More lightning creation

Don’t fight enemies that have control of the skies.

Just don’t. If it’s even remotely possible to avoid, do so. You do not want any of that action. There are a lot of reasons for it, tactical and strategic—the advantages of mobility, supply lines, transportation, the conducting of otherwise impossible operations, information gathering, and many more. Most importantly in the immediate sense, however, is that a group who controls the skies can shoot a lot of shit at a group who doesn’t. Whether bullets or bombs, it didn’t really matter; you weren’t going to enjoy it. If you had any way of dealing with that I suggest you employ it as quickly as possible, before they can get into position.

Which was why I shot them with lightning. Well, that’s not quite true—the amount of energy required to create lightning is…well, large. I could probably do it, but it’d likely be a, no pun intended, charged attack and a very costly one. When I had time, I’d practice it and see what I could do on that front, but in the meantime, I cheated.

This was another occasion where I was grateful for high Intelligence and Wisdom—and grateful for the fact that I studied a lot to increase the former. See, while it was difficult to create lightning directly, doing so indirectly was another matter, if you knew how. It’s a matter of charge separation, the collisions of water molecules in the air, and other facts; the many things that came together to create lightning in nature. With the power of Levant and Xihai, I drew water into the air, stirring it, cooling it, and occasionally heating it with Suryasta’s aid. Vulturnus wielded his power at its most basic level, manipulating charges by repelling them or attracting them. Vulturnus and Levant can together to ionize air and create a conductive path in pretty much the opposite way that I’d once used Levant to defend against lightning. I wielded my power carefully over the air, over my target, negative here, positive there, linked thusly—

And lightning was born, a flash of light that cut through the air for an instant before fading away. It would have been better if it had been a cloudy night—or, even better, an already stormy one—and my creation was only a fraction as fierce as it could have been.

But it was still lightning and in its wake rumbled the thunder. Worse yet, it was lightning controlled and directed by a human mind. I singled out the most dangerous ship—the one that ferried something which shined so brightly—and I created a path to a vulnerability. Like any aircraft nowadays, it had lightning protect, built to deal with the almost inevitable strikes they would create or receive over their course of use, but that was mainly designed to deal with the results of luck and chance. For something meant to strike out and sabotage…that takes something else.

Sadly, it didn’t seem like Atlas had created any robots able to directly use yellow Dust yet.

Lightning struck the ship and lights flickered as the thunder rumbled. I saw, through Vulturnus’ eyes, lights die out throughout and within the ship as it began to wobble before starting to careen towards the earth far away from me. Yet as I watched, the light that shined brightly within it did not so much as dim.

I guess that was too much to hope for. I didn’t even know what it was, but I was pretty sure I wanted to keep it far, far away from me and told myself to be satisfied when it crashed in the forest, out of sight. Of course, being out of sight and surrounded by much taller objects made striking at it vastly more difficult, but I didn’t need to win, I just needed to keep them at bay.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and shifted my focus to the next ship. There were seven in all, a fairly major assault for what must have been short notice, but given everything that had happened I guess they were on high alert. Or maybe they’d just gone above and beyond to make me feel special.

Either way, I pointed a finger at the next one and focused, my Elementals, even distant Levant, doing the same. Air and water gathered and shifted and collided, heat flowed, charges repelled and attracted, electric fields strengthened, air ionized. Water, fire, air, and lightning, the four basic types of Dust, came together towards one purpose, a display of nature’s power.

I tracked the ships course as seconds passed and power gathered—and then, with the twitch of a finger, it was falling. I paused for a moment to breath in the scent of a storm on the air and moved on the next, clearing the skies a ship at a time while the seconds ticked by and jagged lengths of light writhed in the skies.