Swords and Shield

Chapter 1: Protector

The almost transparent wall of force field hit him square in the chest and pushed him back a few feet, but he soon regained his balance and flew back into the air. Below him, the man in the dark superhero suit quickly created a dome of force field around the terrified civilians and yelled at them to quickly get out of the building. Behind them, the officers managed to grab some children and moved the swarm of people towards the exit. Fine, it's not like he's here to kill them anyway.

Thorn threw his arms in the direction of the distracted superhero standing in the ground and a large obsidian sword ripped the air apart, aiming straight at his face. The hero quickly made up a field in front of him, and the sword broke into pieces when it crashed, making a deafening sound. A quite familiar sound to both of them now, after a while dancing around each other. Thorn changed his angle instantly, swinging all sizes of black swords towards him, finding a gap in his impeccable armor, and dove to avoid his counter attacks. The hero, Protector, Thorn chuckled slightly at his name, was not an aggressive offender. He isn't the kind of supe that strike before asking and sloppily destroy public properties, no, he had a point taking the name Protector. His strategy was mostly defend and counter strike, defend and take time to find the weakness of the opponent, buying time for the civilians to escape before really attacking. That suits his power, of course, creating force fields. Thorn believed he also had some superstrength, enhanced durability and flexibility, but he never actually showed it.

Thorn, on the other hand, was always the one to fire first. That's probably what made them not-get-along so well after all this time. He could make out pitch black swords from the air with just a gesture of his hand, and he would like to impale the superhero with one of them one day. As soon as possible. He had been trying to find some kind of gap in the force field, some weak spot that he could exploit, but they had been on each other's throat for months and nothing came to him. Nothing that he found could pierce through the field, no kind of explosion, chemical or metal that could break it, so the hero was almost impregnable. The only way was to wait for it to go down, but this man was just too careful, too vigilant, and he hadn't got many chances.

Thorn floated higher in the air, looked around for a few seconds and suddenly he spotted a blonde woman hiding behind a car not too far from the two of them. All the rest of the people had ran away, it seemed like after the wave of superheroes and villains taking over the world, the citizens started to learn some serious self-defense skills. They managed to run a lot faster than he remembered in his first attack. But there was still a woman left on the pavement, and Protector didn't realize she was there.

"What are you doing here? What do you want?" The man growled, still kept his defense firm. His irises always turned into the same color as his force field whenever he activated his powers, an almost translucent shade of violet, sharp and threatening.

"Take a guess." Thorn shrugged, and threw a giant sword towards the woman behind the car. The woman screamed, eyes wide. It took Protector a second to find out the attack was not aiming at him, and he could shield her only a fracture of second before the sword reached her.

It distracted him enough for his own protection to go down, and Thorn launched himself at the hero, sharp, long sword in hand. Protector turned around in time to block some of his movement, but he scraped the side of the man with the edge of the weapon, and a satisfying pained grunt answered him in return. They both fell to the ground, with Protector on his back, a long hole on his suit and blood started to flow from the wound. Thorn was pushed away, but he quickly rose to his feet. The blow from the attack and the rather deep wound seemed to stun the hero. Thorn took a big jump and aimed for his stomach again with the sword, he was so close, dangerously close to rip his inner organs apart, but Protector created a force field to push his weapon aside. He kept making more and more and threw them in the direction of his opponent, but the field slammed them out of his hands before he had a chance. The hero slowly got up from the puddle of his own blood, sweat covered his face, hair sticking to his forehead, and before Thorn could make another sword, he moved forward and swung his fist into the villain's body.