Not all the words translated, but it was enough.
The scouts knew they had to strike this monster dead that very instant.
“Die, monster!”
Quickness check made!
The bleeding Ruidian suddenly blinked out of sight, just as they released a double barrage, Storms of ice and steel filling the air with deadly shrapnel.
But their foe was already gone.
The pair of scouts exchange a single terrified glance.
“This creature isn’t human!” Lu Cai shrieked. “We have to flee! We have to flee now!”
But Jia Wei was terrified beyond the ability to speak, the blond-haired blue-eyed vision of death having suddenly manifested behind his companion.
And before the wheezing man could do more than blink, Lu Cai’s head was cleaved clean off his neck as the Ruidian roared “Black Swan!” Words so terrible the heavens above roiled in protest, or maybe it was merely thunder. Either way, only two of the spinning whirlwind of daggers protecting Lu Cai actually hit the murderous monster, another five clanging against an obsidian gauntlet going all the way up to the elbow, and the shark-toothed dao that had just decapitated Lu Cai.
Your foe has failed to save versus your killing aura! You are now (momentarily) out of combat. Power Healing engaged.
The monster didn’t even bat an eye as he plucked the pair of daggers free from his shoulder and torso, the spurting wounds already closing, as was the massive gaping wound in his abdomen. The monster was obviously in pain, but the look in his eyes as he locked gazes with Jia Wei left the scout frozen with fear, so frightened he didn’t even dare raise his right hand, crackling with destructive Qi once more.
“Strange. Normally I can’t pick up on my enemy’s final thoughts till I glimpse their spirit in the River of Souls. But you? You, I can pick up perfectly. Too terrified even to move. Were it otherwise, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation,” said the Ruidian monster, hardly even flinching when the blood spurting from Lu Cai’s neck stump washed over him as the corpse tumbled down to the ground far below, Boots of Air Running finally giving out.
“Now you can dispel your daggers and answer my questions, or I can just kill you here and now.”
Jia Wei began shaking so badly he feared he’d lose control of the magical treasure that gave him flight, desperate to appease this monster.
“If you wish to appease me, then dispel your weapons!”
Jia Wei’s eyes widened with terror. “Mind reader!”
In an eyeblink, the terrible monster of a Ruidian was gone.
“Last chance,” said the voice, now behind him.
“Please don’t kill me!” Jia Wei sobbed, finally finding the presence of mind to release his tightly clenched will, the whirlwind storm of Steel Qi around his trembling fist fading to nothing. “It is done, Ruidian! You see? It is done!”
“Good. Then here’s the deal I will make with you. You will answer my questions and swear upon your Cultivator’s Oath that you answered them honestly. You will then be allowed a full sixty count head start to flee me. If you can make it to your allies in time, your life is your own, and you may make any report you wish. Do you accept?”
“I... yes! Yes, I do, terrible one. My Cultivator’s Oath upon it!”
“Good. Who controls your company? Why are you here? What are your short- and long-term plans?”
The trembling man swallowed. “We... we serve the Red Prince.” He began trembling, as if even speaking pained him. But when Alex coldly gripped the man with one Dark Qi-covered fist that passed right through the shimmering elemental ward the wujen had instinctively strengthened to protect his back, fingers pressing into just two of the many acupressure points Alex’s dark kitsune mentors had taught him how to strike and manipulate, the scout shrieked in sudden pain as the last of his resistance crumbled.
Jia Wei hung his head in defeat.
“You pierced my Metal Spirit Ward like it’s nothing! How can you do this? Not that it matters. You could kill me as easily as I could bat a fly.”
“Correct. But I’m willing to grant you a chance at life. Now answer the questions and buy yourself a minute’s head start. I don’t even care if you flee away from your men, knowing you can never return. If that’s the case, I might just decide not to bother chasing you at all. And a life of freedom, a chance to start over, surely beats an ugly death at my hands, does it not?”
The man jerked a nod.
“So, why is the Red Prince so eager to capture or kill my friends?”
The guard suddenly stiffened. “Wait. You truly don’t know who you are protecting?”
Alex squeezed the man’s neck, earning a groan to cover his flinch, realizing he had revealed more than he had intended. “Do you really think me so foolish as to allow you to lead me on? I expect you to fill in all the blanks, so if I sense lies where I already know the truth, I’ll know that everything you say is a lie. And if that happens...” Alex slowly increased the pressure of his grip. His captive shrieked with pain.
“I understand, master! I will tell you only the truth, I swear it!”
“Then talk!” Alex yelled, heart suddenly lurching in his chest, realizing he was missing something.
Something important.
Something so obvious. A bit of knowledge he had taken for granted just minutes ago, while running for his life.
Something that could get him killed.
He wracked his brain as the man in his grip desperately gasped the answers he needed to hear.
“Fangsu isn’t her real name. She is Princess Xian Hong! The Red Prince’s niece! She is illegitimate, and a blight upon our nation’s honor!” The man licked desperate lips. “I will tell you a secret that can make us both a fortune. If you were to capture her for us... not only would the captain not strike you dead, he would grant you a bounty of a hundred spirit pearls! You would be feted as a hero of our nation, and given a title and property and gain the Red Princes’ own favor if you were to do so!”
The cultivator’s breathing quickened with growing anxiety as Alex allowed the silence to drag on.
“This pleases you, yes? A fortune the likes of which no Ruidian... no one not born to nobility or a powerful Silver, could ever hope for, no? Come. Ease your grip, Ruidian, and let’s speak to the captain. He will swear an oath to it. You could capture the girl without harming a hair on her head, take your reward, and your hands and conscience would be clean of all sin! You wouldn’t even have to kill her companions, and you would be rich beyond your wildest dreams. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
Alex didn’t say a word, thoughts racing, finally understanding what he had been missing even as he sensed shadows growing and the weight of doom upon him.
Bullrush! Bullrush! Bullrush!
“Ruidian?” Jia Wei looked about in sudden confusion, realizing he was alone.
His face lit up in a beatific smile. “Heaven’s mercy!” he whispered, obviously having no idea what had caused his tormentor to leave. But he wasn’t such a fool to just hover there, immediately taking off for his company.
Before his eyes bulged to the point of bursting, crying out in terror when an inky dark claw grasped his flesh, his desperate cry transforming into an agonized scream as midnight teeth began tearing the meat off his bones, the man’s shadow stretching wide and long across the forest below, now torn free of its roots, and happily ripping into the flesh of its maker.
And Alex was blinking through the air at a madman’s pace before darting under the forest canopy once more, many hundreds of yards from the shrieking corpse being devoured by his own living shadow.
There had been a fourth scout!
How had he forgotten? How had he not sensed it?
His heart skipped a beat, compelled by terror unlike anything he had ever felt before.
Facing his most fearsome foe.
A kitsune wujen.
One who had obviously broken through to Silver, and was able to cloak himself not only from sight, b
ut from even the forest’s senses.
Even memory.
Until that slightest tingle of Shadow, thanks to Alex’s Lesser Shadow Affinity, had given him that split fraction of a second he needed to survive.
And he almost hadn’t.
Facing an enemy so ruthless they were willing to waste a moment taking out an ally that had dared to reveal secrets before coming for the Ruidian that had foiled them twice, and taken out six of their men.
Qi Perception check made! You sense imminent death!
Bullrush!
He could taste death’s whisper in the air.
Darting as fast as thought, trees exploding to kindling behind him.
Heart pounding wildly in his chest, terror as much as inhuman strength and vitality propelled Alex onward while the thunderous roar and crash of an ancient oak smashing through the canopy as it fell to its ignoble death echoed through the forest, frenzied leaves rustling far more than the breeze should allow.
He was caught on the razor’s edge between life and death.
He didn’t dare break cover in a futile attempt to Storm Flight away.
Alex desperately narrowed his focus, existing only in the moment, knowing that so long as his foe was forced to lash out with his Qi blindly, as long as the company continued to follow him and not his friends, the four of them had a chance of surviving.
But with enemies this skilled on the board, he was somehow certain that the moment he ditched the ring, either his or Princess Xian Hong’s troubles would get infinitely worse.
And he dared not flip into the ring Silver Fox had given him. Divine in its potential or no, an artifact so new, so potentially fragile that any miscalculation, especially one made in a life-or-death dynamic, ran the risk of destroying what might possibly be the greatest gift he had ever been given, before he could even level it up, as WiFu had implied he could.
Alex clenched his teeth, knowing that wasn’t the only reason.
He had dared Soul Cleave not once, but twice, this day. Even had he not been fleeing for his life, the stygian river of nightmares that he took such cold pleasure entering only when embracing a killer’s fury could well follow him even to that sanctuary, and he was not such a fool as to doom his ring to the same demise his first artifact had suffered, already inferring one terrible truth, no matter how well he leveled up his ring.
Any day he dared the deadliest of Black Swan morphs, Soul Cleave, was a day he would be utterly denied what might be his greatest shelter, and, just maybe, his trump attack card as well.
That was, of course, assuming he lived long enough to put that rule into effect, as a moment’s distraction nearly caused him to fumble while leaping through the air for yet another nearby tree before darting safely through the foliage once more.
So for a time he put all thoughts of the ring, all worry for his future, behind him as the forest came into ever-sharper focus in his mind’s eye, until he became little more than an extension of the swaying trees and rustling canopy all around him, terror soon replaced by darkest serenity as he moved with a fluid grace alien to the panicked Alex of just moments ago.
Congratulations! Forest Flight is now Rank 5! Adept status achieved! You may choose either Effortless Movement, Rapid Movement, or Diffuse Movement! You have chosen Diffuse Movement! Your footsteps now blend in with all background noise, and your Qi signature is lost in the web of spiritual energy all around!
Alex didn’t dare pull himself from his moving trance to carefully analyze his choices, allowing the decision to be made by the same sure intuition that had his right hand reaching for a vine that couldn’t possibly be there, but was, flipping through the air before springing off yet another branch and another, now blending in so well with the soft rustle of the leaves all around, utterly in tune with the ebb and flow of woodland Qi as if it were an echo of himself, that even the beacon of an enchanted ring’s odd pulse seemed to resonate in time with the living beat of the woodlands, cloaking itself at least in part.
Now Alex could sense the buildup of deadly Shadow Qi as his foe attempted to lash out via artifact link and not actual line of sight yet again... only for it to fizzle and diffuse into the sea of woodland spiritual energy all around them, and Alex could all too easily imagine the guttural curses his enemy spat out, some distance away.
But though his modified Forest Sense made it that much harder for any enemy to triangulate him, he knew Fangsu’s ring was still giving his presence away, whereas Alex, despite multiple perks in play, could hardly sense his foe at all. Save for the awful sense of crosshairs burning into his back whenever he paused for a single heartbeat.
He surrendered all concerns save for that single endless moment in time, his sense of the forest all around him deepening further as his movements became ever more erratic, his leaps more daring, darting about like the hare who had mastered his environment for the desperate day the hawk gave chase.
It was a move that saved his life.
Quickness check made! You have dodged explosive death! You have taken 3 Medium Wounds from wooden shrapnel! You have dodged three collapsing trees!
And when trees around him simultaneously exploded as a powerful Silver howled with fury a short distance away, Alex knew it was time to play his final card.
Bullrush successfully chained tenfold!
His Qi took a serious hit when he began skipping through the trees, desperate to put distance between him and his foe, knowing he was rapidly running out of time, desperate for some sort of enlightenment about how he could possibly get out of this insanity when...
There!
He heard it, the gurgle and splash of a nearby stream that was almost, but not quite, a river, and he couldn’t help smiling in sudden inspiration, looking for something... anything... there!
A small piece of wood with a couple nubs where twigs had broken off.
Good. He wasted no more time, doing what he should have done from the get-go.
Sparing a single moment to glance at the ring, confirming what almost an hour of flickering glances and his Qi Perception stretched to the utmost had already told him.
It wasn’t the ring itself that was cursed.
It was something inside it.
Alex quickly pulled out silken purses filled with coins and spirit pearls, an unspeakable fortune that meant almost nothing at that moment, save for the single heartbeat spent quickly squirreling it away in his nearly overstuffed storage pouch after pulling out and dropping one of the two heavy metal rods he had claimed. Then he immediately took off once more, darting through the trees, burning another 20 Qi as he flickered through the trees another quarter of a mile, now down to just a third of his original pool.
With Qi-covered hands, he pulled out one treasure after another from that ring; masterwork weapons, silken attire, mother of pearl jewelry boxes, and pots of kohl and dye, clearing the ring of nearly all its treasure in less than twenty seconds.
Until only a single pile of scented vellum letters, sealed with wax, remained.
His eyes widened, having no doubt he was looking at noble seals.
Artificer skill check made!
Then his breath hitched as Qi Perception skills and his own experiences dealing with a particularly nasty merchant allowed him to spot several infernally-tainted contracts that would be catalyzed instantly upon breaking their seals.
Alex frowned before tucking the letters safely away in a very mundane burlap pouch he had claimed, grateful that his storage devices were free of taint.
It was the letters alone that could spell his doom.
And it was only after another half hour of panicked racing through the woods as trees sporadically exploded behind him that he finally got the moment’s breath he needed to blink forward another four hundred feet, right before the rocky shoals of the river he had been following for some time, carefully shuffling through the letters with Dark Qi-covered hands, instantly sensing which contracts were also linking the letters to the perpetrators even now approaching, e
yes widening when he caught the names on each envelope.
One was made out to Princess Cui Chan, another to Prince Cui Long, and a third to Princess Cui Li.
Alex felt a spark of fury equal to the terror he felt as he immediately picked up his pace once more, heightened senses more attuned to the waves of destructive Wood and Shadow Qi when it hovered in the air as if seeing him... or the letters Alex now held.
Crumpling all three into a ball without breaking a single seal, he threw them into the rapids before springing for the trees once more, feeling a fierce sense of delight that the entire company was now flowing in the direction of the rapidly moving and widening river.
He could only pray that he would make it to Baidushi in time, and that his friends would survive this horrific ordeal.
He wasn’t such a fool as to make a beeline for his ultimate target, not until he was sure, absolutely sure, his enemies were well and truly off his tail.
But still, a part of him couldn’t completely suppress the fierce surge of hope and excitement he felt, darting through the trees in a winding route that would eventually lead him to the capital.
He felt a certain visceral thrill at the thought of being able to start over, so much wiser and more powerful than he had been just a handful of months ago, for all that he was still in desperate need of resources.
This time, he would do things right!
With luck, he would finally be accepted into an academy that would teach him all the things he desperately needed to know if he wanted a body cultivation technique that would complement Silver Fox and keep his skull from being cracked open like an egg. If he was really fortunate or diligent in his search, he might find manuals or teachers that could give him those crucial insights into White Crane kung fu and Light Qi cultivation that would give him the final pieces to the puzzle he needed to devise his own cultivation technique unlike any other, one that he sensed would be absolutely perfect for Hao Chan to use.
As an added bonus, maybe a powerful enough academy would have wards in place able to stop even a clever kitsune killer from breaking through. Though Alex doubted it.
Silver Fox & The Western Hero: Warrior Redeemed: A LitRPG/Wuxian Novel - Book 5 Page 36
