Takes Bakuda's force bomb

Clink

I barely heard the noise, amidst all the rest of the chaos. It was like a pin dropping during a concert, and even when I thought back on the fight later, I had no idea how I’d managed to notice it, but I did.

When I looked down, there, sitting by my feet and lolling slightly from side to side, was a grenade, and one of Bakuda’s, to boot. For a few fractions of a second, as my heart stopped and I realized what it was, it gleamed up at me, all chrome and vaguely futuristic, and it seemed the most sinister, evil thing I had ever laid eyes on.

Contrary to the clink that I had barely heard, the click of the thing arming itself sounded thunderous.

“Shi —”

At the last possible moment, I managed to throw up my arms to guard my face and my head, and then the grenade went off with an echoing BOOM, throwing me back with an incredible amount of force.

I was flying through the air for far longer than I really thought I should have been, and I landed roughly on my back on something hard and solid and whole — and it hurt. The air was driven from my lungs by the impact, and my head cracked against the ground, filling my vision with stars.

No, wait, those were actual stars.

I gasped, heaving and trying to draw in air, and blinked up at the night sky. Around me, a pair of buildings jutted upwards to form a frame, and after a moment of staring dumbly at the sky, I realized that Bakuda’s grenade had thrown me not only backwards, but out of the warehouse and into the alleyway behind it.

And it had hurt.

I shot up, scrambling to my feet, and tried to ignore how my back felt like one, gigantic bruise and how the back of my head throbbed from where I’d hit it. I patted down my stomach and my chest and my thighs, but I found nothing, and when I looked down, my front was entirely unscathed. Fortunately, that…I decided to call it a “force bomb.” Fortunately, that force bomb and whatever shrapnel it had thrown at me hadn’t actually done any real harm.

It had gotten through my shield, though.

And…yes, there, even as I watched, my defensive barrier shimmered back to life around my body. That force bomb had taken it down, if only for a few seconds. I had no idea exactly how much power had gone into it, but whatever it was, it’d been enough to pop my barrier like a soap bubble. I’d have been a goner, probably had my organs pasted and liquefied, if I’d been a normal person.

Fuck, that was close, though. He’d almost —