If I had talents with this kind of destructive output from the start, that fight might have ended considerably sooner.
The thought moved through Lukas's mind with the unhurried quality of someone sitting with a realization rather than rushing past it. He turned Lightning Bolt over in his tactical awareness the way he might turn a new weapon over in his hands — assessing range, assessing cost, assessing how it fit against the gaps in what he currently carried. The answer was that it fit well. Very well. The talent operated at a distance and delivered its result instantaneously, without the telegraphing that close-range attacks were always vulnerable to. Against fast targets, against enemies that used mobility as their primary defense, against situations where closing the gap was the most dangerous part of the engagement—
He filed it. Kept thinking.
Movement in his peripheral vision interrupted the process.
Tommy had turned toward the remaining snake corpse.
