Proximakinesis lashed out at a hundred and thirty-nine targets, pulling them together in a room-sized bundle. Since I didn't have the time to form the force-fields slowly, I burned through stamina to create them near-instantly, leaving me gasping and almost cramping in a way that fifteen minutes of battle never could have. If anything, after shrugging off the mental assault I had been feeling a good buzz as my Empowering Regeneration had been boosting me throughout the fighting. Most of that extra energy was now gone because I needed each force-field to be semi-independent, last at least twenty minutes on its own, and I needed them to be ready yesterday.

  The moment they were all done, I didn't bother with any fiddly bits and launched off the shortened (topless?) mountain. Still linked to me, the force-fields followed and we burned through the atmosphere for a fraction of a second. They were not as powerful as my own Proximakinesis directly applied to make me fly, nor could they be amplified with Force Adjustment without spending a great deal more effort to layer a second array of more costly, more complex force-fields to do just that. Forget about using Forced Acceleration or Instant Action to speed everything up; the former would not only be costly but also mess with the duration of other effects and also make the Red Dragon's victims die faster, while the latter was a strictly personal effect. My cargo's acceleration was thus limited to partially scaling off my base, unaugmented strength.

  That did not mean it was slow, by any stretch of the definition. While my base strength could only push around a battleship instead of tearing a skyscraper off its foundations and whacking a kaiju over the head with - a move as awesome as it was impractical that I was so going to try one of these days - none of the guys in the cargo massed more than three hundred pounds. Acceleration being force divided by mass, we punched through the lower atmosphere and its drag like breaking through a solid wall and hit the Kármán line at a good a hundred and fifty thousand gravities. Since my cargo was already mindless, self-healed physical injuries and would die in minutes no matter what I did, I hadn't bothered with safeties, atmospheric pressure and oxygen replacements or other life support concerns either.

  Something small crossed the entire envelope of my senses faster than I could react and struck my right fist with the force of a small atomic weapon. One moment everything was fine and we were speeding away from the planet, the next I nearly staggered off-course due to a freak, one-in-a-million impact with space debris. Every bone from my wrist down shattered and my fingers were left more than a little mangled but my regeneration was on it and this was a good reminder not to be an idiot. I immediately shifted Focused Invulnerability to protect from high-speed collisions; had the same thing happened a few minutes later into the trip my whole arm would have probably exploded. Then I activated Forced Acceleration and slowed down to match the cargo just so I could better react to unforeseen events.

  Twenty-one seconds after leaving Earth we flew over the Moon, leaving Earth's sole natural satellite behind us and below as our flight was randomly angled above the ecliptic. It was a bit of extra preparation that felt like paranoia, but you're not paranoid if there really are such things as invisible spectres that want to devour your mind. From there we only sped up in total silence except for the microscopic firecracker-like impacts that started to gain noticeable intensity a few minutes into the trip and slowly ramped up in both intensity and frequency from there. I'd never traveled anywhere close to such velocities before, not even during my travels around and back from Mars, so I'd never seen them before. I suspected however that they were collisions with interstellar dust; at the speeds we were going even a nanogram of dust would hit with the force of a bullet. Irrelevant to supers... as long as it was only such tiny quantities or less every time. An actual grain of dust would shatter a main battle tank; all those fictional space-ships that didn't have shields? Those should have been scrap metal.

  We were halfway to Jupiter when the first guy died. He was one of the physically smallest in the group and all the rough treatment from the battle, the violent incapacitation, the Red Dragon's attempts to kill them and get his investment of power back and the unprotected trip so far finally became too much. His heart stopped despite the constant slow regeneration and his brand flared, the flames turning black more than red before rapidly expanding. In only seconds, his entire body was consumed leaving nothing behind, not even dust. The red glow from this magical incineration floated around for a few moments in a vaguely humanoid shape, accelerating along with the rest of us. Whatever he had become, my own power still clung to him at least a little. Then he dispersed, my force-field lost its anchor and failed, and the light was sucked in by the one hundred and thirty-eight survivors.

  With my senses I saw them becoming a little tougher, their healing coming a tiny bit faster. Presumably their other powers would be boosted by about another percentage point, maybe a bit less, but it didn't matter. Here, what Mandy had meant about the enhancement being inflexible became obvious. A normal super's durability was not just physical toughness; it depended on our perception and if we saw something as harm it would resist more than an unpowered person would have proportionally to our overall toughness increase. But if someone boosted only toughness with some external effect such as me using Force Adjustment on someone else, it would have no impact on resilience that wasn't part of toughness, such as how easily they could be poisoned or in this case simple cold. No matter how tough the enhancement made them, it hadn't been designed to restore heat drained away from a body part. Their healing helped, but they'd need regeneration much faster than their current levels to restore their brain faster than Mandy's spell could cool it.

  From that point on it was a race as more and more of the Red Dragon's victims died at a steady rate. Those initially weaker or older, those more worn down by injury, those with the occasional genetic fault or other underlying issue since they hadn't been supers long enough for their self-image to completely overwrite the bodies they had been born with. Being boosted might make them more powerful, but it also stressed their bodies more and more the further they got from their baseline. Like overclocking a processor, no matter how efficient and powerful cooling you added there was a limit to how quickly you could remove heat based on its physical make-up and beyond that point it would quickly fail. Or in this case how rapidly you could put a person back together before they exploded.

  First by ones and twos, then by small groups, their hearts failed and the symbols on the unconscious martial artists' chests flared into flesh-consuming fire. They left behind those same reddish shadows the first one to die had before those, too, dispersed and their power was absorbed by the survivors, prompting another small leap in power and another round of deaths. The ramp-up was not particularly fast but it was exponential as more and more power was spread to fewer and fewer people. Like in a fission device, there was a critical point where their average power level would far exceed most of the underlying bodies' ability to handle it. And just like in such a device, the end result promised to be violently explosive.

  A bit farther out than the asteroid belt, which we'd left well below us in the ecliptic plane by now, the one thing I'd been counting on happened. Unfortunately, it happened to the wrong set of spells. Mandy's set of brain-freezing spells (and they were brain-freezing, no matter what she claimed), started flickering and getting out of control. One prisoner had their whole head freezing over and crumbling away under the rough acceleration. Two more had their heads explode as every bit of moisture inside their skulls flash-boiled. The rest of their bodies were consumed by red-black flames an instant later, much faster than simply getting worn out. Then, with less than a hundred mostly-mindless shells left, all of Mandy's spells winked out. It was because of the distance, of course.

  More than half a year ago, I'd attempted to throw a boulder into the Sun in a fit of stress-induced rage. It had been just after the Invasion's final battle, we'd barely scraped a Pyrrhic, and it had left me clinically dead for some time. So on waking up in an unfamiliar place I'd grabbed the nearest convenient target, wrapped it up in a propulsion field and thrown it at the distant Daystar from all the way on the top of Mount Olympus - the one on Mars, not Greece. While the impromptu missile had eventually hit, that had been more because the Sun was such an enormous target with such a powerful gravity well that hitting it wasn't hard even from a hundred and fifty million miles away, not because my spur-of-the-moment construct had lasted all the way. It had not run out of duration; my powers simply couldn't extend to and support active effects at such enormous distances back then. Maybe more experienced mages in other worlds could weave active spells that worked in perpetuity or reached across dimensions; the Invaders were capable of both. But magic on Earth was less than a year old; even if it was possible, nobody here knew how to make lasting magic without rigidly attaching it to a physical object.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Mandy's spells had just faced that particular issue. Outside the reach of her control, active, loosely-anchored magic dispersed and failed over the course of only a few seconds. The cursed enhancement the Red Dragon had created was a lot bigger, with a stronger link, but it was also much more complex than just some heat draining. I was betting that sooner or later it would start failing too; I just needed to take it a bit further first, so I kept accelerating.

  This was complicated by the rapid recovery of the still-living, still-strengthening hosts of the curse. Ten seconds after Mandy's spells failed they started wriggling around and trying to fly off. There, my choice to put each of them in their own force-field paid off. They might have the power of several of their fellows each, but when it came to physical force and its applications, I was by far the strongest superhuman on the planet - or the solar system, as long as aliens weren't around. They only had a fraction of my power and proportionally less of it went to their strength and by extension locomotion. Then they had to deal with the disorientation of massive acceleration through deep space, and their own rapidly failing bodies. All of that put together meant they weren't going anywhere until it was too late.

  It didn't take them long to realize just that and they stopped trying to escape in favor of pelting me with those red blasts of theirs. We weren't on Earth though, we were in deep space and another thing they lacked was super-senses. With no landmarks or other reference points, no means to feel most of the acceleration except for tidal stress from rough handling on my part and zero experience under such conditions, their accuracy was pitiful. Me on the other hand? Flight, especially in space, was a core aspect of my powers, something I had put thousands of hours in, and my favorite activity overall. I was flying circles around their efforts and I was barely breaking a sweat.

  By ones or twos or half a dozen their numbers dwindled further. The bodies died and the red shadows migrated, each time brighter and more defined than the last. They were no longer people but empty vessels for copies of the originator of the curse that were rapidly nearing completion. Finally, with only about thirty of them left it happened; all the remaining hosts died in a massive cascade of crimson energy that almost immediately condensed into a solid, opaque, humanoid shape that looked like it was made out of blood. It looked like a tall, bald, thirty-something man, dressed in an open robe and an archaic culotte. He had a mid-length beard narrowing down to a point and went bare-chested to better display a muscular but still somewhat lean torso. All in all perfectly normal for an Asian pseudo-guru cult leader except for the color... and his eyes. Said eyes were lidless, pupiless yet somehow fully expressive despite being twin black pools full of hate and cold rage.

  The... effigy easily overpowered the single proximakinesis field still on... it? Him? Let's go with 'him' and attempted to close with me as we flew. With five hundred times the power of the original soldiers he was solidly in my weight class and proved it by actually keeping up. Then he made a sharp, demanding gesture that I stop immediately just as it cut off its own acceleration, as well as something else that I couldn't read properly but could guess at its meaning. Probably something about bowing and scraping at his feet if he was true to the original's personality and culture so I just laughed and used the field to make it audible.

  "Just speak. I can both talk and hear in space just fine," I told him, my tone, expression and body language showing how supremely unconcerned I was about his presence and demands.

  "So be it," it attempted to growl but of course there was no air. I could read the intended words in his body just fine but the lack of actual sound robbed it of emphasis and tone and made it more than a little funny. "Take us back now shèngnǚ, or you'll regret it." Those eyes weren't focused on me, though. They kept scanning our completely empty surroundings.

  "I don't think so," I called the bluff immediately. "We're not on Earth anymore, we're in deep space and space is MY domain. Yes, you can fly, but I bet even now I can put a lot more of my power in sheer speed and maneuverability than you can. Without air resistance or stationary targets that I have to stop and defend you will never catch up."

  "I don't need to if you're still in my reach," he sneered and started firing bolts of red thicker and longer than telephone poles. Far faster than the fist-sized ones his hosts had thrown before, too, each glowing with power. But I was faster still, side-stepping, barrelling over or under, or teleporting around one bolt then another, then another and another. After about a dozen he stopped, recognizing the futility of trying to hit me like that.

  "Told you you'd never catch me," I bragged because I knew it would enrage him further. He was probably the kind of person that demanded others respect him even as he trampled them underfoot; how he'd treated his fanatical followers proved it. That kind of attitude only cemented my decision to not show him any respect whatsoever. "Now why don't you put your tail between your legs, turn around and snap back to daddy? Oh wait, you can't."

  Instead of responding he formed a dozen man-shaped constructs and hurled them at me. They were humanoid and capable of action and almost as fast as his bolts had been. I stood my ground and punched the first one to get within reach. The construct shattered after only moderate resistance but my newly healed fist also felt like I'd punched a piece of jagged ice, sharp pinpricks of pain biting into my fingers. The second and third shattered too, to more bites but the third got a punch in and the fourth grabbed my leg. The sensation of needles or perhaps cat-like claws returned and lasted longer before I slammed the constructs together with shattering force then popped the rest with rapid thrusts and the occasional kick.

  "Was that your best effort? I barely felt it!" I taunted again, the aches disappearing. "Did you really expect such feeble constructs to work?" I laughed at him and was rewarded with a slight narrowing of those empty black eyes. "Then again, what else can you do? There are no landmarks here but the sun so you don't know where we are. The Earth is too far for you to see, but would a terrorist even have the grasp of astronomy to know where to look? Plus how fast can you fly? Would you get back in hours? Days? Weeks maybe? How long do you have without a host?"

  "Long enough," he spat, then several somethings struck me from behind, bands as thick as my arms and more wrapping solidly around all of my limbs and pulling. They were the bolts he'd fired first and missed with, except they had not been merely magic bolts but fully articulate constructs themselves. They didn't hurt like the humanoid ones but with three per limb they had a pretty firm hold that they used to get me within the bastard's reach. He swung for the fences, burying his fist in my diaphragm. "Are these working now?" It was his turn to taunt as pain exploded from that one blow as if I'd been impaled.

  "Meh, three out of ten," I struggled enough to shrug. "I've been nuked before, dumbass. Shot with lightning bolts as thick as the Eiffel tower, bathed in plasma and dark magic, punched by a demon with a fist the size of Hoover dam. Your little temper tantrum is barely annoying, and being an annoyance is the last thing you have left."

  He didn't like that as evidenced by the rain of punches, uppercuts and kicks sent my way. He was maybe two-thirds as strong as I was and I was a lot tougher than I was strong. With Focused Invulnerability against his pain touch he couldn't even make them hurt. Then he staggered, flickered, and the outline of his previously solid form began to slowly leak red mist.

  "Pro tip: an object in motion stays in motion and in space you can't tell if you're actually moving due to lack of landmarks and air resistance." My eyes flashed, eye-beams slicing through the oh-so-inescapable bonds he'd put on me. "We are still moving at about half the speed of light and we just left your daddy's control radius five million miles that away," I pointed behind him and smirked. "Sorry, six million miles now. Or is it seven million? It's increasing so quickly you certainly can't count that fast."

  The slowly destabilizing simulacrum turned around and fled. So I stepped outside of time, got ahead of him, and reentered the time-stream at just the right place to slug him in the face. It was extremely satisfying... and sent him hurtling away like a rocket. So I did again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Unlike some people I couldn't keep that up forever... but I could do it a hell of a lot longer than a dwindling disembodied construct.

  "Hey look! You're leaking all over the place!" I taunted and kicked him in the gut. "What was that you said about me regretting it?" I asked and shattered his nose. "Nothing clever to say? It is the last chance you'll get!" I shattered his right knee. It didn't regenerate. "Or is it that you only boast and bluster and threaten when the other side in the conversation can't talk back?" He started with threats again. Then curses. Then followed the pleas, even begging. In the end he was reduced to a flickering empty sack of a construct, black eyes wide with terror. He had the full mind and sapience of the original and could tell exactly what was about to follow.

  "See, when mentally screwed evil monsters like you," I crushed what remained of his left hand, "get it into their maggot-ridden noggin that people are things which only exist for their amusement," I crushed his right hand as well, "the rest of us object as is right and proper." I grabbed him by his now scrawny, misshapen neck as his construct body deflated worse than the meanest starvation victim. "We object by getting together because unlike you we actually have friends, corner you in dark, remote places like this one, and don't stop kicking until you either change your mind or you croak." I shook him until the last bit of him was flickering erratically.

  "Understand this as you die, ever-loathsome, ever-fool." He flickered one final time and blew up into red mist, dispersing in the cold dark depths of outer space. I waited until every last bit of the simulacrum faded, then groaned. I needed to trek all the way back and then we'd need to repeat all that with the original asshole.

  So much for my vacation.