Fuck. They know I’m a champion…
Rain Dancer was standing in front of the church’s entrance. Malcolm swore under his breath for not trusting his instincts.
“Whatever it is that you intend,” said Rose. “You’ll have to go through me to carry it out.”
“There is no need for hostility,” said Shield Maiden. “We don’t wish for violence. All we wish is for the two of you to come with us and allow us to present our movement to you in full.”
“And what if we refuse?” asked Malcolm.
Shield Maiden smiled sadly.
“Your friend, the shadow spryte, is more than welcome to decide as she pleases,” said Shield Maiden. “You, however, are a champion. I’m afraid we can’t trust you, yet. It would be… unfortunate, if the Champion Authority were to discover our presence.”
Malcolm looked over at Rose. A half second of eye contact was all it took for both of them to confirm that they were on the same page. Rose dodged to the side, shooting shadow tendrils out at Rain Dancer. Malcolm shot up through the air, double teaming the demon with a flying kick aimed directly at his head.
Rain Dancer’s eyes widened, and he reacted instantly. He extended one hand outward toward Malcolm. Little arcs of electricity formed between his fingers, filling the air with crackling noises. Malcolm knew what that meant before he saw the flash, and felt the bolt of electricity hit him.
Electricity is my weakness. This… is not good.
The electric surge knocked back, striking with a force somewhere above a taser, but below a bolt of real lighting. Malcolm’s wind manipulation went dry as though someone had turned off the faucet that supplied his powers. He fell to church’s wooden floor in a heavy pile, and groaned as he forced himself back up to his knees.
His shirt was smoldering. He could feel small burns on his skin, but still had Tapestry’s regeneration power, which immediately went to work on healing them over. Rose had slipped into shadow at some point, hiding herself to prepare for a sneak attack.
“The Wind Runner,” called Rain Dancer. “Beaten that easily? After all the attention the press gave you? That’s a little sad, you know.”
“You can cry about it if you want,” said Malcolm. “Me? I prefer the more practical approach.”
Malcolm threw his hand to the side, striking one of the church’s beautiful, expensive, and probably irreplaceable stained-glass windows with a burst of wind. It shattered, and he collected the shards in a gust as they fell, pulling them into the church and swirling them in a defensive circle around his body.
Rain Dancer’s face twisted into a snarl. He let out a roar and threw his hands forward. Malcolm dove behind one of the wooden benches. Lightning struck, turning the bench into shards of smoldering wood and making Malcolm’s eardrums ring from the noise.
He countered, launching the largest of his stained-glass shards at Rain Dancer. It was about the size of baking sheet, but with jagged edges and a deadly point. Rain Dancer saw it coming and hit it with a bolt of lightning.
It didn’t work out as the demon had planned. The glass turned orange from heat and lost its shape, but it did not shatter. It hit Rain Dancer’s shoulder and he immediately let out a deep, horrible sounding scream.
“Damn, hot glass,” said Malcolm, chuckling. “I can’t even imagine how that feels, dude.”
He stood up. Rain Dancer was moving around wildly, alternating between patting his shoulder and trying to tear his shirt off. Malcolm readied another shard, but before he could launch it, Rain Dancer blasted more lightning in his direction, this time enough to branch outward into several bright white lines.
One of them hit Malcolm in the hand, and he felt every hair on his body stand up straight, along with a burst of heat and extreme pain. His powers failed again, the glass dropping from the air to the ground, useless to him for the moment.
“You’ll pay for that!” shouted Rain Dancer. “I was going easy on you, fool!”
“Yeah, likewise,” said Rose. She materialized from the shadows of the nearest corner to Rain Dancer, striking out at him with tendrils of darkness.
Rain Dancer dodged back, shooting lightning to meet Rose’s attack. Malcolm realized what was about to happen a split second before it was played out. While the lightning couldn’t interact with the shadows directly, the bright, unfiltered light it gave off was as much Rose’s weakness as electricity was his.
Rose’s face grew serious as her tendrils dissipated. She took a step back. Malcolm moved to intercept Rain Dancer before he could follow up with more lighting. He took a single step forward, and then saw Shield Maiden point at him out of the corner of his eye.
A bubble appeared at the tip of her finger. It was like her skin, colored with pink and purple and blue, and it flew through the air and collided with Malcolm’s arm. He swore under his breath, losing his concentration, though also a little amused by how impractical her power seemed to be.
She can make bubbles. Real scary.
Malcolm swept up his fallen window shards with the wind and hurled them at Rain Dancer. They made it across about half the space in between them before Shield Maiden pointed again. More of the bubble shields burst into existence, this time surrounding each of the shards and arresting their momentum.
“Hey!” said Malcolm.
“Enough,” said Shield Maiden. “No more violence.”
Malcolm was already preparing another attack when she pointed at him. Suddenly, the room disappeared, the walls replaced by a multicolored, curving sphere just big enough for him to stand up in. He pushed out against it. The sphere gave under the touch of his hand, but not by much. It felt like rubber, but with less give.
“Rose!” shouted Malcolm. “Get out of here!”
“She got me too,” came Rose’s reply, along with an annoyed sigh. “I’m trapped in a bubble.”
Malcolm couldn’t see anything outside of the sphere beyond vague shapes, almost like looking through a multicolored shower curtain. He turned toward what he thought was Shield Maiden and waved his hand.
“Come on,” he said. “What’s the point of this? Are you going to force us to join up with you?”
“No,” said Shield Maiden, her voice muted slightly by the bubble. “Just to listen.”
CHAPTER 15
On top of being able to hold them within the bubble spheres, Shield Maiden was also able to move them with her mind. Malcolm was sitting down, but could feel the motion of the bubble in relation to the rest of his surroundings.
As far as he could tell, he was in the church’s back room. Rose’s bubble was visible next to him for a few seconds, and then someone switched the light off and closed the door, leaving them in darkness. Malcolm groaned and fought off a growing sense of claustrophobia.
“Well,” said Rose. “That went well.”
“Hey, don’t blame me,” said Malcolm. “I wasn’t expecting ebony and ivory out there to get the drop on us.”
“I’m not blaming you,” said Rose. “I blame myself, to be honest. We should have focused on approaching my sister in a more indirect manner.”
“This isn’t anything we could have predicted,” said Malcolm.
Rose was silent for a couple of seconds.
“What do you think is going to happen?” she finally asked.
“Honestly, I don’t have the slightest idea,” said Malcolm. “But whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll find a way to handle it.”
He pushed his hand against the inside of the bubble, trying to stretch it out far enough to make contact with the one Rose was in. It tipped to the side, surprising him, and Malcolm fell to the ground in an uncoordinated crumple.
“What did you just do?” asked Rose.
“Nothing, shut up,” he said.
The two of them spent the next few minutes in silence. Malcolm took out his phone and tried to make a call, figuring that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to call Tapestry and Multi for backup. Unfortunately, he had no service, and he suspected it was either because of the bubble, or some electric cellular interference on Rain Dancer’s part.