Even after closing his eyes, the shining beams still sparkled beyond his eyelids.
"You will not give up so easily, will you?" a familiar voice said to him.
Quan-Qan opened his eyes again. His main security guard, a lifelong friend, stood before him. And with constant, almost unnoticeable, swift blows, he was able to prevent the fire jets from even touching their clothes.
"You! I thought they'd caught you," Quan-Qan told him, not holding back his blissful smile.
"Almost. When I came back here, I saw them kicking out the audience and I knew what was about to happen. I took the opportunity to go to your office and brought you this. I still had some problems on the way but nothing I could not solve. My wooden staff burned, though," he said, pulling up his sleeve and revealing blood painting his once black nails, "It's not mine. I know I'm supposed to be protecting you, but it seems to me that this time you're going to have to fight too.”
"And it will be a pleasure to fight by your side, boy. Give it to me," Quan-Qan said, taking his chosen weapon. A metal hammer whose thick, light cedar handle was perfect for his fat, sweaty fingers. "Take care of the two men. I'll take care of her."
"Yes, sir. We are about to run out of people, but so are they. It seems to me that it is up to us to decide how this will end," the friend said to him.
"I already missed this adrenaline rush in my veins. Do not let them touch you. You may be exceptionally good at martial arts, but without chi, you are vulnerable to physical confrontation."
"I know, boss. Do not worry. I'll be careful," he said and smiled back.
"Don't call me boss. Call me Quan," he replied, turning his face, looking at Chim-Lan, now angrier, her lipstick smudged above her upper lip.
"Are you done with the emotional gathering?" she asked them, scratching the back of one hand with the sharpened fingernails of the other. From the cut marks she already had there, it was not her first time, "you're pissing me off. It's time to end this."
"It's called friendship. Not that you could understand any of that," he replied.
"Words hurt," she said, bending her head, her hair covering the evil grin that reappeared on her face, "you're wrong. I fought beside you because I believed in what we were doing. At the time, I thought it was necessary not to let one of the schools surpass all the others. But now I realize that the world doesn't work that way. There will always be someone stronger and there is no harm in being on this side, the winning side. Enough talking, let's move forward. It does not matter how much time you gain here. The kunoichi are on their way. They won't stand a chance,"
"You..." Quan-Qan said, clutching the hammer with vigor. "Did you call them even without confirming that Liu was here?"
"We won't let him get away. They are the elite female group of the Kaji school. Fast as an arrow, dissimulated like a snake, manipulative like a fox," she said.
"Shao Cheng would be disappointed in you. But do not worry, your day will come. It will be ironic when her daughter chops off your head."
"So, it's really her. For years I sought her out but without success. It was her father who put me in a difficult position. I will take revenge on the girl. So that her father, even in the next life, will understand the mistakes he once made," she said, giggling louder, her eyes about to burst out, her wrinkles popping out in plain sight.
She wove her fingers through the air and the metal arrows went straight back to a horizontal row before her. She stretched out her arm, opening her bloody hand, commanding the arrows to strike again.
Quan-Qan stretched his mustache with his free hand before throwing the hammer up in the air, holding it midway, and swinging it from right to left, unleashing an edge of heat that pushed the arrows back.
He still had his arm lengthened and exposed when Cham-Sin threw himself at him, a superhuman jump, carrying two newly created metal swords on both hands. She had crossed them, readied to plunge them into his shoulders and sink them until they sank into his dantian, tearing everything apart on the way. Quan-Qan lowered himself, putting his free hand on the ground. A hurricane of fire broke out in the same place, pulling the woman off course, eventually reaching the ground a few meters to Quan's right.
Both sweated, now fighting for the mana that remained, undecidedly dangling between one and the other. The main security guard was still fighting with the two-level 3 Kaji members, hanging close to them so they could not use fire attacks, but not so close that they could immobilize him. Of the rest of the men, there were only three Kaji soldiers left and one from Quan. The other soldiers' blood soaked the floor. The metal kept rubbing against metal, beams of light resembling fireworks rather than explosions.
Quan-Qan put the hammer back in front of his chest. Chim-Lan stood up, still with her swords in hand, lowering her head. She laughed again. Always the same megalomaniac laughter.
"It's time to end it. Boys. Stop playing. Incinerate him."
"But if we do, the building may fall," one of the soldiers answered, gulping dry as soon as she cast a frightening glance at him.
"I don't care. Burn him. Make him burst into flames. Show what happens to those who rebel against us. The stories will tell our name. I'll take care of this one."
"You know, I wonder if you've always been that crazy, or if their torture has changed you. Whatever the answer might be, you are right about one thing. This ends here," Quan-Qan said. "Come behind me, boy."
"I can do it. Trust me. Do what you have..." the main security guard was still replying when his words were hushed up by the snapping of both soldiers' fingers before him.
Flames burned along the blood corridor, spreading to the wooden beams and the boy's boots and clothes. If the lumber burned, and the putrid smell graced the place, the boy tried to remove the clothes faster than the flames were gnawing at him. His skinny legs merged with the tissue, his corpse dipping into the mixture that his skin had now became. And as soon as he had appeared, he, too, disappeared from the battlefield, the ashes being now but an eternal memory of the boy he had been in life.
"NO!" Quan-Qan shouted, the voice overcome by the boy's gnashing teeth, as he used his last living force not to succumb to agony, never to show fear before his adversaries as Quan had taught him when he had rescued him from a thief's camp, a city to the east, "You will all die," he said, red eyes filled with intense rage, the resemblance of a blaze arising amid his iris. Smoke flowed out of his ears and a hot, bubbling clank escaped through his half-open lips.
The cracks in the oldest wooden beams spread throughout the entire length. Chippings broke off and browned the surface. The building could not stand much longer, and everyone knew it, and, even so, no one tried to escape. Quan-Qan wanted revenge. Cham-Sin was too crazy to even try to escape without being victorious and none of the Kaji soldiers were bold or stupid enough to challenge her.
She grabbed the swords' metal handles and slid across the ground, throwing blows along the way, sending metal edges towards Quan-Qan. The man did not move. His chi raised the temperature of the place to astronomical levels. The closer to him, the epicenter, the hotter it was. Cham's metal melted before it even reached him.
"How is that possible?" she asked herself, backing off.
"You'll never understand because you have never fought for friendship, passion, for any feeling that makes your heart beat," he said and stepped forward, his foot blazing a crater on the ground, a heatwave obliging her to cover her eyes with her arms. She dropped her swords whilst protecting herself, screaming even with the tip of her tongue scorching for the rest of the soldiers to help her, "this battle ends here. I may die, but I will take you with me," he added, his body permeated with a scarlet color, the flames blistering with a purplish color.
"Is he going to kill himself?" one of the soldiers asked the other, his voice muffled. The clothes glued to their bodies and the weapons melted until they were nothing more than metal balls and squares.
"Time to get out of here!" she called out, terrified for the first time. She
never expected the man to reach that point, accepting death with a smile in his mouth simply because he could punish her.
"You're not going anywhere, traitor," Quan-Qan said. He wielded the red hammer, lifting it above his head with both hands stiff on the tattered wood. "Thank you to you all," were his last words before he slammed it into the ground.
The place was devastated by a haughty energy that turned into explosions of fire, volcanic heat waves, earthquakes, flames clinging to everything they could, from bodies to wood, to what was left of musical instruments and to the ring's metal rods. Everything burnt to the ground until there was no more than shrapnel and debris remaining from what was once the building.
When the dust settled, there was only one body left standing. Chim-Lan inside a thick steel square, which was all scarred and scorched, harder to penetrate than the Kaji treasure vaults that were hidden under the school, the access unfeasible except to the grandmasters. She snapped her fingers and the square shrunk until there was no more than one pearl left that she attached to the earring in her left ear. Her hands were rugged, her clothes taped to her body, her chest coated with ashes and, above all, her throat was dry.
The rest of the bodies were completely charred. She walked to where Quan-Qan was, scrapping the debris along the way, and laughed under the crater he had created.
"You still managed to escape," she said. "He really was right. If anyone has ten lives, it is you. You won't escape me next time," she said.
Cultivation Novels Facebook groups:
Where you can find books like this one
Click here
or this one
Click Here
Awakening: (The Necromancer's Legacy Book 1) Page 21
