“Fair enough,” I said instead, my mind racing. “Shall we keep this to the ground?”
He frowned, another funny spectacle when wreathed in flames. “Why?”
“I thought you were looking for a test of strength,” I said with a shrug. “Seems to me that if we’re flying and I land one good accidental hit, out go your lights and you crash to your death. Fight over, all on the basis of a lucky punch.”
He thought about it. “That … is also true.”
“You know my abilities,” I said, the lying becoming easier as I went. “And I’ve seen yours—or at least some of them. Let’s keep the destruction toned down and I will battle with you as hard as you want. You start ripping apart the whole city, I’m going to find a very unfair way to murder your ass as swiftly as possible. If you want a true contest of strength, fight me like a man, not a meta terrorist. Capische?”
“Your terms are fair,” he said and set his feet. Flames smoked off of him. “Are you ready to begin?”
Not remotely, I realized, since I had exactly zero ways to cause him damage when covered with flames. At least, nothing at hand.
“Just a sec,” I said, and strolled over to the corner of the street, where Oceanaire’s outdoor furniture was sitting stacked on the sidewalk.
“What … are you doing?” he asked.
“Well, it’s not going to do me any good to punch you when you’re covered in fire like that,” I said, looking over my shoulder at him, “and I can’t get you with a light web. We’re not flying. I mean, I could probably get in your head with Odin powers—”
“I have those myself,” he said, still watching me walk toward the sidewalk patio space in front of Oceanaire.
“Which means those are useless for me,” I raised my voice and he started to slowly follow behind me, warily, because we were about to fight and obviously I was going to bushwhack him somehow. “So what have I got left? I can’t turn into a dragon here, we just agreed to limit collateral damage and that’d just make a mess of this building,” I nodded at the tower that stretched out of Oceanaire’s facade, “so … I’m kinda out of easy options.” I stopped by the stack of furniture. “Advantage: you. We fight as is, fist to fist, and it’s either a stalemate or you beat me with your superior quantity of powers, see?”
He stopped short of the sidewalk. “Well …” He shifted uncomfortably. “I do not like all this talking. I thought we would fight.”
“And we will,” I said, lifting a chair out of the stack. “But you can’t expect me to walk into it with nothing to hurt you with. What’s the point of that? How are you challenged by that? What’s that do to—what was it you said? ‘Remind you of who you are’ or whatever?”
“That is a good p—” he started to say, but I winged the chair at him and he paused to try and stop it from taking his head off. He raised his hands and acted like he was going to catch it, but instead he tossed a little fire ahead of him, superheating the metal and turning it into a puddle of slag that hit him and steamed. His mouth pulled into a grimace, because he might have been able to absorb flame, but molten metal didn’t just evaporate when it made contact with his fire shield. Not that much. A bullet, sure. But a whole metal chair? Nah.
It slid past his flame shield and onto his skin, sizzling as it burned him.
I’d already heaved a table at him to follow it up, and he tried to block that but it went low, like a frisbee, right to the gut. It melted as it struck, but not before it transferred some force to him. He made an “OOF!” noise as it bounced and got him in the gut, doubling him over on the wire surface. He melted through the surface instantly but stopped as he made contact with the sturdy steel beams that held the supports together. They boiled, turning molten, and he screamed as he recoiled away from them.
“Heads up!” I shouted, throwing another chair at him. He looked up, but I’d aimed low, throwing it like a shot put at his gut, chair-back first, and it caught him in the midsection, searing and sizzling as he melted that, and then caught the seat portion right in the chest and chin.
He wobbled, leaving another pile of slag on the street as I tossed another table at him, then another. They went frisbeeing at him as he wove on unsteady legs. One cleaned his clock and dropped him to the ground while the other took his legs out from beneath him. The fire started to fade as he hit the ground, elbows buried in the slushy mess in the gutter.
I bombed him with another chair, still about twenty feet away, then grabbed another two, one for each hand, clutching one by the wire back and gripping the other beneath the seat. I was going to tame this flaming lion, tame him or kill him, and I took off at a run to cross the distance between us before he regained his wits.
There wasn’t going to be a lot of time to shellack this guy, and I was going to have to get him to drop the flame shield if I was going to even have a prayer of doing so. I rushed in on him and a little past, then whapped him squarely across the back with the chair in my right hand. It slagged, but not before the physical force sent him flying into the curb. I heard the rich crack of his collar bone as he impacted on the gutter, shoulder catching as he did a serious dive and ended up face up on the sidewalk, making little snow angels as the slush around him melted and ran off.
Brandishing my partially melted chair, I came at him like I was going to stake him with the melted remainder. I had a couple of points left of the tubing that secured the chair back in place before it had been turned to molten metal, and it came to a sharp end. Drive that through his heart and he’d be just about done, I figured, or at least he’d be in a bad enough way that I could turn his head into a pinata and shower the street with his brains before I called this thing a day.
I didn’t telegraph my move before I came in on him, driving the point at his chest. I would have leapt high to drive it in, but that would be overly dramatic and also give away my intent. Instead I just came running up and—HOO-AH!—rammed it toward his chest.
I was about to make contact when something shredded its way into my mind like a physical punch inside my brain. I’d been hit by Bjorn’s Odin power before, when he and I had fought, lo those many years ago before Old Man Winter had forced me to absorb him and he’d become a complaining part of the cadre of powers I kept in my head. His powers tended to manifest in the form of a raven—your dark thoughts given mental form—blasting their way into your mind.
That … was not what happened here.