Chapter 396: Sudden Assault |
Yu Sheng was not entirely sure whether this world even had the notion of a Tibetan fox, but the red-dressed girl’s great-uncle did have a very square head. If that head had not been beaten into that shape, then this six-tailed fox demon could only be a Tibetan fox that attained spirit and form.
Now was not the time to quibble over such details.
With Immortal Yuan Hao acting in person, the Tibetan fox that had been more out than in finally began to stabilize.
Just as the situation looked to be improving, a strange noise like glass being squeezed and splintering rose from nowhere and, in the rain, sounded especially shrill.
Foxy was the first to hear it: her ears twitched, she turned toward the sky above a nearby building, golden-red eyes flashing with a sharp, cold gleam beneath the umbrella as a warning growl rumbled in her throat, and in the next heartbeat countless dim Fox Fire flared into being around her.
At almost the same moment, Luna stepped forward, the razor edge at her fingertips skimming the rain with a cold glint as she said: “Radar, contact!”
An instant later, cracking booms rang one after another as eerie fissures appeared in the sky hundreds of meters away, fine lines spreading like a shattered mirror along the slanting sheets of rain; phantasmal figures showed between the rifts and, as the spatial channels opened, sharpened quickly into focus.
Irene gasped the moment she saw them, then twisted to shout at Immortal Yuan Hao as he treated the wounded: “Can you pause what you are doing for a second, what the hell!”
Yu Sheng almost sprayed laughter and snapped back: “Does that sound like human speech to you?”
Yu Sheng said nothing more, turned toward the opening rifts, and with one hand hauled along his still-dazed nephew: “Hide near Immortal Yuan Hao.”
The next second, the central mass of rippling rifts suddenly bulged; with a teeth-hurting, tearing screech, every fissure burst at once and the entire section of space caved inward like a sheet being yanked down. As it collapsed, the rain around them abruptly took on a strange, transparent, false texture, and even the nearby buildings and the towering ancient refining tower in the distance turned vague and unreal. In that wavering phantom, a wasteland of jagged rocks seemed to overlay the city’s outskirts.
Yu Sheng had no time to wonder what he was seeing, because one silhouette after another was already hurtling out of the collapsing rifts straight at them.
In the lead came a group of evil-path black-robed cultivators in grotesque masks, with many ferocious beasts at their heels, clearly monsters driven by those black-robed cultivators.
“It is them!” cried the red-skirted girl at once: “They are the ones who injured my great-uncle!”
As she spoke, a blinding javelin of lightning ripped the sky, the downpour lit for a heartbeat, and several twisted beasts used that flash to pounce.
Yu Sheng tossed aside the inconvenient rain hat, right hand gripping the spiked mace he had just hauled out of the basement, left hand hauling Irene (rebar) that he had snatched from the living room, while another Irene (black-iron turret) braced on his shoulder was already humming with power as he strode to meet the charge.
Black Spider Silk surged and grew wild in the rain; a winged beast brushed the silk, seized up midair for a heartbeat, and Yu Sheng’s Tetanus Staff crashed down on its skull so hard its head snapped back into its chest. Searing lances carved the downpour a split second later as the shoulder-mounted turret Irene shot down another beast trying to flank; the beam speared and tore it into sizzling chunks that thumped to the ground.
The losses did not seem to trouble the black-robed cultivators; still more beasts burst from the rifts and the black-robed cultivators dropped from the air one after another in grim silence, treasures flaring as they unleashed killing strikes.
“Not even a line of trash talk before swinging?” Irene, heat shimmering around her on Yu Sheng’s shoulder, squawked as she spun up another beam: “Isn’t this where you are supposed to spit two lines of garbage and give a theatrical prologue before you start?”
Before Yu Sheng could answer her, the red-skirted girl raised her voice: “They never spoke when they fought us either! The moment they showed up they started killing, that is why my great-uncle and I were caught off guard and injured!”
As she spoke, the Jade-faced Golden Fox suddenly skipped back two steps to evade a beast’s lunge, flicked her wrist to draw from nowhere an iron-hued flute that gleamed with chilling light, and blew.
A keening, sobbing tone rolled out; each winding note seemed to grip sinew and viscera. Rings of ripples spread visibly through the rain, and within those ripples every monster’s movements slowed by a half-beat. The red-skirted girl took the chance to leap lightly back, golden tails swaying as she scattered one phantom after another in the rain-churned haze.
Two beasts, confused by the flute and the illusions around them, wavered for just an instant and Luna cut them down where they stood.
Irene glanced back at the girl, iron flute in hand and stepping like a dancer in midair through the rain, then swung to glare at Foxy as Foxy set fires everywhere and huffed: “So this is how the local foxes fight, huh? Dumb fox, look at her style, now look at you!”
Foxy bared her teeth at Irene and the red-skirted girl, said nothing, and simply fired eight Fox Carrot Missiles at once. Eight silver-white tails spat eye-searing exhaust, shockwaves blasted the rain apart in all directions, and the missiles erupted among the black-robed cultivators who were driving the beasts.
The local cultivators had never seen anything like this. The black-clad assassins, silent until now, let out a chorus of cries as they hastily threw up defensive qi and life-preserving treasures. Several with weaker cultivation had their shields punched through and were swallowed in fire before they hit the ground, cremated to ash.
The flute cut off in an instant; a short, piercing squeal sounded as if a breath had gone wrong, and when Yu Sheng glanced back he saw the red-skirted girl coughing hard, eyes wide at Foxy. The golden tails behind her were puffed up like a graveyard of swords. [Local fox, utterly aghast.jpg.]
“High Immortal!” the red-skirted girl hacked and wheezed until she could breathe, then thrust a hand toward the tufting clusters of Fox Fire falling after the blown-off tails and cried, face cracking apart with panic: “Your tails!”
She did not finish before Foxy turned; with a resonant hum eight new tails unfurled behind her, and after a heartbeat of warm-up she launched another string of thrusting rocket booms as eight more Fox Carrot Missiles streaked skyward.
The sky filled with the Nine-tailed Silver Fox’s launched tails, and in between them a certain doll fired random high-energy lasers.
The red-skirted girl hovered there in midair, dumbstruck, suddenly convinced something had gone wrong with her last few centuries of cultivation. She lifted her iron flute but forgot how to shape a melody, then hesitated, glanced back at the five golden tails behind her, and after a moment’s thought grabbed one and yanked.
She yowled at once, teeth bared and eyes watering with pain.
Yu Sheng was too busy fighting to look back and thus had no idea why the local fox in red was yelping and pinwheeling through the air. All his attention was on the black-robed cultivators and the beasts they drove, and as he fought he realized something was wrong.
There was a gaze, faint yet constant, hiding behind the black-robed cultivators and their monsters, watching the battlefield from some shadow no one could sense.
A black-robed cultivator lunged and Yu Sheng raised the Tetanus Staff without thinking, but before they could trade a blow a ghostlike shape bloomed at the attacker’s side. Luna, feet light and swift, stepped through darkness and drew a graceful arc with her fingertip blade through the rain, the point slipping precisely into the black-clad assassin’s throat.
That feeling of being watched came again.
Yu Sheng frowned and asked Luna: “Have you scanned any enemy hiding nearby?”
Luna paused, then slowly lifted her head as her “gaze” swept the field: “Radar, negative.”
He did not relax. [He was certain the feeling of being watched was not a mistake; something was hidden here.]
It was not a conventional concealment, because if it were only some stealth technique it would not have escaped Luna’s multi-frequency seeker array or Immortal Yuan Hao’s divine sense.
Suddenly he recalled the instant when those spatial rifts had broken, how the fissures spread and everything around them turned transparent and false, how even the grand old refining tower had seemed to vanish. He remembered, too, the barren land of jagged stones overlaying the city beyond. It was as if two spaces had been overlaid here.
A thought clicked in Yu Sheng’s mind, and at almost the same time he heard Zheng Zhi shout from behind: “Brother Yu!”
He turned at once and saw his nephew pointing to a corner of the sky.
“There is someone there who has been staring at you,” Zheng Zhi said offhandedly: “Feels like bad intentions.”
[What?!]
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