Wei Feng 7 - Desert Ambush (Hua war, Year 65)
Wei Feng 7 - Desert Ambush (Hua war, Year 65)
==========================================
Above the village of Panmei Wei Feng peered at the sky. Out here he looked like just another peasant labourer out for the day. Better still, with use of his soul filling rasp he would feel exactly like another peasant labourer to the senses of any cultivators. A qi condensation practitioner, even one who had ascended to the half-mythical 13th heaven stage, could stand not 2 inches away and not know him for anything other than a mortal. A foundation establishment's more acute senses could pierce his protection, but he hoped that it would at least mean they would have to get closer than usual.
He was out here as one of the forward scouts. Devil bees could travel at incredible speeds but had limited endurance. That limited endurance was even further exacerbated here with the thin qi of the desert.
With their capture of the one of the floating hive islands deep within the Hua Empire, the Devil Bee sect had been sending out large numbers of raiding parties at villages and towns across the empire. Villages like this were tempting targets to the devil bees. The wanton slaughter of the villages strengthened the Devil Bee cultivator and their beasts, allowing them to range further. It also forced the Golden Devils and the Hua empire to divert forces away to counter them, lest the enemy behind them grow stronger even while the larger towns became glutted with refugees.
A cold strategic calculus that belied the horror that might await the people behind him.
The plan was simple. The Devil Bees the cultivators rode gave them superior strategic mobility. His first strike had to cripple the beasts. This would prevent them from retreat to return another day and protect the village behind him by stopping them from hopping over him to attack the village.
He heard a droning noise and looked up abruptly.
A hairy desert bee looked back at him, buzzing around his sweat soaked form before flying off. Another false alarm.
This was the 4th day he had been out here, and he had to admit he was getting pretty tired of doing peasant work. Not that it was hard. He was many times stronger than the people who would normally be doing this work. In all honesty, it was too easy. For the plan to work he had to appear as nothing more than another labourer, which meant he had to limit himself to the strength of a normal human. Worse, he had to be alert to possible devil bee incursions, so he couldn't allow himself to fall into a meditative trance to the rhythm of the work.
He heard a buzzing drone and looked up. No errant bee or fly this time. They were here.
He reached up into the sky with his senses.
Three of them. Two at the fifth level of Qi condensation, one that matched him in the seventh heaven stage. Tricky.
It would be easy to dismiss the fifth levels. As a seventh heaven stage cultivator he was almost half again as fast as them, even before the advantages provided by his Blood boiler cauldron body tempering. But Wei Feng was a veteran of many battles. He knew better. Speed was a great advantage, but in battle positioning and number were just as important. All the speed in the world wouldn't help if you would be skewered no matter where you turned.
Worse they were veterans of the worst sort of demonic sect. They would be capable fighters. The incapable would have been food for the bees long since.
Wei Feng bends back to his false task and begins muttering to himself. Under his body, invisible from the air, he begins making the gestures for a spell. Under the cover of a canopy shielding them from the sun, the lids of the labourer's 'water supplies' begin to shake.
==========================================
Li Ping looked towards the village before him. He was as bored as a cultivator from the Abyssal Devil Bee sect could be, which is to say he was only really paying attention to preventing betrayals from his fellow disciples.
The mission was routine, and with the glutton that was Fat Lin leading he was not likely to even get a decent share of the bounty. None of the Hua's pathetic armies were in the area, and the wretched cultivators of the Golden 'devils' were only threatening when cowering behind their walls or in groups large enough to be easily detectable.
With some warning, he was certain their Devil Bee mounts could outrun anything short of a foundation establishment cultivator, and even those pathetic simpering sentimentalists wouldn't spare a foundation establishment cultivator on these nothing villages of mortals.
A bright reflection flashed at the base of his peripheral vison. He turned slightly. You never wanted to look head on at sudden flashes. More than a few of his brothers and sisters had paid far too much attention to a sudden brightness in front of them to see the non-reflective dagger in the back.
It was… a river? Sparkling with reflected sunlight below them.
It had to be a mirage. This was still the desert, and the maps of the region showed no river here. It was…
Coming closer.
He jinked his mount to the side.
"Move!" he screamed. Ahead of him he heard Fat Lin cry out, struck with the full brunt by the geyser. Beneath Lin, the Devil bee let out a vespid scream as the water struck like a blade, shearing through one wing and amputating three of its legs.
Behind him, he though he heard Du Peng curse, then the water was upon him.
With his split second warning, Li Ping had avoided the main focus of the technique. Still, he had reacted far too slowly to guide his mount to avoid it entirely. Water slammed into them, lacking the sharpest killing edge granted to it by qi but still hammering home like hammer blows. Knocking him back and forth until he could barely tell which way was up. He chocked instinctively as liquid forced its way into his nose.
And then he was through, fine mist replacing pulverising drowning. He looked up, only to see the earth above him. He was still falling.
Yet Li Ping was a veteran of many battles. Forcing his panic aside he fought to regain control of his bee. Cursing and kicking at it as they spun until, in seconds that felt like minutes, the great beast began to flap its wings again, controlling their fall.
Free of panic, he looked around to see what had happened to his fellows. Below him, he saw Fat Lin hit the earth, trapped beneath the dying corpse of his mount.
For a second, he couldn't see Du Peng, then he spotted him, falling to the earth, mount nowhere to be seen.
Both had likely survived, though with injuries. Even with the attack, falls from such heights were unlikely to kill cultivators of their level. Thoughts that he, intact and still with his mount, might be temporarily the most powerful of the group were tabled firmly for later.
He scanned for signs of their assailant. Stretching out his senses, he searched for the qi of their attacker.
Nothing. Nothing at all. Just some shirtless peasant mortals, one of which was running to see what had happened.
He sat up straighter, straining and stretching his senses to their upmost limit. Still nothing. Below the peasant had almost reached the form of Du Peng. Li Ping squeezed his mount urging it to fly higher again so he could have a better view. It ignores him, continuing its descent.
Simultaneously, two things happened.
Li Ping realises that his mount is not ignoring him. Wings soaked by water and laden down by rider and weight of water in its fuzz, the Bee is being forced downwards.
The peasant reaches Du Peng's prone form, raises its foot and stomps on his head. Rather than bouncing off and leaving the mortal with a very sore foot as expected, instead the foot passes right through Du Peng's skull, splashing bone fragments and brain matter across the desert sands.
Their adversary had somehow disguised his qi!
Many would be dismayed by this, but as a cultivator of the Abyssal Devil Bee sect Li Ping is a veteran of many battles. He instantly reads the flow of the battlefield and decides on a course of action. He orders his mount to dive on an attack run, stinger extended.
From the water attack and the ease with which he had dispatched Du Peng, it is likely that his opponent has greater cultivation than him. Escape on foot is unlikely and with his mount's wings also sodden he cannot hope to flee. But poison has ever been the weapon of weaker cultivators hoping to strike at stronger ones. Few in this desert will have faced the venom of an Abyssal Devil Bee before.
By the time the shirtless man reacts Li Ping is almost on top of him. He cannot hope to dodge!
Still the man tries, succeeding in shifting the impact of the tip of the stinger to the flesh of his arm. Less imminently fatal, but that is all the better. The pain will paralyse him, and feeding his still living form to his mount will lay another tile in the base for Li Ping's ascension.
His visions of glory are interrupted as he feels a vice-like grip on his ankle drag him from the back of his mount, slamming him into the earth. He tries to roll to get his feet under him, but a fist hammers into his chin, bouncing his head off the ground behind him. He hears a terrible crack as his vision goes grey.
…..... ......
He starts, sounds of battle ring in his ears. He hears the sounds of flesh on flesh, hears and feels the roar of a fire spell. He tries to roll over. Fat Lin is still alive. He has to get up and help fight. If he's still on the ground when Lin wins…
He can't move. His arms won't respond. The sounds of battle recede slightly into the distance.
Move. Move. Move.
*Bubump bubump babump*
Have the sounds quietened or is his own heartbeat too loud? Move, he wills himself. Move!
Another sound is heard. Closer. Six thumping sounds. A pause. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
His eyes shift wildly. Suddenly he sees. It is his mount, wounded and bleeding. He nearly sobs in relief. His treasures are in the saddlebags. Even crippled, his command over his qi was not gone. With that, his mount can be made to trigger one of his treasures to allow them to escape.
Six thumps.
The bee is standing over him now. Terrible compound eyes stare at him. He reaches out with his qi in the appropriate patter to command the beast.
And bounces off.
Too late he realises, this is not his mount. It is Du Peng's. It will not respond to his commands, for no demonic cultivator trusts a beast that another may control.
Li Ping stares into pitiless, hungry compound eyes.
Mandibles open.
Li Ping screams.
==========================================
Wei Feng winces as he limps back to the corpses of the two fifth heaven stages he killed.
Even having been heavily wounded from the fall and his initial ambush; the Seventh Heaven Stage cultivator had put up an incredible fight. His body is covered in singes and light burns, and he bleeds freely from a dozen cuts to his torso.
His arm burns, pain radiating up it and into his chest. That sting had nearly done for him. If not for the resilient constitution and resistance to poison he had gained during his meditation beneath the Faeces Coconut tree he doubted he would have been able to keep fighting long enough to put down the seventh Heaven Stage fighter.
As he comes closer, he realises that there are too many Abyssal Devil Bees ahead of him. He had killed two, but he sees a third. Its thorax is half crushed and it is bent low to the ground. It will die soon even without his intervention.
It is eating something. Even as it lays dying it attempts to devour the corpse of its former master. It almost certainly cannot recover even if it eats every scrap, but it greedily swallows and bites at the flesh before it.
It stands there. A perfect metaphor for most demonic sects.
It's almost a shame to end such a perfect tableau. Still, as with both Demonic beasts and evil cultivators, Wei Feng has learned it is best be certain.
==========================================
==========================================
AN: 2112 words.
This one fought me for days. I just couldn't get the battle scene down. Then when I was thinking about what situation the initial strike would cause, I started thinking about the positioning more and tried writing it from the other side. Then it finally flowed.
This is set relatively early in turn 4 during the Hua war, when Wei Feng was out defending villages. It was originally supposed to be a couple of scenes with him fighting cultivators of his own level, leading up to his trapping the foundation establishment cultivator away to be ended by the clan and saving a town. Alas I got hung up on one fight scene and had trouble coming up with a plausible scenario for the foundation establishment portion. So instead it became a view of his time defending a single village.
Comments and criticism's welcome.
Edit: A few more typo's fixed.
==========================================
Above the village of Panmei Wei Feng peered at the sky. Out here he looked like just another peasant labourer out for the day. Better still, with use of his soul filling rasp he would feel exactly like another peasant labourer to the senses of any cultivators. A qi condensation practitioner, even one who had ascended to the half-mythical 13th heaven stage, could stand not 2 inches away and not know him for anything other than a mortal. A foundation establishment's more acute senses could pierce his protection, but he hoped that it would at least mean they would have to get closer than usual.
He was out here as one of the forward scouts. Devil bees could travel at incredible speeds but had limited endurance. That limited endurance was even further exacerbated here with the thin qi of the desert.
With their capture of the one of the floating hive islands deep within the Hua Empire, the Devil Bee sect had been sending out large numbers of raiding parties at villages and towns across the empire. Villages like this were tempting targets to the devil bees. The wanton slaughter of the villages strengthened the Devil Bee cultivator and their beasts, allowing them to range further. It also forced the Golden Devils and the Hua empire to divert forces away to counter them, lest the enemy behind them grow stronger even while the larger towns became glutted with refugees.
A cold strategic calculus that belied the horror that might await the people behind him.
The plan was simple. The Devil Bees the cultivators rode gave them superior strategic mobility. His first strike had to cripple the beasts. This would prevent them from retreat to return another day and protect the village behind him by stopping them from hopping over him to attack the village.
He heard a droning noise and looked up abruptly.
A hairy desert bee looked back at him, buzzing around his sweat soaked form before flying off. Another false alarm.
This was the 4th day he had been out here, and he had to admit he was getting pretty tired of doing peasant work. Not that it was hard. He was many times stronger than the people who would normally be doing this work. In all honesty, it was too easy. For the plan to work he had to appear as nothing more than another labourer, which meant he had to limit himself to the strength of a normal human. Worse, he had to be alert to possible devil bee incursions, so he couldn't allow himself to fall into a meditative trance to the rhythm of the work.
He heard a buzzing drone and looked up. No errant bee or fly this time. They were here.
He reached up into the sky with his senses.
Three of them. Two at the fifth level of Qi condensation, one that matched him in the seventh heaven stage. Tricky.
It would be easy to dismiss the fifth levels. As a seventh heaven stage cultivator he was almost half again as fast as them, even before the advantages provided by his Blood boiler cauldron body tempering. But Wei Feng was a veteran of many battles. He knew better. Speed was a great advantage, but in battle positioning and number were just as important. All the speed in the world wouldn't help if you would be skewered no matter where you turned.
Worse they were veterans of the worst sort of demonic sect. They would be capable fighters. The incapable would have been food for the bees long since.
Wei Feng bends back to his false task and begins muttering to himself. Under his body, invisible from the air, he begins making the gestures for a spell. Under the cover of a canopy shielding them from the sun, the lids of the labourer's 'water supplies' begin to shake.
==========================================
Li Ping looked towards the village before him. He was as bored as a cultivator from the Abyssal Devil Bee sect could be, which is to say he was only really paying attention to preventing betrayals from his fellow disciples.
The mission was routine, and with the glutton that was Fat Lin leading he was not likely to even get a decent share of the bounty. None of the Hua's pathetic armies were in the area, and the wretched cultivators of the Golden 'devils' were only threatening when cowering behind their walls or in groups large enough to be easily detectable.
With some warning, he was certain their Devil Bee mounts could outrun anything short of a foundation establishment cultivator, and even those pathetic simpering sentimentalists wouldn't spare a foundation establishment cultivator on these nothing villages of mortals.
A bright reflection flashed at the base of his peripheral vison. He turned slightly. You never wanted to look head on at sudden flashes. More than a few of his brothers and sisters had paid far too much attention to a sudden brightness in front of them to see the non-reflective dagger in the back.
It was… a river? Sparkling with reflected sunlight below them.
It had to be a mirage. This was still the desert, and the maps of the region showed no river here. It was…
Coming closer.
He jinked his mount to the side.
"Move!" he screamed. Ahead of him he heard Fat Lin cry out, struck with the full brunt by the geyser. Beneath Lin, the Devil bee let out a vespid scream as the water struck like a blade, shearing through one wing and amputating three of its legs.
Behind him, he though he heard Du Peng curse, then the water was upon him.
With his split second warning, Li Ping had avoided the main focus of the technique. Still, he had reacted far too slowly to guide his mount to avoid it entirely. Water slammed into them, lacking the sharpest killing edge granted to it by qi but still hammering home like hammer blows. Knocking him back and forth until he could barely tell which way was up. He chocked instinctively as liquid forced its way into his nose.
And then he was through, fine mist replacing pulverising drowning. He looked up, only to see the earth above him. He was still falling.
Yet Li Ping was a veteran of many battles. Forcing his panic aside he fought to regain control of his bee. Cursing and kicking at it as they spun until, in seconds that felt like minutes, the great beast began to flap its wings again, controlling their fall.
Free of panic, he looked around to see what had happened to his fellows. Below him, he saw Fat Lin hit the earth, trapped beneath the dying corpse of his mount.
For a second, he couldn't see Du Peng, then he spotted him, falling to the earth, mount nowhere to be seen.
Both had likely survived, though with injuries. Even with the attack, falls from such heights were unlikely to kill cultivators of their level. Thoughts that he, intact and still with his mount, might be temporarily the most powerful of the group were tabled firmly for later.
He scanned for signs of their assailant. Stretching out his senses, he searched for the qi of their attacker.
Nothing. Nothing at all. Just some shirtless peasant mortals, one of which was running to see what had happened.
He sat up straighter, straining and stretching his senses to their upmost limit. Still nothing. Below the peasant had almost reached the form of Du Peng. Li Ping squeezed his mount urging it to fly higher again so he could have a better view. It ignores him, continuing its descent.
Simultaneously, two things happened.
Li Ping realises that his mount is not ignoring him. Wings soaked by water and laden down by rider and weight of water in its fuzz, the Bee is being forced downwards.
The peasant reaches Du Peng's prone form, raises its foot and stomps on his head. Rather than bouncing off and leaving the mortal with a very sore foot as expected, instead the foot passes right through Du Peng's skull, splashing bone fragments and brain matter across the desert sands.
Their adversary had somehow disguised his qi!
Many would be dismayed by this, but as a cultivator of the Abyssal Devil Bee sect Li Ping is a veteran of many battles. He instantly reads the flow of the battlefield and decides on a course of action. He orders his mount to dive on an attack run, stinger extended.
From the water attack and the ease with which he had dispatched Du Peng, it is likely that his opponent has greater cultivation than him. Escape on foot is unlikely and with his mount's wings also sodden he cannot hope to flee. But poison has ever been the weapon of weaker cultivators hoping to strike at stronger ones. Few in this desert will have faced the venom of an Abyssal Devil Bee before.
By the time the shirtless man reacts Li Ping is almost on top of him. He cannot hope to dodge!
Still the man tries, succeeding in shifting the impact of the tip of the stinger to the flesh of his arm. Less imminently fatal, but that is all the better. The pain will paralyse him, and feeding his still living form to his mount will lay another tile in the base for Li Ping's ascension.
His visions of glory are interrupted as he feels a vice-like grip on his ankle drag him from the back of his mount, slamming him into the earth. He tries to roll to get his feet under him, but a fist hammers into his chin, bouncing his head off the ground behind him. He hears a terrible crack as his vision goes grey.
…..... ......
He starts, sounds of battle ring in his ears. He hears the sounds of flesh on flesh, hears and feels the roar of a fire spell. He tries to roll over. Fat Lin is still alive. He has to get up and help fight. If he's still on the ground when Lin wins…
He can't move. His arms won't respond. The sounds of battle recede slightly into the distance.
Move. Move. Move.
*Bubump bubump babump*
Have the sounds quietened or is his own heartbeat too loud? Move, he wills himself. Move!
Another sound is heard. Closer. Six thumping sounds. A pause. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
His eyes shift wildly. Suddenly he sees. It is his mount, wounded and bleeding. He nearly sobs in relief. His treasures are in the saddlebags. Even crippled, his command over his qi was not gone. With that, his mount can be made to trigger one of his treasures to allow them to escape.
Six thumps.
The bee is standing over him now. Terrible compound eyes stare at him. He reaches out with his qi in the appropriate patter to command the beast.
And bounces off.
Too late he realises, this is not his mount. It is Du Peng's. It will not respond to his commands, for no demonic cultivator trusts a beast that another may control.
Li Ping stares into pitiless, hungry compound eyes.
Mandibles open.
Li Ping screams.
==========================================
Wei Feng winces as he limps back to the corpses of the two fifth heaven stages he killed.
Even having been heavily wounded from the fall and his initial ambush; the Seventh Heaven Stage cultivator had put up an incredible fight. His body is covered in singes and light burns, and he bleeds freely from a dozen cuts to his torso.
His arm burns, pain radiating up it and into his chest. That sting had nearly done for him. If not for the resilient constitution and resistance to poison he had gained during his meditation beneath the Faeces Coconut tree he doubted he would have been able to keep fighting long enough to put down the seventh Heaven Stage fighter.
As he comes closer, he realises that there are too many Abyssal Devil Bees ahead of him. He had killed two, but he sees a third. Its thorax is half crushed and it is bent low to the ground. It will die soon even without his intervention.
It is eating something. Even as it lays dying it attempts to devour the corpse of its former master. It almost certainly cannot recover even if it eats every scrap, but it greedily swallows and bites at the flesh before it.
It stands there. A perfect metaphor for most demonic sects.
It's almost a shame to end such a perfect tableau. Still, as with both Demonic beasts and evil cultivators, Wei Feng has learned it is best be certain.
==========================================
==========================================
AN: 2112 words.
This one fought me for days. I just couldn't get the battle scene down. Then when I was thinking about what situation the initial strike would cause, I started thinking about the positioning more and tried writing it from the other side. Then it finally flowed.
This is set relatively early in turn 4 during the Hua war, when Wei Feng was out defending villages. It was originally supposed to be a couple of scenes with him fighting cultivators of his own level, leading up to his trapping the foundation establishment cultivator away to be ended by the clan and saving a town. Alas I got hung up on one fight scene and had trouble coming up with a plausible scenario for the foundation establishment portion. So instead it became a view of his time defending a single village.
Comments and criticism's welcome.
Edit: A few more typo's fixed.
Last edited:
