The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Confrontation

Hearing the chorus of footsteps as they raced across the street towards his temporary refuge, Mordecai grimaced and continued to pull in ambient energy as fast as he could.  Already a cold wind, stirred by the rapidly shifting temperature gradients within the alley, a short side street that terminated only fifteen metres in from the road, was twisting around his body. 

It flung icy particles, formed when suspended water vapor abruptly condensed first into water then into ice as the temperature continued to drop, like miniature knives, cutting through clothing and shielding alike with its force.  The layer of hoarfrost that had formed on the man in black's clothing was bare protection against it.

But Mordecai grimly pressed on.  If he was going to have the necessary energy to defeat all the movers at the same time, he had little choice.

"Warning, Mordecai,"  Paladin's soft voice whispered in his ear from her place in an inner pocket of his jacket. "Your energy absorption levels are exceeding safety tolerances."

"Tell me something I don't already know,"  the big man muttered roughly.  "Like how I'm going to use all this energy to defeat over a dozen movers simultaneously!"

A cold wind greeted the Brotherhood movers when they finally reached the alley's mouth, the vicious blast slashing across their unprotected skin without warning.  But, even as the icy gale cut into them, they found something more important to occupy their attention.

Standing stiffly, a corona of blue light dancing about his body, enhanced by the cloud of ice particles that swirled tightly around him, Mordecai slowly turned to face them.

"Hi, kids," he rasped, his voice thick with power.  "Come to play?"

"Take him!"  the lead mover barked, jerked from his stunned immobility by Mordecai's voice.  A thought later a wall of shockwaves streaked through the frozen air to hammer into the man in black's frost-covered body.

The big man grunted as the multiple psyken battering rams slammed into him, roughly pushing him back with unrelenting force against the wall behind him, despite his shields and neuron armor, effectively pinning him in place.  But it didn't matter; he wouldn't need to move if the idea that had come to him just as the Brotherhood psionics arrived worked.

With the frost that had covered him now knocked from his clothing by the force of the Brotherhood shockwaves, it was easy to see the tendrils of bioenergy that wreathed the big man's body.  Energy that was only enhanced by his awesome abilities.  Abilities that would shortly be used to launch a devastating attack.

It would begin with the individual particles of ice that now swirled in the unsettled air like tiny pixies of blue and white, dancing on each breath from the ice dragon that the wind had birthed in the tiny alleyway.  Tightening his sensory sweep, Mordecai's incredible brain swiftly identified each particle, calculated its trajectory and mapped its location in space relative to his own.

Then, as a second wave of shockwaves began to pound at him, he began infusing each particle of ice that he had identified with both psyken and pyroken, the individual ice grain glowing a hot blue in response as the atoms within the ice matrix became super energized.  As the last grain received its allotment of energy, the man in black now surrounded by a dancing cloud of blue-white motes of light, miniature fairies dancing on the wind, he turned his attention to the cloud that had formed above him.

Despite the drastic drop in temperature, not all the water vapor had condensed into the ice particles that swirled around Mordecai's powerful form.  Some had remained as vapor, coalescing instead into a thick cloud of fog and almost microscopic ice particles just above his head.  It was to this cloud that the man in black now turned his attention.