Ruthless V6Ch4-The Battle of Orlando Part 3

As soon as James reached “one,” he threw a pair of Air Strikes behind himself and propelled himself forward at a flight speed he hoped none of the enemy Rulers could match.

There would be no second chance for those creatures to escape, not if he had anything to say about this.

James flew toward the Precision Paper Wasp Queen first. Her body type told him that she would be nimble, especially in the air. She was the most likely to be able to retreat swiftly once she saw that the battle was going against them.

He did not worry about the rest of his forces, though he sensed them beginning to charge in the few seconds after he himself advanced. James had done everything he could to set them up for success—given them good commanders, kept them in units that made sense to ensure each individual would want to fight hard for the one next to them, blooded them through previous battles over and over, got the Panther Queen to dispel the effects of the enemy Rulers’ auras—but the actual fighting was up to each person, whether human or nonhuman, to do for himself. He couldn’t afford to think about whether people might die. He already knew that some would.

Ever since he acquired the One-Man Army Title, James recognized what his true role was in the heat of battle. He was a tide-turning living weapon. More than a commander—he barely understood basic military tactics—he was just a destructive force.

He could take out the enemy leadership and create chaos. That would be more valuable than anything he could do by commanding his own people.

Or perhaps he was just giving himself permission to do what he was inclined to do anyway.

James reached within six feet of the Wasp Queen before she reacted—but she moved swiftly once she decided to dodge. Her body zipped to the side, then straight up, then up diagonally away from him.

He swung his arms diagonally and threw two more Air Strikes to change his direction again. James could not fly nearly as quickly as the Wasp Queen. In fact, she was moving so fast now that she left afterimages that blurred before his eyes.

But with Air Strikes, he ought to be able to change direction faster than her.

She darted further up, and James felt more wasps appearing in his peripheral vision. So that was her plan. Try to leave him to her minions.

Pathetic.

James turned his head to face toward the oncoming insect monsters.

Soul-Freezing Gaze.

He made rapid-fire eye contact with each wasp in turn. In theory, he had to overcome them with his willpower in order to freeze their bodies, but in practice, each one stiffened, crumpled, and fell away instantly on his locking eyes with them. As he had suspected, insects were a particularly weak-Willed class of creatures. At least the drones and worker types were.

Dozens more stood behind those that had been closest to him, so James continued swiping his eyes back and forth, trying to paralyze as many of his would-be attackers as possible—until he felt something. A tickle at the back of his neck. Not quite a physical sensation; it was in his mind rather than genuinely coming from his body.

His combat senses were warning him that he’d had his back turned to the Ruler for too long. James tucked his head down and hugged his knees, curling into a ball to minimize his target area. An instant later, he felt a sudden sharp breeze brush past the back of his neck. Something had just passed through the space where his spinal cord had been, moving very quickly.

He tilted his head up slightly, just in time to see the Wasp Queen, carried by her own momentum, shoot past him. Then she zigzagged up and out of the way again. It was so quickly that he could not have uncurled himself from his rolled up position before she evaded, let alone taken a moment to aim a counter attack.

Okay, I can’t catch her in the air, James thought.

He turned to try to lay eyes on the Wasp Queen, and after searching above himself for a few seconds, he found her. She had positioned herself with her back to the sun as she waited for her next opportunity to strike. This one was a clever wasp.

But her evasion and attempt to hide in the sky would do her no good. James extended his left hand toward her and opened his palm.

Precision Gravity Control.

An intense, invisible force suddenly grabbed hold of the Wasp Queen and yanked hard, pulling her downward and toward James’s open hand.

The Queen managed to flutter her wings in an urgent, frenzied motion at the same time that she was being tugged into James’s reach, but the movements were not strong enough to counter his gravitational pull.

As the Wasp Queen drew within six feet of James—dropping into his grip much more quickly than any of the other wasps could reach him and provide backup—he saw her limbs all moving in a frantic activity he did not understand.

Then he saw. Every one of her six legs had transformed slightly so that each was tipped with a stinger, like a miniature version of the stinger she had on her lower body. If she was to be forced into close combat, the Queen was prepared.

She drew another two feet closer and then launched a flurry of strikes at James.

But she was just a little too far away. Her limbs were shorter than his, and all he had to do was throw himself slightly backward and then launch another Air Strike with his left hand to push him into range for a punch from his right.

James’s fist struck the Wasp Queen in the side of her head, most of his strength behind the blow, and the Queen went flying through the air, the hold of his Precision Gravity Control having been momentarily released.

He looked down at his fist. His hand didn’t hurt, but he didn’t see any wasp blood on his knuckles either.

I didn’t hit hard enough, he assessed. Or I need her to hold very still, so I can hit her with maximum force.

“Wonderful,” James said, smiling cruelly as he looked up at the Wasp Queen. “I’ll make you into a phenomenal suit of armor. You can replace the old Spider Queen’s set.”

This seemed to anger the Wasp Queen, though she said nothing back in response.

Instead, she flew down in that zigzagging pattern of hers and willingly shot back into range. James and the Wasp Queen began trading blows at lightning speed—James quickly resorted to actual Lightning Strikes, because infusing his punches with Lightning Mana allowed them to keep pace with the Queen’s attacks much better than his unenhanced fists.

The damage each did to the other was marginal—slow, whittling attacks that only brought down their respective Health bars very slowly—but James knew his well of Health was much deeper than the Wasp Queen’s. And that wasn’t his only advantage here.

True Regeneration allowed him to recover from injuries very quickly.

The speed of the fighting meant that the Wasp Queen’s minions could not intervene without risk of striking her instead of him. And they seemed to recognize that, as they kept their distance. Only a small subset of the wasps even stayed nearby; the rest joined in the fighting that was taking place below, which was barely within James’s awareness.

The only thing on his mind was winning his fight. The most salient fact at this moment was that the longer this exchange with the Queen continued, the quicker she would die. He just had to keep trading blows with her. Once he had whittled her down, he would look for the opportunity to land the fatal blow.

The flurry of blows had lasted for two minutes when he began to feel the effects of her venom.

Impressive, he thought. It works even through those tiny scratches she’s leaving me. I was trying to avoid the stingers, too.

And the larger stinger on her abdomen hadn’t successfully made contact with him even once. It was purely those tiny stingers she had created on the ends of her limbs that must have been injecting venom.

The scratches themselves healed instantly—James’s True Regeneration Skill was even more powerful than his deep well of Health—but the Queen probably thought she had nothing to worry about, because she could sense the venom she had left him circulating through his veins. It was only a matter of time before it slowed him down enough for her to land a more substantial blow.

That was probably what she thought.

Full Body Control.

James had allowed the venom to take partial effect, just to understand the effects and how powerful they were. Now he ordered his blood cells to isolate the venom in his bloodstream and feed it into his digestive tract. From there, Omnivore would disassemble the wasp venom into its component parts, and it could be integrated into the venom-based attacks James already used—which were based on spider venom, since that was the type of monster he had acquired the Skill from.

His body acted on his wishes without any conscious direction other than the simple manifestation of that intent.

The Wasp Queen seemed to recognize that the venom was not penetrating deeper into his body, because she suddenly broke off their exchange, jerked backward and made as if to flee.

“Oh, now that you’re losing, you don’t want to play?” James asked, giving the Queen a smile that showed all his teeth.

“Fuck you, arrogant human!” the Wasp Queen growled. “Kill him!”

This last was clearly directed at her minions. A flurry of projectiles suddenly launched at James from all sides. The Queen getting a little distance had served more than one purpose. She could now try to fly away, and James was vulnerable to those distance attacks from her kin.

From what James could tell, the other wasps had fired off the tips of their stingers as little missiles.

Precision Gravity Control.

James manipulated the gravity around his body to shoot the stingers back toward their senders. Then he focused his power on the Wasp Queen. She had started to flap her wings at super speed again, zigzagging away. But once again, in the power department, she began to lose out to his gravity manipulation.

Slowly but surely, he pulled her backward through the air, flailing legs and wings swinging wildly as the Queen cursed.

“Damn you, human!” she screamed as she drew within touch range.

James ignored her and grabbed hold of her wings. Despite the fact that she was a giant specimen of her kind, the fabric of these limbs was almost as thin a membrane as those of a normal-sized wasp.

“Wait, wait, we can discuss this! We can come to some understanding…” The Queen suddenly began to plead now that she seemed to be locked inescapably in James’s grip.

“Nope,” James replied. “I already told you what was going to happen if you stayed to fight.”

More importantly, he could sense her minions circling closer while the two combatants remained relatively still in the air. He guessed she was giving them some silent commands.

James pulled hard on the wings in his hands and used Predator’s Strike for an extra boost to his strength. The edges where the slender structures met the Wasp Queen’s body began to tear. Then her mandibles opened extremely wide, and a green goo shot out of the opening aimed directly at James’s face.

He was still pulling at the wings in his hand—based on the Queen’s desperate reactions, James suspected they could not be regenerated, just like a normal wasp’s wings—so he couldn’t dodge fully.

Instead, James closed his eyes and jerked his head to the side as far as he could without letting go of the Queen.

He felt the burning pain of acid searing into the right side of his face, through his ear, into his nose and his mouth, though his lips were tightly closed—and through both sets of eyelids. For a brief moment, he saw the color green and sizzling smoke. Then his eyes were burning like the rest of his face.

Even through his high level Pain Resistance, it was agonizing—in addition to actually blinding him in both eyes and obstructing his hearing in the one ear that was exposed.

The only real bright side to having corrosive fluid sprayed into his face was that he got an alert into his mind’s eye.

[Sufficient experience accrued. Pain Resistance leveled up!]

[Required conditions met. Skill evolved: Pain Resistance became Pain Ignorance!]

Suddenly, James found that the pain dulled completely to nothing. He focused on it, and it surged back to reality, burning more agonizingly than it had before, and then he deliberately took his focus off again. It faded away to nothing; he only had the sense of what was going on with his body, rather than the sensation of pain that accompanied it.

Pain had suddenly become something he could toggle on and off selectively.

That’s very good timing.

James left the agony switch set to ‘off’ for now, and he focused on completing his task. His muscles burned with effort, but he finally ripped the Wasp Queen’s wings completely off. It felt like a major victory against this Ruler, perhaps the decisive moment of the duel.

At the same time, he was fortunate that Extrasensory—the Skill that had replaced his other sensory Skills—had activated.

[Extrasensory: When hostile environments and enemy Skills seek to sap your sensory abilities, those interferences succeed. But something else is unlocked. A sense that only exists within the combined reach of your own sphere of Mana and natural Perception. It perfectly replicates the functioning of all your existing senses assuming no impairment—and may provide a glimpse of something more. Consumes Stamina and Mana.]

James had an impossibly clear picture, audio, and even the odor of the world around him. The information was carried from all around him directly into his brain.

He even perceived things he wasn’t certain he could sense with his biological sensory apparatus.

He could feel the agony emanating from the Queen. He could feel the tension in her bodyguards, which were rushing to her aid at that moment.

He knew he couldn’t let them reach her. It might turn the tide of the fight.

As the Queen began to fall, no longer supported by her wings, James latched onto her and allowed himself to drop too.