The moment of impact stirred to life his memories of that day, just two months in the past – but in terms of effect, the differences were almost more obvious than the similarities.
When Steadfast Heart had struck the battlefield near the bay, he had cracked the ground under his feet, but what had caused the deaths of the invading army had been an attack on the spiritual level. Each alien man’s soul was shunted from his body by the force of the Patriarch's spiritual sense, rather than any physical shockwave.
When he struck the city-sized island floating upon the ocean’s swell, however, it instantly shattered. Building-sized chunks of porous stone were flung like pebbles as he descended a hundred metres down below the surface, before turning around to smash the remnants though with a second pass. He burst upwards from the frothing, churning whirlpool to stand in the open sky, looking downwards as whatever alien magic had sustained the landmass flickered and died. In the time it had taken to blink, a number of men easily ten times that of entire first invasion had died – more than that, if you only counted the combatants of one side or the other.
The amount of force had simply been on an entirely different level – but despite that fact, many hundreds of Salt men had survived. Ah, I see that these are their proper soldiers. They floated in the water, some leaking blood or missing limbs, while others were only ruffled.
Of note was a particularly large man, his skin a bright reflective white like fresh snow. The Patriarch recognised him from the accounts he had been passed. “Junk Dog the Immense. You lead these men?”
The giant pulled himself up, and stood on the water. It would have been a trivial feat for any cultivator, but the Patriarch could feel the foreign qi expended to hold the man up – it was an amount that truly matched his title, easily equivalent to any elder realm spell.
When he spoke, there was no need for translation arts – meaning bloomed in the air like multicoloured lilies, each man’s intentions made obvious as their souls spoke to the other directly. “Not at all.” Junk Dog looked across the slowly swirling whirlpool; already, the signs that land had existed moments ago had nearly disappeared. “I am only a speck of dust, dancing beneath greater powers.”
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Emperor Sen Du looked down, and beheld two worlds which were fighting for their lives. In one, his old compatriot was crossing fists with a massive giant, his life burned away drop by drop as the unorthodox alchemic power circulated through his veins. In the other, thousands of war-priests stalked a strange patchwork reality, accompanied by half their number in black-souled cultivators. Where are they? Why are they not defending their territories? Unless he had gravely misunderstood the functioning of their alien laws, Salt’s Great Ancestors drew most of their strength from their alignment with these so-called deadworlds.
We’re set to cut them out of their own reality within days. What are they doing? The enemy isn’t stupid; there must be something I’m not seeing. Some facet of our strategy must be misinformed.
He ground his teeth against each other, even as flecks of his Heavenly qi speared out through the reality barrier to empower the crusaders. Do we pull back? If an enemy general were to behave in this manner, I would assume I’d misunderstood his strategic goals… But our mortals are being devoured in their beds. We cannot simply retreat.
There were three thousand men and woman of the orthodoxy assaulting the deadworlds, and he was feeding strength to nearly one in every six, twice as many as he would need to if the load were shared evenly. Alas, not every Emperor was equal; the Imperial trio had ascended through unorthodox means, and only equalled he and his peers when taken together as one. Chu’Hua, as much as he might deny it, was still greatly weakened by his injury at the hands of Heim’s deities.
And the youngest of them, Chin and Shinda Da, were yet to acclimate fully to the cultivation of Heavenly qi. He shook his head inside his helmet. No. I cannot afford to withdraw my attention. The others won’t be able to take up the slack. Not even they were immune to the liminal space’s turbulence; a thousandth of a second for them might stretch to minutes for their followers.
On Earth, a massive amount of seawater burst into vapour as each reality’s mortal champions collided. And in the myriad and dreamlike deadworlds, his loyal clergy cut down more and more of their opposition’s gathered souls.
“We appear to be winning,” Taon stated from atop his throne. He did not say it with hope, but rather a grim frustration – he had noticed the same thing as Sen Du.
“But in war, appearances are often deceiving.” Enough of Earth was revealed to them that no divinity could hide from their gaze, and a similar situation was forming in the deadworlds. Salt, the mortal planet which the Ancestors governed, was by far the most barren and exposed; the enemy were not there either, excepting the massive being towering above the breach, a creature too bound in itself to even pass through. The only one we can see is the one that has no capacity to endanger us.
But again, it was not as though they could stop to reassess the situation. Three thousand war-priests were relying on their empowerment; if they withdrew in caution, even for a minute, those men and women would begin to die.
Wordless communications flitted through Heaven as the Emperors debated with each other, hundreds of angels set to the task of divining each movement as below their eyes, the two separate battles raged on.
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Junk Dog dearly wished that the human had introduced himself, because he was easily the most powerful creature the Clanboss had ever battled.
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His punches were heavier than even the blows of the Primarch of the Prime Movers, Treadin’ Jack. He was faster than Killer-In-Four-Seasons, eldest of the Daughters of the Serpent’s End. And his techniques…
Junk Dog felt that if the Earth Emperor himself were to crawl from Stingy-Eye’s stomach and breath his irresistible destruction, it would not land with even a fraction the force.
He was struck by lightning, took a knife-edged palm to the back of his neck, and then was kicked in the ribs hard enough to send him flying high into the air, all within the span of a breath. In the last minute his regeneration had sucked down more energy than he had spent in the entire preceding year combined, this terrible warrior more vicious than even Joe’s earth-compacting presence.
It was all he could do to deflect every fourth or fifth blow, that was how fast the human was. What event could catalyze such strength? What kind of will could produce such immense effect?
Energy bid his limbs to move despite his severed spine, and a lance of flame was stopped a finger’s width from his eye – only for a second and third, hiding in the glare of the first, to land home. He was outclassed in every area, and it was not close – every area save for one.
The human struck him again, smashing in his half-healed ribs, clogging his throat with pulp. His spirit strained as it pulled his flesh back into place, not nearly fast enough to avoid being worn down. I have yet to land a single decisive blow. It was…
“Glorious,” he mouthed, as chains of ice snapped his wrists together, flinging him down towards the blue ocean he could smell but not see. He struck the water hard, the feeling indiscernible from striking stone at the speed he was moving, and he felt his few unbroken bones creak, his joints and muscles tearing from shearing forces as he tumbled. He opened his regenerated eyes to a dim murk, corpses drifting far above.
A shockwave knocked out what little air remained in his lungs, and he smiled as his blood further coloured the water. One advantage.
The human paragon descended in mimicry of his first strike, his fist howling with restrained energies. Junk Dog could feel it even with the vast quantity of water muddying his senses; if that attack were to hit, the damage may exceed his capacity to heal.
Strange power accelerated the man faster than sound – but then, as he touched the surface of the water, it happened. From one side of the man’s shadow slipped a rope, knotting around his neck. From the other came a needle-thin spear, nearly invisible with speed as it pierced the human’s wrist.
A shape not unlike a whale breached the choppy surface, an exceptionally tall man riding its back along with five others, the lot of them wreathed in lightning. A chunk of stone twice the Clanboss’s size emerged from the water, then another and another, until a ring of twenty orbited around a small man held aloft by purple-pink psychic emanations.
Junk Dog smiled. I have allies, while you are alone.
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The agony was beyond anything Steadfast Heart had ever experienced. The Three-Coloured Finality Pills were a miraculous medicine, but the level of strain they were putting on his entire being was indescribable.
Not only was his body breaking apart, his mind turning to dust, and even his soul cracking under the pressure, but he felt as though even his Path was losing coherence. Will there even be a soul left to enter the Wheel, when I am done? These were true berserker pills; win or lose, there was no chance he would survive.
Better to win, then. He attempted to pull himself off the spear, but it followed him unerringly – attached to his shadow, the same as the rope doing its level best to hang him mid-air.
So instead of continuing to struggle in vain, he cut off Wind God’s Blessing and allowed gravity to take him. The ocean’s water was cold when he hit, but it almost immediately began to boil off as strikes of lightning grounded themselves around him. Ah, my fighting instincts have dulled over these peaceful years. I should have picked off the small fry before they could find their heads, but I arrogantly assumed nothing could stop me.
Boiling blood joined the vaporous seawater as his body was inundated with strike after strike, and something that could be called a smile ghosted over his clenched teeth. Such foolishness, and in my final moments! Forms built out in his mind’s eye, and his qi dropped sharply as he cast a twelfth realm spell that had sat unused in a dusty corner of his mind for millennia. I suppose I’ll have to substitute sense with brute force. Art of the Green Grass General: Grass-Cutting Sword!
Despite the name, no spell-sword appeared in his hand. No, the Grass-Cutting Sword was a fist art. Green qi wreathed him head-to-toe as the rope and spear began to corrode, even the lightning seeming to become hesitant to touch him. In moments he was free, and he sent blades of green-tinted water to strike his assailants both above and below.
His enhanced Water Whips never landed; instead a colossal pressure smashed half his attack as a beam of white energy consumed the rest. The Supreme Touch took him away from where they met, and as he blasted back into the sky the great beam pierced through the expanding cloud of steam, dissipating it.
For a moment that lingered despite being a mere fraction of a second, Steadfast Heart looked down to see a Junk Dog completely unobscured, hovering in a hollow tube where once there had been ocean. Their eyes locked, and for a second the dying Patriarch dreamed. Such skill and coordination. If only we both could have lived…
Then a rock the size of his house teleported above his head, and the moment ended.
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Ren attempted to wipe the blood off his flail, but it was useless. His robes were drenched, the gold completely obscured by red of a half-dozen shades. Some of it was his own, but he couldn’t say how much – the last of the demonic beasts had gotten him with some sort of poison, and he had no feeling anywhere in his body. But he could still move, and so he walked – it wasn’t as though staying in place would be safer.
“Little boy, it seems you’re starting to become a man. Eye-gouging? We’ll make an adult of you yet!” Black Cloak was no less bloody than he, though her injuries disappeared a moment after they were made. For a moment he felt spite, before blowing it away.
“I am in my fourth decade, Matriarch. Though I suppose for a woman of such historical magnitude, all mortals must seem like children.”
She made a sound he refused to call a laugh, and flicked the side of his head. “Some people are children their whole lives, little boy.” For a moment she seemed ready to collapse, before the weakness disappeared – even with healing magic, this place was taking its own toll on the cultivator. “It isn’t about the years, it’s about maturity.” She flicked her own head.
“Of course, honoured elder. Unfortunately, one of us is too immature to understand maturity.”
She laughed, and Ren wondered if the growing heartbeat he could hear was his own, a sign of something approaching, or simply the poison leaking into his other senses.
And then his prayers were finally answered. His body was made whole, sensation returning to his skin and bones as his companion flinched away from the intensity of Heaven’s light – but unlike the crusade thus far, this time the light stayed with him.
Softly, he heard the voice of Heaven. You are close to the centre. Go; strike down this Hell for the sake of all the world.
The heartbeat did not disappear with the poison. It shuddered through the ground and air, more visceral than audible. The blessing of the Heavens lifted his body and spirit, and he began to sprint, trusting the evil woman to keep up.