Priya's first shot missed high.
She already knew she wasn't as good a shot as Zarek—especially not when there was a flare of pain in her back and she was skidding along the ground. But after she saw where the first one went, her Godsfall flared up as high as it could go.
Without caring for anything else, she dumped as much energy as she could out. If this man died, she would have a chance to survive. If he didn't…
She didn't have the confidence to make much more of this situation.
The first bullet landed true, then the second, and then the third. All the way to the fifth, and then she clicked for nothing in return.
She finally skidded to a halt, pain shaking her body and a feeling akin to a twisting knife in her gut. If Zarek had been there, he could have told her that the latter feeling came from squeezing herself dry of Godsfall—something that normally could only happen to veterans. Unfortunately for Priya, her Talent was so high that she managed it before she could truly understand the consequences.
But worse than that…
The first bullet was stopped by a barrier.
The second cracked it.
The third shattered it to pieces.
The fourth collided with Van Hollen's chest, only for the fifth to do the same.
But the final two seemed to vanish into Van Hollen's body as though swallowed up by a black hole. The man froze for a moment, but there was no sound of pain, no slumping to the ground—just silence in the chaos of the battlefield.
At least, that was what it felt like. Priya was holding her breath, so all she could hear was the raging sound of her heartbeat. It drained out everything else in its white noise, making it seem like the only two people in the world were herself and the man she wanted to see fall into a heap of his own blood.
But he didn't.
Van Hollen pressed a hand to his chest, coughing up a mouthful of blood. He finally showed some semblance of injury, but it was from nothing more than the strength of the bullet's impact. They broke his ribcage, but they didn't manage to make it through his body armor.
He wiped his lips with a forearm, bringing out an Elixir that he downed with a single swig.
Priya had already begun to push herself up from the ground, her hands trembling as she struggled to unload her magazine and slip in a new one. But she had been so focused on aiming that she hadn't protected her body at all.
Her arms didn't seem to want to cooperate. She was seeing in double and not quite being able to remember exactly how to do it.
She wasn't a veteran in battle. Maybe if she had loaded and unloaded guns thousands of times, ingraining it into her muscle memory, she would have been fine. But that wasn't her life.
Funny enough, she knew that even if Zarek had tried to drill her in something like that before the apocalypse, she would have looked at him as though he was crazy. It would have been her stubbornness that was her undoing, and her boyfriend knew her so well he didn't even try.
'I promised. I promised.'
She flexed her arms with all the strength she could muster to try and stabilize them, finally managing to pull out a loaded magazine—but by then, it was already too late.
Van Hollen had already summoned another mature clone. It barreled toward her just as she slipped the magazine into place, but there was no time to react as her hands were slapped down by a palm and a fist launched itself toward the side of her face.
A stinging pain resonated through Priya's arms and she couldn't even see clearly enough to react to the punch. But even so, she could feel the harsh wind approaching—fast and sharp.
Priya didn't brace herself. Her mind went blank, and she reacted on instinct. At a point like this, what crippling fear had been holding onto her was suppressed in the face of the reaper's smile.
There were two ways people dealt with facing their own mortality. The first was the way the middle-aged woman had acted. The other was to face it with wide eyes and a defiant heart.
BANG!
Priya felt her jaw crack on impact, her eye socket fracturing beneath the power of the strike. However, she had managed to point her gun up at the same time.
The echo of the gun was drowned out by the pop to the side of her face, but she knew she was successful—not because she saw it, but because she felt the clone dissipate into energy.
As she flew to the side, she pulled hard, bringing out every ounce she had in her.
Melaloon activated, and the Godsfall that should have returned to Van Hollen was ripped out of control, flooding into Priya with such speed that her skin and hair glowed with a blinding light.
Break!
Zarek had told her not to do this, but she acted first without thinking this time—her intention carrying the same fiery light as her boyfriend. It seemed to be the very same madness they both carried within one another.
—
[Intelligence has shown great progress]
—
>[Intelligence: E]
-
>[Intelligence: E+]
—
The gasp of energy flooded into her. Matched with her breakthrough, Priya practically felt as though her torso was about to explode with power, but she directed much of the new flood into her head, activating the Heal ability of her Talent.
By the time she hit the ground, all of her injuries seemed to have already been healed and her gun was aimed at Van Hollen once again. This time…
His real body.
It was clear to Priya by now that Van Hollen could only swap places with a clone that was one degree of separation from him… and that clone had just died.
So much Godsfall poured into Priya's gun that it cracked, glowing a red-hot that almost singed her skin clean off. But from her expression, one would have thought that she couldn't feel a single thing.
"DIE!"
BOOM!
The gun's barrel splintered and frayed, a bullet of spiraling energy jetting out with such speed that Van Hollen couldn't react even if he wanted to.
He realized at that moment that he had made a mistake. He held back on his punch and didn't even use the sudden fusion ability because he didn't want to kill Priya. He wanted to capture her. She was far more useful alive.
But now…
His body curved as though all the wind had been ripped out of him. And maybe that was exactly the case… because a hole had been torn clean through him, spanning at least three inches wide.
BOOM!
The bullet continued through, ripping through a distant wall and out into the world beyond.
Priya huffed for breath as one clone after another popped out of existence. The pain in her hand finally seemed to come to her, and she looked down to find her fair palms covered in blood, blisters, and ghastly burns.
Her hands trembled, pain piercing through her like needles…
Until a familiar hand slowly pressed down over them.
"…Zarek?" Priya asked through a blurring gaze. She smiled lightly. "I did it."
Zarek looked down with a gentle gaze. "Yes… You did."