"You're sure you wanna do this alone?" Nix asked.
Black electricity danced along her extended right arm, ready to blast the approaching Spartan. I looked at him and then back at Nix, wondering how difficult this challenge would be for her.
"The storm does not hide in the dark," Typhon said.
I rolled my eyes in disgust. Of course, the storm didn't. The storm always took the hardest road possible. He did have a point, though. These challenges weren't going to stop. I had to handle this on my own, or die trying. I nodded to Nix.
"Yeah, I have to be the one to send this guy packing."
She slowly backed away, keeping her eyes on the Spartan. She sat down on a pallet of wooden planks behind me. I turned my full attention to the threat in bronze armor. I can do this, right? I asked myself as the Spartan lunged.
He thrust the pike forward. Adrenaline rushed through me. I sidestepped to my right and went into the fighting stance Nix had taught me. The Spartan swung the tip of the pike at me. I had an idea. I pictured wind from the soles of my feet lifting me into the air.
It worked, and the pike passed underneath me as I rocketed into the air. I threw a kick at the Spartan's face and made him stumble backward several steps. I landed again and kept the attack going. I pointed my right hand forward and concentrated on spraying acid. When the thick green liquid sprayed out of my palm, I smiled. This was going better than I thought it would.
The Spartan managed to react in time to block the spray with the bronze shield. Just like before, the acid burned through the shield everywhere it touched. The Spartan whipped the smoldering metal glob at my face as if it were a frisbee. I ducked beneath it and ran forward. It clattered across the gravel-covered ground behind me.
The Spartan dropped his pike when I was close enough to strike and pulled a dagger from somewhere on his belt. He slashed downward at my face. His hand slammed into my wind barrier. I avoided the slash and threw a hard right hook at his face. It landed, but with no impact. It was like an insect flying into a statue. The Spartan made two quick swipes at my arm. The first one hit my barrier. The second one opened up a thin line down my forearm.
I yelped in pain and spun away, clutching my wounded arm. Pain like a wildfire raged in my arm. Instead of fear, anger came over me. I was going to make him pay for slicing me. The churning inside me started. Green liquid bubbled from beneath my skin and covered the cut. The skin on my arm closed beneath the acid. I looked at the Spartan. The blade had curled into a melted mess. The Spartan grunted and tossed the useless blade to the ground.
Okay, it was fist versus fist. All I had to overcome now was his hulking size and superior fighting ability. The Spartan rushed me. He moved so fast I couldn't move away. He wrapped me in a bear hug. His arms were like iron weights crushing me between them. I screamed out as the bones inside my back and abdomen cracked. I punched him in the face with both fists.
I felt like a toddler punching a sumo wrestler. In response to my powerless attacks, the Spartan tossed me backward. I landed on a pallet of metal pipes. They clanged all around me as the strap holding them in place snapped. I landed spread-eagle with the silver tarp trapped against me like a cheap cape. I tried to stand up, and pain turned my legs to jelly.
All I could do was flounder on my back like a flipped turtle. A shadow passed over me, and I looked up. All I saw was the bottom of the Spartan's leather sandals. I pointed my hands at the ground and prayed for my wind power to kick on. It did, and I slid away just in time to avoid being flattened. The Spartan landed with the force of a meteor.
The wooden pallet erupted into splinters and dust, and loose metal pipes shot into the air. They landed like deadly projectiles, embedding themselves in the dirt. One of them hit my wind barrier and fell to the ground beside me. My heart thundered as I realized how lucky I was not to have been impaled. There was a thick cloud of dust surrounding the area where the Spartan had landed.
I tried to stand up. I was able to roll over and get onto all fours. The Spartan burst out of the cloud and toward me at a speed similar to Nix. All I was able to do was clench my jaw as the kick he threw slammed into my wind barrier. There was a loud popping sound as his leg broke through my barrier and connected with my jaw.
I hurtled backward through the air until I met something solid and metal. My head banged against the hard surface, and the world around me faded to white. But not before I heard Nix yell, "Stormie!" The next thing I knew, I was standing on the school rooftop, just like I dreamed the day of my awakening.
An enormous hurricane tore through the city below, heading straight for me. The sounds of firetrucks and car horns battled with the rushing wind. Thick black smoke gathered beneath the gray clouds above, making the air almost unbreathable. Something about the way the storm moved caused a pull inside of me.
"The storm is who you are. That is why it calls to you," Typhon's deep, rumbling voice called from beside me.
I turned to my left, and what I saw scared me more than anything ever before. Typhon was easily 11 feet tall. His shirtless torso was so muscular his brass-colored skin looked like it was carved out of stone. His lower half was made of thousands of snakes slithering over and around one another. He had two enormous bat wings coming out of his back, and his hair was made of dozens of tiny dragon heads. I understood why he presented as a storm cloud the first time he spoke to me.
"Why am I here again? Did that Spartan kill me?" I asked, ignoring the fear I felt just being this close to him.
The storm continued moving closer, gobbling up anything in its path and adding it to its swirling collection of destruction.
"The storm can only be the storm. It does not pretend to be anything less," Typhon said.
I looked at him, wondering what he was getting at.
"What does that have to do with my being here?" I asked him.
He continued staring forward, but the dragon heads hissed and snapped at me. I turned my attention back to the hurricane.
"It means you will die if you do not accept who you are."
I watched as the storm reduced a skyscraper to dust in seconds. Is that what Typhon wanted me to be? An indiscriminate killer with no concern for the lives of others.
"And who am I supposed to be exactly? Another you? A killer monster that only cares about power?"
Typhon folded his arms over his massive chest.
"Only the storm can decide what course it will chart. But it must first accept that it is the storm."
I thought about that as the storm approached the roof we were standing on. Was I pretending to be something I wasn't? I viewed myself as a normal person, and maybe that was the problem. I thought about the fight I was currently in. I had mostly used my powers to escape. The storm didn't run away. It just moved forward, and everyone else had to figure out how to handle that. Could I be that way?
The roof crumbled as the storm closed in on it. I walked forward. I didn't fear the powerful winds or the flying debris. The stone beneath my feet disappeared, and I didn't falter. I walked through the air into the swirling wall of violence. As the world around me vanished, my eyes popped open. The sound of the harsh wind still filled my ears, but I was back at the construction site. Nix knelt over me.
"Hey, welcome back," she said, her face a mixture of relief and panic.
"I couldn't leave you for too long," I said, my head throbbing.
She smiled and stroked my cheek.
"You still okay to go on, or do I need to get us out of here again?" She asked.
I flashed her a pained smile. I was being macho, but I actually did plan to end the fight rather quickly. I was exhausted, and my entire body hurt.
"Just give me a few minutes. This one is over."
"Okay, but you better not die," she said and stared at me for a few long seconds before backing away.
The Spartan rushed at me, pike back in hand. Ready to finish me while I was down. I attempted to stand up, but my legs were still too weak to lift me. That didn't matter because I didn't need legs to fight, only to run away, and my running days were over.
I lifted myself into the air on a cyclone of wind. While I was in the air, I split the cyclone in half. I guided the second cyclone through a pile of metal pipes. It picked several of them up. When the Spartan was close enough to the cyclone, I made it erupt. Two of the poles impaled the Spartan. One went through his right leg, and the other passed cleanly through his left shoulder.
The pole in his leg had embedded itself in the dirt behind him. He gripped the pole to pull it free, and I hit it with a stream of green electricity. I glided toward him, pouring all of my power into the attack. The Spartan's body shuddered as the volts travelled throughout him. The electricity moved up the pole and across his hands and arms. His skin charred as smoke wafted off him. I kept pumping power into the attack until green sparks popped from his hollow eye sockets. My power, not his. He was nothing but a smoking husk.
I stopped the attack and drifted slowly to the ground in front of his smoking corpse. It was nothing more than a charred skeleton wearing warped bronze. The smell of burned flesh made me turn up my nose. I wanted to feel guilt or remorse, but all I felt was justified. He deserved what he got.
"Wow, you weren't kidding about it being over," Nix said, landing next to me.
The look on her face was somewhere between impressed and afraid. I truly hoped it was closer to impressed.