Book 2: Chapter 29: Desperate Measures
The knowledge that the bird spirit beasts needed to go first did not fill Sen with happy feelings. To get the birds, he needed to limit visibility from the air in a way that didn’t pin down his exact location. That meant he needed to implement the other idea. The only upside to that idea was that it would further confuse his scent. The downside was that, once he started setting things on fire, he had limited control over how that fire spread. Of course, he also couldn’t keep going as he had been. He’d never even make it to the wall if he kept burning through qi at the same pace unless he started burning through some of his liquid qi.
Yet, that was problematic in its own way. He’d been conserving that liquid qi for the day when he’d form a core. Experimenting with it seemed wasteful to him, so he only had vague ideas of how powerful his techniques would be if he used liquid qi to fuel them. They could spin out of his control. That would make his own techniques as dangerous to him as they were to the spirit beasts. If he got desperate enough to take that route, though, he suspected he wouldn’t be in a position to worry about it. Recognizing that the problem wouldn’t get any easier to solve if he kept putting it off, Sen took a few moments to cautiously look out the windows and get a feel for the buildings around the one he was in. When he pinned the route that offered the most cover between buildings, he piled up a few of the more flammable things he could find and set them on fire.
After that, it became a dangerous game of getting out of one building and into another before one of the spirit beasts found him. He’d dash from building to building, setting one on fire from inside. Then, pushing the limits of his fire qi affinity, he’d set another building on fire at the very outer edges of what his techniques could reach. It didn’t take long before everything was in chaos. Some of the buildings went up in flames fast, while others took a while to really get rolling. A few of the spirit beasts with water qi affinities tried to douse the flames, but there were already too many buildings on fire for that to work. The good news, to Sen’s thinking, was that smoke was doing a better and better job of obscuring everything. Even if the spirit beast birds stayed in the air, they’d struggle to pick his movements out from the other spirit beasts or the smoke. The bad news to his mind was that the fire was spreading a lot faster than he expected it to.
He could see places at a distance where the fires in four of five buildings seemed to be almost feeding off of each other and creating a truly frightening inferno. From his hiding spot in a shadowy alley, he spotted at least a few spirit beasts simply fleeing the town. Part of him wanted to join that exodus, but he worried about leaving too soon. Indecision held him in place for most of a minute before he decided that there was never going to be an ideal time. It was a risk if he stayed, and a risk if he went. At least his fire-starting activities had gotten them all closer to sunset. The reduced light and smoke would at least give him a chance of avoiding casual notice.
Committing to the decision, Sen did his best to mimic a ghost. He flitted from shadow to shadow. When he thought he heard spirit beasts nearby, he looked for garbage to help mask his scent. It likely wouldn’t have worked under normal circumstances, but there were enough other distractions that it seemed to keep them at bay. Sen could tell that the pressure of hiding non-stop for all that time was starting to wear him down, but he steadfastly refused to let that slip from his grasp. The extreme measure of setting off a conflagration in a town that he was inside of would mean nothing if he did. It would be child’s play for the spirit beasts to find him if his qi become visible again. It was still a double-edged sword for him, though. While it might keep him from showing up in the spirit beasts’ spiritual senses, it also severely limited his own ability to feel with his spiritual sense or his qi. The fires he’d set at a distance had largely been done blind, with Sen relying on years of practice and a clear knowledge of his own limits.
For the first time in years, Sen was relying almost entirely on his regular senses to keep him aware of what was nearby. There had been a time when those senses were finely honed. Forced to rely on them again, Sen realized how much he’d forsaken those old skills in favor of the cultivation skills he’d been learning. He knew, in his head, that his regular senses were actually better than they had ever been. He also knew that there had been limited choice in focusing on cultivation. There had simply been too few hours in the day to keep sharp with everything. Yet, that wasn’t the case when he considered the time since he’d been away from the mountain. There had been demands on him at points, certainly, but there had also been time to work on things like minding his senses more closely. Assuming he made it out of the town alive, he’d have to make that a priority. After all, he’d admonished Bigan to do something to fix his problems. Sen wasn’t enough of a hypocrite that he’d ignore his own advice.
While Sen had feared it would, and almost expected it to, he was still disappointed when his luck ran out. It was an unavoidable run across an open road in the town. He didn’t know if the spirit beast had just been looking his way or if something else had given him away, but the bear had spotted him and let out a roar. Sen could actually see the wall from where he stood. It was close. It just wasn’t close enough. He couldn’t get there without something intercepting him. He was still injured, and all of the smoke was making it harder and harder to breathe. A sprint for the wall just wasn’t feasible. At least, it wasn’t if he tried to do it on the ground. A flash of memory showed Sen an image of Master Feng traveling parallel to the ground in the courtyard at Uncle Kho’s manor. Feats like that were still well beyond Sen, but a different idea took him. Turning away from the fast-approaching spirit bear and toward the town wall, Sen took off as fast as his injuries would let him. He dodged between two buildings and then, hoping it would work the way he planned, he fired up his qinggong technique.
He jumped, planted a foot against the wall of one building, then launched himself upward and toward the wall of the other building. He repeated the process two more times before the first qi technique nearly killed him. He felt the flare of metal qi only a second or two before the technique was on top of him. It was only the superior durability of the spear he held that saved his life. He whipped the spear around, bracing it against his own body, right before the spearhead and the metal qi technique collided. With nothing to brace himself against, Sen was flung away from the technique. Acting almost on instinct, he cycled the pattern for lightning and sent a bolt in the direction the metal qi technique came from. A pained bird call rang out a moment later, and Sen saw something fall from the smoke cloud hanging over the city. Then, he crashed through the wall of a building.
Sen was used to enduring pain, but there was a distinct difference between pain he realized was coming and pain that he didn’t expect. The latter always hit his mind a little harder. It always took him a bit longer to regroup. He was still up and moving fast, but it was a reflex. He didn’t have the wits about him to dodge the hail of stones that crashed through the hole in the wall that he’d just made. Most of them missed him, but a few bounced. One with a point buried itself in his right bicep. He nearly dropped the spear he carried before he could think to stow it in his storage ring. A second slammed into his already burned calf, injuring the muscle beneath the scorched skin. A final stone punched against his back with the audible sound of at least one rib breaking. He went down hard. Part of him wanted to just stay there for a moment, to rest, to let the pain ebb just a bit. His mind was tired. His entire body ached where it wasn’t in some kind of more desperate pain.
The rest of him knew that was a suicidal choice. He couldn’t sense the spirit beasts precisely, but he could feel the qi techniques they were preparing. He lurched to his feet, stumbling through the unfamiliar building and looking for a window that faced toward the town wall. This was going to be it. They knew where he was now. Whatever beasts were left in the city were no doubt gathering on his location, preparing to cut him apart with their techniques. Then, Sen heard breaking wood from somewhere below. Or, he thought grimly, they plan to do it the old-fashioned way and kill me with tooth and claw. The thought of it made him furious. This trap he was in hadn’t even been meant for him. He was just the first one stupid enough to walk into it. Stumbling up against a wall next to a window, he reached across his body and drew his jian with his left hand. He wasn’t as practiced with that hand, but he wasn’t really planning on using the jian as a sword, just as a conduit. He smashed out the window with an elbow, made sure it faced the town wall, and then did what he truly hadn’t wanted to do. He sent a drop of liquid qi into his channels and used it.
The raw power that thundered through him then was almost too much to control in his weakened state. He lost a precious second or two simply wrangling that power in the right direction, cycling it the way it needed to be cycled. Some of that power went into his qinggong technique. It was the only way he’d reach the wall. The rest of it went into cycling for lightning. He poured that lightning qi into the jian and poured his killing intent after it. When he heard the spirit beasts crashing through the floor he was on, Sen knew he had no time left. He planted his foot on the bottom of the window and launched himself into the air backed with the full force of his liquid-qi enhanced qinggong technique. Much as he feared it might, the liquid qi made the technique far more powerful than he expected. He shot through the air like he’d been launched from a crossbow. The spirit beasts let out a collective roar of fury as he flew beyond their grasp.
He still had one last thing to show them. Sen twisted in the air, struggling to maintain the technique that was overcharged from the liquid qi. He centered his mind for just a moment and then he launched Heaven’s Rebuke back at the building. Where he expected a beam of darkness like the one that had killed Cai Yuze, this time a sphere of darkness the size of a wagon hurtled back toward the town. Sen took a shuddering breath. He’d got the balance wrong again. He was over the wall and trying to figure out how to land without breaking even more bones when Heavens’ Rebuke detonated. The last thing he saw before blacking out was a huge chunk of the town wall shattered into pieces and launched out into the surrounding forest.
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