Your battles are vividly described with details that put the reader on the scene. But these are cartoon battles, never credible because the level of violence dealt to Cramer is often greater than any human could survive. A middle-aged man who gets thrown with enormous force into wall after wall, or slammed against a marble floor littered with glass shards, doesn’t pop up merely cut and bruised to fight yet another foe who’s possessed of superhuman strength. A young woman whose arm has just been virtually wrenched out of its socket doesn’t get hurled from the top of a gallery “into the abyss” and manage to grab a rung and hang on. Passages like this one occur frequently:
He picked me up and slammed my back down against the roof, harder. I recoiled from the pain. My hand was throbbing. My back was screaming.
His back is screaming? This is the ninth or tenth time Cramer’s back has been slammed against concrete or a wall or a roof. His back should have been broken long before now.
The problem with cartoon battles, however much fun they may be to read, is that they keep readers from accepting and fully entering the world you’ve created. You really want them to do this so they’ll care on a deep level about what happens in that world—not just have a good time reading about it. This means you need to stick to the writer’s obligation to tell the truth. Telling the truth for a writer involves making things real for the reader. That means not violating (at least, not strenuously violating) the physical laws of nature if you’ve set your story up so that you’ve got aliens fighting humans who have a home-team advantage.