pop up. While Jasmine clearly had and made a point of showing off her half-naked figure to full effect.
In that moment, Jay hated himself because as dire as the situation was he couldn’t help but be attracted to her. Her body was exactly like he had dreamed about which again made him think that future him must have been in a relationship with Jasmine. That only added to his confusion about what to do now. That and he could feel the waves of emotion rolling off of her, enticing him to see her as the most desirable thing in the world.
He reached out telepathically to Meikiyo, hoping that it wouldn’t break her concentration. “I’m here. How can I help?”
Disciplined as she was, Meikiyo’s sword dropped just a fraction of an inch. In that instant, Jasmine’s hand shot out in a palm strike. She was nowhere near close enough to reach the fiery girl standing between her and Jay, but a fanged tentacle suddenly burst forth from her open palm. It latched onto Meikiyo before she could respond.
Jay took in the entire scene before him. He saw another similar tentacle lying on the ground seared as if by a flaming sword. The one that latched onto Meikiyo bit into her with four short but sharp fangs. Almost immediately the flames in her hair began guttering in and out of existence as if she struggled to maintain her power. She dropped to her knees and the sword in her hands winked out of existence.
Reflexively, Jay lashed out with a rapidly summoned PSI blade and cut the end of the tentacle off. He instantly dispelled the blade and caught Meikiyo before she could hit the ground. The remaining tentacle slithered back into Jasmine’s hand as she screeched out in pain.
Jay set Meikiyo down before standing back up and looking at Jasmine. “What have you done?”
“Nothing, my mate. You are meant to be mine. It is destined. I am almost past the third threshold. I am the only one fit for you. We shall be the new Adam and Eve. Our children shall rule over this new world, such as it is.”
“You can’t treat people like this,” Jay replied.
“Of course I can. They only are here to obey us. I’ve been draining energy from these pawns from the very beginning.”
“If you can’t understand how wrong this is, then you leave me no choice,” Jay said.
Anger burned through Jay, protecting him from the tug of her emotions. He was furious and yet didn’t trust himself to stand there staring at her. He just couldn’t take the chance. Still killing her outright, without knowing exactly what had happened seemed a rush to judgment.
He opted for what he hoped would be a middle ground. Instantly his strength and speed hit maximum and burst forward before she could say more than a single syllable. His open hand hit her across the back of the head and she instantly lost consciousness. Jay caught her as she was falling and lowered her to the ground without further injury. He hoped he hadn’t caused her permanent injury, but it was a risk that he had to take.
Chapter 27- Passing Judgment
After that he went to Meikiyo and woke her gently. She seemed weak but otherwise unharmed. Even the small puncture wounds were healing with her passive regeneration. When her eyelids opened, she started and her entire body jerked, until she realized that he was holding her against him. Then the smile that lit up her face made him feel all warm and tingly inside just as he lost himself in the deep pools of her eyes, promising all the inscrutable mysteries which a woman was.
“Oh, I’m so glad you are safe. Did you manage to kill her?”
“No, but I have incapacitated her,” Jay answered.
With that, Meikiyo bolted up to a sitting position. “She is too dangerous. We have to remove her.”
“I have her under control for now. I’m pretty sure that I fractured her skull when I knocked her out. Now what we need to do is wake up everyone else starting with the rest of the team.”
She smiled back at him. “Yes of course you are right. I will wake up my sisters on the team and you start helping the others. Okay?”
Jay had really wanted to be the one to wake up Amelia and the others, but he couldn’t deny Meikiyo anything when she looked at him like that, so he acquiesced to her request.
One by one he walked around and woke up each of the girls. It was some strange blend of gratifying, flattering, and scary how each of their faces lit up when they found him leaning over them. More than once he got kissed, but in the end he had each of them up.
It was only after he got the last one up and moving that he saw Amelia standing over Jasmine with her dagger shrouded in shadows and raised in preparation to bury it in her chest. He reached out his hand to direct a broad cone of force. It knocked her away. He hoped that it didn’t hurt her too much or there would be hell to pay.
“All of you stop. We will decide together what happens to her, but we will not kill her out of hand,” Jay yelled.
“We have to, Jay. I know you…” Jessie began.
“No, no. You don’t get to decide what I think. There are too few of us already. We can’t be killing each other.”
“Then what, Jay. She is out of control. She was going to take advantage of you. She wanted to use you to control the rest of us. Do you think she would have had the same mercy on all of us?” Amelia asked.
“I’m not saying that, but we don’t have to be her. Besides, it has to just be the chemicals in the water. Otherwise why would she be in such a rush to jump my bones? We have to remember that we are all victims here,” Jay said.
“I know why,” Meikiyo said. All eyes turned towards her. “I know why she wanted to sleep with you.”
Mia laughed. “You mean besides the obvious.”
“Not the time for jokes. This is serious,” Huong said.
Jay said, “Enough. We need to make a decision before she wakes up. I don’t know how to restrain her power.”
“Actually, I think I can help with that,” Emma said.
“What? How?” Amelia asked as she had gotten herself up off the ground.
Jay saw the ugly look that she gave him and thought there was gonna be hell to pay for knocking her over, but at least she looked mad and not hurt. He didn’t like it when she was mad but hurting her would have killed him.
“I have another skill called Intellect Fortress. I can create an entire dreamscape of sorts and it feels entirely real. I go there sometimes when the stress of all this gets to me. The point is, that I disco
vered when I am there, I can’t interact with the world around me.” Emma paused before continuing, “I had imagined that it was purely a defensive thing and that I would learn to use it like that, but I think I could take someone else in there with me. I would be able to contain her safely.”
“But you have to stay there with her?” Amelia asked.
“Until I figure it out better.”
“As much as I would like to find a way to constrain the people who are acting out, it isn’t right to ask you to be stuck in mind prison with her all the time,” Jay said.
“It’s not like I have much of anything out here for me,” Emma said. Jay couldn’t help but feel like she was asking him a question when she made that statement though.
“Yes, you are valuable and before Jasmine started this shit, we were going to invite you, actually all of you to join Team Jay,” Amelia said. “That is if you want anything to do with this big bonehead over here.” She pointed at Jay with her thumb as she said the last part.