?

  Even with the assistance of his armor, I found the dark skinned raindrop to be weaker than I was by a fairly significant margin. Of course, I couldn’t take so much control of Over-Surge drones that I could order them to race to their deaths for my amusement. So, I suppose we all have our own strengths, mine just happen to be superior to everyone else's.

  He screamed as he scrabbled at my spear that I was forcing into his stomach. The raindrop grasped it with all six arms,his pistols stupidly abandoned in his haste to protect himself. If he'd shot at me, I might have been forced to abandon my efforts to disembowel him. Instead, he chose to pit his strength against mine, something I would never recommend. I will admit that the leverage his mechanical limbs could create, along with the way his feet scrabbled backwards, managed to stop me from getting my spear all that deep. A fact that wouldn't have mattered when I drove him off the top of the building in just a few seconds. Unluckily for me, I didn’t get those few seconds.

  As it turned out, the circle of light that now lit both me and the raindrop was being projected from an armored car flying above us. It was larger and a lot more box-shaped than Fabio’s Infinite Crown. If I truly had to compare the two vehicles, the one flying above me was a plow horse, where Fabio’s was like…not a warhorse, but one you would use for racing; Lean, fast, and maneuverable. Of course, the Infinite Crown could only fit a couple of people at best; this thing above me was in the process of deploying a strike force.

  When the voice being projected from the vehicle had first boomed out, I ignored it and kept up my assault on the raindrop. I thought perhaps I would have time to finish him off before whoever was speaking could do anything. On top of that

  “Drop your weapon and lie face down on the ground!” wasn’t the sort of demand I imagine anyone gave into. It was basically asking to get executed, and that was an experience I had no intention of going through a second time. The choice was taken away from me far sooner than I had anticipated as my HUD began flashing with warnings about abilities being employed above me. It was the same lightning-based ability, but it was being deployed three times by multiple different sources.

  [Subjugation Cage]

  [Lighting Base]

  [Lethality: Low]

  One source was the class of a man I could see above who had stepped out of the hovering car and was standing in the air next to it like he was atop an invisible platform.

  The next source was a cybernetic arm belonging to another man who was leaning out the side door that the flying man had just exited. I think both of them were in some sort of identical uniform, but I didn’t have time to really tell. The third source was a big three-barreled gun that was sticking out of the bottom of the car itself.

  Now, to be clear, when I say barrel, it's not the barrel you would think. As it turns out, the tube bit at the front of a gun is actually called a barrel. There is some reason for it that Diaochan once tried to explain to me. I hadn’t listened, and I don’t think it matters for this tale of mine. What does matter is that each of those techniques that my HUD was warning me of was being fired at me.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The [Subjugation Cage] ability flew at me in the shape of a crackling blue orb a little larger than my head. If it had just been the initial volley of three, I probably could have dodged them and then finished off the spider armor raindrop. Unfortunately for me, this was not the case, and I was forced to rip my spear away from the raindrop, who was still desperately pushing against it. Feather Fall was easily yanked out of his grip, and I spun away from the first trio of crackling blue energy.

  Before I had begun to sprint away from the incoming projectiles, another pair had already been fired by the vehicle and the man leaning out the side of it. After that, they fired another duo, the flying man, who had only fired once, was descending to the roof at a rate that was faster than falling. Speaking of travel rates, the blue orbs sped through the air at a speed only marginally slower than the bullets that had been fired at me moments earlier.

  It seemed to me that with a name like Subjugation Cage, the spherical projectiles should be given a wider birth than their apparent size suggested. I usually listen to my instincts about these sorts of things, and this time I was more than glad that I had. As each orb hit the roof around, they would explode outwards in a pulse of lightning that would expand like a half-sphere and then contract immediately into a square cage of that same lightning that would remain where it had landed for longer than I stuck around to find out.

  Another two men who hadn’t fired anything at all at me leaped from the car as it dipped lower to join the flying man who had just impacted on the roof. When he did, a wave of forest green energy flew out from him in the shape of a ring for at least forty feet in all directions. Where the green wave touched, drones collapsed; they looked like nothing so much as puppets whose strings had been cut mid-performance.

  I skidded to a halt and changed direction as the energy wave flew towards me and the lightning cages deployed all around. To my annoyance, the green wave still struck me, if only just. When it did, my HUD flickered and vanished before reappearing perhaps five seconds later.

  I didn’t have time to worry about the brief vanishing of the display over my vision. I had decided it was time for Lu Bu to leave. I had defeated the pair of raindrops who had thought they could insult The Flying General without suffering his wrath. I not only had no feud with the warriors pouring out of the flying car, but I might also find myself outmatched by them. I had already seen that the man who flew was level fourteen, though his class was invisible to me.

  When the men who leaped out of the vehicle hit the roof, I noticed cybernetic legs that seemed to account for the drop onto a hard surface. Fortunately, neither of them unleashed waves of energy like the man I took to be their leader, but all three that were now on the roof with me seemed to be focused on securing the pair of injured raindrops.

  That didn’t stop the soldier leaning out of the car or the car itself from continuing to shoot at me, and now they were doing so with actual bullets, which I could only just keep enough track of to avoid. I was annoyed that I was being forced to run, and curious about how and why that force had responded to the needs of the two raindrops so quickly.

  I knew that if they were injured, the wealthy kids would unleash a beacon so this sort of thing could happen, but it was my understanding that they deployed from a base up on the sky tiers. It didn’t make sense to me that they arrived so soon during the fight between the pair and me.

  I supposed it didn’t matter right now, not when compared to my own need to escape the roof and the heavens only knew how many hired soldiers inside the car hovering above it. Once, I would have tried to bait the car to come in a little lower so that I could leap atop the vehicle and slay it like a particularly large mount. My plan for this day was almost exactly the opposite.

  Still dodging away from the attempts above to fill me with bullets, I angled myself towards one of the large holes in the roof. I had to double back and make last-minute changes to my movements for maybe ten seconds more before I slid on my knees under a hail of bullets, only to pop onto my feet and toss myself into the dark hole that evidently didn’t just lead to the floor below.

  “Diaochan,” I demanded in a move I probably should have made before leaping into the gap. “Calculate if I can survive this fall.”

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