256 Chapter 255: Wild Dogs (1/2)

”About face,” I instructed Tong Xue, and turned to face the five underlings. They would be easier to deal with than their boss. I was sure of that.

”We're going to break through those five?” Tong Xue asked rhetorically, but I knew him well enough to be sure that he had already thought of the same strategy as me. ”Sounds like our best chance.”

”Yeah.”

We both did a complete 180 and immediately dashed toward the five approaching martial artists, using our Jin or shadow footwork. The five Black Venom Cultists were almost caught by surprise when we burst into their sight, our swords and dagger lashing out to cleave through them. The first two couldn't react in time and went down immediately.

Tong Xue had slit the throat of the one leading from the left, while I had decapitated the one leading from the right.

In just a few seconds, we had evened the odds from five against two to three against two. An enemy that outnumbered us 2.5 to 1 now only had a 1.5 to 1 advantage, having suffered a forty percent casualties.

This was a great performance by any standard.

The surviving trio immediately fell back, drawing their poisoned weapons as they faced us cautiously.

”These are no ordinary kids!” one of them hissed as he held his short sword in front of him, the blade dripping with venom. ”Be careful!”

”Don't underestimate them!” the second Black Venom Cultist added. A bit too late for that now, wasn't it?

”You take the one on the left, I take the two on the right,” I suggested to Tong Xue, even as the trio charged at us, brandishing their lethal weapons. ”Be careful! Don't get cut by any of their weapons! They're poisoned!”

I might sound like I was stating the obvious, but Tong Xue nodded patiently. ”You be careful,” he told me.

Honestly, I was more worried about Tong Xue than myself. Unlike me, Tong Xue didn't possess any immunity to poison like I did, but he didn't know that. He acceded to my proposal because he knew what we were good at. I was more of a frontline warrior than he was, possessing more powerful, offensive techniques whereas Tong Xue specialized at stealth, assassination and subterfuge. As well as collecting intelligence and information. He was not meant for direct combat, and hence he recognized that I was better at fighting head-on than he was.

So he conceded that I should take on two opponents while he dealt with one.

However, we also had to rely on speed. Behind us, the Heavenly Venom King was closing in. The moment he arrived, the both of us were doomed. As such, we had to finish this quickly, and then run away.

I left the guy in the left to Tong Xue and charged right at the other two. The both of them jumped back in surprise by the ferocity of my attack, the guy to my right ducking under my Azure Lotus Sword and the cultist to my left parrying my Shadow Fox.

I tightened my grip on Shadow Fox and unleashed a swift Shadow Dragon Meteor Strike, which overwhelmed the guy with black qi and left him bloodied. Coughing, the injured Black Venom Cultist toppled over, but before I could finish him off, his comrade dove in to take a slice of me.

Even though I had immunity to poison, I wasn't going to let him hit me. I wanted to keep that knowledge secure for as long as possible. That could be my hidden trump card, in the extremely likely event that I fought Sha Chen.

Yeah, these guys were just the appetizers, or the small fries. There was a reason why I didn't even bother to find out their names. They were just minor side characters doomed to be cannon fodder. The prelude to the main event.

Unfortunately, reality didn't work that way. Just a minor slip up, a single moment of carelessness and I would succumb to the deadly attacks of these so-called small fries. I knew many readers would be complaining about fillers and wanting to go straight to the main fight, but these dudes had no idea what a ”filler” was. They were just using the word carelessly to label whatever they thought was uninteresting, to call the chapters they didn't want to read ”fillers”.

But that wasn't a filler. They weren't the writers. So what gave them the right to decide which chapters were relevant or not irrelevant? Ever since the advent of fillers in Naruto, where the anime had to create original content that was exclusive to television and never in the manga, these people had been referring to whatever they didn't like as ”filler”, wanting to go straight to the so-called ”real” content of the story. Many of them labeled background chapters, or chapters that provided material on the world or world-building, or information on the story as ”fillers” just because all they wanted to read were action or romance or whatever.

That wasn't filler. Okay, some of those chapters might be horrendous info dumps and poorly written, but there was a huge difference between info dump and filler.

In any case, reality was always like this. Of course I wanted to jump straight into the battle against the Dark Sage Sha Chen…actually, I didn't. I would love to avoid a confrontation with him, if possible. But obviously, being the leader of the Black Venom Cult, he had subordinates. And to get to him – the so-called final boss – we had to defeat his lackeys first.

Otherwise we would never reach that stage.

Anyway, there was a possibility that I could avoid fighting Sha Chen altogether. As long as we broke out of this cordon and smash these guys, we could keep running. As powerful as Sha Chen was, he couldn't possibly be fast enough to pursue us, otherwise he would have caught Song Ting Yu long ago. Of course, it was possible that Song Ting Yu's bodyguards gave their lives so that their mistress could escape, but I doubted that. They were all poisoned by the Black Venom Toxin, according to Song Ting Yu, so it was meaningless to let her escape alone.

Whatever the case, I could only gamble on this.

Parrying the strike from the fallen guy's scythe, I twisted around and kicked him in the jaw. The guy grunted through gritted teeth, blood spraying from between his mouth. Ducking under his desperate swing with his poisoned scythe, I tried to finish him off, but his comrade dove at me, forcing me to parry his short sword.

Despite being bloodied by my Shadow Dragon Meteor Strike, he was still pretty active, slashing ferociously despite the blood flying off his body. With a bellow, he thrust his poisoned sword at me, but I whirled away to avoid it, and then brought my arm down on his elbow, breaking it. The guy shrieked in pain, and I cut his neck.

Or tried to, but was forced to pull back when his partner's scythe came flashing toward my head. There was a screech and a shower of sparks as I tried to knock his curved blade away, only for him to bring it slashing down on me.

”!”

I quickly stepped to the side to avoid getting carved in half, and then lashed out with Shadow Fox. The other guy blocked it for his comrade, and the latter pressed on with his attack.

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Tightening my grip on Azure Lotus Sword, I swung it and unleashed a Yuan Yin Frost Strike that covered the entire area in ice. Both my enemies fell back, their bodies partially encased in ice, but they forcibly freed themselves by using their qi to shatter the ice.

Even so, they had to expend quite a bit of qi to do so.

”…!”

”Br…!”

The both of them realized that something was amiss. Every movement they took was sluggish, and their feet were getting stuck to the ground, frozen solid by crystals of ice. Their breath were misting before them.

”This is…?!”

It was Absolute Zero, but I didn't tell them that. Instead, I seized the chance to attack them now that they were immobilized. Stomping forward, I swung both my swords, crisscrossing my blades to sever their necks.

”Don't underestimate us!”

”Don't get too carried away!”

The both of them yelled at the same time, and they unleashed their venomous qi in a single corrosive burst, melting the ice away with acidic poison. My Heavenly Flow and Earthly Steps had somewhat detected the peculiar flow of their qi and I had withdrawn just in time to avoid the worst effects of their blast.

”Kuh!”

Shielding my face from their venomous qi, I retreated a few steps.

”Hah!” the first one sneered. ”You cannot defeat us!”

”Poison is the most efficient way of killing any living thing!” the second one declared somewhat triumphantly.

”You've to actually get the poison in my system for it to do anything,” I reminded them.