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Chapter 114 – Nevermore
🕑 Added 2024-10-21 18:24:33 +0000 UTCYang Ru placed his spear tip between his body and the raven’s beak. He knew he couldn’t harm it, but the bird was also unlikely to be strong enough to fight through the weapon.
Atop the wall, Xiang Qiao rang the gong.
Good, the village guard was of too low a realm in both Spiritual and Body Cultivation to attack the raven, but the alert would draw others who could contribute to the fight.
Yang Ru just had to survive solo long enough for others to engage.
The bird snapped forward, trying to bite him. Between his dodge, the placement of the spear, and an arrow distracting the creature by hitting it in the eye, he managed to avoid the strike.
Neither the spear tip nor the arrow so much as scratched the raven. Attacks were useless. They could only defend.
Yang Ru just had to keep on holding on. Until Master got back.
He really hoped Master didn’t really take the full time he’d estimated, about four more hours. If he did, the entire village would likely be dead.
###
Ye Zan heard the gong and sprinted toward the gate. Huang Yimen, Hou Yazhu, and another guard, Kong Zemin, followed.
When they arrived at the plaza, a giant black bird was pecking at Yang Ru, trying to eat him. Though Yang Xiu peppered the creature with arrows and Zou Tian kept darting in stabbing it with daggers, it was unfazed.
“Each take a side,” Ye Zan yelled. “We’ll attack at once on my command.”
The goal wasn’t to win. It was to keep everyone alive until Master returned. Yang Ru started the engagement, but if he fought too long against the bird, the likelihood was that the creature would figure out his patterns and get a strike in.
Such an occurrence could lead to disaster. Even though he was near the peak of Qi Gathering and had a technique to increase his resilience against injury, he was no match for an opponent essentially in the Foundation Establishment realm.
None of them were, really.
Ye Zan and the others, however, had what Master called a trump card—their Body Cultivation.
While Yang Ru had only just started his journey having reached the first minor realm, the four guards were already at the sixth. Their skin, bone, muscles, and even organs were much stronger than Senior Brother’s. Where a single strike had the potential to deliver a deadly injury to him, they were much more likely to survive.
They hoped.
Each of the guards took their positions.
“On my mark,” Ye Zan called.
Yang Ru was too busy dodging that lightning quick beak to speak or even to nod, but Ye Zan trusted that Senior Brother, of all of them, knew what to do.
“Three!” Ye Zan yelled. “Two! One! Go!”
As one, five cultivators moved.
Yang Ru retreated, diving out of the way, while Ye Zan and each of the others darted in, catching the bird by surprise.
The movement was perfect. The thrusts were perfect. The result would have been perfect.
Had their opponent not so far outmatched them.
The tips of their spears simply didn’t matter. Even if they’d been equipped with the sect’s primary weapons, the Orange Vigor Spirit Wood spears, it still would not have mattered. Ordinary steel had no way to penetrate a qi shield, no matter the strength behind it, and a beast at rank four or above would never run out of qi to fuel that shield fast enough for it to make a difference.
Such was the gap between major realms that the guards might have well have been children with toys rather than cultivators while fighting against the beast.
The detriment of advancing so quickly in Body Cultivation soon showed itself. Whereas Senior Brother had good control over his movements and could dodge with alacrity, the guards were still unused to their rapidly increased strength. Likewise, they had not yet attained Mastery with their spears, meaning that they were fractions of a second late with their reactions.
All that to say that, when the raven struck at Hou Yazhu, he wasn’t able to fully move out of the way. The bird got in a glancing blow on the guard’s shoulder.
Yang Xiu immediately increased the intensity of her barrage, hitting each eye in turn one after the other and keeping the bird blinded.
As Zou Tian pulled the slightly stunned Hou Yazhu away from the creature, Ye Zan, Huang Yimen, and Kong Zemin closed ranks, each stabbing at it from a different direction.
The bird screeched in anger.
The streaming arrows stopped, probably out of fear of running out of ammunition rather than any other reason.
It tried to peck at Ye Zan, but he dodged out of the way. Next, it targeted Kong Zemin, but he, too, was able to avoid being hit.
Huang Yimen performed best of all, anticipating the coming strike and easily sidestepping.
The fight continued with the guards barely managing to avoid the bird’s mouth.
Ye Zan looked over at Hou Yazhu. The man didn’t appear to be really injured. He wasn’t even bleeding.
Good. They’d need him.
In battles, a minute was a lifetime, especially against a foe was fast as the bird. The guards had to keep alert at all times, and even straining their abilities to the utmost, they had a difficult time dodging all the bird’s many, many attacks.
A mistake was inevitable.
Ye Zan felt his body begin to fatigue. Even with six minor realms of Body Cultivation, he was subjecting it to much stress. He needed a breather.
As he was about to call out his need to be replaced to Hou Yazhu, the bird altered its pattern. Even though Kong Zemin should have been up in the rotation, the damn creature struck at Ye Zan.
The peck caught him surprised and flat footed. The only thing he could do was use his spear and speed to prevent being hit in the head, a likely fatal blow. The beak instead caught him fully on the shoulder, squeezing tightly.
The sharp mouth penetrated enhanced skin and muscles, but the underlying bone was too tough for even the Foundation Establishment equivalent bird.
Still, the pain was the worst, most intense agony of Ye Zan’s life.
And he wasn’t even out of danger. The bird still had a grip on him. All it would take was for the creature to toss him up into the air and catch him before gobbling him down.
He was moments from death.
###
Yang Xiu watched in horror as the bird latched onto Ye Zan. The whole situation was like something out of her worst nightmare. Every arrow was hitting exactly where she intended, but they were doing no damage. At best, they were a mild distraction.
The bird tossed Ye Zan into the air, and she acted without thought, grabbing one of her blunt practice arrows from the battlement near her.
Master had one day told her about a great hero from his home called Hawkeye. The man—birdman?—used a bow with specialty arrows to defeat his foes.
Yang Xiu had found the story fascinating. Arrows that exploded. Arrows that turned into a net. Arrows that did something with lightning to stun.
She wanted them. But all she had that was different from her normal ones were the ones she used for training her fellow sect members to counter enemy archers. So, she kept a few nearby just in case she ever felt a need for them.
Yang Xiu, and Ye Zan, would be forever grateful that she did.
The man flew through the air, and the bird prepared to catch and swallow him.
Putting as much draw strength into the bowstring as she ever had, she shot that blunt arrow.
At Ye Zan.
The shot hit him in the stomach, and he let out a pained oof.
That effect notwithstanding, the arrow did exactly what she want it to. It pushed Ye Zan away from the bird’s mouth just enough so that it missed eating him.
Instead, his body hit the ground with a thud, and he groaned.
Her brother and the other three guards renewed their attacks to distract the beast while Zou Tian pulled the injured man away and fed him a Healing Pill.
They couldn’t keep going like they were. Someone was going to die for real. How long would it be until Master got back?
###
Some instinct drove Benton to push himself as he sprinted and Quickstepped back to the village. His disciples were in trouble. He just knew it.
Of course, that same instinct had caused him and Evelyn to rush home from almost all their date nights, and the kids had never been in any danger. So…
Still, he pushed on, stepping eleven miles instead of ten and sprinting even harder during the time he consumed his spirit coins. Instead of an hour, he made the return trip in less than fifty-two minutes.
His last step landed him a few miles from the village, and he scanned the area with his spiritual sense. More than a half dozen of his sect members were battling a death aspected rank five beast in the plaza.
He quickstepped inside the wall.
Yang Xiu was on the allure, ineffectively peppering a big black raven with arrows. Yang Ru, Hou Yazhu, Huang Yimen, and a guard that Benton for the life of him couldn’t recall the name of had the bird surrounded, but they weren’t doing any damage.
Off to the side, Zou Tian was feeding a pill to a bloodied Ye Zan.
Well, it looked like the kids had done pretty a good job so far. There were no bodies lying around, anyway. Time for him to step in.
A microburst of gravity propelled the bird into the air quite against its will, and as it scrambled to use its wings to regain control, another burst, equal and opposite to the first tugged on it, leaving it suspended in the air.
“Yang Xiu, do you wish to do the honors?” Benton said.
A twang followed by an arrow plunging toward the bird was her reply, aimed, of course, right at its eye. He hastily attached life qi to the arrow’s tip and layered that aspect with a single qi’s amount of void.
The life qi, even without Benton having it as a Concept, popped the bird’s shield like a soap bubble, and the arrow penetrated its eye, burying itself in the beast’s brain. If that hadn’t been enough to kill it, the void then triggered, hollowing out the inside of the birdbrain’s cranium.
Benton stopped the gravity pulses, and the corpse fell to the ground.
“Good job, everyone,” Benton said. “I’d say that’s one raven who will quote nevermore.”
The kids looked like they had no idea what he was talking about. Which they didn’t, of course. He was really going to have to learn some of his new world’s famous literature to make funny remarks about.
Comments
richard C bond
"Good, the village guard was of too low a realm" - should that be "Sure, the village guard"...? Good seems wrong there.
Daoist_Matt
TFTC!! 😋🥳
