Chapter 378 Avian-folk
Hails of feathers as hard and sharp as arrows crisscrossed against salvos of bullets from the soldiers’ rifles.
Steel-like glints bounced off the feathers in the sunlight as they struck down the bullets fired at them while the rest were reduced into harmless white flashes when they hit the magical shield of light that Chu Xun conjured.
These were not the average pennaceous feathers that Wingeds used to fly but a skill they used in combat.
The feathers struck down every bullet that the guards fired and Chu Xun’s magical shield defended the guards from the torrent of deadly-steel feathers, culminating in a stalemate.
The only Winged on the ground – the one whom Chu Xun shot down earlier with Jiang Tao’s rifle – had his face contorting with spasms of anger and bitterness.
The Winged race had never suffered the ignominy of defeat since they revealed themselves to the world. They feared no one, save the races of Peacocks and Zombies and a few other kinds of ancient breeds. Being immensely prideful, they viewed humans, the original masters of Earth, as lesser beings.
Yet today, he, a member of the Winged race, was shot down by the device of a common human soldier!
“How dare you,” he growled with a hateful stare at Chu Xun. Bare patches mottled his wings now practically devoid of feathers and what parts that still had them looked badly unkempt.
Rata-tata-tata!
Chu Xun peered at him and without warning, fired another salvo of bullets at him.
The Winged scoffed. He was shot down earlier because he had been careless, or else, no bullets could ever hope to cause him any damage – or so he thought.
He shook his wings and flung forth a barrage of steely feathers.
But instead of striking down the bullets, his feathers vanished in little white flashes right before they met!
Before he knew it, he screamed loudly with uncontrollable pain. The bullets blasted through his wings, spreading specks of blood like blooming flowers of deep scarlet-red on the hole-ridden appendages.
“Mo Yu!”
The other two Wingeds still up in the air cried with anger and shock.
“How dare you harm a member of the Winged race! You’ll pay for that!” the female Winged cried loudly with venom.
Chu Xun aimed his rifle at her and fired. This time, her feathers failed to parry away his bullets as they slammed into her wings, knocking feathers off the wings while leaving bloodied holes on them.
The female Winged shrieked painfully, her wings threshing wildly like a frightened hen as she slowly lost altitude.
Her male comrade immediately swooped down to pull her up.
“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.
“There’s something wrong about that man! We need to go now and get help!” she urged urgently.
The pair shot a scathing glare at Chu Xun and wheeled around, flapping their wings to flee.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
A pair of vine-like tendrils – both forged of True Energies – shot up from the ground as viciously as a bullwhip and coiled around their ankles.
“What on earth is this!?” they cried. In their panic, they fired more steel-like feathers at the magically-conjured tendrils to cut themselves free but to no avail.
Chu Xun reloaded his rifle magazine and fired again, puncturing the male Winged’s right wing.
The male Winged cried with agony, nearly falling himself. Fortunately, with another of the female Winged’s wings still intact, they clung on to each other like driftwood and each beat their wing as furiously as possible to remain in the air.
Even so, one single pair of wings could hardly sustain the weight of two persons for long.
“Jiang Tao, order your men to switch your ammunition to blanks.” The captain did not understand why, but he obediently did as he was told.
He returned no long later with copious amounts of blank ammunition.
“Switch your ammo to blanks,” ordered Chu Xun.
And the whole squad of guards followed his instructions.
“Fire.”
Another storm of gunfire ensued with bullets whizzing into the air.
The male and female Wingeds tried summoning their powers to defend themselves but they failed to; the tendrils of pure True Energies coiled around their ankles pulsed with a purplish glow and the pair of Wingeds felt themselves becoming weak and powerless.
“Damn it! What on earth is this!” cried both of them, frustrated and startled at their sudden helplessness.
They began screaming. The guards bombarded the Winged pair with countless blanks, the male and female Wingeds could only wince and flinch without any way to fight back.
The blanks might not kill them, but it was enough to scare the living daylights out of the two avian-folk if not causing them stinging pain and soreness.
In mere seconds, feathers fell from the sky like snowflakes in the winter. The volleys of blank ammunition caused minor explosions, singeing the Wingeds’ faces and torso as they yelped and cried in pain.
“How dare you inflict such disgrace to members of the Winged race. You’ll die a most terrible and painful death for this! No one will save you!” roared Mo Yu, still prone on the ground.
Chu Xun aimed his rifle and discharged lead into his head, blasting his brains open.
That horrified the crowd of onlookers witnessing the skirmish. They stared at Chu Xun with horror. No one could recognize him – not when he has magically altered his appearance but his eagerness to shoot to death a Winged was not at all reassuring. Many shook their heads gravely, sighing with trepidation at what repercussions might come.
But Jiang Tao and his men were instead exuberant with brimming fervor. The prospect of fighting alongside the great Chu Xun and his courage in executing the fallen Winged was as rousing as a call to arms.
The remaining Wingeds were stunned themselves; they did not expect any human to dare execute one of their kind.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?” the male Winged screamed at Chu Xun.
Jiang Tao immediately fired his weapon at the male Winged, knocking off some teeth and leaving his mouth and lips swollen from the force of the blast.
Another guard fired a blast at the male Winged too, hitting him in the groin which elicited a couple of agonizing screams.
Another blast caught the female Winged on her chest, causing her bosoms to gyrate violently back and forward from the shock. She looked so astounded and embarrassed that she looked like she was on the verge of spewing blood.
“Where do you think you’re hitting, you moron!” scowled Jiang Tao to one of his men, giving him a hard smack on the back of his head.
“All right, you guys enjoy,” said Chu Xun, “I’m taking a break.” He tossed the rifle back to Jiang Tao and trotted off to an army jeep and sat on its hood, watching from there.
Rata-tata-tata! The gunfire persisted, interlaced with more screams and howls from the Winged couple. The blank ammunition would not be lethal enough to kill, but that did not make being shot anymore bearable.
Especially since they each only had one wing still intact. Eventually, they could remain in the air no longer and they crashed to the ground.
“What am I to do with these avian-folks, sir?” asked Jiang Tao, requesting orders.
Chu Xun motioned for him to come closer and Jiang Tao sidled close to listen.
“Arrest them both and study them. Find out ways to cripple them,” whispered Chu Xun quietly.
Jiang Tao nearly shivered at how brutal Chu Xun could be. But he knew that the government had been running experiments to find out ways to defeat the raging wild beasts as well as the unknown races who had just recently emerged.
Before he’d left, Chu Xun slipped him a few more instructions.
Jiang Tao regrouped with his men and beheld the mob of onlookers who had flocked to witness what happened and declared loudly, “The airspace of the capital is hereby declared off-limits to everyone and everything. Anyone who disobeys this directive, there you have your example.”
Warriors standing in the midst of the crowd stared strangely at the captain and his men, wondering thoughtfully, “Since when did the government found enough courage to adopt such a forceful stance?”
“Arrest these creatures. See that they are sentenced to prison time no shorter than eight to ten years! This is what they deserve for flying overhead the capital as if there’s no rule of law here!” announced Jiang Tao with a sonorous voice.
“Prison?!” The warriors nearby all cast bewildered looks. “Is this seriously ten-year imprisonment for these Wingeds? That’s unbelievable!”
Four soldiers marched up to the Wingeds and each seized the Winged male and female by a wing and dragged them like how one would with a floundering hen.
“STOP THAT AT ONCE!” a voice like rolling thunder came booming from a distance.
Several flashes of light zipped through the air and stopped.
In just the blink of an eye, they had come.
Four Wingeds, each beautiful and handsome warrior clad in light armor, their wings flapping gently but yet with such force that everyone could feel the strong gales sweeping by.
They beheld the corpse of Mo Yu coldly and when they saw the arrested Winged couple, their eyes blazed with rage and malice.
“A year has passed since the day we of the Winged race have revealed ourselves to the world. This is the first time one of ours perished. How dare you! What has possessed you to commit such sacrilege!” thundered one of the four. As he spoke, white halos of light pulsed from his head down to his toe, adding an air of dignity and purity to the winged warrior.
Emboldened by Chu Xun’s presence, Jiang Tao retorted loudly, “They have broken the rules of the capital and have refused to abide by them despite our urgings. This is a fair punishment.”
“Fair punishment? Who defines what is fair or not?” snarled another of the Wingeds. “The day where even this capital falls into our hands is near and we shall make our own rules then, not your puny humans.”
“Just because you have some wings doesn’t make you an angel of Heavens, avian-folk,” hissed Jiang Tao sternly, “Birdbrains wishing to conquer the capital. Just wait till you find out who sets the rules here. It’s our Major General Chu Xun!”
“Major General Chu Xun? Is that the Devil?” asked another one of the Wingeds.
“Indeed. The Devil was conferred the honorary rank of Major General and he makes the rules here,” said Jiang Tao exaggerating with no expense spared for he knew that none of the Wingeds would have any ways of ascertaining that lie. All that mattered was bringing up Chu Xun’s name.
“Lies. The Devil has been missing for years and his seat, the Fire Dragon Palace, is nearing doom. Make the rules? Hmph. He should be begging for mercy.”
“Shuddup, bird brain. The Fire Dragon Palace is one of the Chu Mansion and its master is our Major General Chu Xun. Do you wish to conquer the capital? Fine. You’ll have him to deal with.”
“Much praises you shower upon Chu Xun,” growled a young Winged, “But where is he now? At present, the Winged race reigns supreme here at the capital. For the transgressions of murdering one of our kin, I hereby sentence you to death.”
“Horseshit!” burst Jiang Tao loudly. The captain of the guards could not have been any more confident with Chu Xun around. “All of you Winged creatures are hereby prohibited from entering the airspace over the territory of this capital! Disobey this order and you will be shot! That includes all four of you! Any more defiance and you shall be arrested!”
“You imbecilic vermin. Congratulations, you’ve successfully enraged me,” said one of the Wingeds with white halos pulsing from this head down to his toe. With simmering anger, he hissed, “I would love to see what your government would do if I were to kill you all today. In fact, what would Chu Xun do?”
A bright brilliance of pure white flooded the very spot he hovered at, blinding everyone’s view of him before something else happened: several hundreds of white feathers hung like curtains in front of him.
“You’ve murdered one of my kin. For that, you shall be utterly obliterated.”
Bang!
He had only just finished when a purplish tendril from the ground and swatted at the hovering feathers, reducing into mere speckles of white before they dissipated into nothingness, by which time, the tendril had wrapped around the Winged’s throat and constricted savagely before yanking him to the ground from the air.
“ARGH!”
The restrained Winged cried with horror when he realized his powers were utterly gone and he could not prevent himself from plummeting.
Bang!
The earth erupted, kicking up sand and dirt into the sky. The Winged crashed into the ground with half his face smashed into the granite flagstones of the ground when he came down and the impact left a huge crater.
“What the?!” No one knew what happened. Yet their eyes wandered to the young man sitting on top of the jeep’s hood.
Despite not being able to make heads or tails with what happened too, even the Wingeds realized there was more than meets the eye with the strange young man.
“Mo Lin!” cried one of them, descending rapidly to the ground to help his kin.
Another purplish tendril shot up and constricted around his throat, sealing his magic and he too was dragged down viciously from the air in peals of horrific screams.
Bang!
More flagstones on the ground burst into pieces. Feathers mottled the air as the tendril bashed the Winged deep into the ground like an onion plant.
The onlooking crowd drew its breath and held it. “What has this idiot done?! He’s thrashing the Wingeds! Is he not afraid of any consequences?!”
Aghast looks wiped across the faces of the last remaining pair of Wingeds still in the air. They flapped their wings anxiously to gain more altitude while retreating a small distance.
Jiang Tao smirked. He turned to look at the two incapacitated Winged on the ground and scoffed, “What did you say just now? You want to kill me, you say?”
He brandished his rifle and began firing madly at them.
The two Wingeds – the first with his head stuck into the ground like an ostrich while the other with half his body buried upside down into the soil – could do nothing. Unable to get out and with their powers sealed by Chu Xun, they could only writhe violently with spasms of pain as Jiang Tao discharged his weapon to his heart’s content.
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