Aurora Over a Dead World

"That’s not exactly what I was expecting!" Tanya shouts as she barely defends herself from the monster’s punches. Rouge tries to attack too, but the monster is far faster than any of them, moving so quickly that even Charlotte and Rouge—humans with mutations that enhance their senses—can’t track it.

Rouge takes a kick and immediately becomes the target after getting involved. The monster’s attack pattern is almost the same: focus on the immediate target with no planning. But the difference now is that its speed and strength have skyrocketed, and lightning bolts won’t stop firing or falling from the sky.

Eirwen forms an ice dome over all of them so the lightning from above doesn’t hit, but because she has to constantly reinforce the damaged sections, she ends up out of the fight to focus on defense.

Charlotte tries to help, but she’s too slow to even land a hit on the monster, and her power has limited range. So she opts to stay back and protect Eirwen from debris, since if the ice dome breaks, they’ll have to deal with all the lightning raining down.

With that, only Edith, Rouge, and Tanya are actually in combat, which reduces the monster’s number of targets. Rouge tries to combine her close-quarters combat with air-based attacks, but the speed difference between her and the monster keeps ruining everything she attempts.

Without enough concentration, she can’t shape the air with precision. Without precision, she loses the ability to mold the atmosphere and has to rely only on powers using air and wind, which are easier than shaping the atmosphere itself.

Tanya tries to help, but Rouge is too close—if she fires and misses, she’ll hurt her ally. In the past, she would have shot without care, but what Zenith taught her is helping her think more calmly about what she’d actually hit if she attacked recklessly.

"Edith, do something! Poison her or whatever!" Tanya yells at Edith, who’s mixing some kitchen chemicals.

"Calm down! I’m still figuring out what to do! Not just any poison would be effective, and I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure Rouge doesn’t want to get accidentally poisoned. Aren’t you the one with a bunch of different powers? Use them!" Edith’s criticism frustrates Tanya.

"Fine! I’ll show you what I can do!" Tanya instinctively points at the monster and uses a variant of her power, generating microwaves. Since both derive from heat and she naturally fires heat waves anyway, she can use this variant more easily than others.

Tanya forces the propagation vectors of the microwaves to converge exclusively on the monster. Since the waves aren’t visible, it looks like she’s doing nothing. It takes a few seconds before the monster’s body starts heating from the inside.

The monster stops attacking Rouge and staggers back. Tanya is depositing electromagnetic energy inside its body, causing volumetric heating—a terrifying application of a variant. Since the monster’s body is already extremely hot from the electricity it carries within, it starts to overload as lightning becomes visible across its skin, as if trying to escape.

"HEY, YOU IDIOT! STOP THAT—IT’S GOING TO EXPLODE!" Rouge screams at Tanya, who stops what she was doing, confused. The reaction Tanya was creating wasn’t like cooking meat in a microwave—it was like trying to heat an already unstable super-battery. The natural reaction would be destruction followed by an explosion.

"I-I—" Before Tanya can say she didn’t expect that, the monster locks onto her. It lands a punch to her face. Lightning discharges, and Tanya is sent flying, slamming into the dome’s wall and falling unconscious.

Meanwhile, from the contact point between the fist and her face, lightning erupts and strikes everything around, punching holes in buildings and nearly hitting Edith.

"...!!!" Rouge remembers what Zenith did in the simulator—dragging the sky like a surface—and tries something similar. Moving her hands, she "grips" the atmosphere and pulls it down, trying to increase atmospheric pressure to crush the monster and stop it from going after Tanya.

It initially works, but the pressure variation isn’t strong enough to crush the monster. Doing this makes Rouge gasp from lack of oxygen in the area. The island is already high in the sky, so the amount of oxygen is lower than it would be at the surface.

Dragging everything at once to crush the monster completely cut off oxygen and air circulation in the environment, creating a high-pressure zone while other regions were left with extremely low pressure. Combined with the extreme cold generated by Eirwen, it ends up hurting Rouge, who miscalculated how much space would be left for her to keep going.

Instead of the atmosphere being continuously pulled while maintaining some stability, what happens is that the atmosphere inside the dome is pulled without the outside being pulled too. The combination of Eirwen’s and Rouge’s powers made the situation worse.

’I-I should have thought about Eirwen’s powers...’ Rouge staggers, realizing her mistake too late.

The monster charges electricity into its fist and lunges at Rouge. Since Rouge is out of air, her concentration drops and she can’t defend herself in time—only being saved by Edith, who throws a flask at the monster’s face, making it miss its attack.

"..." The monster writhes on the ground, the large eye on its face starting to bleed as it uses its claws to scratch and tear at its own flesh, trying to get the chemical off its face.

"Haa... haaa..." Edith gasps without air, feeling like her lungs are about to collapse from the sudden shift in atmosphere.

"..." As the atmosphere slowly returns to normal, Edith forces Rouge to drink something that helps her feel better.

"D-Don’t do that again. I felt like I was going to die," Edith says as she looks at the monster on the ground. Lightning covers its body protectively, leaving no opening for her to attack.

"We have to retreat! We can’t win against this thing—none of us can deal enough damage, and this monster is too fast for melee combat to work." Edith starts leading Rouge toward Eirwen while Charlotte uses her portal to recover Tanya from under the debris.

"So... looks like we lost this one?" Charlotte says, disinterested. She’s the only one who came out without a scratch since she barely fought or got directly involved.

"Yes. Staying here will kill us. Let’s go. We weren’t even supposed to deal with this problem—let some Kaira handle it!" Edith says, unwilling to sacrifice her life for a fight that has nothing to do with her. After all, they’re all students, and Zenith told them not to go.

"But we can’t leave this thing loose! There’s no one in the dome’s area, but not everyone’s evacuated yet! That thing is fast and could reach the people still escaping!" Eirwen says, offended by Edith’s "cowardly" attempt to flee.

"Then stay here, but I’m not giving any support. I want to leave. Whoever wants to stay can stay," Edith says coldly to Eirwen, who bites her lips, struggling to maintain the ice dome against all the lightning now falling even more aggressively.

"..."

"Make up your mind. The acid I used won’t stop that monster for long. We’ve already seen it regenerates, and Tanya—the only one actually dealing effective damage—is unconscious."

"...Okay... let’s... let’s go." Despite wanting to stay and fight, Eirwen thinks about her companions. It’s not fair to risk the others’ lives just because she wants to fight, so she accepts retreating because she knows she’d be useless alone here, since she can’t beat this monster.

"Then let’s go, everyone!" Charlotte opens a rift in space, and Edith carelessly tosses Tanya through it. Rouge stumbles into the rift, followed by Edith.

"Watch out!" Charlotte shoves Eirwen back while dodging by leaping toward the portal. A lightning bolt passes extremely close to them as the monster, its face covered in blood, approaches—smoke rising from the hand it fired the bolt from.

"!!!" Eirwen tries to enter the rift, but when she runs toward it, it simply closes. Charlotte deliberately used this chance to abandon Eirwen as a "test" without making it look intentional. She used the monster’s attack as an opportunity to both test Eirwen and Zenith’s reaction.

"...Hey, where’s Eirwen?" Rouge asks Charlotte, who puts on her best worried expression.

"S-Sorry! I couldn’t bring her! The monster attacked—the lightning it fired disrupted my spatial rift! I don’t think I can go back there right now." She lies, though it doesn’t land well with Rouge.

"Electricity can really affect a spatial rift?"

"Of course it can! Professor Zenith herself has spatial powers and an electric variant!" Charlotte defends herself against Rouge’s small accusation.

"...Yeah... maybe..." Rouge accepts it because she’s hurt and prefers not to cause problems. Besides, she barely talks to Eirwen, so she doesn’t care that much anyway.

"As soon as I get the chance, I’ll go back and save Eirwen! If only her phone were working so I could find her position!" Charlotte strikes a pose of concern while Edith starts carrying Tanya to a nearby hospital. They exited in a block Edith knows, so she leads the way.

"Rouge, you should come too. Your lungs might have been damaged..." Edith says with a slightly hoarse voice as Rouge looks at the ice dome extremely far away. She can see the lightning striking down on it.

"...Okay... we should call someone..." Rouge says, unsure how to handle this. She’s already tested her strength and seen what she needs to improve, so she considers this the best she can do right now.

"..." Charlotte opens another rift in space, heading somewhere she can get a new phone to make a call.

"I think Eirwen will survive... maybe I’ll go get her later... I wonder what Zenith will say to me... after all, it was just an accident."

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