196. Death & the Black Sun, I (Patreon)

"Don't play around," Ke Jiaming commanded. "Finish it quickly."

"Yes, sir!"

Wu Hao barely heard their voices as Master Shu pulled his staff from his storage space and ripped loose the veil keeping his qi from view. It churned with a hate so thick that it alone might have made every other emotion impossible to read. But there was trust, too, and that same self-recrimination that had dogged Master Shu's qi whenever he'd lifted his veil before, though less of it now.

"Boy," he said quietly. "He and I will fight. The four others there - they'll chase you down. They cannot intervene in a duel like ours, except by bringing me your head. But, all the same, neither can you. Don't try to fight them. Just run."

"But -"

"It is vital that you are not caught. Take a route around the forest, try to loose them within the trees, and sprint as fast as you can to the main sect. Find someone - anyone - there, but do not trust anyone."

Master Shu paused for a short breath, his eyes scanning the group before them.

"Do not," he repeated, "trust anyone. Tell the Patriarch to come. If he shows, then either we're doomed or we are saved. If he doesn't show, then we are saved, as well."

"You can take on Ke Jiaming by yourself?" Wu Hao muttered.

Master Shu's qi resounded like a gong, once. It wasn't a tap, but the meaning was clear. It meant 'yes'.

"Go," Master Shu ordered. "I'll hold them off. Go!"

Wu Hao sprinted for the trees, qi spinning underneath his feet as he ran and accelerating his every other step, until he was skating across the ground like a bird diving from up high. He pushed the Dragon Gate Ascending Art to its limit.

The Black Sun Sovereign across the snowfield from them didn't bother with the ice, this time, but instead gathered a second-grade artist's worth of qi in an instant into his hand and threw the ball high up into the air, where it swirled for a moment before locking onto its targets.

Embers of black flame rained down from the ball of qi above, streaking through the night air like invisible arrows. When they touched down, it was like more of those explosions that had consumed the house entirely - at first destroying everything in the path of the wave that erupted from the ember, then rapidly reversing the explosion and leaving nothing in its wake except a crater gauged out of the earth.

Wu Hao moved as quickly as he could, feeling the cold rip at his clothes whenever another ember passed by too closely and he had to zigzag past it, losing valuable time. With gritted teeth, he pushed off from his left foot again and switched courses, catapulting himself into the forest and narrowly avoiding smashing himself into a pine tree face-first.

"Come on," he muttered between breaths. "Follow me, you fuckers."

Three surges of qi followed his words, though he doubted they'd heard him. A streak of clouds flew across the pockmarked snowfield, heading straight and occasionally dancing out of the way of the rain of black flame. The guard that he'd seen last night and the night before was heading straight towards him - his focus on movement techniques made him the fastest of the three pursuers.

Wu Hao threw himself into the air and launched himself at a tree, swung from a dead branch that snapped as soon as he touched it, and was gone again, accelerating. The Dragon's Gate Ascending Art had never been meant for high-speed pursuit, though - it was a footwork that was middling in everything, with no particular advantages and no particular disadvantages.

So the instant that he'd used the rebounding force of smashing into another tree to launch himself around a corner into a momentary blind spot behind a pine tree that led into a small slope heading downhill, he forced himself to a sudden, undignified stop, skidding once and rolling twice, snow scattering all over him and dirtying his clothes.

Small scratches were etched into his skin, but fuck it. He was beyond pain and the cold that was hemming him in.

When he came up, he came up with his spear already in his hands and his qi gathering into a tight little loop. A flickering shape of qi sped through the empty treetops after him and slowed down just a little bit. He could smell the confusion tinging that cloud-like qi, the acid rain preparing to strike and coursing through his opponents' veins.

As his opponent lunged at him with a strike so quick that it blurred through the night air, Wu Hao spoke. It was time to gamble.

"One-Shot Kill Spear Art," he said. "Heart Seeker."

The spark of power caught, the spear in his hands flew, and Wu Hao's feet slid backwards as he stopped the guard's charge with a stab that pierced through the man's ribs and held him up. The man's sword was still held high in the middle of a maneuver that probably would've cleaved Wu Hao's head from his shoulders.

Wu Hao stared up at the guard, watching as his qi started to bleed away. He twisted the spear, making sure to destroy every single bit of the heart by shredding it with the spear's tip, and let the man collapse to the ground in a heap.

"How -" the guard said, coughing blood. Wu Hao knew how that felt.

There was a simple trick to dealing with the Flowing Cloud Sword Art, actually. He'd realized its disadvantages after seeing three exhibition duels that featured it and facing the style himself. It didn't have many defensive options, instead opting to dodge and parry whatever was possible to parry. It'd never attack the opponent straight on, either, instead advancing through sidesteps that incorporated dodge and attack at the same time.

With the pine tree to his side, that meant his opponent had one side left to attack from. Wu Hao hadn't fought him in this timeline, but he remembered the whirling strikes all too well, including their timing.

His qi still bubbling beneath the surface, Wu Hao dismissed the spear back into spatial storage. Without sparing a single additional look, he sprinted away again, waiting for his qi channels to untie themselves. Just a little more until he could activate the Dragon's Gate Ascending Art once more. Behind him, his first victim collapsed to the ground.

Three more to go, he thought to himself. He didn't need to look behind him to sense that the next was already coming at him, a woman with a qi that resembled a crane. Wu Hao hadn't fought one of them before. That was a disadvantage. Then again, what was he supposed to have done, challenged every martial artist in the Diancang, repeating every time he could?

Actually, that wouldn't have been a bad idea. Something to keep in mind for later.

As she turned the corner, Wu Hao pulled the saber from his storage, held it in two hands, and felt the lines sprout. The crane-form that her qi took was an ugly beast - a glimmer of a scarred red face, a beak that had tasted blood before.

She didn't react at all to the sight of the corpse at his feet, unfortunately. Her brow furrowed, but that was all. No feelings of deep hate, confusion, surprise, or anything else that he could exploit. There was even some satisfaction in her qi. A satisfaction that she would be the one receiving Ke Jiaming's reward for bringing in Wu Hao's head, maybe? Hard to tell.

Wu Hao raised his saber. The only introduction they gave each other was two shouts erupting at the same time - each of them firing their techniques at the same time.

The saber clashed against the sword, more by accident than any purposeful block, Wu Hao's thunder-charged qi ripping into the feathers that had sprouted around the lady cultist's sword. Qi flashed and let out screeches as the storm tore away at her defense.

Wu Hao pressed forward in the style that the saber demanded, a relentless assault that saw him inch his way past sword-slashes that seemed curiously ineffective. There was a sense that something was missing, and a part of his mind was working on the problem even as he managed to score a series of shallow slashes around her midsection and nearly managed to stab her in the liver. Her lines were simple, almost unrefined, so what was he missing?

He was inside her guard, working to gut her like a fish, when there was a screech like a bird from hell, he saw a thin flash of steel up and above him, and then he juked back reflexively in an ungainly donkey roll.

When he pushed himself back up to his feet he saw that she'd nearly managed to skewer him with her second sword, having hidden it until a crucial moment. He didn't know where she'd pulled it from, either.

She was the one to advance, now. Wu Hao was forced to fall back slightly as she wielded two weapons at once, to their fullest potential - separate edges, but unified in purpose, which was to cut him into ribbons. As one short sword slashed past his face her other hand was already coming up to slip past his blocking saber and cut through his throat.

His improvised answer was to let the first sword cut him. A thin slash scored past his cheek and blazed like fire, but her follow-up had been with the expectation that he'd dodge more than he had, which allowed Wu Hao to smash her second sword aside and leave a long cut along her wrist.

As her eyes narrowed and another movement began with her arms spreading wide as if preparing a hug, Wu Hao forced himself to gain a little distance with a quick back-step using the Dragon Gate Ascending Art. The two swords cut into the space where he'd been standing, in ways that he wouldn't have been able to block.

One disadvantage of the lines that his saber allowed him to see, Wu Hao decided, was that they didn't give him any insight into defending himself. Only to attack.

Hunkering down, Wu Hao pulled his saber back slightly.

"Storm-Cutting Saber Art," he hissed. "Thunderbolt."

He lunged forward, saber extended like a cavalryman's lance, and she tried to block with both swords raised in front of her against his blow. Her qi read an assurance that whatever he was about to do, she could take.

Which turned into surprise the moment that he pushed all of his qi into his legs instead and exploded off the ground in a leap that took him over her head. It took her a moment to turn her head up so she could see him - which left her unable to see the knife that he'd palmed, while she was looking away.

She only noticed when it thudded into the ground, and then she tried to take a hurried step, but it was too late. With the improved arrays he didn't even need to charge it with his own qi anymore, they'd just rip qi from the environment all their own the moment they were pulled from spatial storage.

Loud cracks echoed throughout the forest, combined with a few muffled thuds and a loud gasp of pain. The martial artist's eyes went wide with shock, the first reaction she'd shown the entire time, and she sank to one knee as her leg gave out.

"Storm-Cutting Saber Art," Wu Hao whispered, already gathering his qi again to sprint forward at the exact moment when the last of the knife's shards thudded into the trunk of a nearby tree and into the corpse of her fellow martial artist. "Chasing Thunder."

Wu Hao flashed forward again, his saber carving through her belated attempt at a guard first and then the flesh of her torso until he ripped it free again. He caught the edge of her clothes with his saber, meaning he couldn't quite get free, but from the look in her eyes he knew that she wasn't a threat anymore.

Her swords fell from limp hands. She sagged into Wu Hao, spraying her foggy breath all over his face, and then fell off of from him in a limp, bloody heap. It struck him that he had no clue what her name was, and he probably wasn't ever going to learn.

Wu Hao felt at his face, feeling out the cuts that he'd taken. It'd bleed worse than it felt. He took her swords into his spatial storage, felt the last of the crane qi soak into the ground and stain it with its presence.

Then he sprang back in surprise at the sense of qi that suddenly ripped its way free out of the martial artist's back. He'd expected a crane of some kind, but no more than a single wing managed to tear itself free to point up desperately at the sky before the echoes that had been bubbling underneath her skin reached up and pulled the wing back in.

Feeling sick to his stomach, Wu Hao stared as what he could only describe as "echoes" tore the remnants of her body apart, before burrowing back into the ground and leaving only a rapidly putrefying mess that bled the rest of its qi into the uncaring night air.

Swallowing, he cast out his senses.

Two down. Two to go.