At first Tick didn’t feel the pain.
The power of Chi’karda within him burned so hot, so fierce, that he was unaware of all else except for a distant tugging sensation. Like he’d been thrown into a crowd and they were using his arms and legs as a wishbone. But the pain intensified, began to hurt. Bad. The pulling on his heart came back, too, as if two separate forces wanted to completely obliterate his body.
He screamed and released the power that had been building within, unleashing the Chi’karda with a mental burst of a detonation.
The bright whiteness of the ropes that had captured him was dimmed by the brilliance of orange light as Chi’karda erupted out of him. Streams of it shot from his body in arrows, and a cloud swelled from his skin, bulging underneath the cords like a burrowing animal.
The ropes held, pulling at him and continuing to jerk at his limbs and squeeze his middle. Pain stabbed at his joints and muscles. The pleasurable burn of power had been replaced by a different kind of fire, an agony that hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced.
He screamed again and sent waves of Chi’karda crashing out of him, focusing on the strings of frozen lightning as if the whole thing were a video game, his mind the joystick. Orange flames struck at them, disintegrating half of them in one swoop of power. Tick’s body snapped to the left, flying through the air as the severed ropes found life again, coming back at him and trying to reattach their ends to his arms and legs. He held his breath and continued the onslaught of Chi’karda, firing away at everything in sight.
Sprays of pure whiteness erupted in tiny explosions like bursts of electricity out of a live wire as his power severed more of the cords. More and more and more of them. His mind worked relentlessly as he tried to destroy the things attached to him while at the same time keeping the others at bay. He floated in that strange outer space, throwing flares of energy at anything that moved. The mix of white and orange was brilliant and blinding, almost making him lose his focus.
His body ripped free from the bindings.
Tick quit aiming then and simply threw all his power out in wave after wave, destroying whatever dared come at him. Explosions of light and sound. The black air trembled; his skull rattled; his skin seemed to vibrate on his bones like they might slip free of his body. He was completely blind; the whole world had gone white and hot. There was wind and thunder and the smell of ozone and burning charcoal. It all added together into a chaotic jumble of anarchy, driving Tick insane as he continued to thrust outward with the power of Chi’karda as fast as he could gather it. He didn’t know what else to do, and he was scared to stop.
Something tugged at his heart again. He felt it despite the madness all around him—that sensation of strings being pulled, of being yanked from the inside.
His body suddenly jerked away from the explosions of energy and flying white cords of lightning. He flew through the blackness of that place that had seemed like outer space, the raging battle he’d been fighting gone in a flash. Things changed around him. Instead of darkness, there was a blue haze, splotches of green and brown and red flying past him. Chunks of gray rock appeared, coming at him like a rain of meteors.
Tick used his mind to control his flight, dodging and flipping and accelerating to avoid the rocks. As he approached the biggest one, a jagged stone the size of a bus, he had to slam on his mental brakes, coming to a stop right before he smashed into the thing. This caused the tugging inside him to intensify, sending shocks of pain throughout his nerves.
He reached out and felt the hard surface of the rock. He crawled along it to the other side, then jumped off it by pushing with his legs. His body once again catapulted through the strange-colored air, and the hurtful tug on his heart lessened enough that he could bear it.
Things changed once again.
He dove into a thick liquid, almost like a gel. Cold wetness soaked his hair and clothes and skin as his perception changed. He could sense up and down, everything shifting around him until it felt as if he were near the bottom of a deep ocean, swimming upward even though his arms and legs did nothing to make it so. He tore through the dark waters.