More on forcefield recharge, Flying with Torso

Okay. Here was the trick, then. I disengaged from my forcefield, visualizing and forming the cocoon shape, the ribcage splayed open so I could fly out. Then I turned it toward Torso. Forcefield arms reached out, grabbing him under the armpits, where his arms stuck out of the heavy armor that covered head and upper body only. I lifted him into the opening in the forcefield-

His head lolled back, smashing into the forcefield. I felt it go, dashed to smithereens.

For what felt like three, four, maybe even five seconds, my forcefield didn't come back online. A problem that had only ever occurred with Scion-level hits and Ashley's blasts.

Again, I repeated the exercise. Lifting him, hands reaching inside to brace his head.

The area shook. He flinched, his head moved to tear free of the bracing grip, and he bashed my forcefield into oblivion with a small tap of the back of his head against the 'shoulder' of it.

*****

"Fuck it," I said. I used my forcefield, disengaging from it, but this time, instead of giving him a ride, I used six hands to pick him up. Two at the armpits, two at the wrists, two at the thighs. I held him like I would a battering ram.

"Don't move, let me try this, I'll do my best to keep you safe," I told him. The guy felt more awkward to hold than my twelve tons of gun, and I couldn't even get to grips with how or why. It wasn't that he was heavier. It was that the weight was weird.

******

Flying with Torso felt like an extension of being Torso. Keeping my grip was tough, because the weight seemed to shift every few seconds, to the point he nearly tore out of my grip twice in the time it took me to get ten feet higher in the air, matching the Simurgh's height. Flying forward posed the same problems, only worse, because it complicated up and down and somehow made it impossible to keep from curving left or right.

The screaming in my head was worse, now, compounded by the stress of the moment. I tried to maintain my course in flying toward the Simurgh, and she veered one direction, not even as an apparent consequence of my approach, but because of the way the fight was going.

A pillar shattered, the rebar exposed as the exterior came away in jagged splinters. To keep my forcefield going, I used Torso as something of a human shield, drawing the limbs in. Chunks of concrete struck his giant head and upper body and bounced off, with no harm done. When I tried to reorient, he nearly tore free of my grip again. By the time I had my bearings and was flying straight, the Simurgh was relocating, taking some evasive action and crashing through Narwhal's forcefields as Legend opened fire.

- Last 20.7