DN - Sovereign Fight 1

This twists the fight into a swirling, looping thing, each of us diving, climbing, swooping for position. Sky, tower, and ocean are an almost interchangeable blur around us. The snap-flap-cracking of capes in the wind. The grunt and wheeze of bodies pushed far, far beyond human limits. Crashing glass, crumpling concrete. The slap of fists to meat that comes off like gunshots.

And hey, did I mention he’s got lightning powers? Because he’s got freaking lightning powers, and it’s really pissing me off. My suit is a powerful insulator, which is the only reason I’m not dead yet, but even so, his lightning burns and stings and makes every punch land harder.

Sovereign pivots backwards as I loop above him and snaps a pair of neck-breaker kicks at me. With my arms up to take the blow, I get close and ram him ten floors straight down into the brickwork of the promenade. He catches my arm and tries to break it, so I ride with the torque and whip him through a concrete column. Searing electric bolts leap at me from the dust, and I’m tearing up brickwork from the ground to fire back.

We close in on each other for another blistering round of attacks and counters. It’s too many hits—I need to break contact—but he grabs my ankle as I’m taking off and whips me into the ground. Dust and shattered brick explodes beneath my cheek, a boot like doomsday stomps on my spine. I bend backwards to lock my ankles behind his knee, yank on the lattice to spin him into the ground, and pivot back to my feet. As I’m gripping his leg for the ol’ stomp-and-twist that’s supposed to shatter his pelvis and end the fight, he blasts me with a white bolt that sends me flying backwards in buzzing pain.

And it just keeps going like that. This isn’t outer space—there’s not unlimited room to run and endless options for maneuvering. We get stuck in and we stay stuck in, an endless back-and-forth that’s grinding us both down to a nub.

Time dissolves. No space for thought, no room for plans, only instinct and rage. I love it. I am alive down to my toenails, and I can’t stop smiling.

Detonating an uppercut into his chin and taking a diamond-hard knee to my ribs in exchange. An explosion of dry splinters as I tumble end for end through an unused sauna. Cascades of shattered glass as I run him face-first across a tower’s windows, machine-gunning punches into his kidney as we go. Scalding bolts heating the air as they tear past me, blowing a marble fountain’s statue to gravel—

—tumbling through a wall together, jewels of shattered glass spinning from our bodies, and for a still moment noticing that beneath us Calamity is taking apart a tactical team with her bare hands. Doc has dropped her guns, is firing energy blasts from her palms—

—and then through the mansion and tumbling across the sod, great ribbons of grassy turf thrown into the sky as Sovereign and I savage each other again and again.

Kinetiq and Panzer streak past us, a flying lightshow of lasers and muzzle flash. Kinetiq gives Sovereign a burst of crimson energy right to his face as they pass, but Panzer’s got the same idea, and I catch a rocket with my gut.

- Sovereign, Chapter 29