Chapter 397: An Unexpected Enemy |
In that instant, Yu Sheng gained a deeper appreciation for his nephew’s “eye,” though this was not the time to marvel at it.
He snapped his head around toward the direction Zheng Zhi had indicated. Rain fell like woven threads, and a bolt of lightning split the dark sky. In the rain the space looked empty.
But he finally felt the source of that gaze.
“Foxy!” he shouted as he stowed the Tetanus Staff, then sprinted toward the spot and bellowed: “Send me a tail!”
A bright flare answered him at once as a silver-white fox tail howled in from afar.
With an Irene (black iron) braced on his shoulder and another (rebar) in his hand, Yu Sheng ran, vaulted, and landed astride the tail. He yanked a handful of fur, and the Fox Fire-boosted tail rocketed upward as he rode it into the sky.
A thunderclap slashed the clouds; the storm churned; power brewed in the air. Yu Sheng saw sparks skittering across his skin and a lightning bolt fell from above as if guided by a hand, spearing for his back.
The fox tail suddenly flared with a shell of cerulean radiance. The protective aura Foxy had left on it crashed against the bolt and detonated in midair.
The blast pounded his ears at point-blank range.
More lightning gathered. Silver snakes of current writhed through the air. From amid the crackling arcs and the seething thunder he felt a jolt of raw surprise, and at the same time two beasts burst from the cloud on his left and right to pincer him. A black-robed cultivator in an eerie mask also cut in with a sword whose edge shed chilling light like wind and thunder howling caged within. The power twisted wind and rain into a vast vortex, the man borrowing the wind and the wind borrowing the man’s might as he swore to cut Yu Sheng down here.
Thunder rolled. Wind and rain roared. Beasts shrieked. Against that grand tableau, a brute with two dolls hanging off him rode a tail belching thrust flame and leaped into the sky.
The Jade-faced Golden Fox girl, iron flute in hand, gaped at the scene and felt her worldview shake with her Dao heart. The wind and rain carried her whisper: “Great-uncle, I think I finally understand what you meant by how immortals fight.”
Amid the collapsed factory ruins, the six-tailed Tibetan fox at last forced open his eyes under Immortal Yuan Hao’s care. The first thing he saw was the staggering scene in the sky. He groaned “My life is over,” tilted his head, and fainted again.
Yu Sheng knew nothing of this on the ground.
A nameless pressure like imminent death clamped tight around his heart. He could almost smell the bloody reek of the beasts’ breath, feel the icy killing intent blasting from the black-robed cultivator intercepting him. He felt great power gather in the air and felt the world itself trying to kill him. He felt he could die at any moment, the power in that omnipresent killing intent enough to shatter his fragile flesh.
Yet all of it filled him with fierce delight, a pure, long-missed joy, [like when he tore a chunk of flesh from the Entity called Hunger].
Black Spider Silk webbed out across the sky and snared the diving beasts. A chill that could knife the soul froze their minds; they twitched and fell, and Foxy blew them apart mid-descent with two Fox Carrot Missiles.
White-hot beams raked the rain. Irene lay on Yu Sheng’s shoulder and pointed at the black-robed cultivator in the air ahead; no matter how the man flitted like a startled bird, those brilliant lances pinned his motion tighter and tighter until one ray bored through his gut and he fell with a cry.
Yu Sheng set Irene (rebar) on the fox tail and told her to sit tight and hold on. Then, in a recklessly precarious stance, he stood up on the tail. Fur underfoot made him wobble, but he grinned, reached forward, and felt with his hand in empty air.
His fingers touched something.
A boundary. A partition. A screen stretched between two dimensions.
“Found you,” he said, then shoved with both hands as though opening a great door.
The air boomed like a structure of space itself collapsing, and half the sky warped into a mirror-bright caving and cracking.
In the broken sky stood a tall middle-aged man in a white robe banded with gold, cradling a black leather tome. He hung in the storm, staring in astonishment at Yu Sheng, who had just slapped the barrier open with his bare hands.
Yu Sheng stared back at the enemy who had been lurking in a pocket space commanding the field.
His vestments were religious robes, not the scholar robes cultivators favored. He held a ritual black tome instead of a treasure or jade disk. His face was stern, eye sockets deep. What he shed was not a cultivator’s celestial qi but pure, savage lightning. Standing there in the rain, filaments of fine lightning crawled along his skin and beard. His muscles were carved like stone and shone in wind and thunder.
He looked like a demigod sculpture hewn from marble and stepped into life.
After a heartbeat of shock, the middle-aged man raised a hand to point at Yu Sheng; brilliant white filled his eyes, his hair and beard flared in the storm as he demanded: “What exactly are you?”
Yu Sheng, recovering in the same breath, lifted a finger to the blatant insignia on the man’s robe and barked: “The damn Hermitage Order?!”
A bang cracked the air before the echo died.
Without looking back, Yu Sheng felt a figure launching from the ground up into the sky. The rain sheeted aside in a torn channel. Darkness flashed with chilling light as Luna strode up the shadowed storm, nun’s skirt whirling, fingertip blade stabbing for the priest of the Hermitage Order suspended in the air.
Yu Sheng noticed that Luna avoided the man’s heart. She had aimed for it at first, then at the last instant forced the blade to a different line.
She meant to take him alive, or rather, she knew Yu Sheng wanted him alive.
An Artificial Saintess moved faster than human limits. To Yu Sheng, her ghostlike strike should have been unavoidable.
Yet even against such a sudden, angle-perfect blow, the white-robed priest reacted in an instant. He sensed her before she closed, twisted at an uncanny angle, slipped past the point, and with a flicker of lightning called a storm of bolts out of nothing to crash in a dense barrage at Luna.
A dozen phantom afterimages budded in the air around her to block the storm from every side. Luna halted midair for a breath, then without hesitation changed lines and surged in again.
Her next strike missed as well.
Fine motes of lightning glimmered constantly around the white-robed Hermitage Order priest; each time Luna neared, he seemed to read the field and anticipate her line through the electric hum, moving early to evade. He even slipped past the Black Spider Silk and Irene’s burning beams in a string of narrow dodges.
He suddenly frowned and muttered: “A soul attack?”
His gaze locked on Luna and, for an instant, his eyes clouded. He snapped out of it at once; lightning detonated to seal the lanes of her approach, and he shot back to open the distance from both Luna and Yu Sheng.
“There was indeed a report that an Artificial Saintess disengaged from the cognitive network for unknown reasons,” the Hermitage Order priest said, eyes fixed on the nun-garbed Artificial Saintess floating in the air, then shifted his gaze to Yu Sheng and added in a weighty tone: “It seems that while I was busy at my work, much happened in the outside world.”
“I am surprised too,” Yu Sheng said, never taking his eyes off the man and [ratcheting his guard to the limit]. “You are like cockroaches, crawling into every crevice. What are you even trying to do, and why are you working with the local cultivators?”
The Hierophant, of course, did not answer.
Even as Yu Sheng spoke, prickling spread across his skin and lightning began to brew in the heavens again. Many of the black-robed cultivators who had been besieging Foxy and Yuan Hao turned at once as if on command and surged up to encircle Yu Sheng.
The beasts the black-robed cultivators drove howled in the wind and rain and swarmed the sky in ranks; Luna wanted to press the Hermitage Order priest but had to cut her way through the immediate threats first; Foxy’s Fox Fire swept the storm until the glowing spheres seemed on the verge of setting the rain itself alight; the white-robed Hierophant kept summoning thunder and lightning so no one could close on him.
A battlefield that was already chaotic peaked into utter bedlam.
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