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He'd already "loaded" up an onslaught of orbiting cubes in his mind for this. All tiny, no bigger than golf balls. All icy to the core. All soul-empowered.

From behind his shield, Hector thrusted his gauntleted hand toward the perceived center of Banda's smoke, and the barrage of frozen iron bullets flew forth as if they were being shot out of a minigun with the trigger taped down. Sustained, not stopping.

They pierced the smoke with no trouble, but of course that wasn't the goal. The molten coatings that made the bullets start exploding was.

Frankly, he knew he didn't have enough control to add coatings to every single bullet that he fired. They were way too many moving way too fast. But that was okay. He just needed to get most of them. And the gushing heat from the new iron would cause other, nearby bullets to explode anyway, even without coatings of their own.

And he didn't hold the power back at all. The bullets were as cold as he could possibly make them, and the coatings were as hot as he could possibly make them. The explosions might not have been huge like Melchor's against Xuan had been, but they didn't let up and piled on top of each other.

The result, therefore, was a continuous stream of white-hot fireworks tearing through Banda's red smoke and dispersing it with ease. Hector whipped the stream to and fro as he flew, cutting huge swaths through the smoke even as it slowed its pursuit of him.

He saw no reason to let up. He just kept going, trying to disperse as much of it as he could as quickly as he could.

Steam and black smoke mixed with the red, creating havoc in the storm and rendering it utterly impossible for Hector to tell where Banda's "center" was any longer.

He wasn't about to stop and try to reassess, though. The constant stream of explosions was certainly taxing on his mind, requiring two entire thought processes, but that didn't matter. As long as he could still see red, the bullets weren't going to stop flying.

He couldn't even tell if it was really working, but that didn't matter, either. Not yet, anyway. Because if it was working, he might not get a second chance to take Banda by surprise as he suspected that he had. He needed to go all the way here, providing no breathing room for this son of a bitch.