Chapter 144: Shooting Stars

Night City came out of hiding as Charlotte released her spell from the city. They chose to attack various spots filled with Rank 5 and 6 monsters on this night. Mira stood at the center of one of the 200 member platoons like the other 8 peak Rank 6s in other locations.

Mira was covered in an armor made of Nova which resembled her bubble armor and her platoon, platoon G, stood in a circular formation with people who called themselves middle Rank 6s at the exterior of the circle and those who just became Rank 6s behind them followed by the Rank 5s.

The monsters in the area noticed the presence of the humans and vampires in their midst but they didn't attack. The monsters didn't know whether they were intruders or new citizens of their King so they couldn't attack. They had signed contracts with the Kings under the Rank 20 King not to kill any citizen of the Kingdom and they would die if they did.

The long rangers of the platoon took out wooden platforms from their Storage Rings and stood on them after which they aimed their guns at the monsters and started firing.

The monsters responded with aggression when they noticed that the people were not citizens. The monsters were of different races so they attacked in their own way and this made the battle quite chaotic for the monsters as they all had different abilities and without a formation some of them hindered or injured their comrades.

The monsters' rampage couldn't match Night City's organized assault and the monsters had to draw back as platoon G's circle expanded since the few monsters that survived the long rangers died at the hands of the vanguards at platoon G's circle formation. The long rangers started floating up as they energized their boots, which used Wind Magic technology to push them up and created platforms of wind that they could stand on, to have a clearer line of target on the retreating monsters.

Mira floated up in the air by controlling the Nova armor she was wearing. It was essentially her energy and since it had turned material it could be used as a flight mechanism. Many small balls of Nova, as small as beads of sweat, separated from her armor and she spread them over the battle field and closed her eyes.

She focused on the intent of various parties in the battle that was happening around her and used them to differentiate between ally and foe. When she sensed fearful intent in her allies she sent a bead of Nova into any monster relatively close to that area.

The beads could not be blocked or attacked as they passed through any obstruction like holograms and entered the bodies of the monsters and materialized before exploding.

One bead was too much for one monster and the left over force from the explosions hit some of the first people Mira protected. Mira further divided the beads into 8 each and resumed protecting the people. Even after reducing the size to such an extent, the remnant force was still too much as they shattered the part of the monster they exploded in.

Mira didn't want to completely shatter the corpses of the monsters; she wanted to just cause internal damage since her beads would always hit a vital part of the monster. Mira's intent sensing could discover where the monsters focused their protective intent on so she didn't need to even look at the monsters and judge to know where to hit.

Mira further divided each bead to 8 parts and ordered her IP to put all the en-code she got into her energy stat. The monsters weren't so pathetic since they were very high in number, way higher than the platoon, so as thousands of monsters gathered in the area the battle became harder for the platoon…

…Or at least that was what was supposed to happen; the monsters never got an upper hand throughout the battle because their numbers never got high enough. The only thing that could describe Mira now was the term 'Killing Machine'.

The monsters swiftly learned that the golden grains that had a negligible amount of energy and were easily overlooked were death incarnate. There was no surviving when they got hit and the golden grains just stayed above the contact zone between the people and the monsters and lit up the night like stars in the sky. The grains fell down when any monster was about to get an advantage and ended the monster without fail.

Only when all the monsters learned to dodge the golden grains did they have a glimpse of victory. Their numbers began to give them advantages and Mira found it hard to chase after so many monsters with so many grains; she couldn't control them fast enough and she couldn't control many small Novas away outside her energy zone simultaneously she had a limit.

The monsters slowly gained the advantage and got more moral as they all focused on dodging the grains while fighting. Dodging the grains had drawbacks since the monsters had to focus on two things but anything was better than instant death.

Mira soon stopped trying to chase them and used the time slot when the monsters hadn't gained the advantage to try to develop an new way of using the Novas. She knew that danger enhanced the growth of High Humans, she didn't know about Vampires since they seemed to have a naturally better growth than High Humans, so she wanted the danger to boost the improvement in her prowess.

The monsters took advantage of Mira's inaction; on seeing that the golden grains had stopped falling they attacked with more fervor. Platoon G struggled to hold back the monsters; this was only possible because Platoon G was the strongest platoon in Night City. The city didn't want to give Mira who had such a hazardous ability a weak group that would die if she made mistakes.

People started getting injured and the circle of the platoon started shrinking as the monsters pressed on. While Mira kept creating new Nova grains and detonating them; she was trying to make a Nova that worked like a Balloon Bubble.

Mira stopped after her many failed attempts she sighed and thought 'The explosion is my ambition and dreams. The container is reality. All of reality doesn't have to shatter before my dreams come true a small part of reality is enough, a single drop of good luck, a chance encounter, an opening, a chance. The rest of reality can stay the same'.

Mira remembered the room where she met Malik and the room where she met Jade. The rooms were her reality they confined her within their walls but the people that helped her see the world outside of it were her openings, her doors.

She thought 'You don't have to always break everything; you can just open the door'. After that thought Mira was enlightened, the Nova grain she just made shot away from her as it released a beam of pure energy. The energy exploded when it left the confines of the grain and propelled the grain forward with multiple explosions that pushed the grain further away from Mira as more energy leaked from the grain.

Mira smiled when she saw that and thought 'I don't have to make a new type of Nova I can just change the ones I've already made'. She spent some minutes learning to control the direction of the door that was opened while she tried to make the door more streamlined so that only one full power explosion.

Mira eventually finished mastering the new application in a few minutes while the platoon's circle shrunk. She changed the shapes of all the grains she had made from spheres to what resembled water drops. When Mira opened her eyes to look at the grains, their shape reminded her of the tears she shed while Malik was being tortured and killed before her and the blood that dripped from his body as life slowly left him.

She smiled sadly as she unleashed the new technique on the advancing monsters; Mira called the new technique 'Shooting Stars'. The drop like Nova grains turned into lines of golden light as they zipped down toward their targets Mira targeted them with their spherical side facing the down and the almost conical tip facing up releasing a single long blast of air that made the grains drop so fast that they looked like swiftly descending golden lines or shooting stars to Mira.

To the monsters though, they looked like a sure death. The grains reached the monsters faster than they could react and detonated inside their bodies. Mira wasn't used to the speed at first so she detonated some grains too early or too late but she eventually got the hang of it and the monsters started losing bad.

The massacre continued for an hour before there were no monsters in the area anymore all the monsters were either dead or they had run away. Platoon G returned to the rendezvous point to wait for Jake and Charlotte after collecting the corpses of the monsters.