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Description

The infiltration of the Sorceress' ocean fortress was not going very well. This was, like, the fifth group of armed goons Effortless had crossed paths with!

The room was just like every other one in these labyrinthine tunnels. The walls, floor, and ceiling were sandy coloured stone, and the furniture was the most simple wooden stuff money could buy. Clearly, the defences were set up for utility rather than comfort. Given that the four armed men had a strange green mist filling their eyes, it kinda seemed like they didn't mind too much.

All four of the goons were outfitted in standard military vests, two drew small guns (revolvers? Blueprint was the expert on gun types, Effortless hadn't a clue) while the other pair each had a longer firearm already held in both hands. They raised to fire at her without hesitation.

Which was really very evil of them! Unless they actually recognised Effortless specifically, she just looked like a normal (though pretty tall, to be fair) Chinese girl in a loose summer dress. She wasn't in her usual glorified-sports-bra of a heroine costume because Gangsign had the silly idea before that if the infiltration team just dressed normally, there might be a second of hesitation from any non-monstrous guards. She was in the dress because she needed something that would allow her to move all parts of her body so she could use her powers effectively.

Two bullets were piercing the air already. She hadn't even heard them yet, but she had seen the business end of both small guns held level for a couple of heartbeats, enough that they were definitely being shot. Her arms quickly moved into a guard, positioning her hands over her heart and stomach.

It was times like this that Effortless really hated her codename. Her superpower was limited by distance, not effort. She'd actually practiced loads to be able to do this. And it only worked if she was being attacked by someone who knew what they were doing! If the Sorceress' brainwashing had somehow scrambled their aim, she would just have to get lucky.

Her wrists flicked, and her hands moved a few centimetres. The movement was faster than any eye could detect, and in it was more strength than a full-bodied punch. Probably more than, like, one hundred super powerful punches from someone super strong. Anyway, basically those tiny slaps were strong enough to completely halt the forward momentum of the bullets, and send them pinging into the stone wall.

Effortless gave an open-mouthed laugh when the men saw the unharmed woman, and heard the ricochet of their bullets, and then subsequently stood motionless for a few moments trying to process what had just happened. But then the big guns got brought up to point at her torso. Not good, like, at all. There was no way she could block that many bullets, and it wasn't like they exactly needed to aim with that sort of spread so she wouldn't be able to block by assuming it was heading for her centre mass.

She dropped her guard, and following it her whole body, into a baseballer's slide.

She couldn't actually see the goons' expressions, but she had to assume they were pretty hilarious.

A roar and a a short glimpse of at least five shells flying above confirmed that she had dropped just in time.

Now, of course, there was a reason most people wouldn't just drop to the ground in the face of gunfire. Once she was flat on her back, it wasn't like she could run anywhere, and then she'd be a sitting (lying down, actually?) duck for the gunmen.

Luckily, Effortless wasn't most people. Each of her arms raised a full inch off the floor, and then slammed down. Her body sprang up like a jack-in-the-box in front of the front gunner's face. To his credit (or the credit of the Sorceress' training she guessed, unless she just sorta implanted militant programming in her minions than it was to the credit of her magic, probably worth thinking about some more later), he did shove his gun against her stomach as she came up. The problem with that move was that, while it could have made her double over in intense pain, the slide-and-bounce routine made her abs clench - and they clenched a lot less than her one-inch limit.

The weapon bounced off her skin as if it was especially hard (and cute!) rubber. Her finger came level with his nose.

"Hi there!"

The flick sent his body crashing into the far wall, and disarmed the revolver/pistol/other-small-gun user behind him from the tailwind that followed his body.

Out of the corner of her eye, Effortless was suddenly very aware that the other big gun was being pointed at her. For once, she was really hoping some bad guys wouldn't start firing in the middle of an enclosed room where the ricochet could kill them all, but she guessed she couldn't blame the very-obviously-brainwashed.

She really hated doing the move where she brought her leg up in a crescent-shaped sweeping kick at normal-girl-speed, suddenly clenched her calves and quads to stop the movement, and then just as quickly booped the leg that one fractional distance further. It really hurt, and it felt weird.

It worked, though.

The gun went flying diagonally backwards, and since there was no way the guy was going to let go in time his arms crunched as they were whipped around with it.

That left just the one small-gun-man (hehe), whose shot was just as easy to block as his first, and went down with a single slap. She gave the other three a little poke as well, just to make sure they wouldn't wake up for the rest of the operation. They'd need to call up Stardust or some other magic-user to 'cure' them later.

The fight done, Effortless breathed out, ran her hands through her dark brown hair, and touched her ear.

"Horizon, like, what the heck!? You told me this was a clear coast! Coast was not clear! Again! They could have, like, shot me you know!"

"I'm looking! I'm looking..."

She had expected Horizon to be more annoyed about her whining, but the voice in her earpiece was worried.

"Horizon...?"

"Gangsign gave me these routes. I don't get it. Maybe one clone could lose its sense of direction, but that's four clones who've got it wrong now. Forget it, I'll look myself."

She didn't like the sound of this. She chewed one of her nails for a moment.

Horizon's voice came back. "Okay, found you! Good news is that there's no monsters until you go a bit deeper. Bad news is that you've got one more group of hosti-" There was a gulping pause in Effortless' ear. "Even worse bad news... erm, the Sorceress is closing in on your location."

Oh, sh-

"Where is she?"

"Second corridor on the right from the way you came," Horizon's voice was rushed. Fair. "But that's not the most imp-"

"Yes it is! Don't worry, if I get the drop on her I can totes take her. She's just a squishy wizard, right? We were gonna take her out with one superpunch anyway!"

"No, Effortless, wai-"

Effortless pressed the button on her receiver. She needed to focus. Horizon could see her now, anyway.

Something was going wrong. She felt kinda bad for Momentum, but now was not the time to stick to the pre-arranged blueprint (hehe). She ran down the corridor, and flattened her body against the wall, trying to keep her breathing to a minimum (she was fit enough that a fifty metre run didn't send her wheezing at least, yay!).

Footsteps echoed off the stone. They were getting closer...

Closer...

Closerrr...

Effortless pushed with her left hand and used a little bounce of her left foot to stabilise her motion (another difficult move to practice, but less painful). Her right arm extended outwards until it touched fabric and/or flesh. Effortless only saw a pale, angular face. She hadn't really waited to see who it was, to be honest, it was definitely going to be someone scary.

Her hips rotated. Her fingers bent. Her elbow flexed. Her knuckles shot forward at the speed of sound.

Sonic Boom One-Inch Punch!

She thought. The attack was too fast to do a cool shouting-out-your-attack-name thing.

There was a flash of light to match the boom echoing through the air. An explosion of colour in expanding, cracking fractals. A cool light-show, and (hopefully) the result of her super-strength attack smashing through the Sorceress' magical defences.

A purple-robed body stirred on the floor a long way down the corridor. Even further behind were two sleepwalking women. One in a simple stiped outfit, the other in far more colourful (kinda tacky, to be honest) clothing. They looked way too suspiciously like Timeout and Blueprint.

Effortless remembered the obvious-brainwashed-ness of the guards.

And that Gangsign had fed them false info.

"H-hey, Horizon?"

Her arms suddenly felt cold and heavy, so she hadn't touched her earpiece. Horizon would hear her, still. She hoped.

The prone woman picked herself up. She rose shakily, the multicoloured embroidery on her robe still flashing with excess power from the spent enchantments. She'd survived, but Effortless had clearly done some damage, indicated even further when the pale villainess coughed scarlet into her own hand.

Effortless still couldn't move. Her friends were... Timeout and Blueprint, like, the coolest members of NINE. They were clearly in a trance.

She shook the thoughts out of her head. If they were already brainwashed, she'd have a screaming Timeout, one of her weird holo-illusions, or the nearest heavy object already in her face. They weren't, so she could still fight. The cold receded. Her heartbeat sped back up.

The Sorceress raised her blood-drenched hand. Then the blood seemed to dissolve away into some sort of crimson tattoo.

Flames erupted from the outstretched hand. Red, burning death filled the entire corridor between Effortless and the Sorceress.

But, like, come on? As if she wouldn't have a strategy against fire. Half the two-bit villains NINE faced off against were pyrokinetics (probably, Timeout and Missmerise were the ones who kept the stats, Effortless just looked pretty and slapped things).

As fire raged towards her, Effortless brought up her own hand to mirror the Sorceress' stance. Then she started to wave it back and forth in tiny fanning motions, holding her arm with her right hand to brace it against the air pressure being generated in front of her. Visible gusts of wind parted the flames. They were still very hot, enough to make her even worry about her skin. But they didn't touch or scorch her.

The barrage of fire lasted five seconds, after which there was only billowing black smoke. Effortless took a deep breath and broke into a run.

She tried to focus on her toes. She hadn't totally gotten the hang of it yet, but she was trying to practice a technique where she would do the tense and push, like with her kicks, but against the ground when running to achieve a kind of super-skipping. This would be the perfect time for her body to get into gameface-mode and pull it off.

She couldn't focus, though.

All she could see were patterns forming in the billowing smoke. It was probably just her quickly-becoming-oxygen-starved brain, but she was pretty sure they were the same patterns as when the magic in the Sorceress' robes had exploded.

The patterns were kinda funky. How could smoke get so swirly?

The smoke faded away. Effortless realised that she had stopped running. She tried to frown, but her mouth muscles were so cool that they couldn't even do that. She tried to be annoyed at herself, but her brain wouldn't summon any feeling but a kind of cold emptiness.

But, like, a funky cold emptiness.

She couldn't explain it, but it felt nice. Even though it was cold, it was the kind of cold like she felt outside when tucked up in bed in winter. It didn't actually matter.

Yeah, the fact she couldn't move didn't matter. It really didn't. She was fine.

The other woman stopped beside her. She was a bit shorter than Effortless, and her hair was darker and straighter (but there were a few adorably out of place). She wore a purple robe with some very pretty flashing lights that were (very sadly) starting to fade away.

And she had the smile of a predator.

Effortless, for some reason, kinda felt like the prey. And she couldn't bring herself to mind.

Her friends Timeout and Blueprint walked past her, looking even happier than she was. She heard the woman say something about a failsafe, something else about how she was actually pretty good (which made her feel really proud) and finally about how she had actually managed to make the woman bleed (which made her feel really guilty). Effortless didn't really listen until cold, slender hands touched her temple, and the woman told her to sleep.

Effortless' eyes closed obediently.

---

Follow up to the previous Nine Against One: Nine Against One - Blueprint . On this one I'd like to note that I do feel like I'm starting to Jim Butcher-esque repeat myself on each one, so for anyone reading them all in one go, sorry! But I do want them all to work as self-contained stories instead of needing to be read in serial. Maybe I should have made that clearer, I know my obviously serialised stories tend to get lower readership numbers...

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. A bit more 'experimental' with the delayed action-hypnosis, and also the fancy animation (which I think mostly worked!). I think this is the best one so far for capturing the heroine's voice... maybe because she is the most Vine-like with her slight scatterbrain energy (the distinction is meant to be that Effortless is a bit more airheaded and whiny whereas Vine just thinks she's cool and likes to snark to herself).

Description

The infiltration of the Sorceress' ocean fortress was not going very well. This was, like, the fifth group of armed goons Effortless had crossed paths with!

The room was just like every other one in these labyrinthine tunnels. The walls, floor, and ceiling were sandy coloured stone, and the furniture was the most simple wooden stuff money could buy. Clearly, the defences were set up for utility rather than comfort. Given that the four armed men had a strange green mist filling their eyes, it kinda seemed like they didn't mind too much.

All four of the goons were outfitted in standard military vests, two drew small guns (revolvers? Blueprint was the expert on gun types, Effortless hadn't a clue) while the other pair each had a longer firearm already held in both hands. They raised to fire at her without hesitation.

Which was really very evil of them! Unless they actually recognised Effortless specifically, she just looked like a normal (though pretty tall, to be fair) Chinese girl in a loose summer dress. She wasn't in her usual glorified-sports-bra of a heroine costume because Gangsign had the silly idea before that if the infiltration team just dressed normally, there might be a second of hesitation from any non-monstrous guards. She was in the dress because she needed something that would allow her to move all parts of her body so she could use her powers effectively.

Two bullets were piercing the air already. She hadn't even heard them yet, but she had seen the business end of both small guns held level for a couple of heartbeats, enough that they were definitely being shot. Her arms quickly moved into a guard, positioning her hands over her heart and stomach.

It was times like this that Effortless really hated her codename. Her superpower was limited by distance, not effort. She'd actually practiced loads to be able to do this. And it only worked if she was being attacked by someone who knew what they were doing! If the Sorceress' brainwashing had somehow scrambled their aim, she would just have to get lucky.

Her wrists flicked, and her hands moved a few centimetres. The movement was faster than any eye could detect, and in it was more strength than a full-bodied punch. Probably more than, like, one hundred super powerful punches from someone super strong. Anyway, basically those tiny slaps were strong enough to completely halt the forward momentum of the bullets, and send them pinging into the stone wall.

Effortless gave an open-mouthed laugh when the men saw the unharmed woman, and heard the ricochet of their bullets, and then subsequently stood motionless for a few moments trying to process what had just happened. But then the big guns got brought up to point at her torso. Not good, like, at all. There was no way she could block that many bullets, and it wasn't like they exactly needed to aim with that sort of spread so she wouldn't be able to block by assuming it was heading for her centre mass.

She dropped her guard, and following it her whole body, into a baseballer's slide.

She couldn't actually see the goons' expressions, but she had to assume they were pretty hilarious.

A roar and a a short glimpse of at least five shells flying above confirmed that she had dropped just in time.

Now, of course, there was a reason most people wouldn't just drop to the ground in the face of gunfire. Once she was flat on her back, it wasn't like she could run anywhere, and then she'd be a sitting (lying down, actually?) duck for the gunmen.

Luckily, Effortless wasn't most people. Each of her arms raised a full inch off the floor, and then slammed down. Her body sprang up like a jack-in-the-box in front of the front gunner's face. To his credit (or the credit of the Sorceress' training she guessed, unless she just sorta implanted militant programming in her minions than it was to the credit of her magic, probably worth thinking about some more later), he did shove his gun against her stomach as she came up. The problem with that move was that, while it could have made her double over in intense pain, the slide-and-bounce routine made her abs clench - and they clenched a lot less than her one-inch limit.

The weapon bounced off her skin as if it was especially hard (and cute!) rubber. Her finger came level with his nose.

"Hi there!"

The flick sent his body crashing into the far wall, and disarmed the revolver/pistol/other-small-gun user behind him from the tailwind that followed his body.

Out of the corner of her eye, Effortless was suddenly very aware that the other big gun was being pointed at her. For once, she was really hoping some bad guys wouldn't start firing in the middle of an enclosed room where the ricochet could kill them all, but she guessed she couldn't blame the very-obviously-brainwashed.

She really hated doing the move where she brought her leg up in a crescent-shaped sweeping kick at normal-girl-speed, suddenly clenched her calves and quads to stop the movement, and then just as quickly booped the leg that one fractional distance further. It really hurt, and it felt weird.

It worked, though.

The gun went flying diagonally backwards, and since there was no way the guy was going to let go in time his arms crunched as they were whipped around with it.

That left just the one small-gun-man (hehe), whose shot was just as easy to block as his first, and went down with a single slap. She gave the other three a little poke as well, just to make sure they wouldn't wake up for the rest of the operation. They'd need to call up Stardust or some other magic-user to 'cure' them later.

The fight done, Effortless breathed out, ran her hands through her dark brown hair, and touched her ear.

"Horizon, like, what the heck!? You told me this was a clear coast! Coast was not clear! Again! They could have, like, shot me you know!"

"I'm looking! I'm looking..."

She had expected Horizon to be more annoyed about her whining, but the voice in her earpiece was worried.

"Horizon...?"

"Gangsign gave me these routes. I don't get it. Maybe one clone could lose its sense of direction, but that's four clones who've got it wrong now. Forget it, I'll look myself."

She didn't like the sound of this. She chewed one of her nails for a moment.

Horizon's voice came back. "Okay, found you! Good news is that there's no monsters until you go a bit deeper. Bad news is that you've got one more group of hosti-" There was a gulping pause in Effortless' ear. "Even worse bad news... erm, the Sorceress is closing in on your location."

Oh, sh-

"Where is she?"

"Second corridor on the right from the way you came," Horizon's voice was rushed. Fair. "But that's not the most imp-"

"Yes it is! Don't worry, if I get the drop on her I can totes take her. She's just a squishy wizard, right? We were gonna take her out with one superpunch anyway!"

"No, Effortless, wai-"

Effortless pressed the button on her receiver. She needed to focus. Horizon could see her now, anyway.

Something was going wrong. She felt kinda bad for Momentum, but now was not the time to stick to the pre-arranged blueprint (hehe). She ran down the corridor, and flattened her body against the wall, trying to keep her breathing to a minimum (she was fit enough that a fifty metre run didn't send her wheezing at least, yay!).

Footsteps echoed off the stone. They were getting closer...

Closer...

Closerrr...

Effortless pushed with her left hand and used a little bounce of her left foot to stabilise her motion (another difficult move to practice, but less painful). Her right arm extended outwards until it touched fabric and/or flesh. Effortless only saw a pale, angular face. She hadn't really waited to see who it was, to be honest, it was definitely going to be someone scary.

Her hips rotated. Her fingers bent. Her elbow flexed. Her knuckles shot forward at the speed of sound.

Sonic Boom One-Inch Punch!

She thought. The attack was too fast to do a cool shouting-out-your-attack-name thing.

There was a flash of light to match the boom echoing through the air. An explosion of colour in expanding, cracking fractals. A cool light-show, and (hopefully) the result of her super-strength attack smashing through the Sorceress' magical defences.

A purple-robed body stirred on the floor a long way down the corridor. Even further behind were two sleepwalking women. One in a simple stiped outfit, the other in far more colourful (kinda tacky, to be honest) clothing. They looked way too suspiciously like Timeout and Blueprint.

Effortless remembered the obvious-brainwashed-ness of the guards.

And that Gangsign had fed them false info.

"H-hey, Horizon?"

Her arms suddenly felt cold and heavy, so she hadn't touched her earpiece. Horizon would hear her, still. She hoped.

The prone woman picked herself up. She rose shakily, the multicoloured embroidery on her robe still flashing with excess power from the spent enchantments. She'd survived, but Effortless had clearly done some damage, indicated even further when the pale villainess coughed scarlet into her own hand.

Effortless still couldn't move. Her friends were... Timeout and Blueprint, like, the coolest members of NINE. They were clearly in a trance.

She shook the thoughts out of her head. If they were already brainwashed, she'd have a screaming Timeout, one of her weird holo-illusions, or the nearest heavy object already in her face. They weren't, so she could still fight. The cold receded. Her heartbeat sped back up.

The Sorceress raised her blood-drenched hand. Then the blood seemed to dissolve away into some sort of crimson tattoo.

Flames erupted from the outstretched hand. Red, burning death filled the entire corridor between Effortless and the Sorceress.

But, like, come on? As if she wouldn't have a strategy against fire. Half the two-bit villains NINE faced off against were pyrokinetics (probably, Timeout and Missmerise were the ones who kept the stats, Effortless just looked pretty and slapped things).

As fire raged towards her, Effortless brought up her own hand to mirror the Sorceress' stance. Then she started to wave it back and forth in tiny fanning motions, holding her arm with her right hand to brace it against the air pressure being generated in front of her. Visible gusts of wind parted the flames. They were still very hot, enough to make her even worry about her skin. But they didn't touch or scorch her.

The barrage of fire lasted five seconds, after which there was only billowing black smoke. Effortless took a deep breath and broke into a run.

She tried to focus on her toes. She hadn't totally gotten the hang of it yet, but she was trying to practice a technique where she would do the tense and push, like with her kicks, but against the ground when running to achieve a kind of super-skipping. This would be the perfect time for her body to get into gameface-mode and pull it off.

She couldn't focus, though.

All she could see were patterns forming in the billowing smoke. It was probably just her quickly-becoming-oxygen-starved brain, but she was pretty sure they were the same patterns as when the magic in the Sorceress' robes had exploded.

The patterns were kinda funky. How could smoke get so swirly?

The smoke faded away. Effortless realised that she had stopped running. She tried to frown, but her mouth muscles were so cool that they couldn't even do that. She tried to be annoyed at herself, but her brain wouldn't summon any feeling but a kind of cold emptiness.

But, like, a funky cold emptiness.

She couldn't explain it, but it felt nice. Even though it was cold, it was the kind of cold like she felt outside when tucked up in bed in winter. It didn't actually matter.

Yeah, the fact she couldn't move didn't matter. It really didn't. She was fine.

The other woman stopped beside her. She was a bit shorter than Effortless, and her hair was darker and straighter (but there were a few adorably out of place). She wore a purple robe with some very pretty flashing lights that were (very sadly) starting to fade away.

And she had the smile of a predator.

Effortless, for some reason, kinda felt like the prey. And she couldn't bring herself to mind.

Her friends Timeout and Blueprint walked past her, looking even happier than she was. She heard the woman say something about a failsafe, something else about how she was actually pretty good (which made her feel really proud) and finally about how she had actually managed to make the woman bleed (which made her feel really guilty). Effortless didn't really listen until cold, slender hands touched her temple, and the woman told her to sleep.

Effortless' eyes closed obediently.

---

Follow up to the previous Nine Against One: Nine Against One - Blueprint . On this one I'd like to note that I do feel like I'm starting to Jim Butcher-esque repeat myself on each one, so for anyone reading them all in one go, sorry! But I do want them all to work as self-contained stories instead of needing to be read in serial. Maybe I should have made that clearer, I know my obviously serialised stories tend to get lower readership numbers...

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. A bit more 'experimental' with the delayed action-hypnosis, and also the fancy animation (which I think mostly worked!). I think this is the best one so far for capturing the heroine's voice... maybe because she is the most Vine-like with her slight scatterbrain energy (the distinction is meant to be that Effortless is a bit more airheaded and whiny whereas Vine just thinks she's cool and likes to snark to herself).