Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 54: Obsidian Chainsaw (Patreon)

I had a split second to assess the mess I’d landed in before the Five decided who to kill and how. The demon… The demoness, judging by the curves of her armour, was weighing up how I’d withstood her aura strike.

Perhaps she was wondering about my stage. Maybe she even thought we were equals. My Hook had been rubbish, but I’d damaged her weapon. The red spear looked fancy, and I didn’t think a fifth stage would skimp on her weapon.

Either way, I hadn’t answered her with my own aura, and everything would become clear as soon as I landed a few blows. Blows far too weak for a Five.

And she’d already seen Mardal’s ultimate. It wasn’t something that could kill her, which meant her dead partner hadn’t been a Five — a fourth stage at most, like me.

She’d seen Hale’s ultimate, and she’d even dodged Kon’s shot. Nothing we’d shown came close to being a real threat.

We had more of us, and the same formula from my training, that four Stage Threes could potentially beat a Four, could apply to our situation. It would take four Fours to beat one Stage Five. We had two Fours plus change, if you counted my team as a collective Four. Except it didn’t work like that. The third stages were too weak and too slow to do a Stage Five any harm, and we’d lost the element of surprise.

Run? I dismissed that almost at once. Only I had a chance of escaping, with God’s Stroll. She’d catch the rest without any trouble. Consider them dead already.

Call Novak?

We wouldn’t make it in time.

Maybe if we all piled on at once, she’d panic and flee before she could figure out what was what.

I generated two more Space Discs and attacked with a theatrically aggressive cry of “You’re dead!”

“Everyone together!” I barked separately over comms. “With everything you’ve got!”

The demoness didn’t panic. She retreated, but she didn’t turn her back or let the discs out of her sight. She glided backwards away from me, rising into the air. I sensed powerful Air Qi, though her movements were as fluid as a conventional Water technique.

The demoness flicked her left hand, and I felt Space and Point flash. Two needles flew into my discs, destabilising them and shattering into fragments.

Oops… Looks like she’d found a cheap way to deal with them.

But what was I doing? The idea wasn’t just to attack with the Space Discs, but to use them as portals, too. I needed more control and more spam attacks so she wouldn’t think to destroy the Generators.

I fired up my untrustworthy Chainsaw to bring more chaos into the fight, so that the mismatched projections, each with a different blend of Fist and Blade Qi, would startle her.

As long as I didn’t injure myself in the process.

She was in no hurry; she studied me without turning round, and I even began to hope that Kon, who’d been the first to reach her back, might actually manage something.

As quietly as possible, she angled her sword diagonally, faster than I’d ever seen her move in training. For the second time in this fight, Kon unleashed her other ultimate, the Blade one. She slashed diagonally with her sword, and the amount of qi she’d poured into it astonished me. Kon wasn’t that strong, but she’d had the sense to use stimulants, which I’d completely forgotten about.

“Stimulants!” I shouted over comms, in case others on the team felt the same.

They’d be needed, because the demoness, without turning to face Kon, nudged the blade off course with the shaft of her spear and a light push of Air.

For all the power behind it, the sword went wide.

The enemy was fast and focused, so I chose a similar set: speed, focus, and a shield boost, which I activated straight away.

A silver sphere shielded me from blows, though my opponent hadn’t landed a single one yet. She was still testing me, parrying the projections with the spear she held in one hand. They couldn’t even scratch it. Nor could the two stone boulders Voss launched at her do anything. She split one with her spear and the other with a needle.

She danced out of the way of the burning palms and Hale’s beam, then sprang at me in a style more like Monkey than anything she’d shown before and smashed her spear against my shield like a bat. The shield was covered in a dense web of cracks. If she’d struck with the point, she’d have gone straight through.

I went flying like a ball, and she followed, leaving the rest of the team behind.

“I’ll let you live,” she said, stunning me, “if you give me these devices.” She pointed at the Trouble Generators, dancing out of Chainsaw's uneven bursts and, now and then, batting away a projection that came too close with her spear.

Clever bitch! She’d quickly worked out what they did.

But I wasn’t a fool either. Only the Space Discs could harm her. She wanted working devices, not scrap damaged in battle. As soon as she got them, we’d be done for.

I generated a new pair and threw them immediately, ready for her to parry.

The demoness’s needles flew into the discs and shattered, sliced apart by the spatial displacement. Some fragments teleported through to the other side, but I kept the discs intact, and they kept flying. I was concentrating so hard on the discs and on Space that I inadvertently added it to the Chainsaw mix. Just as I’d predicted earlier, it stabilised the technique. The translucent silver blade projections darkened like a portal membrane but didn’t lose their gleam. It was as if I were hurling perfectly rounded, razor-sharp obsidian shards, and they obeyed me perfectly. No other offensive technique besides Double Cycle had this kind of manoeuvrability!

The demoness was forced to parry the discs with her spear. This time I couldn’t hold them together, but I’d chipped her weapon again. And she couldn’t dodge the Chainsaw! The projections chased her like crows, making her protective formations blaze.

She had red octagons rather than the usual purple mini-shields. And they couldn’t cope. The obsidian blades sliced through them, detonating and leaving deep gouges in the alien armour.

She struck with her aura again, but I held firm. For a moment, the sheer number of blades overwhelmed her agility and focus; she forgot my team behind her and leapt away, desperate to create some distance.

A massive boulder struck her back, bursting into gravel against her protective formations. At the same instant, Hale’s beam pierced the cloud of stone. Once again she’d masked her shot with another object, but this time the defences were active, and although the beam broke through the formation, it wasn’t clear whether it had done any real damage.

The demoness didn’t even pay it any attention, still dodging the obsidian projections and batting them away with her spear, which was now spinning like a propeller, until it lost about thirty centimetres of its shaft. Only then did she hurl the broken piece straight at my face.

The shield, which had already healed, was covered in a web of cracks again, but it didn’t let the broken weapon through; the piece bounced off. In that instant, the demoness pulled an exact copy of the broken spear from her spatial pocket and lunged at me with a dash technique, aiming the point at the shield's weakest spot.

I’d been too busy playing with the Chainsaw and didn’t dodge in time. She pierced the shield and the protective formation, but not the armour.

I used Monkey to leap back and put distance between us.

She followed, keeping her spear in the hole in my shield so it couldn’t fully regenerate.

Fire flared behind her, and Mardal slammed into her back, seizing her horns with his hands and clamping his legs around her waist.

His hands blazed with burning gold.

I don’t know whether demons have nerve endings in their horns, but she certainly didn’t enjoy it. She screamed and struck again with her aura. I finally managed to put some distance between us, but Mardal went limp. She grabbed him by the shin with her left hand and flung him away, only to catch up with his body in flight an instant later and run her spear clean through his formations and chest plate.

“No!” I roared, and instead of pulling further away, I monkeyed to close in. Someone else shouted something similar.

I burst with Chainsaw projections. Stones, beams and spikes flew from the rest of the team. I generated new Space Discs but didn’t have time to use them. The demoness flicked her spear at me, shaking Mardal off it, and I dove down so the body would fly past.

As soon as the space between us cleared, we threw ourselves at each other.

She thrust her spear out, aiming at my chest and filling it with piercing Point Qi.

I used Misty Step. Both the spear and she herself passed straight through me. The Space Discs I dragged behind me slammed into her helmet, cracking her visor. I solidified abruptly, and it felt as if a volcano had erupted in my chest. Something had gone wrong, but I had no time to work out what; I just injected myself with painkillers on top of the wild cocktail already in my blood.

I threw my whole body into a Monkey leap. One moment I was flying away from the demoness, the next I was right behind her. My hand landed on the back of her neck. The metal under my hand dissolved, and I tore a chunk away, feeling my vision darken with pain.

That moment of weakness cost me dearly, because the next moment she was already looking at me through her cracked visor, and the long blade of her spear had gone all the way into my right side.

There was hardly any pain. It hid behind the burning in my chest.

I seized the moment to generate another pair of Space Discs. And then the pain came, both in my chest and lower down, where the demoness twisted the spear. She took a long needle from her spatial pocket and drove it through my armour into my heart.

“Kon!” I yelled, nearly losing control and my sense of direction.

The discs flew on instinct. One headed down; the other moved behind the demoness, who had let go of the spear but still held the needle, keeping us in contact.

She took out a large, crude spike, and I realised that when that thing hit my heart, I was done for.

I kept the nearest Space Disc from flying too close to the demoness so that she wouldn’t react. She’d already shown she had eyes in the back of her head. And that was exactly where I held the disc: at a distance, perpendicular, shaped into a portal facing the bare skin of her neck.

As we fell and thrashed about in the air like lunatics, I had to drop everything, even let go of my control over the Generators. The whole world, every stream of consciousness, worked to keep the disc on target. I didn’t even know where its pair was; I could only hope Kon was close.

“Kon!” I squealed like a stuck pig. “Now!”

Kon unleashed her ultimate.

The spike went through the portal, destabilising it with frenzied Point Qi.

The red protective formations of demonic armour barely responded. The spike punched through them and her spine, and came out two centimetres through the armour at her neck.

The demoness’ last, dying thrust missed, and she drove her spike into my shoulder.

The ground slammed into us both, and the world went dark.