To Alex’s surprised relief, not one of his companions declined his invite, and within seconds he had an additional four blinking green dots pinging on his interface.
“What a remarkable Ruidian gift,” Sulia said with genuine wonder as they passed under the foliage of a fig tree filled with ripe prizes that effortlessly dropped into Alex’s open palm, now happily munching his anxiety away as he pointedly ignored the looks the others were giving him.
Dui Zhong gave a delighted chuckle. “Remarkable! I can now sense where you all are in relation to myself, without even having to look your way. This will come in pretty handy, should we end up facing cultivators or walking spirits.”
“Hopefully neither,” Sulia whispered, earning a nod from the former caravan master.
“Hopefully.”
The continued walking in companionable silence. The tension clawing away at Alex’s stomach grew to a fever pitch. His eyes flickered along every alleyway and thoroughfare, yet his senses pinged nothing but sleeping mortals, and much to his surprise, the nearest gate was now in sight without them having run into any trouble at all.
Te Chang’s pursed lips eased into a satisfied smile. “We’re now approaching the Northern Gate. No one’s dared to trouble us, and indeed, few would be foolish enough to do so, and even fewer have reason to. But just in case...”
“We tell them we’re hunting the dead to keep the city safe and harvest cores,” Ya Ling declared. “That will throw them off, hopefully, even if it’s complete nonsense. I mean, are they really going to argue with esteemed cultivators trying to keep the city safe and the water flowing? If they were letting you pass without trouble before now, they should do so again, even if they’re corrupt assholes brought and paid for by the Duo Li Clan… or maybe even the bastards at Qianshi city.”
Her fist clenched as she said the last, and Alex noted how hard she fought not to spit, a particularly egregious insult here in the desert, oasis aside.
Instructor Rah gave Ya Ling a reassuring smile. The date palms lining the boulevard rustled peacefully overhead as the brilliant splash of glittering stars gave an almost mystical air to the night, despite how serious their mission was.
“The most important thing we can do, child, is keep our cool. Though I’ll be the first to admit that the sooner the core is safely secured such that no force could break it free without destroying the rift itself, the better I’ll feel.”
Sulia snorted, blowing a stray strand of hair lying flat between her brows. “It’s impossible to destroy a rift, as you well know, Rah.”
The powerfully built trainer chuckled in agreement as Alex’s instincts flared to sudden brilliant life.
“True,” he said, looking movie star perfect at that moment, not a single lock of hair out of place.
Just as Sulia’s lay flat against her stern yet striking features. Because despite the near constant breezes as warm desert sands met humid cooler caldera air during the day, Alex already knew that things reached a sort of equilibrium just a few hours before dawn, when the air was dead still, at least for a time.
Which meant that the trees’ rustling was utterly out of place.
Unless, of course, something was in those high-up branches… or the trees themselves were rustling of their own accord.
A final whisper of warning, no matter the eons of triumphs and tragedies that had bound and broke them all.
All those thoughts flickered to life in the heartbeat Alex had, choking back the sudden surge of dread he felt to summon a massive shield of wood. Far larger than any he had ever summoned before. Echoing a forest’s worth of growth… before it had been lost to flame.
“Ambush!” Alex cried as he somehow pushed the memory of an entire forest growing from a single dream of creation a lifetime ago… before so much had been lost with the rupture of a gate, the destruction of a territory, and the death rattles of a god.
Congratulations! You have dared to shape your arts in ways never done before!
Silver tier Shield of the Burning Grove summoned!
Alex howled in silent despair as the area flared to life with no less than a dozen furiously blinking reds, and all his friends startled at him in startled stupefaction, unable to process the severity of their peril in the split second they had.
“Ambush! Duck under my shield.”
By the horrified looks a handful of his friends gave him as they found themselves huddling within his umbrella-like shield of spinning lattices of blazing wood and fire, he knew he had crossed a line from which there would be no going back.
All the more so when he roughly grabbed Te Chang by the back of his loosely flowing cultivator’s robes, no Qi wards blocking his wrench and throw at all.
He could so viscerally taste Sulia’s panic and fury, Alex having instantly surrendered her will a heartbeat after commanding her, as Te Chang was send slamming to the cobblestone road.
The man’s eyes lit with sudden wild-eyed fury as liquid magma swirled around the man, just a heartbeat from being released. An unexpected fusion of Fire and Earth, an exquisitely controlled man-sized ball of hot liquid death Alex was sure was capable of catastrophic damage.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
And the look of furious vindication in Te Chang’s eyes, as if having found the serpent among them, turned to dismayed confusion when the night filled with furious roars and orders, a heartbeat before the sharp snap of crossbow strings echoing between the buildings. Sulia screamed, desperately chanting multiple wards as her eyes pulled from Alex and her husband to armed men manifesting in the windows of multiple buildings on both sides of the road, and from the tops of trees as well.
Wards far too slow to stop the fearsome power of a siege bolt from blasting through flesh and bone from any but the strongest of Bronze body cultivators.
No wujen who was unprepared would escape unscathed.
Which was why Alex had dared what he had, the interwoven latticework of sap-covered vines catching over a dozen quarrels, before they all burst into flame, with massive wards of ice placed right under Alex’s construct as a mind-linked Hanz and Lieberman instantly backed up his desperate defenses with their own.
“Metal beats wood, but sap can dull any edge and turn any blade, and fire is the bane of steel,” Alex said with a hard smile as he summoned his fangtian ji, not needing to mime a shieldman’s grip with the ward that was even now tapping his spiritual energy at a prodigious rate, making it clear what his next move had to be as a smirking man dressed in gold threaded robes gave a mocking clap as he emerged from behind the nearby palm tree.
“Well done, Senior Cultivator Te Chang. I must admit, even I’m surprised that you managed to summon your ward in time to stop death.”
The man flashed a cold smile while Te Chang’s gaze widened, before his killing aura flared to sudden furious life.
“Wei Gui! That you would dare to start a clan war here and now of all times. And with the aid of assassins? The prince himself will have your head when he hears of this!”
The man’s smile twisted into a sneer of absolute contempt as a half dozen hard-eyed men and women radiating deepest bronze, and in two cases Silver, suddenly made an appearance. “Then we will make sure word never gets out. Kill them!”
The air erupted in flashes of fire and explosions of bitter ice, yet Alex was already moving, already knowing what his next move had to be as he raced as fast as he could sprint, suddenly in no position to meet the charging would-be assassins. He could only pray that his friends could handle meeting their frontal assault… as he struck from behind.
Leaping to the nearest date tree welcoming him so openly before leaping from one to another and suddenly he was behind his prey, their senses drowned by the din and hue of battle and the brilliant half-dome of Ice, Wood, and Fire.
He didn’t need the ding in his interface to know that his stealth check had been successful.
He could feel it as perfectly as any hunter stalking his prey.
Before Alex all was flames and chaos, madness and death. He thought he heard Ya Ling’s desperate scream and a cold man’s laughter… but all he could see before him were a trio of powerfully built guadao wielders radiating the strength of powerfully built Bronze cultivators…
Before the night flashed with lightning, and they radiated nothing at all.
Storm Strike!
Storm Strike!
You have critically struck your opponents!
Alex howled with silent fury as his fangtian ji tore through the air, the closest assassin’s skull exploding in smoking chunks of crimson gore. Just enough time for the man beside him to flinch in surprise as smoking fragments of bone smacked his cheek… an instant before steel flashed, and his head was cleaved completely free, eyes blinking wide in disbelieving surprise as his head slowly crashed to the ground.
Which was still too late to save Alex’s boon companion from the bitter sharp steel that had just plunged into his abdomen.
“You’ve chosen the wrong side, fool! Now you will suffer the fate of all those who dare to oppose the Duo Li clan!” Rah’s would-be executioner roared, spitting in the groaning instructor’s face as he crumpled to the ground, his bloody hands desperately holding back the blade from plunging any further than it had as his smirking opponent sneered and twisted, eliciting a scream from Alex’s fallen companion.
Rah’s look of agonized dismay, however, became a desperate grin of relief when the twisting pressure abruptly stopped. Rah’s would be tormentor gazed down at his weapon in consternation for a heartbeat before his brain could even register the blood spraying from the stump of his arm.
“What?” The doomed cultivator’s look of dismay became one of horror, eyes bulging as frothy blood spurted from his lips, spraying Rah with bone, blood, and ruptured viscera as his ribcage exploded under the force of Alex’s fist as he roared and struck with all his killing fury.
And perhaps Alex had momentarily forgotten just how fast and powerful he had become with his latest ascension, moving with the instinctive stalking caution of a low Bronze.
Nonetheless, Silver Tier Strength and Eight ranks of Wind Crane kung fu was more than enough to send the mortally wounded cultivator careening through the air, spraying the entire battleground with arterial blood.
“Alex,” Instructor Rah wheezed, warm blood pouring from between his lips. “Right where you’re needed.”
“Shut up and heal,” Alex commanded silently, lips pressed tightly together, pretending he hadn’t seen the horrified look the man gave him when a single command to his node had the man exercising traits he never knew he had, screaming and spasming not from death, but from his mind forcefully claiming party potency to heal his mortal wound… no matter what damage the crystalline override would have on his own sense of ego or self.
With any luck, he’d pass out and chalk it all up to battlefield madness… assuming they survived at all.
And no one knew how perilous their situation was more than Alex, stalking a roaring Silver tier wujen tearing through a panicked Sulia’s wards of shimmering ice with a white hot drill of flame as a sobbing Ya Ling pulled free a mangled and clearly dying Dui Zhong free of the fight.
Alex’s eyes widened with horror, sensing his gestalt fade to oblivion as his Ruidian companions collapsed. Alex’s blaring interface made it clear that poisons had been in play from an unseen vector, forcing Alex to spend desperate moments flooding their interface with life-giving potency, grateful that at least their crystalline matrices claimed the boons far easier than his cultivating companions.
“Hold, wife! You must hold!” Te Chang shrieked as his own wards began to fail before the mocking cultivator who had initiated the entire ambush.
“Poor fool. Is this all your vaunted school is capable of? A handful of rats sneaking off with a prize that is not theirs, that will never be theirs, in the dead of the night?” The Yidushian-featured aristocrat smirked. “It’s a good thing my own little mouse has been keeping tabs on all you fools,” the man sneered, before his mocking sneer became a snarl of furious hate. “Now it is time for me to avenge your innumerable offenses to my clan, and claim the prizes that is ours by ancient right!” The man roared, his entire body lighting up with a swirling surge of Metal and Earth Qi that Alex knew would spell the end of both husband and wife if Alex didn’t act NOW!
Perception Check made!
You sense death rapidly approaching!