The Atlantian System: Creation

‘Speed. Speed is what I need to stay alive. The best fighters aren’t the ones that hit the hardest; they’re the ones that can hit so fast that their enemies are dead before they even realize it. If I had been fast enough, I could have gotten out of the way of the manticore. And the minotaur. Hell, even the nixie.’

Leta looked back at the two options, though, in all honesty, there wasn’t a competition.

‘Okay, Gada. Select Storm Step.’

[Selection made. Downloading skill software now.]

The sudden sharp pain in her brain caused her to involuntarily hiss as hot prickling needles skittered over her gray matter and down her spine to tap dance over every nerve and bone.

Allister shouted her name in shock as a hot trickle of blood began to drip from her nose and down her tightened lips, covering her teeth in red.

Leta felt every inch of tissue and muscle in her body intimately, almost uncomfortably. Waves of knowledge flooded her mind like she was speed-reading an entire library’s worth of information in an instant.

She took a big deep breath and filled her lungs with the smell of stale petrol and concrete, using the sound of the city’s ambiance in the distance and the feel of asphalt beneath her feet to center her.

After a moment, the flow of knowledge and the agony in her body began to fade until she realized she was bent over and breathing hard through clenched teeth with the taste of metal on her tongue. Hayato and Allister were on either side of her, their hands trying to hold her upright and keep her from falling to the ground.

“Lords above, lass!” Allister barked, his face pinched with concern as he watched the young woman take another deep breath to steady herself, “What was all that about? You’re bleeding.”

“Oh, shit,” Leta muttered softly, rubbing her nose with her gauntlet and doing a poor job of cleaning up until Allister handed her a handkerchief from some hidden pocket. Leta thanked him and blotted her upper lip before looking down at the now bloodied cloth with a frown, “I hope this wasn’t important. Could be a priceless artifact from the first Queen Elizabeth for all I know.”

“No, lass.” Allister sighed, “I’m not that old.”

Atreus watched blot the crimson from her face with a look of concern and confusion. “What was that?”

“Um, a whole lot of info at once.” Leta admitted through the fabric before looking down at the soiled handkerchief spotted with her blood, “Remember what I said? If I do too much upgrading too soon, it can hurt me. Two skills back to back give me a bad migraine and a nosebleed.”

Allister and Atreus shared a concerned look over her head, the questions flitting back and forth between them obvious.

“These skills.” Atreus addressed her, “They are new abilities you didn’t have before. They are not some dormant ability that needed some catalyst to occur?”

“Nope,” Leta shook her head as she held up the ruined handkerchief, deemed it unsalvageable, and tucked it sheepishly into her pocket, “The skills are brand new to me.”

“What skill did you acquire?” Hayato asked curiously as his head tilted to the side slightly like an intrigued puppy.

Oh! Um, a speed skill called Storm Step.” Leta answered, “You’ve seen my lightning, right? I can create a bolt of lightning from myself to another unobstructed place and,” She paused as she searched for the words before looking at Hayato, “It’s, well, you know how you use shadows to move from one place to another? It’s kind of like that, but where you can be miles apart without a clear line of sight, I need an unobstructed path through the air to where I want to go.”

Allister listened intently, with Bonnie watching by his side, “Fascinating. Can you show us while we are headed to the front? The clock is ticking, and we’re already running late.”

“Right! Yeah, sorry.” Leta gave them an apologetic half smile, then focused on the world around her. Knowing how to pull off such an impossible feat came quickly as she visualized the arc’s path.

She exhaled deeply before drawing in her power with her inhale, feeling her chest heat as forces began to build inside her.

Leta could perceive the team taking several steps back as tiny snaps of electricity fizzled just above her skin and hair, but she paid them no mind.

Her focus had zeroed in on the empty space before the stairs leading to the lower floors. For a moment, barely a faction of a second in the universe’s timeline, Leta could see the world slow to the point that it seemed to stop.

She was moving, flying, where all the world was frozen in time.

A sudden release of power seemed to propel her forward with such a speed that every atom in her body felt as if she were merging with the stream of positive and negative charges. Each chain reaction was like an explosion from a rocket shooting her forward until her feet materialized in front of her, the world around her returned to its average speed, and Leta found herself stumbling into the wall from her own momentum.

“Mary, Mother, and Joseph!” Allister screamed in shock, his arms coming up as if he had been taken by surprise.

“Leta!” Hayato and Atreus shouted in unison, briskly walking towards where she was partially kneeling with her hands on her knees.

She put one hand in the air and took deep breaths, her eyes wide as if trying to process what she’d just accomplished, “I’m okay! I’m fine! Just… wow.”

The three men looked at her bewildered as Allister spoke, “How? One minute, you were there; the next, you were gone in a crack of thunder.”

“I never even saw you move,” Added Hayato, “and I have the fastest reflexes of the entire Sect.”

Atreus’s mind was whirling with possibilities. “How often can you do that?”

“Uh,” Leta quickly calculated, “I’m pretty sure indefinitely. Or at least until I start getting tired. The charge I’m creating is just short of a full lightning bolt, so it is not putting a big strain on me.”

“How far could you go at one time?”

Leta looked to the concrete ceiling as she ran the numbers in her head, “Well, lightning can strike 16 to 20 kilometers from its storm cloud, but some could go as far as 96 kilometers, so somewhere in that general ballpark. I’m pretty sure if it was a straight line, no barriers between, I could maybe do the 96, but I’d need to visualize where I’m landing.”

“Good lords,” Allister rocked on his feet with a shell-shocked look, “16 kilometers an hour, and you did that little light show once a second; you’re traveling over 57,000 kilometers an hour.”

“Consecutively, if you never stopped and just kept going,” Atreus added with a cross of his arms, “You’d be going over forty times the speed of sound.”

Leta blinked.

The knowledge and mathematical equations of performing the skills were in her brain but didn’t provide any scope of the power she wielded.

Unable to be touched in her formless state between one spot and the other, she could move from point to point, striking her foes with a lightning-covered gauntlet or a stab of the boot dagger Yelana had equipped her with.

An almost malicious grin pulled her lips at the images that danced through her mind of lightning and battle.

That anger-fueled part of her seemed to blossom in battle purred like a well-fed cat. Was it for this new ability or the promise of beating her enemies into submission? She couldn’t say.

“As unheard of as this ability is, we must depart.” Allister cleared his throat to get the team’s attention, “We’re already behind schedule from the car accident. We should make haste.”

“Agreed,” Atreus nodded but not before giving Leta a sharp look that spoke volumes about his feelings about going into battle with unknown variables in play. It was a look that promised a long and in-depth discussion later.