Jayne kept staring at Twist in bewilderment. The boy walking towards her right now didn't show even a lick of damage on his face from the blow she had landed on him. Even if he had a sturdy level of Fint reinforcement around his body, he should have cracked something at the very least.
"Who knew so many specimens would volunteer for my cause? I won't have to bother Bee after all," Twist said with a deranged look on his face.
Jayne frowned.
"What kind of sick and twisted little f*cker are you?" she said.
"Don't underestimate him!" one of the two remaining Agents barked. "He's able to switch our positions! It must be some kind of spatial technique... or something!"
Jayne gave a short glance to the Agent who spoke.
Switching positions?
That's the kind of Utility that had them all so shaken up?
Jayne didn't say it, but she was very disappointed in the fact that this was all it took to eliminate all these Agents.
'His Utility is nothing to worry about. What's frustrating is his skill in Fint reinforcement. Still, he'll fold with enough hits, and I can land many. Also, without the one Dein just sent flying into space, we have a bit of time to whittle down these bastards,' Jayne thought, reassuring herself.
Twist's slow approach didn't faze her at all, but it did rattle the two remaining Agents who had lived through the horror from just moments ago. Though, even as they anticipated being shifted around, they were empowered by Jayne's arrival on the battlefield.
With her here, they had more options. They could even use themselves as bait for the brat.
One of the two took a deep breath, cast his rifle aside, and pushed his hand outward while gathering Fint. Cold mist gathered around his hand, blue and flaky, and it poured sharply at Twist with immense speed.
Jayne watched as blocks of clear ice budded around the boy and started to freeze his body rapidly.
She kept her eyes keen, making sure to try and identify any changes to the Agents registering in her peripheral vision.
"You see, this is the problem with speedsters," a youthful voice suddenly sounded beside Jayne, crippling her with shock. "The dumb ones actually stop to talk."
Jayne's head had turned to where Twist was standing before the boy had finished speaking.
She was stumped by the fact that she didn't realize he had already switched positions with the Agent who cast the frost with his Utility just now. She distinctly remembered seeing a short boy getting layered in ice not even two seconds ago, yet the variant she was looking at was completely fine and still decked in the oversized armor of the Agents.
However, these thoughts didn't bother her for more than a split second.
In the next minuscule instance of time, Jayne flashed over to Twist and dragged him along as she bolted like lightning through the forest. She sprinted at her maximum speed, becoming so fast that everything turned into a whooshing blur.
She and her tag-along streaked through wide tar, passed a filling station, a series of grocery stores, a pub, and a hospital on their way to a remote resort, the Rocky Isles as it was called, famed for its beautiful rocky views.
After confirming for a split second that she still had Twist, Jayne slammed him into a massive boulder, and the whole thing exploded as though an explosive round of ammunition had been fired into it!
As broken chunks of rock fell on her and the victim she was pressing with both hands into the crumbling mass, Jayne shook... and then gnashed her teeth.
It wasn't Twist in her grasp, but a dead tree wearing the dark, sleek armor from the Bureau. Jayne had punished a victim of nature's invasive beetle species instead. The poor tree had been crushed into powder, save for a few branches and roots.
A second later, Jayne streaked back toward the way she had come, and in the blink of an eye, she returned to the forest to find Twist putting on a new set of jeans, a jacket, and a shirt. Next to him was a wooden coat rack holding other pieces of clothing.
It was hard to tell how he had changed his clothes – or where he found a new set of them – in barely three seconds, but Jayne didn't show him courtesy. She decked him in the face with a hard punch as he was putting on his other trainer, and…
A wave of pain coursed through Jayne's hand. It had fractured upon contact!
"Arghhh!" she screamed while strangling her wrist and drew back.
This time, Twist didn't go flying off from the hit. Instead, he finished putting on his shoe and wore an amiable smile.
"Honestly," he said, shaking his head.
Twist's Utility was called, well, Twist.
It allowed him to alter aspects of reality, like space, but his current capabilities limited him to only switching the positions of up to ten targets at once. He was still a young boy in the process of developing. He hadn't even fully figured out how not to swap his clothes with those of a live target when switching.
What was truly stunning about Twist's abilities, however, was the range within which he could apply the Utility, Twist: a full kilometre!
Nearly as impressive as that was the fact that every time he switched, nearby observers and even the victim of the switch wouldn't realize it until much later. They lingered in the pre-swap reality until it was too late. This aspect of the Utility tended to vanish when stronger opponents were involved though.
"Father really hated speedsters. Or I guess, hates," Twist said as he tied his shoelaces. "He says they are dumb and arrogant, and that most of the time, they die because they fry their brains running around in circles instead of actually killing their opponents. Ah, Uncle Roy was a speedster too, now that I think about it. Father killed him over dinner. Said he grabbed the desserts a little quickly."
As Twist was monologuing, he felt Fint surge a short distance away behind him, and then a stream of frost barrelled towards his back. At the same time, Jayne flashed towards him, held him by the neck, and covered his eyes with her fractured hand!
The burst of cold came from the Agent who had been trapped in his own ice attack just seconds ago. Because he bore a Utility related to frost-type abilities, he couldn't be harmed by them, hence why he hadn't remained incapacitated. He used this chance to attack, hoping Jayne could capitalize on it!
The cold blasted Twist like an avalanche and Jayne gritted her teeth as her hands were frozen too.
"Eat that! Let's see if you can get out of it unscathed!" she growled.
However, in the next second, the most bizarre thing happened.
Twist, Jayne, and the remaining fodder Agent… found themselves in the air.
No. Wait, yes! No, that wasn't it!
The ground and the sky had flipped, but only within a certain range!
Clouds could be seen under their feet along with the boundless blue sky while the green-infested ground could be seen ways overhead!
The three started falling… upwards.
It was odd.
Around ten meters away, the ground resumed after a harsh transition from the skyscape, and above, the sky could be seen around the patch of land they were falling towards!
Jayne and the Agent froze.
The opposite happened to Twist. He shook off the blocks of ice as Fint reinforced him.
He had truly been smitten by the chilling cold this time, but only because he didn't intend to dodge. The only movement he had made, was bringing his hand to the hilt of the katana behind his back.
"Ooooh, I see now!" he said with a childish chuckle, the air whipping his hair as he fell. "You covered my eyes because you thought I couldn't switch if I didn't have a live view of the target I wanted to switch with. And you thought that making direct contact could compromise my ability as well – like my Utility won't work if I'm with another subject. Fascinating, but not at all very accurate!"
It wasn't unusual for Utilities to have such limitations, especially those from the Violet Spark, but that simply wasn't the case for Twist.
His berating didn't register to Jayne or the other Agent though.
They were busy wondering what they were to do with the whole dropping-to-their-deaths situation—or rising?
Twist laughed at the fear depicted on their faces.
The katana on his back was his J.U.N.K. It certainly didn't do something like nuke knaves, but he, like everyone else in the Ryduun family accepted that their customized weapons would be called as such for all time.
Where Bee's acted as both a long-range and short-range weapon to cover her weakness, Twist's J.U.N.K amplified the potency of his Utility.
While wielding his katana, he could flip more than just small inanimate objects and living creatures.
And on top of that…
The boy unsheathed his sword just as Jayne started racing her feet, attempting to do something she probably hadn't done before: running on air.
Twist grinned and slashed with his katana.
The space between him and Jayne seemed to bend like rubber. It wiggled, the effect traveling to Jayne's legs… which were then violently rippled off so suddenly that for the first five seconds, the speedster didn't even register that her legs had divorced her body and were falling upward on their own.
"ARRRRGHHHH!" Jayne shrieked in agony.
The other Agent trembled in fear.
What the heck...?!
Twist snapped his fingers and all of a sudden, the world returned to normal.
All three of them were back on the ground, but Jayne kept screaming.
In what he perhaps saw as a gesture of kindness, Twist walked over to Jayne's pair of legs, picked them up, sliced off the arms of the other Agent when he yelled, "You'll never get away with this" and tried to use his Utility again, and placed Jayne's legs beside her.
He then crouched by her side and said in a kind voice:
"When we get to experimenting, we'll see if we can get your little legs moving again."
The pat he gave on Jayne's shoulder truly made Twist feel good, but then, his mood was crippled by the sudden appearance of a vast, circular shadow on the ground.
Twist looked up and his mouth hung open.
Even Jayne and the other Agent ceased their cries of pain.
They were awed and devastated at the same time.
The wild gust that accompanied the shadow terrorized them all the more.
"Oh, fudgeballs," Twist cursed at the sight of a moon falling towards them all.