Yuan leapfrogged his way to the trashemoth and left a trainwreck of devastation in his wake.
His duel with Gayak had already given him a taste of what his Third Coil-level body could achieve, but the last few days of cycling unlocked its full potential. Where Yuan once needed momentum to fly a few meters ahead, he now had to tone down his strength so as not to fly away. He could have easily leaped over a hill with barely any effort.
Combining these immense jumps with the Recoil Fist resulted in quite the lethal combination. Yuan simply had to activate the technique upon landing on an enemy car to maximize its impact and then immediately jump away to the next target. The plastic men perished by the dozens, their vehicles shattered to pieces, their projectiles bouncing off his steel skin. They fared no better against Yuan than his old team did against Slash.
They were Scraps to him.
Many considered the Third Coil to be the moment when cultivators moved beyond the reach of ordinary men, and living through it confirmed it to Yuan. His reflexes had sharpened so much that he could see rubber bullets fly at him at what seemed like an agonizingly slow pace. Most hit him because he didn’t bother dodging. They did nothing to him. The few First Coil cultivators among their numbers were hardly a blip on his radar either. A Recoil Shockwave crushed them like their kindred, and their attempt to harpoon him simply resulted in their weapons shattering against his chest.
They simply couldn’t hurt him.
Slash had allowed himself to be shot. The realization only infuriated Yuan. His killer could have dodged his last bullet without any effort, yet decided to mock his victim by playing along and then crushing his hope.
Yuan almost sympathized with the plastic men. Though he held no hesitation at tearing through them after they’d launched an unprovoked attack against him and his allies, he had been in their place more often than not. He didn’t make a show of slaughtering his way through their forces. He simply did it.
A great shadow passed over him, and a giant claw moved down to crush him.
Yuan used a Recoil Shockwave to quickly move out of the way. The trashemoth’s ‘hand’ crushed the vehicle wreckage he was previously on under its immense weight, the impact raising a cloud of dust and smoke in its wake.
The spirit-beast hadn’t even targeted Yuan. It simply trampled anything unlucky enough to find itself between Orient and itself. The trashemoth focused on the spirit-train with the most mundane of emotions: pure, absolute hunger.
Combining Gayak’s Barrier-based flight technique with the Recoil Fist greatly improved Yuan’s maneuverability in the air. He only had to use feng shui to create temporary anchors in the air that he could then exploit to direct his trajectory. Yuan used it to ascend upward and gain a better view of the battlefield.
Yuan had single-handedly torn through a third of the enemy force, and his allies further cut down the warband to half its size. Normal marauders would have likely retreated after suffering such heavy losses, but plastic men didn’t feel fear the same way humans did. They rode after the spirit-train in utter silence and attacked without shouts or threats. They knew they could easily pull themselves back due to their lack of vitals or merge with their wounded.
Yuan recalled that Jaw-Long once tried to communicate with a captive plastic man, only to waste hours on a pointless task. Their kind didn’t speak nor seemed to understand vocal language. Yuan wasn’t sure they even thought the same way a human would, making conversation all but impossible. It made them quite unnerving to fight.
A few trash trucks got close enough to the spirit-train to harpoon it. Barbed chains struck the windows and metal wheels. Their vehicles weren’t heavy enough to derail Orient’s wagons, but it gave them a foothold onto the spirit-train. A plastic man with blades for fingers attempted to climb into the treasure car, only to take a Molotov cocktail to the face and burn away while Bucket bombarded its vehicle.
Yuan trusted his allies to manage on their own and focused on the true threat. The trashemoth gained ground on Orient and would catch up to her in a minute.
So Yuan punched it.
He threw himself at one of the creature’s eyes and then activated the Recoil Fist. The resulting shockwave threw noxious yellow sludge-blood over Yuan’s arm and hardly caused the monster harm. The trashemoth’s thick outer layers of trash absorbed most of the impact and its noxious blood burned his steel skin like acid. The wound would have liquefied Yuan’s flesh and bones back when he hadn’t crossed the Third Coil, but his qi-reinforced body reduced the potency to superficial burns. The pain was hardly noticeable compared to the strength of the late Gayak’s blows.
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I’ll need to pierce through this thing’s hide to reach its vitals, if it has any, Yuan thought while coating his arm with Elemental Infusion to repair the damage. Repeated Recoil Blasts might punch through, but it’ll quickly drain my qi. I need to find a less taxing method. Fire would be ideal.
Yuan quickly considered his options and recalled his fight with Gayak. The Flesh Mansion Sect cultivator took him by surprise by breathing flames from his mouth. This didn’t seem like an innate technique to Yuan, so he wondered if he could mimic and adapt it to his Path.
His affinity lay with metal, which bent to fire. Creating flames directly would likely be beyond Yuan’s power. However, he recalled using shotgun pellets charged with magnesium to produce incendiary projectiles. Since his body had become a living weapon, it should be able to reproduce this phenomenon naturally.
Deciding to test out his theory, Yuan inhaled deeply and cycled through his lungs. Engraving sutras into his metal flesh gave him greater awareness of his bodily processes and how to exploit them. He charged the gunsmoke inside his chest with qi, saturated it with magnesium extracted from his very bones, slowly heated it up until it started to itch, then exhaled.
Yuan spat out blinding flames onto the trashemoth’s wounds.
His breath was nowhere near as refined nor did it sustain the same rate of fire as Gayak’s own technique, but it was quite the lightshow nonetheless. Sparks spewed out of his mouth in straight lines and set the trashemoth’s sludge blood ablaze.
Yuan decided to call the technique Dragon’s Breath.
The monster roared in pain and anger as it finally turned its head at Yuan before attempting to catch him in its immense jaws. Yuan flew along its body’s length while sustaining his Dragon’s Breath. The trashemoth’s plastic hide caught fire and melted from the searing heat. Flames slowly spread over its body and raised black smoke into the sky.
The monster’s smaller mouths retaliated by spewing noxious smog at Yuan in an attempt to counterattack. This, however, proved a fatal mistake on the monster’s part. So great was the heat of Dragon’s Breath that it ignited the trashemoth’s fumes long before they could reach their target. The monster’s chimneys soon began to spew out fire rather than smoke, its hands tearing at its own hide to rip away the burning parts before the flames could spread any further. Tons of melted plastic soon fell off the monster’s body.
The trashemoth attempted to catch Yuan within its immense talons, but the cultivator quickly wrapped himself in a cloud of Black Haze and slipped through its claws. Yuan analyzed his enemy’s qi all the while, searching for a weakness. He eventually detected the trashemoth’s core buried deep within its immense skull. Now that his flames had softened the creature’s hide, a powerful enough blow should reach its weak point.
Yuan propelled himself above the trashemoth with repeated Recoil Kicks, then wove a Barrier around his right arm and used the left to wave another behind him. His aim was steady, natural, untouched by the smoke and chaos.
“Recoil Blast.”
The technique that slew Gayak erupted from Yuan in a mighty shockwave. His improved Barrier design let him direct and disperse the blowback in a way that wouldn’t harm him while focusing the power on one point to maximize damage.
The blast hit the trashemoth in a devastating collision, the impact blowing up half its skull. Tons of burnt plastic and metal fell off onto the surrounding desert, unveiling a black core of coalesced sludge pulsating into a festering mass of orange sinews melded with fossilized plastic. Its qi was so foul it made Yuan nauseous just to look at it.
He didn’t hesitate.
His second Recoil Blast utterly shattered the core and erupted out the other side of the trashemoth’s skull, leaving a gaping hole in its head. The spirit-beast’s qi erupted from its fatal wound in a tide of poison while its many heads breathed their last. It collapsed onto the desert, crushing its plastic men herders under its weight and missing the spirit-train by a few meters.
It was… easier than expected. Yuan knew size didn’t matter much when evaluating a spirit-beast’s power, but that trashemoth would have likely required the likes of Gayak to take down.
I can fly, I can breathe fire, I can kill a large spirit-beast on my own easily enough. Any of these would have sounded unbelievable to Yuan not too long ago. All three of them underlined his meteoric progress in the past month. I’m strong now. Truly strong.
And it was nowhere near enough.
Yuan already stood head and shoulders above Scraps in terms of power, but he had barely taken his first steps on the road of cultivation. The likes of Manhattan and the Yinyang Khan had been there, done that, and progressed farther ahead still. He couldn’t allow himself to feel satisfied with his current progress.
He needed to keep that hunger burning inside him. Keep pushing forward.
As Yuan chased after the spirit-train to help its passengers mop up the remaining plastic men, he began to consider what other techniques he could adapt to the Gun Path. His thoughts wandered to the first cultivator he ever defeated; an oni who could transform his body into mist at will. While Yuan’s Black Haze mimicked his fog-shrouding fist technique, he had yet to find a way to fully turn his body intangible.
Toshiro achieved that feat while in the Second Coil; Yuan had no excuse for not doing the same one step ahead on the road to the Dao. Now that he had gained a better mastery of his unique physiology, he would try it out.
From metal to gunsmoke.