The hotel's owner, Old Punk, had barely cleared his stubby pistol—no time even to aim it at Maya—when a thin line whipped out and coiled around him a few times over. Before he could get out more than a syllable, the thread hauled him off his feet and sent him tumbling out into the middle of the street.
There's no time left. What do I do? What do I do?
By now the third-floor street-side room of the Punk Hotel was leaking a faint, uncanny glow of dark crimson. Even without Spider-Sense, Maya's spirit-sense was screaming a danger alarm for all it was worth.
Maya swept her gaze around—and something clicked. Another thread shot out. CLANG. The manhole cover at the curb tore loose and lifted.
Then, ignoring Old Punk's wailing, Maya pitched him straight down into the sewer. At the same instant, the ODM gear at her waist spat out seven more lines, snagging the nosy onlookers craning in from all sides and reeling them in—one after another, stuffing every last one of them down the hole.
Under three minutes.
"—! What the hell IS that thing? There's no time left!"
Maya swore, then dove into the sewer herself, dragging the cover shut over her head as she went.
WHUMP—BOOM! BA-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
Even through the cover, and from better than 20 meters (65 feet) away, Maya's ears rang and rang, and a rolling wave of heat came surging down after her.
Given the situation, Maya waited only for the barrage to ease before she flung the cover back open—because piled beneath her were dozens of people, and the fire was devouring the oxygen fast. A Shadow Clone didn't need to breathe. Ordinary people wouldn't last.
Maya climbed up out of the manhole and lifted her head to look around—and everywhere was devastation. The whole block looked like it had swallowed one giant incendiary bomb, the kind laced with ten Tomahawk missiles for good measure.
The Punk Hotel, ten-plus stories tall, simply no longer existed. A few low stumps of pillar and wall were all that remained to testify to its former glory. Maya, right now, couldn't see a thing with her eyes—all around her was dark red flame, ruined walls crackling and popping in the blaze, the very air buckling and folding in the heat.
Before Maya was a wash of ghastly red, twisting dark-crimson firelight flooding her vision. Everything up to this point, her perception had told her—not her eyes.
Even now, Maya stayed wound tight. Tighter, in fact, than a moment ago. Because she'd finally found the culprit behind all of it—and it wasn't a bomb at all, nor any of the weapons she'd guessed. It was a person. A living, breathing person.
A man hung in midair, head thrown back, roaring at the sky, his shoulder-length hair streaming loose around him. His antique robe billowed in the inferno, and the dark-red flames took the shape of dragons and serpents, coiling and circling around him. One of his eyes shot out a seven-foot lance of golden light; the other was clouded, unfocused. The whole of him looked like a man come completely unhinged.
Not just a human—a human from the mystic side.
Finding the true culprit brought her no relief. If anything, she'd have preferred the thing that just went off to be a micro-nuke—blow up and be done.
Because now the real trouble was only getting started.
The first thing Maya did was cut the looped announcement at her waist. Against a scene this apocalyptic, a street-vendor's ad blaring on repeat was frankly a little embarrassing. Ahem. Give her credit—even here, even now, she still had bandwidth to fret about looking cool.
The sewer she'd used wasn't a main line; the mouth of it was on the narrow side, and a lot of people had jammed up partway down—no way out above, no way down below. So she decided to save the ones stuck in the shaft first. At minimum, the oxygen problem had to go.
Wind feeds fire—but that depends on what kind of fire. Maya thrust out her right hand, and an apple-sized Rasengan swelled up fast like a balloon. Not Naruto's kind of swelling, the sort you get by cramming in more chakra—this was pure expansion of form. The chakra load barely rose; even its original pale blue thinned away to no color at all.
And so a nearly transparent sphere, four or five meters (13 to 16 feet) across, sat balanced on Maya's single upturned palm. Then came the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of rushing wind: centered on the manhole, out to a four-meter (13-foot) radius, a reverse tornado formed. A torrent of air came sucking down out of the high sky and pouring into the shaft—and even the flames all around were shoved back by the sheer force of the wind.
That was Maya's idea. A normal tornado blows things up off the ground; from that, Maya had drawn her inspiration and simply flipped the direction. It was a slick little trick—it drew oxygen-rich air down from up high and fed it into the shaft for everyone to breathe, and at the same time it carved out a fire-free zone all around.
All of it, the clever application of the Rasengan's wind nature. Not a shred of killing power to it—but here, it was exactly right.
Pity Maya only got to enjoy it for about two seconds. The man in the flames ahead, startled by her chakra, loosed a great roar and came hurtling at her like a thing possessed.
"Snap out of it! What the hell is wrong with you?!"
"—!" A writhing, twisting dark-red fire-dragon came streaking her way.
Maya kicked her vector thrusters on and slipped nimbly clear of the fire-wave as it grazed past.
Right—all around her was rubble and stumps of wall, and the ODM gear had nothing to anchor to. So she took a page from Tony's book and fired up the backup turbo thrusters to drive her body through the air.
And in the same instant she dodged, eight threads came dancing out from her waist like a nest of flying snakes and stabbed straight at the man.
Ting—ting—ting.
A pale-red curtain of light flared up around him and stopped the barrage of needle-sharp heads cold.
BOOM.
A ring of fire erupted. Skreee—ting-ting. Two of the threads snapped clean; the other six scattered across the ground.
"Taru! Teshub! In the Old Persian tongue—god of storms! The Bull!" the long-bearded, long-haired man bellowed.
And then, before Maya's astonished eyes, a bull of flame five meters (16 feet) tall and twelve meters (40 feet) long winked into existence out of nowhere and charged her, dead center, aimed at her chest—
If she'd hit this kind of situation before meeting Stick, Maya would have been finished. But now, with that massive flaming bull's head barreling down on her, Maya steadied her nerves, strode both legs back in a long stance, and—right hand planted on the bull's brow—vaulted into a full 360-degree forward flip, clearing the impact entirely and landing behind the beast.
Once she'd stuck it, Maya glanced down at her right hand. Damn. A single second, if that, and her right hand was scorched clean to the bone. Good thing she'd learned Medical Ninjutsu.
At the thought, green light welled up out of her palm—and in under ten seconds the hand was whole and unmarked again.
CRACK!
A bolt of lightning came down straight for the crown of Maya's head. She'd been ready for it—in her perception, the energy massing overhead was as blatant as an awl driving for her temple.
CLANG! Ssss—
A thin cord swung the manhole cover up to intercept the strike. Maya glanced back: the six-, seven-centimeter (two-and-a-half-inch) slab of solid steel had been sheared and twisted out of shape.
Even as she dodged the lightning, Maya was sprinting toward the man in a hard zigzag. Along the way came more—lightning, ice spikes, fire-serpents. But even instant-cast magic gave off an energy ripple she could feel, and so she either slipped it early or picked the angle that would cost her the least and took it head-on with a gold-glowing fist.
"Take this, you bastard—Thanos Killing Punch!"
Maya was closing the gap fast now, right fist clenched, her whole arm blazing gold.
"What—a person—"
Maya was shocked to see the man in front of her go abruptly hazy, insubstantial—and then vanish clean out of her sight.
Skree—!
An arm crackling with lightning and fire punched clean through Maya's chest.