Outer Olympus

Outer Olympus: Chapter 30

The white hot tip of Hope's psyblade hovered an inch from Rune's collarbone, radiating heat and death into the air. All Hope had to do was fully extend her arm, an effortless motion, and Rune would be impaled, flesh and bone melted away in an agonizing instant.

Rune was fairly soundly beaten. Her mind raced for the opportunity to turn the situation around; she had escaped from Hope before, but always by the skin of her teeth. The obvious answer was to summon some lightning, but Hope was an expert at countering mystic attacks, and a simple psychic observation showed she still had her guard up for such a moment. That would be a path to getting a hole burned through her chest, not escape. There didn't seem to be a way out of this right now.

There was a thunk, and Hope yelped in pain. A wrench clattered to the ground, and both Rune and Hope turned to look at the train; Viola was standing there with a sheepish look on her face, apparently having decided to try and help by tossing the tool. Unfortunately, the girl had a terrible throwing arm, and it had done more inconvenience than damage.

"What the hell?" Hope yelled, "I'm letting you all go, idiot! Get out of here before you get arrested!" At this moment, Rune saw another opportunity. Hope hadn't dropped her mystic defenses even a little; a lightning attack would still be worse than useless. But she was just relying on the blade at Rune's throat to counter any sort of physical assault, assuming Rune couldn't do much without being impaled even with her head turned away. Rune would need to charge something with psychic energy to knock the blade away, but if she tried to grab something else telekinetically Hope would stab her before it reached her palm. But if all she needed was metal to supercharge, she had a custom-built slab of it attached to her shoulder. Steeling herself, she charged her new arm with the weakest current she could imagine being effective against a psyblade.

The pain was immediate, and worse than anticipated. It wasn't just that holding a psychic charge began decaying and melting metal, although she could feel that eating away at the arm immediately, it was arcane current striking every nerve conduit Taroh had installed and setting them off at maximum intensity. Heat, cold, pain, pressure, every type of sense her arm had was triggered at once, ripping into Rune in a way that dwarfed the pain from when Taroh had first installed it. Her hand struck the side of the psyblade, knocking it away from her body. Hope turned back to her, surprised not only by her sword being shoved but by the sudden pain she could surely sense in Rune. A pain Rune was happy to share. Her maneuver bought her a split second, and she had to make it count.

Hope's myriad of defensive techniques were very impressive. She could deflect lightning with her blade, absorb some of it purely with mental exertion, she could parry nearly any sword technique, and was a talented martial artist. But none of these skills gave her much advantage in the situation of catching an unexpected metal fist to the jaw, the impact sending her sprawling. Rune didn't feel the impact in her fingers- that brief explosion of sensation had burnt out the nerve endings across the arm. In the wake of the blow, the arm fell uselessly to Rune's side, the servos and motors that animated it melting. Hope stepped back, reeling from the impact, spitting a mouthful of blood that had pooled in her mouth. But it wasn't the that shifted the situation most drastically.

In her shock at being hit, Hope had dropped her psyblade.

Before the girl could recover, a moment of psychic concentration brought the blade into Rune's remaining hand. While in Hope's hand the blade had been a straight edge of white energy, in Rune's it was a flickering blade of glistening red. Occasionally, a bit of lightning flickered over the blade. Rune breathed in. Rage with focus. Power with purpose.

Then she moved in to attack.

Rune's blows were swift and relentless. Unlike Rune, Hope didn't have experience channeling mystic energy enough to be able to create her own weapon to parry. This was not an even fight, Hope didn't have anything resembling a possibility to counterattack. Around the edges of Rune's consciousness, she felt Hope reaching in with telekinesis to try and push Rune back, but such attempts were not difficult to counter. Fortunately for Hope, though, there was one easy way to reliably dodge a swinging sword: stepping back out of its each. So Rune began to chase Hope back towards the train with each slash, Hope giving ground without much resistance.