Not natural wind.
His wind was far from natural. Natural wind had systems, pressure gradients, and fluid dynamics in a way he’d never have understood a few months back. He might not have understood it, sure, but Theo probably would have.No matter what he understood, his wind barely had any of that.
What it had plenty of was power.Aerokinesis sent him upward, a compressed whirlwind of force beneath his boots. It was like a reversed hydraulic press for all of a split-second, a heartbeat of thrust violent enough to launch him sky-high.
Flying.That was the word for it, technically.
No, technically… technically was wrong.
Flying was smooth. Flying was clean.
Flying was what Glory Girl did as she soared overhead in a lucky shot on the evening news, the concept of easy confident lines with flawless hovering and never needing to run the math on mass and weight and balance and counter-force.Which is why what he did wasn’t flying.
It was launching a ballistic object out of a cannon and desperately trying to make sure he always fell feet-first. Leg damage was a dozen times easier to heal than brain damage, after all.
Whether it was math or muscle memory, the first concussive gust punched him clean above the PRT roofline, air pressure popping sharp in his ears enough to clear the immediate ring from Shatterbird’s first attack.
The second caught his cloak. Fabric snapped open behind his head like a sail, yanking his shoulders and whipping his hood forward over his eyes. For one stupid second, the world became black behind blue cloth and vertigo. “Fuuuu-!”Nearly.He caught the rest of it behind his teeth.White Knight did not say that. White Knight might say “damnable,” or “accursed,” or whatever else might come out of the mouth of Brian Blessed. Even when his body started to tip and dip forward, he shoved the curse back where it belonged.
Greg twisted midair, all force and panic, armor joints grinding in protest. A blue-white platform snapped into existence under his boot, thin as a pane of light and solid as concrete for the half-second he needed it.
He kicked up one more time, wind under him sending him higher as he found balance. Ugly, and wobbling, but balance was balance. Behold. Sir White Knight, peerless master of almost eating pavement.
The second he caught himself again, he looked down and that joke died before it could find its way out.
After all, a bird’s eye view may have been a pretty thing but not when the city grid was being turned into a glass-powered meat grinder.
The front side of the PRT building had become a glittering wound, open and jagged as people and personnel spilled out like blood through the main and side exits. They ran for cover wherever cover pretended to exist; dozens of people scrambling under awnings, diving behind black armored vans. So many more pushed through the thick smoke toward what few emergency lights were still flashing, glass still falling from the upper administrative floors in cascading sheets.
Tiny shards weren’t the only threat.
Long knives jagged and slender, some nearly the size of a human arm rode down powdered clouds of glass; all of them tearing down toward crowds of people who’d already been through far too much today.
A guy in a torn dress shirt and ripped tie chose the wrong second to look up, a fractured frame finally letting go of its glass payload right above his head.
“Shit.”
As much as White Knight didn’t say that, the word slipped free. Without costume, without polish, without even the little Ren Faire varnish he kept slathered over himself like emotional armor.
The screams drowned it anyway.
White Knight twisted mid-air, all the force in the motion yanking his spine and muscles in a protest against simple torque. The joints of his armor protested all the same but he didn’t listen to either; a blue-white platform of mana snapped into existence right under his boot.
Greg locked his knee and wind slammed outward as he kicked down.
A localized hurricane hit the side of the PRT building, a wall of pure pressure blasting out with force. The falling sheet of glass veered sideways, missing the screaming civilian by maybe three feet to explode against the side of an empty armored van instead.The civilian dropped flat to his knees, arms covering his head.
Greg didn’t wait to see if he was actually okay.
After all, there was more.
Always more.
Constantly more.
Both armored hands slammed down toward the pavement, gauntlets exploding out with air in a hard burst of force. Glass dust rolled back from the fleeing staff like a tide forced to reconsider its path, shards skittering across the pavement as they lifted off with the crosswind. Every piece in the shredding fog was flung hard across an empty patch of street, spent against a brick wall instead of slicing through soft squishy bodies.
Not a clean move, and not enough, but there were more people breathing down there than there would have been otherwise. That had to count for something.
Another bout of that ringing scream pulsed through the city, ratcheting up and whining against his teeth. A full block away, three massive storefront windows bowed outward, glass straining against itself like it was pregnant.
Blue eyes caught the shimmer, saw too many people hiding under cheap cafe tables and others trembling under a bus shelter; as if that could even help when the sky started raining knives as small as a snowflake.
Teeth locked hard enough to grind against the inside of his cheek as White Knight kicked off another pane of blue, a head-first launch right toward the bending glass.
Each block was covered street-by-street, his movement not a line; there were too many stop-starts and double-backs for that. He launched himself on an invisible jet engine, gliding badly on the drafts, kicked off platform after shining platform. He changed angles, dropping fifteen feet at a time, just to rise an easy thirty a heartbeat later. He missed one platform by almost a half-step, boot scraping empty air before the brick wall of a bank rushed up to meet him. It took a desperate gust from his left palm to shove him clear at the very last seconds, white paint scraping off in flakes from the near-contact.
Everywhere he went, glass was raining like hail.
Everywhere he went, people were caught under it.
Glass dust was sent skyward, a family crouched behind an overturned sedan no longer in danger. He kicked off another platform, already moving before the little girl covering her head could even turn to look up. Another blast of wind went sideways, shearing glass from a collapsing pharmacy storefront and forcing the shards to slide to the other end of the street instead of tearing straight through the people desperately crawling away from it.
Shatterbird was still blocks away; further down, farther out, and higher up. Distance and height were her other weapons, the angle and ascent enough to let her make out every single window left for blocks, a perfect way to use each one like her own personal instrument of murder.
White Knight pushed higher for a second, wind biting through the gaps in his armor and chilling the sweat on what little skin he had bare to the world. The shifting shape trailed above the skyline, Shatterbird almost dancing in a surrounding cyclone of glass hovering around her. Thin lethal lances formed and dissolved, glittering all around each other in a swirling storm of hypnotic intent. Sheets of glass spun and folded over another, reflecting the sunlight and the woman inside across too many kaleidoscopic places at once.
“White Knight! Been waiting on you!”
And directly between Greg and Shatterbird, Glory Girl was already there —
…alone?!
— his name shouted back at him over the grinding of the glass.
The girl in white and gold might as well have been unstoppable, hair snapping behind her against the tearing wind of the storm. Her forcefield took the first glittering wave entirely as Glory Girl took the center of it, a floating pane of glass torn apart into fine powder as she kept her momentum through another formation as Shatterbird’s storm finally folded around her.
For half a second, she was a flawless missile of ballistic power
Then Shatterbird shifted.
The sky shaped the glass around Glory Girl, mirrors the size of sedans flashing under the sun as false angles opened in the air; razor-edged sheets rotating rapidly around the flying girl’s path.
Glory Girl broke clean through the first trap with the simple brutal logic that came with being Glory Girl; punching her way out with raw strength he couldn’t match without at least pouring on some Willpower.
It was the second trap that caught her.
A sphere of glass sheets snapped inward in a simple cage, too wide to punch in one go; planes too thin and layered to treat like any one solid thing. Light seemed to distort all around Glory Girl for an instant as thousands of shards hit her from absolutely every direction at once. "Are you kidding me!"
The yell carried through the storm, high and tight as the first wave broke against her.
The second too.
Shatterbird lifted one hand, dark skin visible beneath that hyper-reflective stained glass dress as the glass cage tightened around Victoria Dallon and the rotation sped up.Eyes wide as the pitch of the glass began to warp, Greg shot forward with a burst of wind, only for the street directly below him to burst out with a scream.
He looked down.
A man in a delivery uniform was trapped behind the steering wheel of a stalled sedan, his windshield fractured into a hundred interconnected teeth; center vibrating straight toward the guy’s face in a slow-moving drill.Oh, you bitch. Greg hissed a breath through his teeth. The man screamed.
Glory Girl shouted.One of them lived longer than the second it took him to take in a breath. With a roar that owed a lot more to rage than vocabulary, White Knight launched himself higher into the sky.
A figure wreathed entirely in open fire streaked toward his left, orange heat cutting an erratic path toward the sky as blistering streams tore under them like a messy rocket. Greg barely even registered the shape or the impact.
Shoulder to shoulder, heavy and fast in the open air.
Heat washed instantly over the white plates of his armor as something learned exactly how strong he was, the flaming figure tumbling wildly off trajectory toward a rooftop far below.
Greg didn’t even turn his head to look.
If it was one of theirs, they needed to get the hell out of his way.
If it was one of the Nine, she could definitely wait six seconds for her turn.
His boots found purchase as he formed a fresh mana platform, hard-light plane shattering in a flare of mana as he tore even higher — a direct angle towards Glory Girl fighting for her freedom.
Shatterbird turned her head toward him.
The glass turned with her, a localized storm moving in sync.
Greg brought both white-armored forearms up in an ‘X’, face covered as he screamed air back in a burst from all sides. Glass needles scattered against air pressure, some still shrieking forward off pure speed and hostile intent. A lethal killing cloud became a highly painful one in an instant, thin pieces biting directly into exposed skin.
One heavy shard snapped directly against his face, leaving a hot spot of blood across his vision for a terrifying second before he got his head on straight.
“White Knight!” Vicky’s voice fought through the grinding of glass. “Break the rotation!”
“Working on it!”
Blue-white light flared bright under his boot as he kicked sideways, three massive spear-thick lengths of glass stabbing cleanly through empty air as he left it behind.
Shatterbird’s storm shifted again, another part of the mass folding around him to integrate him into her kill zone as she shaped the airspace. Every single opening she gave him through the swirling storm was a suggestion toward a massive wall of kaleidoscopic teeth doing a transparent mimicry of Hookwolf.
Even without Danger Sense, he could feel the trap laid out in front of him. It didn’t matter all that much, though. After all, he was a lot of things.
Strong, sure.Fast, of course.Bleeding from several dozen minor puncture wounds, most certainly.
But above all else, Gregory Lucas Veder was historically excellent at split-second-impromptu planning.
So he stopped taking the easiest path — blue eyes splitting sharp and teeth even sharper.
"To hell with your games, glass witch!"
He dropped.