Slumdog Hero

Chapter 43: Phase Shift (Part 1)



Fii woke to the taste of copper and sand. She lay still, tracing the warm trickle from her nostril with her tongue, salt-iron against cracked lips. The sun already burned through her closed eyelids, the heat seeping into her bones even in early morning. Her skull felt like someone had taken a rusty chisel to it, each heartbeat a hammer blow against the blade.

Something had gone wrong with her powers. Had been wrong since the basin. Since the Netherlings.

She pushed herself upright, sand cascading from her borrowed clothes. Luke and Serena slept nearby, sprawled beneath the minimal shade of a rocky overhang. They'd walked until exhaustion claimed them, their salvaged supplies from the expedition site strapped to their backs like the world's shittiest yard sale.

Fii pressed her palm against the sand, reaching for the familiar tug of gravity. It answered, but wrong—like grabbing for a solid handhold and finding jello instead. She flinched as another spike of pain drove behind her eyes.

A small rock lifted at her silent command, wobbling drunkenly as it rose. Not right. She'd been lifting boulders since day three with her powers, precise enough to stack them like toy blocks. The stone suddenly shot sideways without her telling it to, embedding itself in the sand five meters away.

Blood trickled from her nose again, fresh and warm. She wiped it with the back of her hand, leaving a rusty smear across her skin. In all the slum fights, all the training sessions with Virgil, all the stupid stunts with Quinn, she'd never bled from using her powers. Not once.

"You're up early."

Luke approached from behind, his footsteps nearly silent despite the sand. The past days had worn away some of his Guardian stiffness. He moved differently now—more fluid, less mechanical. Like the desert was teaching him to bend instead of stand firm.

"Couldn't sleep," Fii replied, not turning. "Head feels like someone's driving railroad spikes into it."

He crouched beside her, frowning at the blood. "Still?"

"Getting worse." She gestured toward the distant horizon, where heat seemed to distort the air. Only it wasn't just heat—to her gravity sense, there were places where the pull felt twisted, inconsistent. "Something's messing with gravity out here. Can feel it under my skin, all wrong-ways-around."

Luke squinted at the horizon, seeing only the typical heat shimmer. "Looks normal to me."

"Trust me, it's not." Fii couldn't explain how the gravity fields felt fractured, with layers and pockets that shouldn't exist. It was like trying to describe color to someone who'd been blind from birth.

Serena stirred, groaning dramatically as she stretched. "Please tell me we found civilization while I was asleep. Preferably with air conditioning and actual beds."

"Just more sand and weird-ass air patterns," Fii said. "But the cylinder's doing something freaky again."

The data cylinder they'd salvaged from the expedition site sat on a flat rock beside their makeshift camp. Its surface glimmered with that strange iridescence Fii had seen before, patterns shifting across the metal like oil on water.

"Been doing that since dawn," Fii explained. "Getting brighter."

Luke frowned. "Could be responding to whatever's affecting your powers."

"One way to find out." Fii reached for the cylinder.

Luke caught her wrist. "Bad idea. Last time you touched it—"

"Last time I wasn't ready," she cut him off. "Besides, my head already feels like it's going to explode. How much worse could it get?"

She pulled free of his grip and wrapped her fingers around the cylinder before he could argue further. The metal felt abnormally cool against her skin, almost numbing.

Nothing happened at first. Then, like a wave crashing over her, images flooded her mind—not words or explanations, just a rapid-fire slideshow burning into her brain.

A structure half-buried in sand. Equipment racks. Vehicles under tarps. Walls of metallic panels reflecting sunlight.

Landmarks leading toward it—a split rock formation shaped like an anvil, a dried riverbed cutting east to west, a cliff face with three distinct spires.

Fii gasped, dropping the cylinder as the torrent of images receded, leaving her skull throbbing anew. "Holy shit."

"What?" Serena and Luke spoke in unison, alarmed.

"I saw... a place." Fii pressed the heels of her hands against her temples, trying to hold onto the rapidly fading images. "Some kind of outpost maybe? East of here. There were vehicles, supplies."

"The cylinder showed you?" Luke asked, skepticism heavy in his voice.

"Not in words. Just pictures, flashes. Like someone jammed a camera reel through my eyeballs." She squinted, struggling to sort through the jumbled impressions. "I think I could find it, though. There were landmarks."

Luke and Serena exchanged glances.

"The cylinder just happens to show you a survival cache," Serena said flatly.

"Look, I don't know what it is or why it showed me," Fii snapped, irritation spiking with the pain. "But unless you've got a better idea than walking until we die of heatstroke, I say we check it out."

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"We need to move anyway," Luke decided, already gathering their supplies. "If that cylinder's active, it might be signaling more than just us."

Fii didn't argue. The wrongness in the gravity fields around them had grown stronger overnight. Patches of desert felt impossibly heavy to her senses, while solid rocks barely registered at all. If the Netherlings followed these distortions, they wouldn't be far behind.

The sun climbed higher as they set out, following Fii's flashes of insight from the cylinder. The terrain grew increasingly strange—even Luke and Serena began to notice subtle irregularities.

Sand occasionally shifted without wind, pebbles sometimes rolled uphill for a few inches before stopping.

"Did you see that?" Serena pointed to where a small stone had just skipped sideways across the sand with no apparent cause.

"Yeah," Luke replied, his eyes narrowing. "Been noticing a lot of that."

Fii nodded grimly. "That's what I've been feeling. The small stuff you're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."

As they walked, these anomalies grew more frequent. Their water sloshed strangely in canteens, sometimes seeming heavier, sometimes lighter. At one point, Serena stumbled when the ground seemed to give slightly beneath her foot—not sinking in sand, but as if gravity had momentarily intensified.

"Watch that spot," Fii warned as Serena nearly stepped into what looked like ordinary sand. "Gravity's all screwed up there. Step in and you'll sink to your knees, at least."

Serena hastily sidestepped. "How can you tell? It looks the same as everything else."

"It's like..." Fii struggled to explain the complex web of forces she sensed. "Like a drain. Everything pulling toward it at the wrong angle."

To demonstrate, she picked up a pebble and tossed it onto the patch. It landed with an unusually heavy thud, immediately sinking several inches deeper than it should have.

"This whole place feels wrong," Luke muttered, eyeing their surroundings with new wariness. "The air, the land. Everything's... off."

"Welcome to the Wastes," Fii said dryly, then froze as something shifted in her awareness. A familiar distortion, approaching from behind. Her stomach dropped. "We've got company."

Luke dropped instantly into a combat stance. "Where?"

"Three o'clock. Moving fast." Fii pointed toward a ripple in the air about fifty meters distant, where sand visibly swirled without wind. "Pretty sure it's one of those things from the basin."

The creature materialized as if stepping through an invisible door, its blade-arms gleaming in the harsh sunlight. Larger than those at the basin, its carapace marked with swirling patterns that hurt to look at directly.

"Just one?" Serena asked, her hands already glowing with hard-light energy.

"That I can feel," Fii replied. "But they were hunting in packs at the basin, so..."

The Netherling paused, multi-faceted eyes swiveling toward them. It made no immediate move to attack, instead cocking its head in an unsettlingly intelligent manner.

"It's watching us," Luke observed.

"Deciding which of us to gut first," Serena muttered.

Fii tried to get a gravity read on the creature, but its mass felt... slippery. There one moment, gone the next, like trying to grab smoke. Not quite solid, not quite weightless. The air around it visibly distorted, light bending strangely where it stood.

The creature suddenly charged, moving with blinding speed across the sand. Serena threw up a hard-light barrier directly in its path. The Netherling hit the golden wall at full speed—then simply passed through it, its body momentarily transparent before solidifying on the other side.

"Shit!" Serena backpedaled. "That shouldn't be possible!"

Luke stepped forward, absorbing kinetic energy from the air itself, his fists glowing with stored power. As the Netherling lunged, he struck—a perfectly timed blow that should have connected with devastating force.

His fist passed harmlessly through the creature's torso. The Netherling phased at the exact moment of impact, then slashed at Luke with terrifying precision. Only his combat reflexes saved him, twisting away with millimeters to spare.

"It's learning!" Luke shouted. "Timing its phase shifts!"

Fii concentrated, ignoring the ice pick being driven into her brain. She couldn't get a solid grip on the creature directly—its gravity kept fluttering in and out like a bad connection. Instead, she focused on the space around it, trying to compress reality itself.

The air warped visibly, sand rising in spiraling patterns around the Netherling as local gravity intensified. Luke and Serena both staggered as they felt the pull shift. The creature shrieked, its phasing stuttering. For a crucial moment, it was fully material.

"Now!" Fii gasped, blood flowing freely from her nose.

Luke and Serena struck simultaneously—his kinetic blast and her hard-light spear hitting the creature from opposite sides. The Netherling's carapace cracked, ichor spraying across the sand.

But it wasn't finished. One blade-arm lashed out, catching Serena across the shoulder, tearing through fabric and skin. She cried out, stumbling backward.

The sound ignited something in Fii—rage, protectiveness, desperation. She pushed harder, gravity crushing inward from all directions. Pain exploded behind her eyes, but she couldn't stop. The weight of a building, a mountain, a whole damn city bearing down on a single point.

Around them, reality visibly warped. Rocks lifted from the ground. Sand swirled in tight spirals. The air itself seemed to bend, light fracturing into prismatic shards. Luke shouted something, but his voice stretched and distorted like a recording played at the wrong speed.

The Netherling contorted, caught between phases. Then, with a sound like glass cracking, it simply... collapsed. Not into pieces, but into nothingness, folding out of existence like a paper figure crushed in a fist.

Fii staggered, her vision swimming with black spots. The pain wasn't just in her head anymore—it coursed through her entire body, every nerve ending screaming. Her control slipped completely, gravity going haywire around them.

Rocks larger than her head shot upward like they weighed nothing. Sand flowed in impossible patterns, defying normal physics. A nearby dune collapsed entirely, grains flowing like water rather than solid particles. The ground beneath them rippled in waves, as if suddenly fluid.

"Fii!" Luke shouted, grabbing her shoulders as he began to drift upward. "The ground's moving!"

She tried to pull her power back, to cage it, but it slithered through her mental grasp. Gravity twisted around them, creating pockets where all three of them momentarily floated, weightless, before crashing back to the ground. Other spots suddenly multiplied gravity, forcing them to their knees under invisible weight.

Blood poured from her nose, her ears, even the corners of her eyes. The pain transcended anything she'd known—like her skull was being crushed and stretched at the same time.

"Can't... stop it," she choked out.

Serena stumbled toward them, clutching her injured shoulder, her feet leaving the ground with each step before slamming down unnaturally hard. "What's happening?"

"I don't know," Luke grunted, fighting to stay grounded as gravity fluctuated wildly. "It's like her powers are feeding back on themselves."

Through the haze of pain and blood, Fii glimpsed something in her mind's eye—the Netherling's death creating a ripple effect, gravity fields collapsing and colliding. The cylinder's images flickered through her awareness, showing tears in reality opening and closing like hungry mouths.

Maybe this was why her powers hurt to use now. Maybe they weren't just affecting normal gravity anymore, but something deeper, more fundamental. And every time she pushed, she made it worse.


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