Witness [A First Contact Romance]-COMPLETE

64. Acceptance

Earth

2017

Sparks of electricity danced across the bright blue sky in a web. Morfrain shielded himself against Vehru's attack, deflecting the strike into a high arc. With their attention solely upon each other, Rory had to move fast to take advantage of the situation.

"Really?" Morfrain called out. "You're using your Replica on me now? It can't help you defeat me. Don't draw her away from important operations for a battle you will never win."

Rory did not know enough about how the Replica worked to know just how vulnerable this would leave Vehru's operations. Certainly, much of what the Replica did must have been automated, and programs must have run independently at all times. But the more advanced processes would be affected by this distraction. Perfect.

Vehru fired another explosive beam of electricity with one hand while holding the other hand toward Morfrain, her palm shimmering as if a thick gas floated around it. Morfrain's body shook as it was pulled toward Vehru. The deployables all shot at the same time.

Something had to hit.

Morfrain cried out and unleashed what looked like a gust of wind in a perfect sphere around his body, pushing it out in all directions. The electricity slowed, but pushed through, while the shots from the deployables scattered in the wind. Morfrain twisted to the side, catching only the edge of the sparking beam. His face twisted in pain, but it didn't slow him down as he rushed Vehru. At the last second, he flew straight up instead, leaving what looked like a perfectly round, dense black orb in his place.

Vehru dove for the ground.

A powerful wind ripped at Rory and Jace, managing to knock her over and drag them both across the ground. Leaves and then branches snapped off the tree and raced toward the orb. It was sucking everything into its center.

Vehru aimed her palm and slowly the orb began to collapse, though it still dragged everything in the surroundings toward it, until finally it disappeared.

It was hard to turn away from the commanders as they flew toward one another again, their hits as loud as thunder and powerful enough to shake the ground. Rory had to act now though.

Jace had loaded all of the data he brought onto her handmods and Theo had taken the box of handmods she had built with him. The technology in the ones Jace had brought her would not hold up against the Replica for long, but it could get the job done for a short time if she used the stealth mode. Even though Rory could not do nearly as much as Trin had been able to with such functions, hacking her phone to get connected to a more secure network connection was easy enough. Keeping the Replica out, now that was a different matter. She'd ping locations from dozens of countries to hide the best she could. Even with her efforts, the most time she could buy would be five minutes, and more likely only one.