Sparks! I should have been expecting her. I dove downward, passing the stories of a nearby building in a flash, and hit water as the popping noises of gunfire sounded above.
The water was an icy shock, jets propelling me face-first under the surface. Diving for the water had been my first instinct in order to avoid that gunfire, and it worked, as I didn’t get shot. But it did put me in Regalia’s grasp.
The water around me began to constrict, to thicken, like syrup. I twisted, thrusting my feet downward, and engaged the spyril at full force.
It was as if the water had become tar, and each progressive inch of movement was harder than the inch before it. Bubbles grew trapped as I breathed them out, frozen like in Jell-O, and I felt the spyril shake violently on my back. Blackness surrounded me.
I didn’t fear that blackness any longer. I’d looked it in the eye. My lungs strained, but I shoved down the panic.
I broke the surface. Once my arms were free, the spyril thrust me out into the air with a triumphant jet, but tendrils of water waited for me. They wrapped around my legs.
I pointed the streambeam of the spyril right at them.
My machine sucked up those tendrils like it did any other water, spraying them out the jets at the bottom and freeing me in a heartbeat. I burst higher into the air, dazed from lack of oxygen. I reached a rooftop and let the jets cut out, rolling across it, breathing deeply.
Okay, I thought, no more going underwater with Regalia around.
I’d barely caught my breath when water tendrils climbed up over the roof, like the fingers of an enormous beast. Newton landed near me in a blur, trailing glowing color from her hair. She came right at me, fast as an eyeblink, and all I could do was engage the spyril, my streambeam pointed right at one of Regalia’s tendrils.
The sudden jet of power lurched me across the rooftop away from Newton. Just barely. Worse, only one of the footjets engaged. I didn’t know if it was the constriction down below, the tendrils that had grabbed me after, or the rough landing. But the machine had always been finicky, and it had chosen this moment to finick.
Newton moved past me, her sword striking the ground where I’d just been lying, throwing up sparks. She reached the side of the rooftop, where another building rose up alongside this one, no space between. There she stopped.
And, from what I saw, stopping was pretty dramatic. Best I could tell, she came out of her super-speed run by throwing one hand up against the wall of the building next door. All of her momentum was transferred to the structure and, in the bizarre way of Epics, completely scrambled the laws of physics. The wall exploded into a spray of dust and crumbling bricks.
She turned around, dropping her sword—now jagged and broken—and reached to her side, slipping another one out of a sheath at her waist. She spun the sword, regarding me, and walked forward more casually. Around us, Regalia’s tendrils continued surrounding the entire building, creeping up over the sky, making a dome. This small rooftop was abandoned, and its painted graffiti reflected off the water around us. Liquid began to pour in over the lip of the roof, flooding it with an inch or two of water, and Regalia took shape from it beside Newton.
I pulled out my gun and fired. I knew it was pointless, but I had to try something, and the spyril just sputtered when I engaged it—both jets refusing to spit anything out now. The bullets bounced off Newton, reflected out toward the closing dome of water, making little splashes. Newton leaned down, one hand on the ground, preparing to sprint, but Regalia raised a hand and stopped her.
“I want to know,” she said to me, “what you did earlier.”
My heart thumping, I scrambled to my feet and glanced to the side, looking for a way out. Regalia’s dome of water completely encased the rooftop, and new tendrils were rising from the flooded roof to try to snatch me. Desperate, I pointed the streambeam at one and tried to engage the spyril. The jets at my feet wouldn’t work.
But, to my relief, the handjet did. I was able to slurp up the tendril and shoot it the other way. I got the next, then the next, then started shooting them at Newton as I hopped backward. My attack just splashed away from her, but she seemed to find it annoying.
More and more tendrils came for me, but I sucked each one up, jetting them outward.
“Stop doing that!” Regalia roared, voice booming. A hundred tendrils grew up, far more than I could target.
Then they immediately started to shrink.
I blinked at them, then looked at Regalia, who seemed as baffled as I was. Something else was coming up out of the water around me. Plants?
It was roots. Tree roots. They grew wickedly fast around us, sucking in the water, draining it from every source it could find, feeding upon it. Dawnslight was watching. I looked back at Regalia and grinned.
“The child is acting up again,” Regalia said with a sigh, crossing her arms and looking at Newton. “End this.”
In an instant Newton became a blur.
I couldn’t outrun her. I couldn’t hurt her.
All I could do was gamble.