“Why don’t you all scurry along,” Koyon said, waving at the other Heroes to cross the moat and make their way into Vermögenburgh.
Sofiane jolted, knowing it was a matter of time before they found Shuixing, Gomiko, and the others. “Don’t you dare!”
“Shut-up."
Koyon waved his hands and a spectral horse whip cracked in Sofiane’s direction. Sofiane threw out Perfect Parry just in time to deflect the ghostly green strands into the ground where they took a city-block sized chunk out of the ground, killing two Heroes caught in the crossfire. Dirt and shattered wood rained down around Sofiane from the destroyed wagons. Exploiting the opening, Sofiane used Ball Lightning to zip up to the floating Koyon and thrust his rapier at him. To the surprise of both, the blade connected, setting Koyon's speed to 5,000 miles per hour in a downward trajectory. All the various factors were calculated and in the next five millisecond chunk of time, Koyon was functionally teleported to the ground, whereupon he stopped.
Koyon blinked, looked up, and started laughing. “Oh man, I was wondering why the Yishang put that wording in! Sorry, I don’t take fall damage, kiddo.”
Ice cold dread crawled up Sofiane’s spine. He was about to begin his own descent when Koyon floated up and clasped his hands together to deliver a hammer blow to the back, slamming Sofiane into the ground. Things inside him cracked and his mouth and eyes filled with blood. He had taken a small amount of fall damage, but the real reason that bastard Koyon had struck him in the back was to make it as painful as possible without targeting his HP. If Koyon wanted, he could've ended the fight with a flick of his whip. Sofiane thanked the gods Koyon was too sadistic to finish the job.
Behind, he heard Kane yell, “Hold on, I’m coming!”
But another crack of Koyon’s spectral whip produced a cry of pain from the same voice. A moment later, the leather sole of a sandal pressed down on Sofiane's back, grinding into whatever was left of his ribs after the fall.
“So, you’re the one I replaced? The previous cute boy?” Koyon said, his voice accompanied by a chorus of FDJ guns as their enemies began the assault on the walls across the moat.
Sofiane tried to reply, but the foot on his back dug in and expelled the rest of his air.
“No one replaced me, so I guess they must’ve found perfection,” Koyon continued. “I ought to thank you for helping them work out all the kinks, but every time I look at you I just see all the mistakes and it makes me sad. The Celestials want to see people get stronger and better, after all. They get bored with boring, stagnant little fucks like you. Now please die for me so I can be done with this tedious event.”
It was a strange, almost surreal feeling, Sofiane thought, to witness everything crumble so quickly. First the defense plans he spent weeks revising and preparing, then Natsuko being killed, and now Koyon, the Hero who took his archetype and inadvertently sent him on this whole insane quest leading to this moment, was about to kill him with barely more effort than a flick of the wrist. He felt the foot lift from his back and prepared for the lights to go out for good, but instead, as though to taunt him, Koyon threw up his projectile-blocking Prismatic Block, casting shimmering rainbows across the ground in front of him.
“What the hell!? That’s my ability!” Koyon shouted.
“Mine now, bitch,” Natsuko said.
Sofiane fought through the pain to flip himself over. A few feet away Natsuko was holding out her hand to project a wall a mile wide and tall made of transparent rainbow light. Koyon stood on the other side looking livid.
“Pech was right…” Sofiane said through a throat full of knives.
“Good, cuz I don’t know what the hell I did to come back!” Natsuko said. “Oh, this thing has like five seconds left by the way, so you might wanna run.”
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Terror pulled Sofiane up like marionette strings and he sprinted, wincing and wheezing, towards Kane. Behind him he heard something that sounded like a roaring wind tunnel and he couldn’t stop himself from looking back to see what it was. On the other side of Natsuko’s Prismatic Block, ghostly horses and their riders were pulling themselves into existence out of thin air, amassing a single horde to sweep across the destroyed remains of the tent city the moment the wall went down.
“Kane, run. Puffball, start charging a Coup de Grace that-away,” Natsuko said, pointing in the opposite direction from Koyon.
Sofiane’s brain had time enough to process this with a half-second to spare as the rainbow light disappeared and an army of ghostly cavalry bore down on him. Ignoring them, he charged his Coup de Grace towards empty space. It was replaced in the next moment by the backside of the wave of spectral horsemen as he was swapped into position to strike Koyon. He released Coup de Grace and a second later his world exploded into pain for the second time that day as Koyon roundhouse kicked him out of the thrust.
“I was with Xiuquan when you tried that, dumbass,” Koyon said.
Natsuko was on him in the next second. Her first strike with her bottle accomplished the same as Sofiane’s rapier in sending Koyon to the ground, but unlike Sofiane, she followed through with a second swing the moment he touched the ground, moving faster than Sofiane had ever seen. A single eye blink was all it took for Natusko to throw Koyon through the ground and send up a buffeting whirl of wind in the wake of her bottle as she dug her heels into the dirt to stop her momentum.
“Okay, so you can move your butt when properly motivated,” Sofiane said, chuckling through broken ribs. “Good to know.”
Natsuko laughed with her hands on her hips. “I kept telling you all I could! I just always knew grinding mobs was a waste of time.”
Sofiane bit his tongue about the two years she wasted doing exactly that.
“Thanks for the save, but I need you to stop the Heroes flooding into the city,” he said, pointing at the breach.
Natsuko hefted the bottle over her shoulder. “Will do. You and Kane fall back and get healed. I can take care of things here.”
Her suggestion didn't require a lot of arm-twisting. With the immediate danger gone, the pain in Sofiane's rib cage returned in full force. Pushing through it, he hobbled towards Kane who was double fisting two space weenies and chomping on them to regain HP. The sight was a welcome break from the ugliness and danger of the past few minutes. Sofiane watched Natsuko take off with Black Fire to bomb the Heroes scrambling over the ruined portion of wall into the city. Adding to his pleasure was the fact that the Non-Heroes were manging to dimension-jump a handful of them. The battle wouldn't be over just from repelling the second wave, but he would be breathing a whole lot easier. Especially once Vladim healed his rib cage.
His relief was cut short when a coal-black missile appeared out of the blue sky over Vermögenburghand and intercepted the bone white one heading for the breach. Boulanger, bathed in a cloud of smoke and hellfire, slammed Natsuko into the wall near the city gate, collapsing even more of it and sending up a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris.
Sofiane hobbled faster. “Shit! Kane, we gotta move!”
Kane dropped his half-eaten hot dogs and pulled an FDJ rod out of his belt.
“Move? But I want you right here!”
Natsuko had warned Sofiane that all of the Xians could teleport, but seeing it in action was nerve-wracking.It meant he couldn't even trust his own blinks, lest they have an enemy on the other side. This was the case at present, as Ailing popped into existence between him and KAne dressed in a jade white, opalescent hanfu bright enough to be a blinding ability on its own.
Kane burst towards her, sending arcs of purple lightning spidering off him. Sofiane knew something was wrong when Ailing stood still, giggling into the gauzy sleeves of her dress.
“Kane, stop!” Sofiane shouted.
With no other way to stop his momentum, Kane tucked and rolled out of the way as Koyon popped back to the surface in time to swing an FDJ rod, missing the Imperian Hero by inches. Kane slammed his own rod into the ground to bring himself to a halt.
“Oh-ho, so dimension-jumping doesn’t work against dear little Natsu, but it seems you two are still worried. That’s good to know,” Ailing said.
She was half-right, Sofiane supposed, and he wasn’t about to disabuse her of the other half. In all likelihood, it wouldn’t matter anyway. If Koyon came back from being dimension-jumped, it likely meant all Xians could come back. And that was a big problem. A catastrophic one, even. Because if Sofiane was correct, he and all the other members of the rebellion had just lost their last advantage against the Xians. For all intents and purposes, the Yishang had won.