Alas, poor Not-Quite-Corban. Such potential, wasted. She might’ve gone quite far in the ranks of the Company, had she not met Meteor that day.
The cannonuts had been invested with Meteor’s will – possessed by fragments of her mind and transformed, however briefly, into extensions of her body and vessels for her power – and she had not relinquished that control at any point during the fruits’ maiden flight. The flurry of carbonated javelins flew out and struck the dozen-strong salvo of cannonuts…to little practical effect. The cannonuts, actively hardened by Meteor’s continuous focus and will, were also held together by that same hardening will. The javelins drilled neat little holes through the cannonuts before flying on into the waters behind the still-quite-dangerous telekinetically-directed cannonuts they had been meant to stop.
They did not explode into harmless splurts of coconut milk and shattered rinds, nor was their progress towards collision with NQCorban’s general self abated for more than a few heartbeats. The sheer kinetic impact of the darts ripping through the cannonuts slowed them for a beat or two, caused a few wobbles in their path, but it was nothing Meteor hadn’t encountered multitudes of times before and learned to correct for damn near instinctively. If the ‘nuts had been thrown and abandoned, the defense would probably have worked just fine…but for ammunition Meteor was continuously manipulating up until the point of impact and beyond, it was a bit like trying to stop a car by throwing a rock at it. However much one slowed the car down, it still had an engine and would speed right back up.
All of which meant that NQCorban was not at all safe from the cannonuts’ impacts. She was, in fact, in just as much danger as she had been a second ago – except this time she had no time to realize her defense had been inadequate to the strike she faced, or to raise a second one. As she closed her barrier over Meteor, hoping to charge in and begin the exchange of sweat and bruises and mighty-thewed tomfoolery so common to the multiverse, she would instead find her diamondite lance smashed out of line by cannonuts she had thought were nothing more than broken fuel cannisters. As well as her legs, her ribs, and her arms – all crushed by brutal cannonut impacts which had been taken without so much as a defensive stance. The only mercy was that her head had been left uncrushed – she would live, provided the paradisiacal trap she and Meteor had found themselves in spat her out somewhere she could get prompt medical attention for the profusion of shattered bones, pulped muscle, and burst organs she would be experiencing.
While NQCorban was learning of her folly, Meteor was bursting her way free of the oddly floofy barrier she had been ‘trapped’ in. The stretchy flexicrystal was singularly resistant to being burst through main force – she couldn’t simply explode her way free of it with an omnidirectional blast of telekinetic power. Fortunately, such wasteful hijinks weren’t Meteor’s first answer to being trapped inside a bubble in the first place; why blast when she could pop. Drawing her blade, Meteor turned the motion into a swift, vicious slash, casting a razor-edged slicing spiral-arc of telekinetic power at the flexi-crystal bubble. Built to withstand expanding, explosive force rather than cutting strength, the spiraling cut sheared through the bubble as easily as a box-cutter might shear through impact-resistant packaging – when struck by a razor attack at a single point at once, the barrier’s stretchiness did it no good at all, and a stretchy barrier was not a stiff, cut-resistant one.
Meteor blasted skyward then, hurling the severed upper half of the barrier away from her with a swift fist of telekinetic force. Should NQCorban somehow still be able to find the fuel for her rocket charge whilst being brutalized with less-stopped-than-she-thought cannonuts, she would find her target a hundred feet above the treeline, her nimbus intact and able to freely maneuver. And intercept her assailant. As Meteor had punted herself up skyward, she’d drawn forth four of the hardened steel bearings she’d brought to this particular engagement. Roughly the size of an old-fashioned musket ball, the bearings had nonetheless been forged and treated in such a way as to give them the same toughness and consistency as the Company’s medium-grade vehicle armor. They were Meteor’s preferred ammunition for gunfights, and there were Company snipers who envied the mentalist’s accuracy with them. There were also Company heavy gunners who envied the raw force Meteor could pack into the bearings.
With a long-practiced combination of brief mental-construct ‘barrel’ and an explosive burst of directed-force, Meteor flicked the bearings out and accelerated them to velocities favorably comparable to high-powered antimaterial rifle shells, targeting NQCorban’s diamondite lance and the area of her legs with two, while discharging the other two at the pixie-like being accompanying her target. Fired via Meteor’s patented telekinetic-rifle technique, the bearings lacked the continuous impetus and fine control of the earlier cannonut shells, but were moving tremendously faster than the cannonuts had been to compensate. The bearings were, in point of fact, moving quickly enough that the mere shockwave from a near miss would be enough to deal considerable damage to soft tissues caught within a few feet of their path. For anything struck directly…
Well. There wouldn’t be much left of anything one of the antimaterial bearings struck directly.
Having struck her foe with heavy firearm-level telekinetic impacts potentially fourteen times, depending on how one counted the impacts against the lance, Meteor cruised around the perimeter of the island in the sky, her blade held at ready guard, maintaining her mental vigil against further counterattacks. However unlikely they were starting to look.
