Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 63: Uninvited Guest (Patreon)

“Ha!” Lina snorted. “You were right; the demons evidently didn’t have a portal before. The Bureau’s analysts have already cracked that mystery.

“The address is Kairea, ring identifier, though, came from Beta-Beta-Beta,” she said.

“So it wasn’t a standard operation to seize a facility, or to free prisoners. They went there specifically for the portals.” I said.

“Explain,” Adam asked.

“They managed to evacuate a portal before the facility was blown apart,” Lina said.

“More than one,” I said. “Our defence systems might not be all that advanced, but they exist. Remember how the portals sparked in the video?” I waved my tablet. “The insides got cooked; there’s not much use left in them.”

I was right, but I’d rather have been wrong, because the enemy was showing a level of intelligence I didn’t like one bit.

“Is there anything about the hypothetical contact between the technician and the Trojan?” Adam asked.

Lina shook her head.

“No…”

She stared at the invisible lines again. I watched her pupils jump from one spot to another, stop. Go back. Stop again.

Lina froze.

“The news, quick!”

Adam obeyed and switched on the television. The screen showed a large portal hub like the one I’d seen in Beijing. It followed the same template; only the city name was different: Nanjing.

This was fucking fast. Far too fast!

I didn’t like the speed of the enemy’s actions either; they’d clearly seized the initiative!

The camera watching the hub from outside wasn’t moving. It was most likely mounted on a fixed tower, so the angle was fixed, but it captured most of the building, the car park below, and the flyers on the hub’s roof.

People were pouring out of every door at once.

Not walking out, but bursting out, like a cork from a bottle. The crowd beat against the glass doors from inside, and those closest tumbled out onto the square, fell, got up, and ran on, while the next ones were already pushing behind them. Someone who wasn’t counting on the doors was trying to break through the glass wall with a potted plant, but the glass didn’t even crack. Meanwhile, the fighting inside was quickly creating new exits. Combat techniques aren’t potted ficuses.

The taxis in the rank all tried to pull out at once and locked bumpers. The flyers on the roof also took off almost simultaneously, causing minor collisions, though none fell.

“…stay at home and do not approach the area around the portal hub…” said female presenter in the red jacket. “And we have a picture from inside!”

The image switched to an internal camera — a camera under the ceiling of the main hall. A view nobody at the channel had probably had time to check before going live. The hall was a continuous blur of pixels, with far too much red. Blood and bodies: the channel’s AI had blurred almost the entire floor and part of the blood-spattered walls.

Only the unharmed demons remained clear. Even they, the ones without red armour, blurred in places. On the red ones, the blood blended in with the armour. I didn’t see the ‘Nephew’. Either he hadn’t made it into frame, or he’d already proven his loyalty to his uncle enough. But I didn’t have time to count the other demons either.

The massacre footage lasted a few seconds, then the picture changed again. This time without warning: the square outside again, the fleeing crowd again. The presenter froze and only after a good ten seconds mumbled something about ‘temporary technical problems’.

In those ten seconds, the obelisk bearers had appeared in front of the hub again.

And then the square, which had just been fleeing, began to turn round.

Not all of it, just a handful. The first were a pair of cultivators in armour whose colours I didn’t recognise. They hit the nearest obelisk from both sides: the silver of a Fist, fire, something glittering and blue. The object was knocked out at once.

The demon jumped away and threw himself at the nearest cultivator, tearing him apart with his bare hands, if you didn’t count the armour.

The police joined the fight. As far as I knew, many were first- or second-stage academy dropouts. They poured bullets and techniques at the demons from behind patrol cars and taxis, from behind the rim of a fountain, and the bullets rang off the demons’ armour like beans off a bucket. No damage at all. But they kept firing.

A lone jetboard banked over the hub. The cultivator fired a yellow beam and punched through another obelisk. The demon who’d been setting it up threw his own board under his feet and took off after our lad. They both quickly vanished from frame between the neighbouring buildings.

Unexpectedly, a bus driver found a way through the crush, turned his yellow double-decker round and drove it straight at the nearest demon. The demon killed him with a lazy wave of his hand. Something flew from it, the driver died. The demon hugged already placed obelisk with one arm and stepped aside, waited until the bus ploughed into the hub’s glass wall, then returned to his marked spot with it.

From the hub’s roof, where two flyers remained, three daredevils were hurling bottles, packages… a toolkit? Whatever came to hand.

Some of this rubbish fell near one demon. He raised his head. A girl flipped him off and threw something else.

All of this was pointless unless help arrived…

It didn’t.

A white line, as if drawn with a ruler, fell onto the hub’s roof. The picture jerked left and vanished.

The presenter in the studio sat with her mouth open until someone off camera came over, took her by the shoulders and led her away. A grey-haired man took her place and reported that an orbital strike had hit the Nanjing portal hub. Rescue teams and an elite clean-up team were on their way.

I… understood that decision.

I’d seen the dome over the rehabilitation centre. It had withstood a nuke! One more minute, and the same dome would have stood in the middle of Nanjing, with demons under it and millions of people around it. Someone had made the decision and carried it out seconds before it was too late.

I understood. Truly.

But I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the shoes of whoever made that decision.

The grey-haired presenter’s face, which had just held professional composure, went blank for a moment. His eyelid twitched noticeably.

“We are receiving reports that the attack on Nanjing was not an isolated one. An alarming report has just come in from Cape Town,” he said.

And Lina got there before him.

“Fucking hell!” she said. “They pulled it off in Cape Town.”

This time there was no live broadcast. Apparently, the channel decided one picture from inside a station was enough for one evening. They only showed a few shots, filmed after it was all over.

Red facets, transparent purple sheets of the force field: the familiar dome of the array covered the portal hub. The force field sliced off the building's two upper corners because they didn’t fit inside. Shards of glass and metal lay scattered across the road; everything around was still smoking. Scattered bodies, overturned cars, blown-out windows and fire in the buildings of the nearest block said that the fight here had been more brutal and quicker.

Now that the demons had walled themselves off from the world, a crowd had gathered in the street. Many were filming the destruction, evidently for social media likes. And beyond all this, above the glass skyscrapers and the harbour cranes, rose a mountain. A strange one, flat-topped, as if sliced off with a knife, with a cloud slowly sliding down its slope. Beautiful. And utterly indifferent to what was happening beneath it.

“…command has confirmed that no orbital strike will be carried out on Cape Town,” the presenter read out. “In light of previous experience, a strike would achieve nothing and would only lead to mass civilian casualties. Residents of the surrounding blocks are being evacuated…”

The city had survived, but now a fortress stood in its middle that not even nuclear weapons could crack. Nobody, it seemed, knew how many demons were inside or what they would do next.

My bet was on a tunnel, or on them organising a way out through the sewers. Maybe we could get in from below and damage an obelisk? If that weakened the array, we could hit it from orbit…

“How?!” Adam asked emotionally. “A message with a Trojan again?”

“They’re talking about some viral article,” Lina said, and read out the headline. “Demons hacked the portals by possessing the bodies of captured cultivators and using them as honey traps for portal technicians.”

“Is that what the Bureau’s analysts are writing?” I asked, not getting the ‘viral’ part.

“No, that’s just the tabloids!” Lina said.

“Send me the link,” I asked.

Lina swiped a finger through the air, and a message landed in my inbox; I opened it on my tablet.

“Demons captured prisoners and implanted the souls of their own fighters in them, after which they were evacuated to hospital as wounded and, after treatment, were redirected…”

Wait, what were these dodgy processes that had just started on my tablet? Windows flashed up and vanished several times, too fast for any mortal to follow.

Was that a portal control utility?!

I monkeyed out of the armchair into the corridor. The armchair flew into the wall behind me, and I slammed into the opposite wall beyond the doorway, then monkeyed on toward the portals, bouncing off walls, ceiling, and floor.

When I burst into the portal hall, one portal was already active, purple horns and a left arm were coming out of it.

The world slowed down to a few short but extraordinarily important moments.

I stretched out my right hand, and my sense of Space as its extension towards the portal. I bent the membrane completely to my will and tore it free, the way I did with Space Discs. I yanked it sharply toward me, thickening my qi and strengthening my will, then crushed it.

The demon, though, had already pushed his head and left arm through the membrane, and he refused to die. He was as solid as a fixed point in space; he was indivisible.

The membrane collapsed and tightened like a noose around his neck and left arm. They hung in the air before me. The noose squeezing the enemy thinned to near zero, but the demon stubbornly held himself together through his own will and Space Qi.

If I gave him any slack, he’d get through. I felt it as clearly as I felt the strain in the hand holding the membrane in place. If I let go even for a moment, if I loosened my grip by even a hair, the membrane would recede, and he’d tumble out into the hall.

I had a colossal positional advantage, but something was still missing for victory.

He looked at me through the black visor of his helmet, and I understood what.

A heavy, thick, cold and vicious aura seized me by the throat and whispered in my ear that I was worthless, not worth the life I had. This aura was more complex and an order of magnitude stronger than the one we’d killed on Verdis.

I know that helmet! It’s a fucking Six!

A sense of doom crept into my chest, fear gripped my heart, and my body automatically flung a single Obsidian projection at the demon. It grazed his forehead, leaving a scratch between his horns on the helmet.

That made me angry.

“You shall not pass!” I screamed, hurling everything I had into his face.

The portal hall drew back. The platforms slid away, the ceiling shot upwards, and space stretched into infinity. Only the demon and I were struggling at its centre.

My aura was probably laughable against his, like a candle against a floodlight. But he hadn’t expected it, hadn’t expected how his sense of space would change.

I burned out in an instant, but it was enough for the membrane to cut through his armour, and blood poured onto the floor.

He was forced to drop his aura to stop the membrane from moving before it sliced through his neck.

I let go of my control over the noose too and, nearly losing consciousness, pulled Chen's sword from my pocket with the last drops of my reserve. I tried to slide it into the hairline gap between the cut armour and the noose of membrane squeezing his neck.

I missed; the sword scraped the armour and slid past.

Adam darted past me, snatched the sword from my hands, and came round to the other side of the head, where the gap between the neck armour and the tightened noose was easier to see. He pushed the sword into the bloody wound, aimed the tip at the brain, braced his feet and, with a roar and every muscle in his body straining, thrust hard.

The enemy’s will vanished.

With a dry crack, like a snapping branch, the membrane closed. The arm fell to the floor, the head lost its support, and Adam barely stayed on his feet after all the force he’d put into the thrust.

He took a few steps forward, holding the sword with the head impaled on it, and accidentally knocked me with his shoulder.

I fell. There was nothing left in my body. No qi, no strength to move, as if someone had sucked me dry.

Adam, still holding the head on the sword, asked in surprise, “Mate, did you just use an aura?”