Chapter 285: Save Me The Trouble
The vine, now buried inside of the earth user’s leg, twisted around the inner muscles of his calf before tightening just behind his knee.
The joint bent sideways with a sharp crack, and his second scream carried through the trees as everyone, hostage and ally moved away from him.
Seeing that everyone was distracted, the mother grabbed the girl and pulled her toward the opening where the earth wall had collapsed. A few others followed, gathering children and bags as they went, but the men at the barricade barely noticed them leaving.
That was the problem with building a group around one powerful asshole. The second he fell, everyone else forgot how to use their own brains.
The earth user tried to crawl away from the ditch. His hands scraped against the road while he dragged his useless leg behind him, shouting for someone to help. Two of his men finally stepped forward, but neither wanted to get close enough to touch him.
I snickered as I watched them treat their ’revered’ leader like a leper.
Pussies.
They had been happy enough when he was hurting other people, but now that he was minutes away from death, they wanted nothing to do with him.
But I had to give it to him. He wasn’t going down without a fight. He gritted his teeth and pressed both palms to the ground, calling on his powers to.... bury him alive? I wasn’t sure, but if that was the case, it was very nice of him to save me the time.
Too bad he didn’t realize that earth powers involved more than just the literal earth.
Some people were just so... unimaginative. The earth was so much than just the dirt under your feet. It was....
A secret.
I flicked my fingers from the wrist that Yuche wasn’t holding on to, and the grass beneath the earth user’s palms began to move.
Thin stems wrapped around his fingers and wrists before pulling his arms out from under him. His face struck the pavement with an almost sickening thud, and the earth wall behind him crumbled into broken chunks.
One of the armed men fired into the ditch like that was the answer to all his problems.
News flash. It didn’t do anything.
Yuche’s hand remained around my wrist as his body shifted slightly closer to mine. He wasn’t looking at me, but his thumb was worrying my skin like I was a genie in a bottle and he had a hundred and one wishes.
"Don’t worry," I muttered, smirking slightly. "I’ll protect you." Yuche’s eyes went wide as he finally looked at me. I lifted my arm that had him attached to it to prove my point. Lingyun laughter practically exploded behind us, breaking the staring contest that seemed to have started between Yuche and me.
"I don’t need your protection," Yuche grunted, a dark look flashing through his eyes.
"Face it," interjected Lingyun, still chuckling. "We all need Rouxi’s protection. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here, now would we?"
A loud scream interrupted our conversation and we all looked at the man screaming on the ground by the intersection.
The earth user had rolled onto his back and was trying to tear the weeds away from his arms with screams of frustration carrying over to us. Every stem that he broke only managed to split into smaller ones that wound around him again. They crept over his chest and shoulders while the other men shouted useless instructions from a safe distance.
"Burn them!"
"With what?"
"Cut him loose!"
"You fucking cut him loose!"
The last of the survivors had already hurried through the opening in the barricade while their captors argued.
Good.
I did not need anyone to see what would happen next.
The thin vine inside the earth user’s leg used the veins full of blood to climb into his chest while another, outside his body, curled around his throat. He grabbed it with both hands, but the grass tightened until his face darkened and his heels drummed against the road.
The men beside him finally rushed forward with knives. They hacked at the stems around his neck, cutting through several, but even more vines rose from the ditch and wrapped around his wrists.
The earth user’s power shook the road one final time before disappearing in a ’pop’.
His hands dropped as he turned pale. He knew he was dead before he even took his next breath.
The plants held him for another few seconds just to make sure that everyone was on the same page before releasing his body and shrinking back into the grass. By the time the armed men gathered around him, the ditch looked almost exactly as it had before.
Almost.
A few crushed vines and streaks of blood were the only signs that anything had happened.
One man crouched beside the body and stared at the punctures covering the earth user’s leg. "Fucking mutant plants. We must have gotten too close to the edge and set them off."
Another immediately stepped away from the ditch. "They came out of nowhere."
I leaned slightly into Yuche’s side while watching them panic over grass.
"The plants were hungry," I murmured.
His mouth moved near my hair. "Apparently."
The men at the barricade were trying to decide whether their dead leader was worth staying near a patch of grass that might eat them next.
Apparently, they had decided that he wasn’t.
Two of them dragged his body toward a truck while the others cleared enough space between the abandoned vehicles to escape. They left the supplies they had stolen scattered across the road, not brave enough to get close to them incase there was more mutated plants.
After what felt like forever, the truck roared to life, and the men piled inside. One remained in the back with his weapon raised, watching the ditch as if the weeds might chase them.
His gaze moved past the road, across the trees, and toward the top of the mansion visible above the vines.
My mansion.
He stared longer than I liked.
From where he stood, he could probably see the trucks near the house and lights flickering behind the covered windows. There was no way he could see us clearly beneath the porch roof, but he saw enough to know that someone lived here.
Yuche noticed where he was looking. His grip stayed warm around my wrist. "He saw the house."
"No shit."
"We could stop him."
I watched the truck pull away while the man in the back continued staring in our direction. Killing him would be easy, but another missing group would only make whoever controlled them more careful.
And there was always someone bigger hiding in the darkness. It was an unwritten rule of the apocalypse. There was always something out there with bigger teeth.
I absently rubbed the leg I had almost lost when I forgot that rule for a moment.
No, I wasn’t going to go after him. Letting one frightened idiot return with stories about mutant plants and a mansion that could be full of supplies would be much more entertaining.
"No," I replied, turning my hand inside Yuche’s grip until our fingers linked together. "Too much work."
His thumb brushed over my knuckles before he brought my hand up to his lips and kissed my knuckles. "You want them to come here."
"I want to know who thinks those men belonged to him."
The truck disappeared around the bend, like the hounds of hell were chasing after them.
Whoever they told their story to would probably decide that the earth user had been unlucky. He stepped too close to a mutant plant, lost control of his checkpoint, and died before his men could save him.
Then they would hear about the mansion.
Someone would decide that all of it should belong to them.
I smiled as Yuche continued holding my hand.
At least the next idiot would save me the trouble of leaving home.
