The man in the robe dropped the two men he was holding and flew up to meet the other man. “So you are the local protector?” he said, flying up in front of the Colonel.
“Colonel Jacob Adams.” the protector said, “And what’s your name?”
“Part of this nation’s military, or some local sect?”
“The nation’s military. Your name, sir?”
The robed man sighed. “Xiu Quo Li. But you may call me Blood Red Scorpion.”
Adams nodded. “Very well, Scorpion. Do you mind telling me what you are doing here?”
“If you must abbreviate my Dao Name, I prefer Blood. As for your question, I came to explore this new world. You have only recently started to Awaken to the true state of things, and on such worlds there are great opportunities. I have come to find those opportunities and exploit them, to offer the crumbs I can spare to your people or people from my world, depending on who will cooperate. Allow me to operate without interference and you will benefit. Stand in my way, and you and your people will suffer.”
“I can’t allow you to harm my people.” responded Adams. “But I have no intention of stopping you if you follow the local laws.”
Blood scoffed. “Mortal laws mean nothing to me, and you can’t stop me. I am the new law. Do as I demand, or you will be eliminated.”
Colonel Adams sighed, the prepared himself for combat. “Then I guess I have no choice.”
Blood laughed deeply. “Do you really think someone at the fourth realm can stand against someone near the end of the fifth? At best you will survive a few blows, if I don’t use my best attack.”
“We’ll have to see, then. Do you intend to abide by the laws of this nation, or do you intend to continue attacking its people?”
Blood smiled deviously and pointed at a group of civilians. In less than a second a burst of red light left his finger and hit in the middle of them. A massive explosion formed where it struck, and the people there exploded. There was no fire, but the shear kinetic force of the blast caused them to separate into hundreds of pieces.
Adams reacted immediately. “For multiple accounts of murder of unarmed civilians and terrorist acts, you are under arrest. Now stand down and…” Adam’s words were cut off as Blood jumped towards him and planted a fist in his stomach, sending him flying over a hundred meters away.
---
I, of course had no idea what the two men in the sky were saying, but something about this situation didn’t seem right. “Guys, I think we need to put up the barrier.” I said. I started channeling my qi to act as the leader of the formation and, after they realized what I had said, the others did their part of the formation as well, calling out what part of it they were taking before doing so.
A few seconds later the robed man pointed his finger at some people near us and there was a flash of red light before the sidewalk exploded, sending pieces of people everywhere. Several people screamed or grew sick at the sight of body parts and viscera flying around, but I focused even harder. If he can do that, this barrier was our best hope of survival, even if it can’t take a direct hit.
A severed leg landed on top of it and slid down the barrier as I saw Adams get punched hard enough to send him flying, creating a loud explosion sound. “Get as many civilians in here as possible. Marcus, can you start teaching them to reinforce it?” Marcus was one of the few people who didn’t yet have a role in the barrier formation, and had experience teaching people formations.
“Yeah, sure.” he said, and started leaving the barrier to lead others back. This barrier could filter what it allowed through. Unlike the Gathering level one, which simply blocked everything except light from passing through, including sound, this one depended on the leader’s interpretation of what was a threat to whitelist items. If the leader thought something was safe, it would be added to the whitelist and allowed to pass. Some barriers used a blacklist instead, choosing what to block, but that could usually be maneuvered around and often let attacks through simply because the leader didn’t know about the threat.
As people came into the barrier, I was forced to expand it to accommodate them. It got weaker in proportion to its surface area, so Liza, who was carrying the fliers with the instructions for tomorrow’s social, told Marcus to come and get the fliers off of her, as she was doing her best to keep the barrier up. He grabbed them out of her backpack and started passing them out. The other Coordinators had found a role reinforcing the barrier and as Marcus handed out the sheets some of the civilians joined in as well.
Soon, as the two men in the air fought each other, the Colonel taking most of the hits, I had managed to reinforce the barrier to the point where a small car going at city street speeds of 30 kph wouldn’t be able to break it if it impacted, but I felt like I could push the performance further. Unfortunately, I was below the halfway mark in my qi reserves. “I’m going to try and make it stronger, but this might take a good bit more qi than we currently have.” I said.
Before the others could respond a tree from the park flew over and hit the shield. The area outside was closer to a hurricane or tornado than a normal day, and I knew that anyone out there would likely have already died. That meant that I would have to work harder to keep us alive. I sent a small amount of my qi into the ground and had it start to pull in more qi. I knew that the bracelets the people around me wore relied on the qi in the air to recharge so, while I could temporarily boost the barrier by drawing it in, that would deplete the qi in the air and cause their regeneration to slow.
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Once I had the energy, I cycled it, then sent out a fraction of it to repeat the process before sending the rest of it into the barrier. This was essentially what I did when I gathered qi to grow my dantian, but the chi was sent into a technique instead of the dantian. Still, the action distracted me from the barrier and, when a flying street light hit the barrier and I started feeling a strong wind, I realized the problem and started putting everything into repairing and reinforcing it. By then, though, my dantian had taken over the job of drawing in the qi just like it had during the meditation.
Eventually I reached the point where even an 18 wheeler hitting it at highway speeds of 100kph wouldn’t fully break the barrier, but the storm outside had gotten worse. I started quickly considering ways to reinforce it further. The people had almost completely exhausted their qi reserves and all except some of the coordinators were now only sending out only what they regenerated through their bracelets. So increasing the energy wasn’t an option. In reinforcing it before I had searched for all of the flaws and weak points I could, but I was now fixing them as quickly as the barrier was being damaged. The Leader was the only one that could direct the qi into correcting flaws, but the five of the inner ring might be able to fix damage.
“Inner ring, do you guys remember how to repair the damage from your position?”
I think I saw one of them nod, but when they realized I could barely see them from my angle they spoke up. “I do.” said three of them, but the other two didn’t.
“Ok, then, try and instruct the other two. I can barely repair the damage the barrier is taking fast enough.” By this time even the coordinators had mostly depleted their qi and only Liza, a guy named Gabriel that stocked shelves, and myself had any qi reserves left, all of us in the Condensing realm but at ten percent or less on our reserves.
A minute later I started feeling that some of the holes were being mended without me focusing on them. They weren’t getting repaired as well or as quickly as I could, but that was a limitation of the inner ring position and not the members themselves.
Just as I thought we were starting to make progress I noticed that furniture and potted plants were starting to hit the top of the barrier along with several pets. I looked up to see that the apartment building beside us was at about a thirty degree angle and was rapidly falling in our direction. “Brace for Impact!” I called and everyone put everything they had left into the barrier. Ten seconds later the building landed on it and everyone inside felt the weight of the building pressing down on our minds through the qi we had placed in the barrier, the amount we were each supporting being proportional to the amount of qi we put into it.
‘Think Kev, think.” I said to myself. There had to be a way to reinforce the barrier. The building was starting to crumble away around us, breaking out interior walls so that more of it was touching the ground, so the force was lessening, but we wouldn’t be able to hold out until it could support its own weight. Some of the civilians were already passing out from the strain, and several more were in pain or bleeding from their noses.
That’s when I realized something from when I had to expand the barrier. The strength of the barrier was proportional to the surface area. “4 pi R squared.” I said.
“What?” asked Liza, the strain of repairing the over-stressed barrier apparent in her voice.
“The formula for the surface area of a sphere. This barrier is a hemisphere, and the strength of the barrier is proportional to the square of the radius, because of that shape.”
“So?” she asked, annoyance entering her voice.
“So, everyone needs to get closer to us. The smaller we can make the barrier, the stronger it will become. If we can cut the radius in half, it will be four times as strong.”
Upon hearing this, the people started moving in towards me. Because they didn’t all move at the same time they were in the wrong position, which started to destabilized the barrier. Marcus stopped them and started having everyone take one synchronized step in at a time. This allowed the barrier to maintain its strength as they moved, and eventually we were standing too close to each other for comfort, but the barrier was around 13 times stronger and the building had collapsed enough that it could support most of its weight.
Now that the barrier had grown strong enough and the building kept out all of the flying debris, we were able to take a bit of a break. Everyone still had to channel their qi into the barrier, but the five people in the inner ring were able to take turns making repairs and I could use only half of my attention repairing the worst of them.
“How long do you think the battle is going to continue?” Liza asked me as she fought to stay awake from the mental exhaustion.
I pulled out my cell phone and texted her a meditation for Mental rest. She should be able to manage that and feeding the barrier at the same time. “It might be over already for all I know. I can’t risk trying to extend my senses to find out right now, though. All the concentration I can spare is on the barrier.”
Liza opened up the file and nodded. “Thanks. I’ll try it.” She read for a few seconds before continuing. “In that case, we should probably think about how long it will take us to get dug out. Disaster relief has gotten faster, but I doubt they can move this much debris in less than 24 hours.”
“We should probably estimate 48 or 72 just to be on the safe side.” I said.
“I don’t think we can hold out that long, though. As strong as the barrier is now, we aren’t on the verge of it breaking anymore, but I doubt we can keep it up for more than eight hours.”
“I can probably only handle six, and with me being the leader, if I pass out it will rapidly collapse.”
“Then what do we do?”
I thought for a few minutes. Everyone was sitting down from the exhaustion, but the barrier was still over two meters tall in most places. “We could shrink the barrier again. Everyone in the inner ring put their back to me, the next ring put their back to them, etc, until we form four or five rings, all facing out towards the barrier. That should let us drastically shrink the barrier again.”
“And the need for sleep? Most people can’t pull consecutive all-nighters, even with qi.”
“The technique I texted you will deal with most of the issues of not sleeping. They’ll have to sleep eventually, but they should be able to buy enough time with it that they won’t doze off until after we’re rescued.”
---
A few minutes earlier:
Colonel Adams hit the ground and rolled before forcing himself to stand up. The other man casually floated over. “Do you still think you can stand up to me?” Blood asked. For the last five minutes he had been beating the man in front of his without taking any damage in return, even when the man managed to hit him.
Adams knew that he couldn’t win the fight, especially with his right arm being shattered, but he had to keep fighting until backup got here at least. If he didn’t this man would continue to attack innocent civilians. He had already used three different techniques for boosting his strength or other statistics, but none of them had allowed him to keep up with his enemy. The man was just too strong compared to him.
“I will give you one more chance.” said Blood, looking bored. “Submit, and your death will be painless.”
“Fuck you.” said Adams.
“I’m not interested in men, so I must reject your offer.” responded Blood.
Adams considered correcting his assumption, but then decided against it. The misunderstanding had bought him a few seconds, so what did it matter if the enemy thought he was trying to bribe him with sexual favors?
Adams had one trick left. “Blood Burn” he said, and a red aura surrounded his body as he channeled qi into his blood vessel meridians in such a way as to destroy the red blood cells but receive a boost to his qi pressure. He burst forward into the air, moving almost as fast as Blood had before the battle began, and swung with a left hook. It landed on Blood’s cheek and his head turned slightly.
“You actually managed to hurt me.” said Blood in surprise before raising his hand. “Congratulations.” He gave Adams a backhand slap and Adams flew back into the ground, leaving a small crater.
A few seconds later a swirling mass of qi formed beside Adams and a man in a dress uniform and a green beret which appeared to be in his early forties stepped out of it, though the man was actually over one hundred years old.
“Admiral Lindstrom.” Adams forced himself to say before coughing, something fleshy coming up with the blood. “You’ll have to forgive me for not saluting. I can’t move my arms right now.”
The Early Nascent Navy admiral knelt down and patted Adams on the shoulder. “Stand down, soldier. I’ll take over this battle now.”
Blood flew down so that he was barely two meters above the ground. “Finally, someone who might actually be able to put up a good fight. Though I have to wonder why you waited so long. If you took much longer I would have beaten you man to death.”
“I needed to call a few friends.” said the Admiral. He stood up and four other portals opened up, and from each stepped a different man. One of the men looked much like Lindstrom, but wore an RAF uniform. One was an Asian man in a robe and carrying prayer beads of some sort. One was a larger shirtless man, over two meters tall and with enough muscle that a body builder would be jealous. Then there was a middle Eastern man in a business suit.
“Seems you’re in a bit of a pickle.” said the man from the RAF in a Scottish accent. “Luckily, though, we were free to help you out.”
