The three cultivators eyed each other, the radioactive wind blowing between them.
Arc had long overcome her need for sight once she had crossed the Fifth Coil. Her eyes had turned to metal inside their sockets, but she had gained a truer kind of sight. Her mind saw everything in a three-hundred sixty degrees around herself. It could penetrate most objects, walls, illusions, and barriers. Her range spanned miles when not paying attention, and hundreds of kilometers when she focused on a single point.
Most importantly, Arc’s Truesight allowed her to analyze the subtle shifts in ambient qi with peerless accuracy.
Czar Zoa hid his core’s location by flooding his flesh with radiation and hiding his qi behind a Barrier. While Arc could easily see past the latter, she would need to observe his techniques to overcome the former.
The Yinyang Khan didn’t bother hiding anything. His monstrous furnace of a core burned deep within his massive chest. It poured out malice like a volcano vomited lava, its darkness obscuring the smaller core of his weaker split personality. Whereas Czar Zoa exuded the cold and sterile lifelessness of a nuclear winter, the Yinyang Khan oozed savage violence through every pore of his skin.
Of course a paranoid warlord would only trust himself with the cube, Arc thought as she assessed her chances. Dyad cultivators were dangerous enough when their cores were split into two separate users; she had never heard of one with both cores conjoined within themselves. That should at a minimum double his qi reserves in a pinch. All of the Path’s benefits, none of the disadvantages. Wonderful.
Both of Arc’s opponents were equally terrible, though the Yinyang Khan’s qi reserves surpassed both of his rivals since he hadn’t used his Authority yet. This would give him a slight edge in their first engagement.
“I must say, nuclear trash, that you have done something that I once thought impossible,” the Yinyang Khan threatened Czar Zoa, his mouth seething with unyielding rage. His entire body brimmed with anger. “You have managed to well and truly piss me off. This is quite the new feeling for me.”
“You speak these words as if they are meant to frighten me,” Czar Zoa replied calmly. The Nuclear Buddha had always been eerily calm, but it seemed his last clash with Arc had purged him of whatever human emotions he had left. “A fool like you, who would use the Nuke to enslave this flawed world instead of saving it, is unworthy of my respect.”
“I don’t need your respect, only your head on a spike! And I shall have it!” The so-called Khan dismissed Arc with a wave of his hand. “Go away, woman. Step away from my cube and I shall allow you to leave with your life. I may even allow you to serve me once I rebuild my capital.”
“Get bent, Yer Majesty,” Arc replied with disdain. The Yinyang Khan was hardly a better keeper for the Cube of Natho than Czar Zoa, especially after that stunt during the race’s opening salvo. Letting him use the Nuke’s power to enslave the Wasteland through the terror of atomic annihilation was hardly any better than letting nuclear cultivators pull the trigger.
They were both assholes who needed to go away.
“Then I shall reward your boldness with a revelation,” the Khan replied, his eyes darting from Arc to Czar Zoa. He showed no fear at facing two of the Fanged Coast’s strongest cultivators; only the delusional arrogance of a madman who thought himself invincible. “I will show why I stand where others kneel.”
The three duelists eyed each other, the Cube of Natho lying between them, their bodies tense. Arc quickly analyzed the situation and decided on a course of action in an instant.
Most of her battles were decided on the first strike, and she had never lost any.
They all struck in the span of a nanosecond, without a word or warning. The three enemies moved at speeds that the eyes of Scraps couldn’t follow and which most cultivators would fail to keep up with.
Events unfolded almost as Arc anticipated. Czar Zoa, ever the pragmatist, teleported next to the Cube of Natho through his Quantum Leap technique. His body split into photons flung forward at lightspeed and then reassembled itself within reach of his prize.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
The technique’s flaw was that it only worked within the user’s direct line of sight, which made it predictable. Czar Zoa had thus focused his attention on Arc in order to anticipate her counterstrike, since she knew about that weakness.
She did no such thing, nor needed to. The Yinyang Khan did the job for her.
As Arc suspected, he proved both eager to protect his hard-won treasure and to take revenge on the man who destroyed his capital. Two of his hands joined in a mudra sequence; a third pointed at the Cube of Natho and trapped it in a circular Barrier keeping it out of Zoa’s reach; and the last one snapped its fingers at the nuclear cultivator. A blade of sharpened wind hit Zoa in the chest with enough strength to slice a building apart, leaving a gash on his supernaturally-tough tumorous skin.
Meanwhile, Arc raised both her arms. Using Sniper’s Bore and Item Materialization, she fired a qi-powered bullet at the Barrier holding the cube. Her rifle arm fired a Recoil Blast of immense power at the Yinyang Khan at the same time.
Arc was both confident in her power and acutely aware of her own limitations. Her best chance to win today was to play for time until Yuan and the others completed their preparations and evened out the odds. Her plan was to repel the Khan, punch through the Barrier with her bullets, and then switch places with it to escape with the cube.
It failed on both counts.
The Khan’s Barrier easily stopped Arc’s qi-bullet and absorbed its impact. The Khan himself teleported out of the Recoil Blast’s way and reappeared next to Arc, his four fists raised to punch her.
No. No, he hadn’t teleported. If he had, he would have reappeared in a different spot without having moved himself, like a picture cut and pasted on another. Yet his lower hands had shifted position from forming a mudra sequence to tightening into fists.
Arc quickly guessed the most likely explanation.
The Khan had divided time itself; split two instants apart to create a space within which only he could move. Arc assessed it couldn’t have been longer than a tenth of a second based on the space he covered, but it was plenty of time for a high-Coil cultivator to react.
Unwilling to find herself trapped in close combat with a four-armed juggernaut, Arc used Bullet Teleportation to switch places with her earlier projectile. She appeared again next to the Barrier and within reach of Zoa. The nuclear cultivator immediately spun and aimed at her face with a kick filled with radiation. Arc dodged it easily enough, but it punctured through the self-imposed Barrier holding back her unstable Authority.
Headshot Forge’s incomplete form leaked out of her in a wave that swallowed much of Battletown. Its debris gained the color of lead and the air choked with gunsmoke. Bullets rained on Zoa’s and the Khan’s heads before bouncing off their skulls. In its imperfect state, Headshot Forge’s projectiles acted like normal projectiles incapable of piercing through the skin of high-level cultivators.
Arc didn’t have time to reapply her Barrier in battle. She knew it would kill many survivors caught within its radius, but the risk of either of these two keeping the cube was simply too great for her to hold back. She could only hope to kill her enemies before they had to redraw the maps.
As for the Khan’s own Barrier, it managed to obscure the Cube of Natho from Arc’s Truesight. This could only mean one thing: that sanctuary excluded its contents from the world itself.
The sheer skill required to pull something like that off spooked Arc to her core. Even the Barriers fueling Item Materialization, which worked along the same principles by excluding everything except the object’s components, hardly lasted more than a split second. Not only had the Khan created one large enough to hold the cube, but it resisted both Zoa and Arc’s attempts to punch through it. He also seemed confident it would last long enough for him to finish off his rivals.
I hate arrogant bastards who can back up their boasts, Arc thought as the Khan rushed at her and Zoa with a savage snarl. Each of his steps sent dust and debris flying back behind him. He’s a tough one.
Arc noticed a very interesting detail as the Khan charged at her: some of Headshot Forge’s bullets hit the Khan’s chest rather than his skull. Did he have a backup head hidden there? Or did his split personality confuse her Authority?
Whatever the reason, Arc repelled Zoa with a Recoil Fist to the chest, then leaped dozens of meters back to put distance between herself and her enemies. The Khan waved his hands and suddenly reappeared in front of Arc, having once again split time. Arc’s enhanced sight and reflexes allowed her to dodge most attacks, but a fist grazed her cheek anyway.
She immediately sensed an invisible blade slash at her very soul. The Khan attempted to sever and divide her spirit from her body. That technique would have likely killed most cultivators, even those who had braved the Moonburns and gained a better grasp of their true selves.
A Gunsoul’s core and their soul were one and the same due to the nature of their rebirth, so the Khan’s attempt to split them failed to affect Arc. She hit the warlord in the chest with a Recoil Blast with enough force to send him flying back by a dozen meters, though he managed to whip up a Barrier in time to lessen the damage to a minimum.
“Disappear!” the Khan shouted, his two lower hands completing a mudra sequence while the upper two pointed at Arc. “Divide Between Heaven and Earth!”
Arc flew.
Gravity suddenly lost its hold on her and an invisible force extirpated her from the earth. She found herself dragged up into the air in an instant. Battletown shrank beneath her. She hardly caught a glimpse of Zoa and the Khan engaging in a lightning-quick fistfight before she ascended through the clouds.
Ever closer to space.