Realistic or Modern A Matter of Worth [Interludes & Short Stories]

[Birdsie]

Here, you can post any specific interludes, stories, and character arcs, including details on the characters' backstories.

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[Birdsie]

436 words, est. reading time is 1min, 35sec.

Prelude to Chapter 3

Avatar frowned, altering his course by several degrees, making an almost ellipsoid contrail of gold as he went through the empty gap between two asteroids.

Among the scenery of asteroids and white stars on a black backdrop, he spotted the target: a gray space cruiser, with a purple exhaust of plasma and a shimmering blue forcefield. He'd gotten a call about it earlier from the cosmic authorities.

Space marauders in the Milky Way? Not on his watch.

Avatar postured like a baseball pitcher, charging up.

Golden light blazed into existence in his palm like a torch. Cosmic energy coursed through his fingers. The primordial power of the universe, resonating across multiple planes of reality, directed by a sentient idea, ready to smite the wicked.

He charged it for barely two seconds, then curveballed it at the alien ship. The vibrations rattled the entire carrier and the forcefield went down.

Avatar collected energy in his body, then slingshotted himself forward, in front of the ship, intercepting it even as it tried to escape. The pilot didn't have time to react, and Avatar kept himself hovering in front of it.

Avatar decided to make this a decisive victory, before the forcefield could reset.

He followed up his first strike with a salvo. A staccato of eager golden lights raced to see which one could hit the bridge the fastest.

The first spread spiderweb cracks on the very dead center of the windshield, the second spread more a bit to the right, the third made a giant fracture in the entire thing, and the fourth was just enough to destroy it. The sudden change in pressure and decompression sucked some of the crew out, and Avatar quickly subspaced from afar them to save their lives.

He frowned when the spot of the absent windshield was taken by carbosteel shutters. These were meant to take superpowered strikes, and weren't limited by human science.

Avatar prepared another ball of cosmic energy in his right hand, reconfiguring its functionality: less concussive force, less blasting force, less thermal radiation, more penetration, more concentrated kinetic force. He charged it up for ten seconds, then shot it at the shutter, creating a truck-sized hole and causing the rest of the crew to be vented out.

He subspaced them to prevent freezing and lack of oxygen, then set a kinetic vector at the helm of the ship to steer the rest of the crew to the nearest civilized planet - not counting Earth. The galactic authorities would take it from there.

Avatar turned into a wavelength and flew back to Earth in seconds, heading for New York.