Polluted Jianghu: 今年恶鲲

It's a tough sort of tranquilizer. Li Peng respected that guy who dared. He flipped through his memories and couldn't turn up a single suspect. Good game. Fair play. He's still gonna get better, find the shit, and rip their guts out their mouth. "Cocaine." His throat feels like sandpaper. "Just give me." What's the words? Remember. Remember. "All of that shit. Now." The Wu and Dan dudes looked like they didn't want to be there. Well, tough shit.

Wait a second.

"We don't sell-" The bartender looks at Li Peng's bloodshot eyes and puts a pack of white powder on the bar. Plastic ripped in the soundless, stretchy manner of cheap packing plastic. Nose candy spilled out into a small mountain. He used his fingers to sort them into lines. How much was too much? He's mixing uppers and downers here. Li Peng remembered. There was one dive bar, how young was he? Thirteen? Fifteen? An idiot, a loser, had overdosed on shabu-shabu and krokodil at the same time. Their eyes (was it a man or a woman? They all looked the same when they were half dead, just bags of meat and bone) rolled in their heads and they were foaming like a wavy shore.

Haha. That's the life. "Straw," Li Peng clenched out. Cardboard. Hmph.

The first shot was white lightning. Running through his nerves. His heart clenched and slammed open. He screwed his eyes shut. There's the heart palpitations, how are you doing? His forehead was slimy with sweat and his hands shook. "It's not working. Caveman style, then." Behind him. Li Peng turned around, legs weak and shaking. The stool under him clattered to the ground.

One. Two. Three. Four fivesixseveneightsofuckingmany-

"Alright. Which one." Acid reflux, burning his molars. Li Peng bent over and dribbled a stream of vomit out onto the floorboards, swaying a bit too much. "Which one," he coughed out, "poisoned me."

"Me." Chains Mcgee. A tall, thin woman. With a chain, of course.

"Me." Fatso. Fat. Your creepy uncle. There was a needle between his knuckles.

"Me." Flay? She didn't look like she cared, just pissed that she miscalc'd the dosage.

"Do all you jokers carry around poison as a matter of course? What, is this for your prostate cancer?"

"I had mine removed," offered Fatso. "For prostate cancer."

"What, do you want mine?" The entire clientele was looking at him like he was a primo cut of meat. The bartender sighed, threw the towel down with a thump, and walked off into the kitchen, which Li Peng noticed was blocked by a blast door. He turned to his side. "Yo, Wu Changxi, I can help you find-"

"You don't have it. Which means I might as well earn some pocket money."

Shit.

"And I still have to repay you for that-" Li Peng wrapped a hand around the side and another on the top of his bald head. Concussion, Dan would have said. And then Li Peng gave him another one. He dragged the Dan soldier down the length of the bar and-

Li Peng realized that there was a small knife in his back shoulder. It was in the mirror. "Fuckingkillyouasshole," Dan whatever mumbled. Nothing hurt. Thank the humble coca plant. God loves Peru. Peru Numero Uno. Li Peng wrapped a hand around Pucehead's ankle. The silence struck Li Peng. No one moved. They were just watching. Waiting. And, if one guy's dead and gone, who cares? One less guy to split the share with.

Li Peng threw the pucehead into the ground like a sack of fruit. Blood flowed everywhere, splattered all over the place. Jackson Pollock-like. He left a man sized imprint. Then into the counter, and then over the heads of the crowd. Li Peng felt like he was wrapped in prickles. He breathed in. He breathed out. And sneezed blood all over the floor.

Sneezed? That's not right. You cough blood, you don't spray your life fluid out like allergy snot. But Li Peng did anyway. Medical miracle.

He snapped the legs off of a stool and bent and squeezed their ends into sharp points. The crowd still wasn't moving. Pucehead groaned against the wall and the hole he made. Li Peng rested an arm on his knee. Who's up first? Who wants to try him? Being a legend is all well and good, but having the life to enjoy is better. He's going to ruin the first guy who steps up to him. That should scare off the rest…

Pucehead stands up. "I'll fuckin' kill you," he dribbled the word out with a pair of twinned onion-headed maces in his hands. The broken stool legs probably won't match up. "Any bastard who takes 'im from me, I kill next."

"Y'gonna let the Dan Surname take this from you? I'm worth quite a bit." The pucehead looks like he's sweating blood. He stared at Wu Changxi. A spear haft thudded against the ground.
"Anyone who interrupts, gets Wu Manor on them too," she announces.

His hair feels greasy. Li Peng threaded a hand through his rockstar locks. Some of the ends were tangling together. "Of course." A coughing fit broke his line of thought. Dan hasn't moved. Li Peng wiped the spittle from his lips. "They're together on it. Of course you'd like that? You'd hand me over and take all the glory, and the money. Thieves together, eh?"

There's this strange, magnetic sound. A mace flew at Li Peng and crashed into his guard. The two stool legs bends further. His arms pressed against his chest under the force, and he skidded, ten meters, twenty, until it pressed him against the wall and then it flew back into the pucehead's hand. What was the trick? An invisible thread? Magnets?

How now, old bean, Li Peng thought. The pucehead advanced like waves to a mountain. You're suffering from heart issues. You're coughing blood and the poisons are playing in your muscles, but who gives a shit? You're stuck in net of survelliance and cops, and there's hunters after you, like this staggering pucehead.

You should like these odds.

BENEFITS (Choose two)
[]- CHAOS (0/3 -> 2/3 General Chaos Clock)
Throw Li Peng into the crowd, and see them fall upon each other.

[]- THE LEGEND (0/5 -> 2/5 Trending Clock, +0.1 PRESENT)
See them driven before you, broken and howling.

[]- INNER STRENGTH (0/8 -> 1/8 ??? Clock, +0.1 PAST)
Li Peng thinks that the world seems to move in slow motion. Or that's his brain damage.

DETRIMENT (Choose two)
[]- SHEER HEART ATTACK (0/3 -> 2/3 Heart Attack Clock, +0.2 FUTURE)
Li Peng feels his heart get closer and closer to nonfunction.

[]- LEVIATHAN WAKES (0/2 -> 1/2 PAP Attention Clock, +0.1 PAST)
A People's Armed Police urban helicopter is arriving on the scene…

[]- THE STAR DROP (0/1 -> 1/1 Stardrop Clock, +0.1 PRESENT)
Pucehead gets off a secret technique.

Li Peng charged the pucehead, low to the ground. First him, then the rest. They hooked their arms around each other's waists. Dan lowered his center of gravity, but that was it. They remained there for one second. Li Peng could hear the steady, ragged pulse of the enemy's diaphragm, and in turn he could hear Li Peng's phlegmy coughs and arrhythmic heartbeats. It was his own action that did him in- Li Peng pushed into Dan, in a short burst of force that would have knocked him over, put him in a mount position.

"This that killed ya," Dan whispered to Li Peng, locked around each other, "is Dan Family's patented Star Drop throw."

"You're a fucking idiot. This is a Bagua Tiger Playing With A Ball-"

And then he threw Li Peng through five walls. No, it wasn't thrown. Li Peng was dragged through the back wall of the pub, through the kitchen, out the back wall, into the cold street and then through a boarded up hairdresser's salon by some invisible force. Maybe it was magnets, he thought. The pucehead fuck turned him into a giant superconducter and now the north pole is dragging him along for the ride.

Rubble abraded his skin. He couldn't stop moving. Every time he thought he found his footing the force dragged him on. His hands grabbed at the broken pipes, dug trenches through the asphalt. He left three human shaped holes in the wall and tumbled head over ass until he kicked two holes in the ground and left two deep gouges into the ground.

Dust motes danced around the sky. Woah, Li Peng thought and picked himself up. He felt like a gravel covered towel. He could have been pasted across the earth, a red and white smear. Red sand poured out in a line. His legs shook and he fell down.

Is the world moving in slow motion, or is that his brain damage?

Fuchai made this spear for his own use.

I don't have it, Li Peng said in a world frozen. His head pounded. He walked and blood dripped down his legs and splattered across the ground. Is there still skin on his back? Is his spine out and touching the world?

He walked on soft clay. All behind him was his footprints, inch deep in rock. Somewhere his combat boots turned into ribbons.

A cleaver hung suspended in midair. He brushed rocks away from the face, just frozen there.

Li Peng stopped behind the Pucehead, locked in a snarl with the crowd. What were they fighting over? The money. The money. He put a hand on his shoulder. Then blood forced its way up his throat and the world snapped back into motion. His ears popped. The crowd started talking. Dan turned and was full of surprise. "How did you-" Dan's head turned an even more alarming shade of red violet. Then Li Peng swept out his legs from under him, so hard that he felt bones crack and watched his head crash into the floorboards.

Li Peng raised a foot and brought it down on his head again and again."Y'full of crap," Li Peng said to the limp pile of tomato-y flesh that was once perhaps, a man who's surname was Dan "That didn't kill me and I want my money back."

"Holy crap," someone said. "How's he standing?"

"Fuck you," Li Peng responded calmly. "I am invincible. A new god of time and thunder. Y'ain't shit."

Hold on. That's reactionary talk. And besides, how can he be a god without being properly certified? It must be the brain damage. He wiped a bead of blood from his nose. C'mon. "C'mon," he said out loud, a crazy, adrenaline tight grin on his face. "After I kill that fuck, I'm going to be shoving Flay's head into a sewer and leaving it there."

"Ah, fuck," Flay sighed.

The first came at him with a wrestling lariat. Li Peng slipped under that one- she seemed to be moving as if through jelly- and stomped the inside of her leg. The second came screaming, a sledgehammer, an industrial sledgehammer, kissed the temple of his skull. He turned the slip into a cartwheel and stood up next to him when his neck prickled up and a spear hissed where his head was.

Wu Changxi was silent and focused. She used her entire body to throw the spear at him like a dart. Sinous and slithering, snaking forward and backwards. You can do it. Catch the haft, snap it in half. Then his head rang, splitting open with pain. Black spots rose in his vision. He had to charge forward, take the spearpoint on his collarbone and pit flesh and might against steel and might.

The shaft flexed. Wu Changxi dropped the spear and went for his eyes.

He caught the hands and broke them at the wrist, and turned back to the tide. The spear clattered against the ground. He kicked it at the feet of the next.

They were all heroes. They tried their best ande they were at their best. But now, Li Peng was stronger than them, faster than them, and too high on adrenaline and deadened to pain to feel anything. He was stabbed, cut, bashed to the ground and fed flooring tile. And for each he gave back tenfold.

It was so beautiful he had to smile, this exchange, this frank discussion of sublime violence and eye gouging, finger biting three inches from death frenzy.

"Hey," he coughed in a lull. The poor pub. They're not getting their deposit back. Everything's ruined."Why'ren't you joining in?"

Fei Dao. Flay. The thin woman with a chain and the Fatso.

"I'm not stupid," Chains sneered. "All I really need to do is wait. And I'm right." The chain swung through the air. It's a rope dart. Fatso… Li Peng can't see anything, and that worried him. Fei Dao'd probably have a brace of knives tucked under his jacket, and Flay's got her big six-shooter. His head is full of wool.

"But that's bullshit." A panting straggler winds up a punch on his cheek. Li Peng didn't even feel it. He pushed him off and the straggler toppled like a bowling pin. "Argh. Whatever. Let's get this over with."

BENEFITS (Choose one)
[]- FUCHAI'S SPEAR (1/8 -> 2/8, ??? Clock)
If only he had the relic in his hands. This will do for now.

[1.4] {PAST} INNER STRENGTH (1/8 -> 2/8, ?? Clock)
That feeling. If he could just slip between moments.

[1.1] {FUTURE} SOCK IT TO ME (0/5 -> 3/5 Trending Clock, +0.1 FUTURE)
Fuck this lame ass woozy dizzy bullshit. Feed all these mooks their own teeth.

DETRIMENT (Choose two)
[1.5] {PRESENT} GIVING OUT (0/3 -> 2/3 Heart Attack Clock, +0.1 FUTURE)
His heart can't take anymore. His head is throbbing. He's still going on.

[]- LEVIATHAN WAKES (1/2 -> 2/2 PAP Attention Clock)
A People's Armed Police urban helicopter is no longer arriving. It is here.

[]- HEROES ONE AND ALL (0/1 -> 1/3 Captured Clock, +0.1 FUTURE)
Those that remained are… pretty good at this fighting thing.

A/N: Apologies for the late update. New semester.