Sheloth moved with unnatural speed, his every strike and lunge kicking up the dust of the dead village around him. In the face of such an assault, XJ-V focused. He saw the trajectory the arc of light weaved by the pale shadow’s sword made before he swung it. He saw it as he now saw more than he ever could in the Dao – glimpses of futures and Grey Potentials that were once beyond his ken were now in the realm of possibility for him. He saw his hand, charged with power, reach out and grab the blade, dulling its edge.
And his body complied.
He gripped the edge of the Xu’Jan leader’s straight sword and clenched down, feeling the energy he had forbidden himself to ever employ again rush through his veins like wildfire, exploding every chakra that channeled the Qi and absorbing the energy of his foe.
But as the blade and hand of these two fighters met, the smile that crept across one of their faces never faltered.
“There it is,” Sheloth murmured as the light of his sword clashed with the inborn power of the Cog. “The power to end all Cultivation. The power to sap the Dao itself. You would dare use my own Lord’s Gift against me?”
“Using it this way is the only thing that gives it any meaning at all,” XJ-V barked back, feeling the energized blade of his foe begin to fizzle and die away at its tip. He felt it in the same way he felt Fai-Deng’s Qi erode as he made contact with his fist, and again as they fought in the Dragonpyre Hearth. He fought to channel the energy that was now sweeping into him – as though he were simply a metal conductor for the raw power of his opponent.
But such power was not what he had ever felt before. Such power, he now saw, did not draw from the Dao at all.
“You miscalculate, machine,” Sheloth told him. “For I am no Cultivator.”
It happened before XJ-V even realized it. A recoiling, a quick slash through the air, a feeling of weightlessness overcoming his body, and then a descent to the ground as he felt something die away. Something that was once whole was now divided.
The light within him pulsed and flared – as though it was searching for something it had just lost.
And that very thing landed right in front of XJ-V’s unbelieving eyes.
His right hand, severed at the wrist, now lay on the ashen ground.
Sheloth’s still charged blade cut through the air with glee as he watched his opponent fall.
“Witness the hubris of the machine,” he told the downed Cog. “Your kind are nothing but form and function. Your weakness is your impure desire to live with us even though you cannot possibly understand us. Faith and flesh shall always triumph over cold steel.”
“He understands us a hell of a lot better than you do!” Ori’un called.
But his voice barely carried towards the Cog’s ears. XJ-V’s sensors buzzed with life, his inner engine begging him to activate his repair protocols immediately.
Instead, he rose, the exposed wiring at the end of his arm sparking and twitching with exposure to air.
“Do you wish for death, machine?” Sheloth asked, holding aloft his Jian blade in the rain. “I shall grant you your respite. You cannot triumph against this world that is arrayed against you. Our world.”
“I…do not have to triumph against this world,” the Cog spat back. “I only have to kill you.”
Sheloth flew at him again, rain cascading off his whirring blade as XJ-V brought his feet up in a Flaming Dervish to counter him. He let fly two Dragon Tooth punches as he spun back round to face his opponent and watched as the warrior simply sliced through both fireballs before thrusting for the Cog’s heart.
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XJ-V watched his left-hand fly of its own accord to block the strike, and then felt a stab of pain erupt through his body as the blade pierced his steel palm clean through and Sheloth pushed him down on his back, his arms forcing the blade further down, through XJ-V’s hand, towards the Cog’s flaring eyes.
“You…see…your death,” the Xu’Jan grinned as lightning speared through the dark skies above. “Let the blade of our Lord finish you.”
Reflected in the shining sword of his opponent, XJ-V could see his own waning determination. Already he could feel his strength fading, his systems begging him to go into shutdown. He was still a Cog, after all.
Yes…he was still a Cog, as this psychopathic warrior seemed to like reminding him.
And it was as a Cog that he would strike back.
Sheloth of the Divine Order expected another flourish of Qi-enhanced powers as his blade sank closer to the Cog’s twitching innards. Instead, his eyes bulged as the machine brought his ruined right arm up to claw at the warrior’s face, sending his naked electric current into Sheloth’s right cheek, burning the pale skin and causing it to crisp and curl. A long scar of energy bulged into blistering life across the Xu’Jan’s face before he finally relinquished his blade and stumbled back, clawing at the wreckage of his face, mouth agape in a silent scream.
It gave XJ-V just enough time to spin, using a Dervish to right himself, and fly at the warrior with all the might still raging within him.
He channeled the Qi raging through his arms – coiling around his steel and iron veins – and conjured a flame that balled into a fist, sending it flying towards his stumbling opponent.
Sheloth’s eyes met his in the final moment of impact, and the Cog felt his strike meet the resistance of the Xu’Jan’s blade again. He looked into the face of the shadow-blade, one eye now melted and oozing with puss, the other an empty void where there was no life at all.
But the power that flowed within the warrior had not abated. In fact, in the face of the pain the Cog had just unleashed on him, the pale-specter’s sword arm seemed even stronger now. Strong enough to repulse XJ-V’s fiery strike and beat him back with the butt of his sword, twirling with lightning speed to deliver a horizontal slash that cut clean through the surface of the Cog’s armored chest.
XJ-V felt himself flying through the damp, dead air, finally crashing into the remains of a blackened house that crumbled down around him.
There he lay, his body beaten and battered on the edge of the village, as Sheloth stalked towards him and plucked him from the rubble by the neck, his gnarled fingers gripping the Cog with such intensity that XJ-V was sure he was about to tear his head clean off.
“You sorry, pitiful creature,” he choked in a voice that was now tinged with hoarseness, the entire left side of his scarred and charred face twitching as he spoke. “You do not know what it is to live as we do in this world. It is only right a human should take you out of it.”
XJ-V twitched his arm, desperately trying to push it towards the wrinkled throat of his opponent. In the next instance he felt weightless, flying again past the village and landing on the hard stone ground outside its boundary.
“Pain is power,” Sheloth said as he glided towards his twitching body. “To suffer is to be brought closer to the light of Lord Yuwa. Our existence is decay. It is stagnation. It is to fall, and fall, and fall again, and yet rise each day in the face of the inevitable.”
XJ-V tried to rise, his servos groaning in the attempt, feeling how intensely vulnerable he now was with his innards totally exposed. His hand flew to grab at the engine at his heart, and he received a swift strike across his face. A strike that sent one of his eyes flying off into the night sky.
“True strength lies not in your pointless little meditations,” Sheloth continued, walking around his fallen prey like a vulture circling a fading life. “Nor is it found in the dead ashes that you call the Dao. True strength in adherence to truth. It is found in living for the only God who knows what it is to be human. We are children of Yuwa, Cog. We are the chosen inheritors of His earth. And your kind are a cancer that writhes at the heart of his glorious Empire.”
XJ-V blinked through his pain receptors that told him shutdown was imminent. And he knew then that the human was right. Even with all the training from Master Longhua, he was still a Cog. He was still just a machine.
“Prepare for your delivery to the dark,” his executioner said. “For that is all that awaits you. You, and all your ilk made in the image of man. Cheap replicas good for nothing but scrap.”
XJ-V watched the sword of the Xu’Jan master rise. The sound of the thundering heavens rose with it.
“Prepare yourself,” Sheloth said. “For death.”
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