New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Read Free Page A

been taken to safety. The poor people who’d been in the immediate area when the crazy Neo cut loose were beyond help, unfortunately.
    At the bottom of the smoking city-block sized hole that once had held assorted business establishments, the Big Bad traded punches with Ultimate and Face-Off. Or, from Christine’s perspective, her ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend. Two macho men who could leap over tall buildings, or pick them up over their heads.
    Two macho men who were getting the crap beaten out of them at the moment. The macho woman of the heavy hitter gang, Hyperia, was already down. Christine could only hope she wasn’t too badly injured.
    The villain going mano a mano with her super-pals had no fancy nickname; his powers had apparently manifested that very day, turning him into an eight-foot tall glowing metal humanoid. Luckily the Legion was in town for the Independence Day celebrations, because this bad guy was too tough for the local superhero team.
    Case in point: the glowing dude took a right hook from Ultimate that would have knocked the Statue of Liberty all the way to Canada and responded with a super-fast hammer blow that drilled her ex into the ground, followed by a swing that sent Face-Off flying through the air. Yikes.
    One of Christine’s special abilities was a set of extra-sensory powers that let her see the flow of energy coursing through a Neolympian. Glowing dude was shining in more than the visual spectrum: he was a blazing cauldron of power the likes of which she’d only seen back during the Genocide War. This guy wasn’t quite in the same league as the alien who’d killed a good twenty percent of the world’s Neo population, including half of its most powerful members, but he was pretty up in there; they could have really used him during the War. And with the two big machos and big bad Hyperia temporarily out of fight, and Brass Man busy throwing a force field around the combatants to keep the collateral damage down, that left…
    Little old me .
    Big tall and glowing turned towards her as she rejoined the fight. She could pick up his emotions now: he was angry and scared and utterly irrational. The sudden influx of power had completely unhinged him, and all he wanted to do was destroy, to throw a temper tantrum with the power of a god. He was gathering energy to send a bolt of pure force her way, much like the one that had nearly knocked her into orbit.
    Christine didn’t give him a chance to try it again.
    Her go-to powers when it was time to kick evil butt were the manipulation of kinetic energy and the creation of energy shields. She’d refined those abilities in the last few months, and learned a couple of useful new tricks. Besides those powers, she was armed with knowledge, courtesy of a cosmic encyclopedia of sorts, a list of Words that could hack reality itself. She glared at the murderous Neo and thought of a very special Word.
    Power .
    She poured all her willpower into that Word, calling as much energy as she could handle, and maybe a little more.
    A bubble appeared around the insane Neo. It soon filled with fire as the melting man unleashed his own power against it. His link to the Source was great as any Neo’s that she’d ever met; he tapped into impossible amounts of energy, driven by anger and desperation. The force bubble began to burn, and the feedback began to burn her as well. Christine couldn’t contain him for much longer. So she did the only thing she could think of: she contracted the bubble, suddenly and violently, adding another Word to the mix, giving whatever she had left to empower it.
    Crush . The Word squeezed the fabric of time and space around the rampaging Neolympian.
    Visually, the effect wasn’t all that impressive. There were no big explosions, loud noises or any colorful FX. The gigantic form below her just crumpled into a spherical shape that shrunk down to something slightly bigger than a softball ball in less than a second. That’s what