CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO: CLONE I.
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“Now let’s test it,” Kevin grinned as the others went inside the power grid station.
The group came across a girl absorbing electricity from one of the transformers. She wore the same uniform as the dark-skinned girl Mike had saved, and she looked drained of life and energy even though she was absorbing the electricity.
The girl noticed them and ran to pick up a transformer, throwing it at them. Gwen stepped in casually and swatted the transformer away with a shield she made.
Gwen retreated back to her team when she saw more girls in the same predicament coming at the group slowly like zombies.
Kevin caught up with the group and raised his fists at the sight.
"The girls here are… weird," Ben surmised, watching the situation get more dangerous but staying calm.
"They are wearing uniforms from my school, but I don’t recognise them," Mike said.
Some of the girls armed themselves with metal rods that were nailed to the floor while the others rushed the group, but were met with an energy blast aimed at the floor in front of them with enough force to send them back.
"Energy bolts… nice!" Ben complimented Mike's ability to fire energy beams of light.
"Try not to hurt them. Maybe we can reverse this… whatever this is," Mike warned.
The girls still came back with vigour to attack the group as the group split up to pick their battles and not get caught up in each other’s attacks.
"Try not to hurt them?" Ben asked, contemplating the difficulty.
Meanwhile, Kevin observed in the sky how his clone acted. He had found another hidden gem in some of the memories and knowledge obtained from the philosopher's orb. Usually, whenever he accessed knowledge or memory fragments from the philosopher's orb, it was like holding his breath and diving into a pool. This meant he didn’t continue from where he had stopped but instead restarted the process each time when he was looking for something useful in a short period before his mind broke.
But after every use, his mind became sturdier, allowing him more time to search for what he wanted. Now he found a cloning technique. Kevin could feel all his abilities replicated and gave instructions to the clone while he flew away from the power station, causing a resounding boom that was ignored by others engaged in combat.
Ben dodged one of the girls' attacks and slammed on his dial, transforming into a Crystalsapien, Chromastone.
"CHROMASTONE!" Ben named this new alien transformation as he stood in a domineering fashion.
The girl he dodged ran to him with a live wire cable and jammed the end at Ben, who found no need to evade. All information about the alien's traits, characteristics, and abilities was transferred to his brain in seconds, and he already knew how to use the alien. Truly one of the amazing abilities of the Omnitrix that makes Kevin fear that device.
Kevin had imagined how powerful Ben would have gotten if Ben's watch had access to one of the races of the Oren Empire and how strong he would be using their characteristics but wondered if that would be possible since they mostly accumulated knowledge from different races they defeated to come up with their cultivation technique. Still, Kevin didn’t plan to leave that up to chance.
"That’s not going to work. I am a conductor," Ben explained and transferred the electricity back to her at a higher intensity, leaving her knocked out.
Kevin's clone, on the other hand, just stood there as one of the girls attacked him with the metal rod, only to find the metal curved around his head with no dent or damage to his facial features.
The girl hit his face after having a stunned expression and shrieked in pain after seeing her disfigured hand. Having a fairly resistant body, the girl launched another punch at Kevin's clone, who raised his finger and dark purple crystals shot from the ground.
The crystals stopped the punch from meeting Kevin’s face as the girl's hands were bound in lowered crystal pillars, causing her to kneel.
"Hey, that looks like what I can do, but your crystal is darker," Ben pointed out to Kevin's clone, who restrained the girl who attacked him.
"What's going on, Kevin?" Ben couldn’t suppress the questions anymore mid-battle.
Meanwhile, Gwen was handling the girls, and Mike supported them from his position above the ground, firing energy beams until Gwen decided to wrap the girls together in a bunch… that was until the group heard another boom they had ignored before, to see Kevin in front of them with a tired dark-skinned girl in his arms.
"Don’t worry, I shielded her while carrying her," Kevin assured the group as Mike's heart began to beat quickly.
‘Why does he have her? What’s going on? Wasn’t Kevin fighting behind me?’ Mike thought and turned back at the same time as Ben, who took his eyes off Kevin's clone to see another Kevin floating before them and found nothing but a bound girl.
"What the?" Mike and Ben asked at the same time.
"I think you have a lot of explaining to do, blondie," Kevin landed in front of the group as the girls resumed their attack, but he only glanced at them and let out a bit of inner energy to weigh on them, causing the girls to halt their movement.
‘What the? Who is this guy? If I had known he could do this, I would have changed my plans from the beginning!” Mike thought as Kevin walked up to him.
"I know you all have a lot of questions, and some of them will be answered. But you should know I cultivate energy. And someone like me can easily sense the movement of energy in real-time, which brings me to this," Kevin said as he assisted the girl he was carrying to stand upright and revealed a mark on her arm that the other girls who were attacking the group also had on multiple spots on their bodies.
This caused gasps in Ben and Gwen, and Mike only looked at Kevin in anger.
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