Chapter XV: Beast Lures VI
Shizukana Gake
Heian Kingdom
The Great Plateau
Month of the Pangolin 4, 172 ,328 DE
The Martial Warrior pulls back his sword for another swing, and riding down its blade with one knife, I step in and stab at the his shoulder. As the Martial Warrior turns his shoulder, my knife's blade skitters across the surface of a metal pate that was hidden beneath a loose fitting jacket that vaguely resembles the clothing of the Dunkle Sonne Empire. Through the tear in the jacket, light glints off a form-fitting silvery pauldron.
Reddish Yuan Qi surrounds the left hand the of the Martial Warrior. He grabs at my arm, as I withdraw it. I turn my wrist to slash the Martial Warrior's forearm, and his fingers just brush hand, as he jerks it away to avoid my blade. After glancing at the back of my hand, the Martial Warrior steps back. A dome of reddish Yuan Qi encapsulates the Martial Warrior and the five soldier Cultivators feeding him.
Feeling a faint burning sensation on the back of my hand, I look down. A patch of my fur, which was touched by the Martial Warrior, has a reddish-brown color to it. A lot of Yuan Qi has invaded my fur, but it is encapsulated in a medium. Poison? A Drug?
Martial technique can conjure poisons, drug, and many other things. I do not know where the conjured substances come from. Old Man Jones suspects the originate form Elemental Power or the Aether. While he does not elaborate on the reasons, he says that has been to the Aether many times, and it is a dark realm filled with potential and nascent Power.
According one of Old Man Jones' books, all Amalgamate Realms arise from the Aether and return to it upon their eventual destruction. All that is born eventually dies, and that includes Mortals, Transcendents, and the Realms themselves. If that book's author is correct, while Transcendents can live indefinitely, that assumes they have the will to keep going, and few beings can carry on forever. In time, beings lose interest in the world around themselves; they need new stimulus to give them something to continue living for.
Whatever this Martial Warrior's techniques may be, I do not think they are conjurations. He must be have a supply of something on his person to act a medium for carrying the Yuan Qi in this attack.
"It's over freak. You're already belong to me. You just don't know it yet." The Martial Warrior smirks at me. He does not appear to notice expressions of anger and hatred on the faces of the visibly aging soldier Cultivators behind him.
I feel Yuan Qi trying to force its way past the flow of Trinity within my Body. As I focus more Trinity into my hand, the burning fades. After a few seconds, the reddish-brown colored fur starts to darken, and reddish-brown Yuan Qi rise from hand. By the time my fur has returned to its natural black color, the Yuan Qi has already begun to dissipate.
The Martial Warrior has a look caught somewhere between shock and rage, but the aging soldiers behind him, who already appear to be on the far side of middle-aged, have expressions of pure hate.
Vorn drops another of the soldiers fighting him, leaving only four enemies. Three of the soldiers have threads of Yuan Qi linking them, but their Bodies are no longer as swelled from Power anymore. The fourth has returns to his normal proportions, and looks visibly drained from the experience. Since the ten containing my swords show no signs of running out of steam any time soon, the fourth fighting Vorn is probably suffering from some form of backlash from the Yuan Qi links ending or being prematurely ended.
The Martial Warrior shakes his head. "What a shame. You could have had the glory of being my pet. Now, I'll just turn you into a fur rug. Since we don't get many chances to kill Beast Cultivators, you'll at least have the honor of helping me one-up a few fools, who think they're better than me."
Following the Martial Warrior's far talker command, the soldier Cultivators lower the shield of reddish Yuan Qi. With a condescending smile, the Martial Warrior raises his sword. "Time to die freak."
Reddish weapon auras form next to the Martial Warrior's broadsword. As he steps forward, his arm almost blurs, and he strikes with an overhand slash. Stepping to the side, I parry his attack, letting the blade and weapon auras sweep past arm, and this time, the weapon auras do not fly free from the sword. The Martial Warrior continues to unleash slashes from varying angles, and I continue to avoid and parry them. The weapon auras never separate from the sword. Either they only separate when an attack is prematurely halted, or the Martial Warrior consciously unleashes them.
Vorn drops the last the soldier Cultivators that he was fighting. He looks in my direction for a few moments. As he turns toward the soldier Cultivators, who are keeping my swords penned, he shakes his head and releases a soft, irritated growl that is probably meant to be a sigh.
A reddish glow of Yuan Qi surrounds the Martial Warrior's free hand, and he makes a grasping motion toward me. The wound left by his earlier weapon aura attack, which no longer bleed, feel like something is sucking on them. As I focus my circulating Trinity into the wounds, the suction stops, and the Martial Warrior frowns. He tried to use technique a second time, and this time, the Trinity in my wounds prevents the suction from ever starting.
The Yuan Qi of the Martial Warrior clearly has a Blood affinity. The same cannot be said for the the threads tying the soldier Cultivators to one another and his bracer. The effect makes it look like it is blood related, but from the feel, it should be directly affecting their life forces. The soldier Cultivators will probably never be able to recover from the damage that has already been done to them.
The Martial Warrior issues another command, and as the aging of the soldier Cultivators speeds up, his movement speed increases. He unleashes another flurry of attacks, but I continue to avoid them. As soon as the soldier Cultivators die, the Martial Warrior loses his value as a training dummy. I intend to get all the I can out of him.
After several dozen attacks, I make a mistake. The Martial Warrior launches the weapon auras, and three of the four slice into my leg. Even if my strength is lacking because of my small size, the density and toughness of my Body sits very close to that of my true form. Like the wounds in my shoulder, the wounds in my leg are not deep enough to damage anything significant. My thigh muscles will be a little weak, but that is all.
Having injured my leg, the Martial Warrior probably thinks the wounds will distract me. He hacks at my throat, but dropping my knife, I catch his wrist in an iron grip. The Martial Warrior tries to jerk his wrist out of my grip but fails. As he tries to punch me in the balls, I shift my stance and take the punch on my already wounded leg. Before he pull back his fist, the point of my second knife plunges into his wrist. The blade slips between the bones in his forearm, and I slice it in half from wrist to elbow.
"AAAAARRRRRRRR!"
As The Martial Warrior screams in agony, he throws back his head. With his neck exposed so nicely, I sink my teeth into it, and lifting him into the air, I shake him like a rabbit. His bones break. His flesh tears, and his hot blood fills my mouth.
I really dislike the taste of humans. After a few seconds, I drop the dying Martial Warrior on the floor.
The soldier Cultivators stop feeding the Martial Warrior with their life forces. Their expressions range from surprise to hatred, but the hatred seems directed at the Marital Warrior. All five have aged decades in terms of a Mortal human's lifespan, and their Bodies appear close to the point of collapse. After a few moment, the expressions of three of them shift, revealing grim resignation, and the other two look ready to explode from rage. The one with my Telepathy thread connected to him closes his eyes, and one more memory of the girl fills his mind.
The girl is older than the previous memories. She walks down a street following another man, another soldier Cultivator, while holding the hand of two children. Her eyes meet the Cultivator for a few moments, but with a sad smile, she looks down and continues walking.
Fuck the Republic! The thought wipes out the memory of the girl.
With anger and hate twisting his face, the soldier Cultivator raises his short sword over his head and springs toward me. "For the Republic!"
"FOR THE REPUBLIC!" The other four raise their weapons and their shouts echo thunderously in the large room. The charge on the heels of the first Cultivator, but like him, their movements are much slower than before. They are no more than candles guttering in the wind
As the four reach me, I do not hold back or use them for training dummies. Burying my knife in the chest of the first Cultivator with, I hurl him aside. My hands wrap around the head of two more, shattering their skulls, and I slam their bodies into the fourth and fifth. As they stagger back, I drop the corpses and tear out their throats.
With Vorn's aid, six of the ten soldier Cultivators, which had been tying up my swords, have fallen, and in just a few seconds, the rest fall to floor, dead. All but two of corpses are missing limbs or their heads.
My sword return to me and enter my Core Real on their own. Can they do that because of the Soul-thread that binds them to me?
You make us weak! Tama's angry thought barges into my Mind, but I do not bother to reply. If I did reply to its taunts, the sword would probably try harder to irritate me. More than a few of the terrible Sengoku novel Hoshi foisted on me included obnoxious weapons in poor attempts to add humor. There is nothing funny about an obnoxious weapon. If I run into any of those authors, maybe, I should let them have Tama for a day.
Circling around the Beast lures, I examine an array of sigils that has been drawn on the floor in powdered metal. A dome shaped shield completely encloses the lures and the array.
Still in his bear form, Vorn displays what is probably a grimace. *Any ideas how to get past that shield?*
I shrug. *Not a clue. These sigils are different from anything I've seen.*
"Brat, you need stop playing with enemies like they're chew toys. Just kill them, or they might kill you. Or worse for you, they might get away and spread your secrets." Old Man Jones appears inside the door of the room, leaning against the wall like he's been there all the time.
"Shitty old men should say something when they're peeping on other peoples fights. They're all dead." I speak in the Beast Language. Old Man Jones is the only human I have met that understands it.
Old Man Jones shrugs. "That half-assed transformation isn't a screw-up I ever saw your mother make."
"This form is not bad. I have the density of my real form, and it heals faster than either."
"You look too much like a wolf. It'll cause you problems if anyone sees it."
I pull my Trinity back into my Core Realm. As the Trinity leaves my Body, I slowly shifts back into my human shape. "I'm not sure I can use this form at will, but I'll kill anyone who sees me transform."
Shaking his head, Old Man Jones joins us at the shield surrounding the Beast lures. "I don't know if I should be amazed this array works or amazed someone thought up something this stupid."
I look at the array of sigils, once more. "I don't recognize most of these sigils. What do you mean?"
"It's an old style used by some War Masters, but these sigils are incomplete. I have no idea where anyone would have learned it in this era."
"They were from the Providence Republic."
Old Man Jones scowls. "That's interesting. I might have to pay them a visit. But first we have to deal with these idiotic toys."
