Descend- Seeing Stars by Sean Oswald (the ebook reader .TXT) 📕

didn’t ease his anger, but it did make him understand. They had wanted to do something nice for him, to let him sleep and not have to worry about something for one. They had thought that they would be able to simply scout the ship but found out that it was better prepared for them than they expected.

      He couldn’t tell what was happening but could sense that they were involved in a large-scale battle. It looked like thirteen of his fuses and, oh shit. Miguel and a few of his girls were there. Miguel’s team was enormously powerful compared to normal humans or even compared to the other clusters of evolved humans thanks to his refining. But they still didn’t hold a candle to any of his fuses and thus were much more vulnerable.

      His second boot slipped on and Jay locked onto where Trina was. No doubt she would wherever the fighting was the heaviest. Instantly with a single Astral Step, Jay was there. His mind took in the scene far faster than he ever could have before. A portion of his brain was allocated to keeping track of all his people and those of Miguel’s. Another assessing the enemy and yet another to evaluating the best reactions he could make.

      The enemy was fascinating. They were cat people of a sort. Some were as big as him, broad with black skin and stripes of orange fur just like tigers. Others were almost as large and covered in golden fur with large manes running down backs. Then there were smaller ones that were covered in the spots of a leopard and moved with deadly grace and precision which only a few weeks ago would have been almost unbelievable to him. The smallest zipped around the battlefield so fast that again until recently it would have seemed impossible for a flesh and blood creature to move like that.

      His scans told him that much. They were definitely flesh and blood creatures. There was no sign at all of any Forlorn technology in them, but they did all have one piece of tech embedded in them. Each had A’snkarnt implants in their brains. That meant this was another experiment race. He felt sympathy for them because of that, but they were attacking his people.

      The assessment came back that they ranged from thirty to one hundred times as strong as a normal human. They had tech in the form of pulse cannons but also seemed to prefer to fight hand to hand with claw or strange vibrating blades. Up above there seemed to be a few individual fighter crafts flying around locked in a battle with Meikiyo and he could see where she had brought down more than a dozen other of the crafts, but they must have become more cautious in how they fought her after learning the hard way.

      As he evaluated the locations of the other humans, he noticed that they were being slowly but steadily split into smaller groups. The defenders were trying to isolate the humans and it was working, even if they were being made to pay a horrible price for it. Still, this had to end. The scene was confused more by Martina’s illusions. She had made it seem there were more than three hundred humans fighting. Every time one of her illusions drew an attack it spared one of the people so that was a good thing.

      Jay saw Trina pushing back. He felt shame and relief swell up in her when she sensed his presence. A moment later, Amelia appeared next to him. Jay said, “I need you both for a second.”

      Then he pushed his power first through Amelia and then into Trina. Whereas this might have taken more than a minute when he first learned how to do it, many years of practice had it down to a mere second for the first merger of channels and two seconds for the second. His PSI was doubled and then doubled again, giving him more than seven million PSI. It would easily be enough for him to do what he needed to do.

      A pulse of energy blasted out from him and the battlefield seemed to slow around him. This time it wasn’t just a sense of battle that made it feel like that. This time it was an actual fact. His temporal mastery had reached the point that with this much power he could slow the reactions of everyone around him. It did affect the other humans too, but he hoped with more practice that he would be able to fix that downside.

      That he started sending out sweeping blasts of kinetic energy to push back each prong of the enemy attack. He drove them back into a cluster. There were more than five thousand of them on this open plain that looked vaguely similar to an African savannah. He Astral Stepped to Meikiyo in the air and laid his hand on her slowed but still burning arm before stepping back with her.

      Then he erected the largest PSI construct he had ever made. The bigger they got the harder it was to make them as the PSI cost became almost exponentially greater. But this done was a thousand feet in diameter and protected not only all of the humans but also all of the illusions. He might as well maintain the lie that there were more of them.

      With that accomplished Jay released his hold on the time flow and shuddered from the effort as time snapped back to its normal pace in the area. Tanks and fighters blasted away at his dome. Warriors rushed in using smaller guns which appeared to be mostly A’snkarnt pulse type weapons. Everything from missiles to claws was thrown against the shield, but Jay had expanded his circuit to include Meikiyo and pushed his PSI up over fourteen million.

      So