Chapter 17-426: The Yellow of Fear (1/2)
July 25th, 2019, the Himalayas near Tibet...
Sama was grinning like the cat that had eaten the canary.
She had long completed her survey of the various surviving Sects and the accompanying analyses, and now she was undertaking another raid into Cultivator territory.
Well, it was more than a raid.
The Heavenly Sky Sect had risen to prominence by dint of one little secret of theirs... the ‘back end’ of the Sect’s territory bordered on the phasma from Tibet.
That was great combat training for the Sect’s members, and even if the phobos didn’t give them goodies like Powered did, they gave the Sect’s members experience in battle, and that was no small thing in a culture as ripe with martial rivalry as that of the Daoists.
What it meant was that there was a constant flow of Sect members moving back and forth from the main Sect to the Tibetan border. Sama had discovered this during her scouting mission here, and come back to release some of the pent-up killing urges in her heart.
Taking Powered babies away to be rendered down into pills, calling them out as ‘dangerous mutants that would be safely disposed of’ as they did so. Conscripting ANY of the Primos with suitable meridians now. Even if they’d never get above Three and get their souls freshly eaten, they could be abused easily, yet were still tougher than mortals and obedient slaves to the rest of the Daoists.
Turning the world into this stinking Qi-filled ecosystem that spontaneously birthed overpowered sapient Spiritual creatures programmed to consider humans and any magical lifeforms good eating.
Utterly hypocritical bastards. Their distant politeness to normal humans was just to encourage them to breed and make more Cultivators. Oh, and grow food.
So, she had started just out of sight of the main Sect, and began killing the Heavenly Sky Disciples in transit.
They were usually in batches of ten or so, juniors led by a senior disciple, maybe one of the lesser Masters. They stayed fairly close together, which made things much easier for her. Cleave Trains made the world go ‘round.
She had to borrow a perfectly non-magical adamantine Sword, since she didn’t want to set off their big magic-detecting alarm yet. Tremble was, of course, very irritated with this, and really looking forward to coming out from bodyphase inside her and showing these bastards a REAL Sword that they dearly didn’t want to see.
They called themselves swordsmen, and they did prefer the sword, but in front of Seven Dragons swordplay, they were laughable. Their style was mostly based on the Tai-chi sword, a dueling weapon with a lot of fencing involved, and when backed by chi and Techniques, certainly capable of being used against the monstrous phobos inside the fog of the phasma effectively.
Against a Forsaken Seven Dragons sword-Hag who loathed them all?
Her first Cleave Train blew through the group of Heavenly Sky Daoists and slaughtered them all. The Senior Disciple took two cuts, the rest only took one.
With a pulse from Tremble to her hands, just a second of a blip, she set one of them on vivic fire, and spread the fire to the rest of them. Their Qi-engorged corpses went up like tinder, and she inhaled deeply of the temporary relief from the stinking pervasiveness of the Qi in the area before shooting off along the well-traveled path the Sect members had been following for years.
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She killed her fourth group, which included a returning master, before the alarm went out behind her, a great wailing alarm horn echoing off the mountain peaks as another team found the dead and the great swathes of white (and all the clothes and stuff strewn around) that indicated vivic fire had fed a bunch of them to the Land, munch-munch-burp!
This last team had been flying on swords, which was very cute when facing a Forsaken with Stillflight. Not expecting anything like that, the whole team went into sudden nosedives when she put her foot down: King Gravity blinked and woke up on His throne, decided He didn’t like Qi fliers any more than anyone else ignoring his lofty status in Reality, and suddenly the flying swords, weren’t.
The master and senior disciple were pretty quick-witted, jumping towards the mountainside laterally, hitting it and rolling down the slopes. They were only about a hundred yards up, which wasn’t enough to kill anyone... but as they crashed to the slopes, rolled, and got to their feet, venting Qi, Sama was coming in.
Two notes reverberated off the mountainsides, and their blood ran cold. They’d heard that Song repeated by disciples who had fled from the front. It carried across the miles, and was hummed by their enemies almost wherever they fought.
Where that Song rose, fear and death followed, and the burning line coming in at a speed that shocked even the most arrogant of them didn’t help things at all.
Some of them had time to scream, some had time to quaver. Not many of them actually managed to lift their swords to try and fight.
These were basically all Senior Disciples. It didn’t matter, they all died in one Sword-cleaving hit from Tremble, the shattered remnants of any Weapons raised to parry preceding them into death.
The master took two swings as well, the Finish and Hew on his favored disciple carrying through her silks-clad body as Sama cut reinforced flesh and bone in two, Qi venting uselessly to try and stop the blow. Tremble’s Singing point proceeded through the gold-scarlet-black white-burning bloodspray, flames like illusions around it, and slipped past the parry to bury her point into the Master’s chest.
He grimaced, Qi venting and keeping him alive as he thrust for her throat. Her bare arm came up to take the hit as if it was made of bronze, turning the sword sideways and forcing it away with superior strength, leaving him wide open.
His eyes were staring wide as her spear-hand went in between them, and came out the back of his skull.
Her Ring of Telekinesis kept their bodies from falling down the mountainside from the moment, removing valuables from the burning corpses before letting them slide away. The bundles of Swords and things that were useful from the prior kills came scooting up on the Disk that had come out of its shrunken state inside Tremble’s Hilt, where her Rings and Scarab had also been stored.