"I hate this," I yelled over the wind. "I hate this so much!"
We were forty stories up.
To be specific, we were standing on the exposed steel girders of the Skyline Plaza, a construction project that had been abandoned for three months due to "structural instability."
Riya walked across a steel beam that was barely six inches wide like she was strolling through a park. She didn't even look down.
I, on the other hand, was hugging the central concrete pillar like a koala.
"Stop whining," Riya called back. "Height gives us a tactical advantage."
"Advantage?" I looked down. The cars on the street looked like Hot Wheels. "If I slip, I have ten seconds to contemplate my life choices before I turn into pavement pizza!"
"Then don't slip," she said helpfully.
She stopped at the edge of the scaffolding and tapped her glasses. "Readings are spiking here. The workers didn't leave because of structural issues. They left because something was nesting in the crane."
I looked up at the yellow crane towering another fifty feet above us. It creaked in the high wind.
"Nesting?" I swallowed. "Like... pigeons?"
"Sure. If pigeons had six-foot wingspans and razor blades for feathers."
SCREEEEEECH.
A sound tore through the clouds. It sounded like metal grinding against metal.
I looked up. A shadow detached itself from the crane. It dived.
It was a Vulture-Harpy. A twisted mix of a bird and a human corpse. It had rotting grey feathers, a long hooked beak, and human arms that ended in talons.
"Contact!" Riya shouted, drawing her katana. "Aryan, get its attention! I'll flank it!"
"Get its attention?" I let go of the pillar. "Hey! Ugly! Your mother was a chicken!"
The Harpy screeched and banked hard, locking its beady black eyes on me. It tucked its wings and entered a dive bomb.
"Oh, crap."
I raised my left arm. The bracelet was already glowing.
< COMBAT MODE. >
< AVATAR: AGNI. >
FWOOSH.
The fire engulfed me. The fear of falling vanished, replaced by the burning aggression of the Fire God. My skin turned charcoal-grey, my hair blazed up.
"Come and get it!" I roared, my voice distorted.
I thrust my palm forward. A fireball the size of a basketball shot upward.
Miss.
The Harpy twisted in mid-air with impossible agility. The fireball sailed past it harmlessly.
"Too slow!" Riya yelled from a beam above.
The Harpy swooped past me, its talons raking across my chest.
CLANG.
My rock-hard magma skin protected me from being disemboweled, but the force of the impact knocked me off balance.
My foot slipped off the girder.
"Whoa!"
I flailed, grabbing onto a steel cable with my burning hand. The cable sizzled and started to melt under my grip.
"Bad idea! Bad idea!"
I hung there, dangling forty stories up. The Harpy circled back, screeching in delight. It knew I was trapped. It was staying out of my range, waiting for me to fall.
I need to fly, I thought desperately. I need to move like that.
I looked at the greyed-out icon on my mental HUD. VAYU.
"System!" I yelled. "Unlock Vayu! Just give it to me!"
< ACCESS DENIED. >
< ERROR: USER MENTAL STATE INCOMPATIBLE. >
< CURRENT STATE: PANIC / ATTACHMENT. >
< REQUIRED STATE: DETACHMENT. >
"I am very detached!" I screamed as the cable I was holding began to snap. "I am literally detaching from the building!"
The Harpy dove again, talons aimed at my face.
"Aryan, drop!" Riya's voice.
I didn't question her. I let go.
I fell ten feet, landing heavily on the floor below.
As I fell, Riya leaped from the shadows above, her sword flashing silver.
SLASH.
She caught the Harpy on its wing as it tried to pull out of the dive. Black blood sprayed.
The monster shrieked, tumbling through the air, but it flapped its good wing and managed to regain altitude, hovering just out of reach.
It stared at us, intelligent and angry. It realized that Riya couldn't fly, and I was a sitting duck.
It opened its beak. A high-pitched sound wave blasted us.
"Sonic attack!" Riya covered her ears, grimacing. The glass windows on the floor below us shattered.
My head felt like it was splitting open. I fell to my knees, the fire around me flickering.
"We can't hit it!" I yelled, clutching my head.
"It's too fast! It's just going to pick us off!"
Riya was struggling to stand. "We need to ground it! Do you have a ranged shot? Like a beam?"
"I can't aim it!" I shouted. "It moves too fast!"
I looked at the Harpy. It was mocking us. It was free. I was stuck to the steel, heavy, clumsy, and burning with useless rage.
Think, I told myself. If I can't be the wind... I have to use the wind.
I looked at the environment. We were in a half-finished building. Tarps, loose debris, and...
A stack of industrial cement bags near the edge.
"Riya!" I shouted. "When I say jump, you jump!"
"What are you doing?"
I scrambled toward the cement bags. The Harpy saw me moving and dove for the kill.
"Now!"
I slammed my burning fists into the stack of cement bags, not to break them, but to heat them. I channeled every ounce of Agni's heat into the air pocket inside the bags.
Superheated air expands. Rapidly.
BOOM.
The bags exploded like a dust bomb. A massive cloud of grey cement dust puffed out, instantly filling the air around the scaffolding.
The Harpy flew right into it.
The dust coated its eyes. It choked on the powder.
More importantly, the dust revealed the wind currents. I could see exactly where the bird was by the disturbance in the grey cloud.
"I can see it!" I yelled.
I didn't aim for the bird. I aimed for the crane cable above it.
I fired a precise, thin beam of fire—a Laser Cutter instead of a fireball.
SNAP.
The steel cable severed. The heavy metal hook of the crane swung down like a pendulum through the dust cloud.
CRUNCH.
It slammed into the blinded Harpy with the force of a wrecking ball.
The monster squawked, its bones shattering. It plummeted out of the sky, smashing into the concrete floor of the 30th story below us.
Silence returned to the rooftop, save for the wind.
I powered down, the Agni form fading. I slumped against a girder, covered in sweat and cement dust.
"Did we win?" I wheezed.
Riya lowered her sword. She looked at me, then at the dust cloud, then back at me. She wiped a smudge of dirt off her cheek.
"Improvised dust-blindness and environmental hazard," she listed. "Sloppy.
Very sloppy."
She sheathed her katana.
"But," she added, a tiny smile appearing.
"Not bad for a newbie."
I grinned, giving her a thumbs up.
Then I looked down at the 30th floor.
The Harpy wasn't moving. But something else was.
A dark, purple mist was rising from its body.
The mist didn't dissipate. It coalesced, forming a shape. A human shape.
Riya saw it too. Her smile vanished.
"That's not a normal decomposition," she whispered. "Aryan, get up."
The purple mist formed a figure in a dark suit.
He looked up at us, forty stories high, and waved.
Then he vanished into the shadows.
"Who was that?" I asked, a chill running down my spine that had nothing to do with the wind.
"Trouble," Riya said grimly. "Big trouble."