Forcing a pause as Alex hissed at stinging hands, lurching back to his feet and retrieving his weapon, now slipped free of the groaning and very much alive alchemist, meant that he could make no excuses of being lost in the moment, did he dare to strike his hated enemy now.
A moment ago? A righteous kill.
But now… Alex gazed down at the broken, sobbing man, a twisted shattered thing.
Now, if he were to strike the man, it would be murder.
And with the cold merciless gaze of his master, and the inhuman deadly aura of what could only be a deadly Gold beyond Elder Panheu’s gates, Alex knew that were he to strike in that moment, it would seal his death every bit as much as his foe’s.
Yet still... he trembled, glaring down at the broken alchemist, wanting nothing more than to rip the man’s spite-filled head clean off his neck.
“I beat you!” Alex roared at the shuddering, battered alchemist. “I shattered all your pawns! I have bested your son and left him a cripple! I have smashed you to broken bones and bitter tears! Do you finally understand, alchemist? I have beaten you! You are nothing before me! Your clan is nothing before me! You have lost, and the stain of your defeat will forever be upon your soul!”
Alex turned, glaring at the audience of wide-eyed cultivators beyond Panheu’s gate. “The Lai clan has fallen to a simple Ruidian! So long as they claim Lai Wei and Lai Leng as their own, they will be less than nothing. Less than dirt!”
And with those final words, Alex spat upon the now-snarling alchemist before stepping back.
Elder Panheu chuckled even as Lai Leng screamed in outrage, blinking away the glob of spit dribbling into his tear-stained eyes, his shattered jaw leaving his words utterly incoherent.
“And there you have it,” Elder Panheu said to the audience, now silent with awed disbelief. “My lowest disciple has bested your favorite black rook. A Ruidian, of all things. A disciple of the Fox, of that there can be no doubt. So now you must ask yourselves, what unforgivable failing has allowed this once-prestigious academy to fall so low? So low we ignore the teachings in our own midst? So low that we run out sources of knowledge, wisdom, and flexibility without which we will be doomed to rigidity before slowly crusting over in obsolescence, as mute and inflexible as the masonry we pass by without thought every day?”
“You speak of the kitsune whore and her mongrels. Filthy trash that should have been purged from Yidushi centuries ago!” sneered one of the Silvers just outside the gate. None other than Alex’s most despised teacher, Fu Shen himself.
Elder Panheu’s eyes crackled with sudden fire. Alex could feel the man radiating a hot, killing fury, much like Alex’s own.
“No, Father! His words mean nothing to me. And you already know how this has to play out,” snapped a jaded-looking Zhao Doushi, arms still crossed.
Boiling fury instantly transformed to frigid ice and a deadly smile.
Alex glared daggers at the sneering Fu Shen. His mentor might embrace self-control, but this was one insult Alex would never forgive.
“You have denigrated a Daughter of the Fox for the last time!” Alex roared. “Take that back and swear never to utter such profanity again, or we fight, here and now, to the death!”
Elder Panheu chuckled softly, bemused smirk in place once more, as if he hadn’t been heartbeats away from swimming in blood. “Have a care, Fu Shen. The moment you enter, and you most definitely do have my permission to enter, is the moment my student’s challenge is accepted.”
Fu Shen’s eyes widened even as Alex breathed deep, grateful for the reprieve his master had given him, his Qi reserves refilling faster than ever before, thanks to his ascent to Bronze. “How dare you threaten me, you filthy piece of Ruidian trash! You think one lucky maneuver will let you get the best of a true warrior? You will pay for that, worm! I will make you—”
And before the man could do more than blink, his head was soaring through the air.
Countless hours spent staring at your most hated instructor, dreaming of the day you could put your Soul Sight to good use, is at last at hand! Soul Sight skill check: Critical Success! Find Weakness skill check: Absolute! He is utterly unprepared, and has no defense you can’t—
Fu Shen was stupid enough to enter the compound with no weapon drawn!
Bullrush! Bullrush!
Black Swan!
The crowd of cultivators cried out or hissed in surprise as spurting blood drenched their cheongsams and cultivation uniforms, a crashing wave of Steel and Water Qi actually manifesting, so potent was Alex’s resonance with the storm and the sea all around them, now physically pushing them back and flinging Fu Shen’s headless corpse back into the crowd.
“How dare he! Fu Shen had no weapon ready!” hissed one instructor.
“There was no need,” declared another. “The foul little worm was halfway across the field! Fu Shen was warded well enough to handle any student, and he should have had plenty of time to draw his jian!”
“No. Impossible! Do you fools not recognize that technique?” hissed a particularly angry-looking onlooker, glaring at his cohorts. “Of course Black Swan will rupture any lesser ward! None but a Silver-ranked assassin could possibly know it. That foul Ruidian should be crippled, just from channeling it!”
A fourth instructor just shook his head in awe. “How did the boy move so fast? Sixty feet in the blink of an eye! And there he is, back beside his master!”
“There will be a price for your student’s insolence,” warned a booming voice washing over them all.
Surprisingly, Panheu only chuckled. “To blaspheme against a god or the offspring of a god is a high crime. Silver Fox’s disciple was well within his rights to defend his master’s honor.”
“But you saw what he did!” snapped one cultivator.
“Fu Shen accepted the terms!” roared Panheu. “A match to the death! It is no one’s fault but his own that he underestimated my student, and was too arrogant even to draw his jian! His death is his own bitter burden to bear, until he is washed free of all sins and idiocy in the next life, assuming WiFu is feeling merciful enough to let him be reborn as anything other than a tadpole or a snake, the way that bastard slithered around so many things that were never his concern!”
“Panheu!” roared that terrible voice radiating inconceivably deadly hostility, once more sending shivers down Alex’s spine.
Panheu winked, a chilling smile upon his features, bending down to put his arms upon Alex’s shoulders in an almost fatherly fashion. “Never you mind him, lad. You have done well. Beyond well. You have surpassed all my hopes and expectations, coming so far, so quickly! And I sense an entire world’s worth of adventures awaits you!” He flashed an almost apologetic grin. “Even if they won’t be here.”
Alex, heart racing, bowed his head. “Thank you for all of your insight and guidance, Elder Panheu.” He swallowed, gazing boldly at his former master, daring to smile as he made a claim even Silver Fox could be proud of. “And the fangtian ji is both a fine boon and a wonderful parting gift. Thank you for that as well, Elder Panheu.”
The man’s eyes twinkled even as Zhao Doushi hissed. “Your true master would be proud. How wide you smile, with your teeth filled with juicy hen. Savor the gift, boy!” His gaze suddenly became as hard and chill as the coldest depths of the sea. “But before you go, I have one question for he who communes with the God of Chaos and Change.”
Alex froze, time itself seeming to stand still, somehow sensing that a poorly thought move here could end things very badly for him indeed.
So when an odd twinkle of bemusement came over his features, he did not fight it. And when he felt his smile stretch in ways it normally never would, he grinned all the wider.
He had roleplayed for years as a gamer in a life long past.
Why not embrace an old favorite, one more time?
“And what is it you would ask a servant of Chaos and Change, deliciously clever cultivator who pulls so many strings while seeming to involve himsel
f in nothing at all?”
Panheu chuckled softly, eyes twinkling as his son glowered.
“There is no way that can actually be him, you know,” snorted Zhao Doushi.
Panheu arched his brow. “Really? Perhaps. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. I have a single question for the fox, Alex’s avatar, or any reborn Ruidian who came so close to destroying this school.”
Alex felt a piece of his soul twist in remembered shame, having hoped no one had sensed it, Alex having long since told himself it had all but never happened.
But of course, it had.
So close Alex had come to unleashing all his pent-up Qi reserves, spirit cores, and fury in a titanic explosion fit to destroy all his perceived enemies when it became utterly clear that Lai Leng and his cronies would cut him down, no matter how hard he fought in the arena. At that moment, tasting his doom and his enemy’s mocking smiles, he had been perfectly willing to blow them all to Hell.
Had it not been for the cultivator peering so intently at him even now, with the girl Alex had fallen for by his side, as if a reminder of what was beautiful, what mattered, the true tragedy of cleaving free countless lives, Alex knew all too well what he would have done. Struck with desperate shame at the thought of hurting Hao Chan, he had instead lowered his head, stayed his wrath, and Elder Panheu had in turn assured that he had a fair shot of survival.
And both of them had pretended Alex had never been just a heartbeat away from butchering everyone in the arena that day.
Until now.
But Panheu’s gaze was free of all judgment. “A deadly inertia has gripped this school. A school full of fools stuck embracing the most rigid of policies. Fearing all growth, all unexpected sources of enlightenment, all semblances of change. Yet chaos too long denied will always burst forth in an act of extreme devastation.”
Panheu smirked down at the groaning alchemist by his feet and the former cultivator Fu Shen in the distance, whose head, by dint of the lifetime’s worth of Qi and cultivation that had gone into his own advancement, had managed to hang on, blinking away for endless seconds before Alex sensed his soul parting at last with a final despairing sigh. “So, who better than a disciple of Silver Fox, of WiFu himself, to appreciate the benefits of accepting and channeling the chaos of change and transformation, the evolution of technique and form?
“Instead of fearing the unexpected and driving all flickers of animus and life away, I’m of a belief that this school is best served by embracing growth and change, no matter how perilous the path! As for the worth of my declaration, you have but to look at my greatest disciple, a Silver in the time most achieve no better than Bronze, or behold the feats of even the least of my chosen, a Ruidian who has dared the crucible of conflict and triumphed over two instructors in a single night!”
Alex couldn’t help chuckling at that, his mentor’s gaze oddly deferential to him, the lowliest of Bronze cultivators, no matter that his laughter rang through the heavens, the waves themselves crashing so high that the entire residence, even the cultivators just beyond, were covered in salty spray.
“It’s a wonderful pitch, and you have done well by my disciple and the strapping lad by your side. But I would expect no less than Silver from Zhao Doushi, the son of your loins and firstborn of the deadliest kitsune it has been my pleasure to nurture in decades!”
Zhao Doushi paled. “Wait… you know? How…” He immediately kneeled.
Alex smirked. “Get up, Zhao. Alex figured it out this very night. It was obvious enough even without the ears and tail that so mark all your sisters, and he’s right in his thoughts that you could have been a better brother to Yinzi, for all that she is my immediate descendant, and you many generations removed. Still, I do find you worthy.”
Alex chuckled softly. “Qie Qie is a lively one. She almost fell for my disciple! But you captured her heart in the end. And something else as well! It is a good thing she now has many kitsune friends. They will be of great help to her in nine months’ time. Oh, why the blush? Of course you will breed true, with Jidihu’s blood singing so potent in your veins.”
Alex tilted his head. “Will you marry her, I wonder? Or foster them off to your mother? I never can tell, with you lot. Rare as your births are, you boys are almost as bad at parenting as me.”
Panheu roared with laughter while his son blushed in shame.
Yet for all his mirth, Panheu’s eyes were hard as stone. “Do I have your patron’s consent, Alex Hammer Liu? Newly-minted Bronze, favored former student, and the only known disciple of the patron god of transformation?”
“And chaos, entropy, and change, let’s not forget, though admittedly transformation is the ideal of change, and the path I tend to favor,” said the voice that sounded so like Alex’s own.
Panheu bowed. “I would claim this Academy for my own.”
“You will do no such thing!” roared the baritone voice beyond the gates.
Panheu smirked. “I do think it’s time for a fresh face and a new direction. Don’t you?”
Alex roared with laughter, lightning flashing across the heavens with his mirth. “A new direction indeed! Do as you will, Panheu. Whether you die a horrid death or actually triumph, just a half-step away from Gold, either way, it will be a damn sight more interesting than my brother’s pathetic excuse for a lackey.”
“How dare you say such things, Ruidian filth!” roared a voice that sent the flood of cultivators by the gates crying out in shock and surprise, in some cases keeling over, blood pouring from their ears as they spasmed and shook. “I will personally rip off your head! Then I will purge this city of your kind, once and for all!”
The stone walls cracked under the weight of the dark oath given.
Alex chuckled softly, surprised by how unfazed he was. He felt oddly disconnected from himself at that moment, as much a dream of the charming rogue of an inspector as himself, lost in the oddest waking daze.
He quirked an eyebrow at a fiercely-grinning Panheu. “I know how you like to hone yourself against strife, but I never took Jidihu’s lovers or her favored assassins for fools. I assume you know what you’re doing?”
Panheu’s bow was as fluid and graceful as any courtier. “Of course, Grandfather. And now, with the night alive with such sweet peril and possibility, I can think of no better time to collect my debt.”
Lady Jidihu’s one-time lover and former assassin flashed a fierce, predatory smile as he swooped down over a now-trembling Lai Leng, holding the broken man high. “Three hundred and forty spirit pearls, is it not? A debt you swore to pay me, honor-bound and soul-bound to keep! And for all that you have forsaken your oath thrice to me and mine, the fates themselves shall not allow you to scurry away under pretext a fourth time!”
Lai Leng’s eyes bulged in horror as he struggled in sudden panic, his jaws ripped apart with a hideous crack as Panheu shoved his powerful fist down the alchemist’s throat.
Awful screams were replaced with hideous gurgles.
The alchemist’s desperate scrabbling fingers clawed at the grinning cultivator, smoking with vilest poisons.
Which phased the powerful Silver not at all.
Panheu gave a mocking tsk as the terrified alchemist spasmed and shook at the end of Panheu’s iron fist.
“Poor alchemist. Thought yourself the puppet master of this school, providing your pathetic excuses for pills to half the cultivators who lack the spine to forge themselves into something worthy of this academy! But take heart, all is not lost. For in your bitter hate, the frustrated fury with which you seethed whenever you forged me your weakest concoction, I sensed your potential. And now, as your very soul struggles against your just fate, your bitter hatred burns brighter than any flame! The same sweet fury with which you forged my student into a deadly sharp blade, you now hone my own not inconsiderable edge!”
If anything, the suffocating alchemist’s struggles grew ever more frantic, eyes bulging, brilliant red pinpricks forming as Alex heard the gruesome crackle of burstin
g cartilage and bone as Panheu shoved ever more of his arm down Lai Leng’s throat.
“That’s it,” Panheu crooned, grinning fiercely at the shriveling alchemist. “Transcend mere hate! Compress all your fear, all your mortal terror, into one tight ball of caustic dread. The dread you feel for me. A lifetime’s worth of alchemical potential, pristine and pure, a hundred years’ worth of insights in one desperate final surge to survive!” Even as Panheu crooned his terrible soliloquy, the gurgling alchemist shriveled and wilted before Alex’s very eyes, a powerfully-built body turning decrepit and frail, strong hard features withering with sudden age, frantically struggling arms growing stick-thin and palsied, and still the struggling alchemist, writhing with unthinkable agony, somehow lived on.
His eyes bulged in sudden unimaginable horror as the ruthless Panheu flexed his powerful muscles, stretching Lai Leng’s throat to the breaking point as he tore free a golden pearl in a shower of the alchemist’s blood.
And to Alex’s horrified awe, the grotesquely twisted thing still lived, though Alex didn’t need Soul Sight to know that the withered wretch was as far from the former heights of Silver glory that he had been just an hour ago as a proud eagle was from a dung beetle. The shriveled figure was a hollow husk, tormented with the memories of all he had been, and the inescapable truth of his own utter defeat before his foes.
The wretch once known as Lai Leng gave one final desperate cry as his clawed hands reached desperately for the golden pearl a smirking Panheu dangled tauntingly before the alchemist.
“Ah, I can see why you hunger for the return of that divine spark that was your source of cultivating power through a thousand lifetimes.” Panheu chuckled, yanking it just out of reach as the dying alchemist sobbed in absolute despair, collapsing at last, with no more strength save to stare at the man who had utterly bested him, as his heart sputtered to a stop at last.
“How you must grieve to know that you will never be reborn as anything but the lowest of mortals. Powerless and despised. But don’t despair! I shall permit the memory of all you could have been and all you have lost to haunt you through all the days of all your lives, until the gods themselves declare your pathetic soul redeemed.”
Silver Fox & The Western Hero: Warrior Forsworn: A LitRPG/Wuxia Novel - Book 3 Page 42
