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He couldn’t see the Salesman’s translucent ability against the blue sky, but he could certainly feel it. The draining effect. Even this suit wouldn’t be able to withstand it for long.

But Abbas had counted the seconds correctly. His cruise missile arrived in time to flank the Salesman for him. Ivan noticed it too late, only capable of giving the warhead a look of bug-eyed anger before impact.

The force of the explosion might have knocked Abbas off course if not for the suit’s automated impact mitigation system. Far quicker than Abbas himself could have reacted, the suit calculated the path of least resistance and corrected his course for him in order to incur as little turbulence as possible. This meant that, rather than curving out and away from the explosion, the suit dove headfirst into it, keeping his body perpendicular to the blast’s point of origin, like an arrow piercing a balloon.

He came through it, no worse for wear, and the Salesman was no longer in the way. Abbas knew that he only had precious few moments to press this fleeting advantage. He rocketed toward the smoke and radiation and lingering antiparticles of his expended jet and let his suit absorb their effects.

The result, as expected, was more explosions. But these were only physical, and his suit had soul-strengthening on its side. The antiparticle effects were not going to last long as they tried in vain to collide with their oppositely charged counterparts, so Abbas had to act immediately, even while wreathed in subatomic annihilation.

He curved around and pushed through the debris of his cruise missile. He saw the Salesman, a half-missing husk tumbling through the air. One might be forgiven for thinking that the man was no longer a threat in such a state, but Abbas knew better. This job was not yet done.