The light of Yuwa’s warrior threw itself across the dead earth beyond Tenak village.
XJ-V and Feng-Lung watched the spectacle unfolding before them with unbelieving, unblinking eyes. The warrior’s lithe arm – a beam of shimmering light ending in a similarly charged blade – swept towards them as though with a will of its own.
The Cultivators backed up now, assuming defensive stances and employing their dual Dragontail Swipes with as much efficiency as their shell-shocked souls could muster against the warrior’s incoming attacks.
Now, Sheloth struck with unnatural precision. His every blow drew blood from the hands of both XJ-V and Feng so that when they eventually managed a coordinated Dragon Tooth to send the Xu’Jan hurtling back in the ash, they looked upon their hands and saw where the cuts of the warrior had been made.
Then Feng charged forward, unafraid.
“Feng-Lung!”
XJ-V flew to grab at his friend as the insidious Sheloth cried out in delight. He charged at the raging Cultivator and slashed for the boy’s leg as it came up to deliver a Flaming Dervish that conjured no fire at all.
“FENG!”
The Cog’s feet moved of their own accord – his heel impacting against the razor-sharp edge of Sheloth’s blade and throwing up dust all around them as Feng rolled out of the way of a strike that would have cleaved his foot clean.
He watched his useless, shaking hands, feeling the strength of the Dao leave him. Feng had felt it in the frantic seconds the warrior’s broadsword had made contact with his skin. It was as though the blood Sheloth had drawn from Feng was all the blood in the boy’s body that was tinged with the anointment of the Dao. The Earth Grade powers of his Sect simply fizzled away as he tried to cast them into life.
Instead, he watched as the lightning strike of the otherworldly warrior severed XJ-V’s leg clean from his torso, splintering it apart in a hail of bolts and wires.
“NO!” the Disciple cried, clambering up and making a bullrush at the monster that was about to end his friend’s life.
And in the split second that he had risen and charged, he felt the hot breath of a reaper on his back.
“Look at what you protect,” the voice of the specter said. “A worthless bag of steel and scrap.”
Feng turned to slam his fist into the warped face of the beast, but found that his hand impacted nothing but air.
Then heat – searing and ringing with power – radiated up his back.
“No matter,” the voice of Sheloth spoke through bloody lips, lungs all but dried up entirely and sustained by faith alone. “You are merely a misguided son of Yuwa. The Lord is merciful. In time, you will call him father. You shall feel the touch of his embrace, as will all mortals upon this blasted earth.”
XJ-V flopped like a fish on a line, body shattered, broken, and pleading with him to lay down and let fate take its course. But as he looked upon the sickening sight of Sheloth pulling Feng to the ground and knocking him unconscious with a single blow to the back of the boy’s skull, he forced his limbs to move.
His sensors – though cracked and malfunctioning – still gave him readouts of the information he needed. It told him what the storm surrounding the outskirts of Tekal village had hidden from sight. Right now, that hidden detail was his best chance of surviving. His only chance.
So, as he slowly crawled away from the battlefield, he shouted back at the warrior of light standing triumphant over his fallen opponent.
“Sheloth! It is I you have come for, fiend!”
The clawed, blood-spurting eyes of the warrior fixed on him instantly.
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“Come then!” XJ-V roared. “Come and finish me!”
The warrior smiled – something vestigial and terrifying, something like a dark slash across his face – as he started to march towards the Cog desperately clawing at the earth, crawling away with the only arm he had left.
“It is curious,” Sheloth hissed, gurgling blood from his slashed throat, light-arm twitching as though it was the only thing that compelled him to move forward. “As you are right now, you are more like Lord Jin’ra than you know.”
XJ-V saw that he had left Feng-Lung where he had fallen. He kept up his crawling and shouted back at the warrior, stalling for more time, hoping against all hopes that his sensor readouts were correct.
“What do you mean?”
Sheloth answered like an amicable father teaching a wayward son. “The High Eagle knows more of pain than most of us,” he wheezed. “Perhaps this is why Great Yuwa chose him to guide this world into His new age. Perhaps that is why He has chosen me.”
XJ-V’s hand found what he was looking for. His eyes pulsed as he touched the edge of the mountain the village of Tenak lay upon – that which had been obscured by the fog and hail sent by the heavens. The drop, according to his sensors, was about five hundred feet deep.
His opponent saw the surprise in the robot’s face and mistook it for fear. He launched himself at the machine and stood above him, blade leveled at XJ-V’s open chest.
The light at the center of the Cog burned with an intensity XJ-V had never before witnessed, its electrified innards crackling as it interfaced aggressively with the sparks from Sheloth’s armblade.
“You see now that your kind – Cog and Cultivator alike – shall never triumph against the will of a true God. In this life there is only power, Cog, and those too weak to struggle in the name of the one true God shall never have it. To such infidels, there is no light. There is no life. There is only darkness. I looked without fear into this darkness on the day Yuwa first embraced me as one of his servants. Now, I shall send you to him.”
“That is the problem with men of faith,” XJ-V said as he watched Sheloth reel back and ready his final thrust.
Beneath the Xu’Jan’s gown, XJ-V’s one remaining foot charged a Dragon’s Tooth.
“When you walk in the dark, you cannot see what is in front of you.”
The blade came down and sliced through XJ-V’s shoulder joint, almost tearing his last arm from its socket. The warrior would have succeeded were it not for the Cog gripping the light of the Xu’Jan and rocketing off from the ash of the mountain – channeling his Qi towards the tips of his toes as he had seen Feng-Lung do in Ori’un’s dream-vision.
Both Cog and man went flying over the lip of the mountain and, fighting the need to blackout entirely, XJ-V dug his foot into the mountain’s tip and managed to steady himself, hoping against hope that the Xu’Jan had fallen.
When the electrified blade of his foe sank deep into the Cog’s only remaining arm, he knew just how wrong he’d been.
XJ-V looked through the blurring world before him – seeing Sheloth grit his teeth in a grisly smile that bled down his body, spilling rivers of blood from the human’s broken face. Below him, the seemingly endless expanse of nothingness waited.
“A clever fool,” Sheloth said. “But I do not fear death. We shall go together into the dark. Let us meet the light of the Lord. He shall find me worthy, and you shall burn in his gaze.”
He dug his blade further into the Cog’s arm, and XJ-V gasped as he felt his remaining Qi reserves finally flutter away like a fading dream.
Sheloth felt it, too. His smile was a testament to his victory.
“Just a machine,” the Xu’jan said. “Nothing more.”
XJ-V felt his sensors finally give up. He relinquished his hold on his basic systems, channeling what slim power remained in his steel frame into nothing more than his arm the Xu’Jan was holding onto. He allowed his visual sensors to die.
When he gave his body his final command, he did so looking into nothing but darkness.
“You…are right,” he told his snarling opponent. “I am a machine.”
XJ-V did not see the face Sheloth made as the bolts around his arm suddenly exploded, and the Cog’s only remaining arm fell away from his body with the Xu’Jan still attached to it.
Maybe he screamed as he fell. Maybe he cursed the Cog one final time, or called for his God to save him before he plummeted to his untimely death. But XJ-V did not hear anything – he had allowed his auditory sensors to die along with everything else.
He pulled himself up by his leg and then lay flat on the edge of the mountain, feeling weightless, staring into the dark. Slowly, as his systems failed one-by-one, he felt his consciousness drain away, feeling strangely at peace. Like he was right back in the Dao…
The last thing he felt was the searing heat of a flame that must have burned with the might of a thousand suns. Something – someone – had just appeared beside him.
“…Longhua.”
He did not know what made him say this. There was no logic to the statement. It was a belief that must have been at the very root of his being for him to give it voice in his most fatal hour.
But what was yet more illogical was the response that he was sure he heard, even as his body told him it was impossible:
“That’s Master Longhua, to you.”
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