Flying through Lung's flame with shields down

As I fell down, fire spiked up, aimed right for me. I flew, and purple flame below me and around me billowed out, swelled, and lanced toward me, depending on its shape, chasing that flight.

As I made my aerial maneuvers around flares that worked like explosions constrained within invisible cylinders, the heat in the air sucked all moisture from my mouth and eyes. Had I been running, the heat would have knocked the wind out of me, saw me crumpling to my knees.

My flight didn't draw on any well of physical capacity like that. Where anyone else might have been drained, I was… I was drained of something closer to my humanity. I was my power in action, my focus, my battle-sense.

I was more a Glory Girl than the Warrior Monk right now, and that was okay. If the focus of a dangerous, barbaric teenage me was going to keep me in the game in a moment like this, I would tap that focus with no regrets.

Maybe wrong to think that within a few seconds of recognizing how I was letting more human, fair parts of me fall away.

His senses were improving, going by his ability to track me in the gloom. More eruptions were coming.

***

Double fuck, I thought, as fire came down from above, far too close to me. He'd manipulated the fire of a spear of flame that extended high above me. The prickle of heat and the wave of it that seemed to soak into my core and take the breath from my lungs and the oxygen from my blood hit me harder than the last time. It was that staggering, fall-to-my-knees kind of heat, and it hadn't been a direct hit. This time, even though there wasn't a physical component to it, my flight wavered, my speed suffered.

All at a time it counted most.

***

I landed, and my legs buckled beneath me. I dropped to my knees, fires burning high just twenty feet away. A steel beam gave me a modicum of cover, but it had been lying in the blaze long enough that I could feel the heat radiating off the metal, which didn't help manners.

- Gleaming 9.11