They sure didn’t seem like very impressive weapons. Even if the shafts had pointed tips, how much damage could they cause? Wu Chang didn’t think of them as much, but his instincts told him otherwise. He felt a dreadful danger emanating from the feathers as they flew towards him. With the giant wind column to protect him, he was hoping to completely bore through the defensive barrier and flee with his life intact. Just like that cursed Lang Sheng had just done, he could also run away and bide his time until he could take his revenge.
That had been the plan. Too bad Ruanfu didn’t agree. She punched through his protection and attacked him from a dozen yards away, giving him no opportunity to use the huge wind construct as a shield. Not only did he have to face her attack from up close, he was still powering the other technique. Fortunately, he’d spent a lot of time practicing for just this sort of situation to remove the weakness of his most destructive attack. Wu Chang snapped the fan shut, breaking free of the momentum from the swirling winds. Then he kicked against the air and swooped sideways. He reached his hand out to the tunnel like wind and grabbed hold of it. His body was swept away like he’d just caught hold of a tow line and he was pulled away from the area the feathers were aiming towards. The feathers had been shot out in a widespread pattern to make it difficult to avoid, and now Wu Chang had avoided them.
Or at least, he thought he had. The feathers seemed to have a mind of their own. When Wu Chang was pulled away, the attacks rushing towards him changed their flight paths to intersect with his new movement. He released his hand and he lost the pulling force, but the feathers curved in the air towards him. Even as fast as these high level cultivators were, there wasn’t much distance separating them, so after cancelling his technique and trying to avoid them twice, the feathers had crossed the distance. The sound of flesh being punctured was quite distinctive, but it also didn’t make much of a mess. Until the penetrating object was removed, said object worked to plug up the wound it created.
Wu Chang found himself with a dozen new wounds, tiny arrows lodged in his flesh. Unfortunately for him, they caused far more pain and suffering than their size and material composition would suggest. Each of them were infused with Ruanfu’s Qi, Laws, and also a fragment of her soul. Not only did a Soul Fragment let her guide them with unerring accuracy, but it also enhanced its other properties like hardness and sharpness. Wu Chang felt a coldness piercing into him from a dozen points on his body. He glanced down and was frightened, not by the number, but the placement of his injuries. Not only was he unable to dodge the attacks, they had landed on matching locations, two upon each of his limbs and four of them on his chest, just over his heart, liver, spleen, and at the base of his throat. How was it possible she could override his control of the wind so much that feathers could strike him with such unerring accuracy?
Ruanfu’s fearsome aura had extended even further and the winds around her raged fiercer than before. She was the eye of a violent blizzard, and she looked upon Wu Chang with hatred. From a distance the feathers hadn’t seemed that threatening, but now that they were stabbed into his body, Wu Chang realized they were massive. Each of the feathers were around 5 yards long, their sharpened quills were much like spears stabbed through his body. A lower ranked cultivator would have already died from such vicious injuries, having a spear like feather already stabbed through his heart. Wu Chang would continue living until his core was destroyed, and he grew more terrified that his enemy hadn’t targeted it. She already showed she could strike his body unerringly, yet she purposely left his core untouched. Even though he was still alive, the heavy damage to such important organs and muscles had quite effectively crippled him.
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Ruanfu didn’t let up, now that she’d broken Wu Chang’s morale, she was going to thoroughly crush it. She swooped towards her weakened enemy and there was a pulse of powerful energy. Wu Chang felt an immense power originate in Ruanfu’s tail and then ripple through her body, like a violent wave that culminated in her beak which released a brilliantly bright blue light. She snapped her beak together and Wu Chang’s arm was snipped off, just above the elbow. The rainbow colored fan began to fall, but Ruanfu’s tail flicked over to it, upon which point it disappeared.
Without his weapon, Wu Chang’s power dropped yet again and the battle was all but decided. Unfortunately for Wu Chang, Ruanfu wasn’t going to end it quickly. She smashed him down to the ground and started to torture him with heavy strikes of her tail, using just the right amount of strength to batter his body without shattering his bones or rupturing his organs. The huge feathers pulled back out of his body and returned to her wings, letting Wu Chang start to heal up before she battered him again.
The giant stone golem managed to land a few blows on the five giant birds smashing against it, but it eventually succumbed to the constant bombardment. The long legged jacanas with bright copper legs had taken a terrible beating, many of her feathers were torn out or broken and there was a crack on her beak. Her legs were in much better condition, though there were a few scrapes that looked somewhat like scuffed metal. She’d taken the brunt of the golems attacks, being struck many times during the fight. Her brothers and sisters had only taken one or two hits each, but they were all in far worse condition than Baozhai. With her naturally tough and strong legs she’d chosen to take the path of a Body Cultivator, so her physical strength and toughness were many times higher than any of the others.
The giant rock golem finally crumbled and four of them began to celebrate, at least until they realized where the fifth of their number, Songji, had gone. She had chosen not to celebrate until the conflict was completely over and she sunk her talons into each of the Strongfist Brother’s throats, ensuring the battle was truly finished. The other four were taken aback, but only for an instant. They knew how ruthless Songji could be, and the Strongfist Brother’s had helped kill their father, they all wished them to be dead. The sudden violence had just surprised them, but they immediately accepted the outcome.
They turned their gaze towards the two remaining conflicts. The man-sized sandpiper, Jiyao, hopped over to the side of the truck sized vulture, Tujiu, and gave him a little nudge in the side with his wing, “Who will be finished first, Boss, or Big Sis?”
Tujiu leaned his long bald neck and head back, tilting his beak up towards the sky at an unusual angle that seemed his version of a head tilt. Then he spun back around and fixed his silvery holographic foil eyes onto Jiyao’s diamond blue gaze, “I’ve got a hundred Spirit Stones on Boss finishing first.”
The huge sandpiper looked at the army of thousands rapidly disappearing into thin air as they approached Sage, and then over to where the large feathery drake was using her tail as a whip to torture Wu Chang. He let out a loud screech like peep and shook his beak from side to side, “No way! Boss will definitely finish first… maybe… okay, make the odds ten to one! My hundred for your thousand!”
The two began to bicker back and forth over the odds, but after a few minutes the argument became moot when all three legions of the Jade Horde were completely gone. Over the side, Ruanfu was still torturing Wu Chang who she had now figured out how to make scream.