Price and Balance (Part 6)
Maria Turn 11 Seventh Omake
The poison was clearly taking effect, looking at the way Lyssa was shuddering. Lungslice had minutes, if that. He hooked his hands under her armpits and dragged her back towards the farmhouse. The leech wall had eaten up enough of her explosion to keep the walls standing, but the roof was gone. Not ideal, but he'd manage. There should be just enough cover in the corners, at least. With a grunt, he heaved Lyssa's twitching body (already clammy to the touch from a cold sweat) into position. There was no point throwing up more leech walls around her. He had neither the time nor the qi. The poison would have to do. Instead, he reached out, took careful hold of the huge armored shoulderpads, and stripped off the woman's bull sleeves. Then he tore off a few scraps of her shirt, and stuffed the rags into the pocket of his robes.
Lungslice stepped back out of the ruin and glanced around. By now, she should… ah. Yes. There, off in the distance, was a spot of gleaming white and blue light, coruscating with flickering power. That confirmed how the siblings' bond worked, then. Alright. From what he knew of Maria, there were two ways this could go. Either fear and concern for her sister would have driven her past anything resembling logical thought, or she'd have gone somewhere in her head that was cold and mechanical until she was certain Lyssa was safe. Of the two, he'd prefer the latter; destructive anger was easier to predict. Better to ensure she got there.
He drew out the scraps of Lyssa's shirt, and carefully arranged them across the ground. Then he got to work on the bull sleeves. There wasn't enough time to destroy them, but he could scratch them up enough to get the point across – a few well-placed cuts from his chitinous arm blades would do for a start, but…
He hissed. Glanced up. The dot was closer than he'd like, but… no. No, it needed a little something extra. With a single, immediate chomp, he bit down on the inside of his cheek hard enough to fill his mouth with blood. If she checked it at all, his ruse would fall apart, but if she was in a position to check then he'd failed anyway. He spat the blood on the gouges he'd hacked into the bull sleeves, smearing it carefully with his fingertips, and dropped them at the edges of the doorway, just barely visible.
The scene was set. Time to see how it played out.
He leaned back against the wall, as casually and unaffected as he could manage, and waited.
---
It had taken every ounce of Maria's self-control not to bolt the instant she felt Lyssa's qi wink out, and then forced her to plumb new wells of it when she didn't feel her sister-self snap back into her mind to regenerate. The shock must have shown on her face, though, because the Elder had stopped his latest overly-long spiel of self-effacing platitudes and stared at her.
"Honoured cultivator?"
Maria hadn't answered. Instead, she'd forced herself to sweep the plains. They'd just reached the edge of the ruins. She pointed.
"There," she said, roughly. "That house. See it?"
"…I do, but-"
"You go there, all of you. You get inside, you close the doors, you wait there. Stay quiet. Clear?"
He'd taken a small eternity to nod in understanding, and when at last she burst into a sprint, the fire of her altered purities technique spurting out of her pressure points and scorching at her brass flesh, she was half-way to frantic with fear and rage.
She could feel where her sister-self had been when she'd vanished. That at least was easy. "Lyssa," Maria whispered, not realizing she'd spoken as the words were torn away by the wind. "Lyssa it's alright I'm coming-"
And then at last she was there at the farmhouse, glaring at the long-limbed figure who waited for her. Long practice at last kicked in. She knew this bastard at least a little; the figure she'd seen at the fortress, martialing Shu Cangquiong's troops. The old disciplines and procedures drilled into her head decades ago at the Dawn Fortress echoed in her brain;
do not escalate. Gather information. Formulate a plan. Then strike like the thunder of Tribulation.
"…Long time no see," she grated. The figure smiled.
"Yes. You're looking well. I like the new hair colour."
"Can't say the same to you. Never got your name."
"Lungslice," he said, politely, "of the Demonic Altar. A pleasure."
"Sure."
Alright. Alright. Think. Get him talking. Formulate, then stri-
Rags from Lyssa's shirt. Not many, but enough to suggest… something. Something awful. Panic burnt white hot in her hind-brain, already starting to alchemize into hate. But no. No, she couldn't afford that, not yet.
"So," said Maria, forcing her voice to a calm, even tone with willpower she'd not known she had, "there a reason you're hanging out this far from the city?"
For a second, there was the slightest flicker of something on Lungslice's face, something she couldn't read before it smoothed out into a bland, professional smile.
"Stretching my legs," he said. "You know sieges. One gets so bored."
"Sure. But down here?"
"Lunch."
His smile didn't change, but she watched his eyes flick back towards the door.
Too obvious, she thought, clinging to the rails of protocol as her only defence against the churning terror that was running through her brain.
It's a feint. Has to be. Lyssa. Find Lyssa.
"No offence, but I hope you're still hungry," she said. Lungslice blinked.
"That's a little rude."
"Well, you eat people. Not really a fan. Nothing personal, but you grow up in the desert? Cannibalism becomes kind of a bugbear."
"Ah yes. Sun Diaxang's little sect. I can imagine you'd build up something of a prejudice."
"Is what it is," she said, shrugging. "So what, just looking for a meal? Got to be another reason."
Lungslice's smile took on an edge.
"Well, that depends, doesn't it? Not all meals are equal, after all."
He angled himself back towards the door. It was the slightest shift, but she saw it. He wanted her to look. She didn't.
"Sometimes it's not even about the eating, either. The value is in the ingredient."
Maria felt her eye start to itch, the weight of his words heavy on her pupils, dragging them slowly down towards…
Wait.
Distortion. Slight, barely visible, like the tiniest ripple in still water. The air was moving wrong. More accurately it wasn't moving at all. It just hung there, directly in front of her, dead.
Leech wall. A good one, too; she hadn't felt it at all. This was a trap.
She shot Lungslice an amused smirk.
"You want to step outside and say that?"
His face didn't quite freeze, but she could see the effort in that.
"Nice little wall," she went on, carefully. The panic and fear were still there, burning in the back of her skull, but she fought them down. Control. This was about control. "Hard to throw it up on short notice. This was prepped, right? Took you a little while."
He said nothing. She watched him start to pull back a little inside the farm house.
"So you have your fancy little wall, which you prep, and then you get Lyssa. Right? That's who's inside. But you haven't killed her. Tell you why, too. If you had, she'd snap back to me, unless you'd figured out a way to eat her and keep her. But if you'd done that already, we wouldn't be chatting like this, you'd just kill me and be done with it. So either you can't, or it's slow. And you're nervous 'bout taking me in a straight fight, or this little wall wouldn't be up."
Maria's fear was a roiling mass, now, buried in her head and her gut, but she could use that. Lungslice was pinned.
"Not an assassination, no matter what you want me to think. Trying to get me riled, run straight through this, and then yum yum chomp chomp look who's a clever little altar boy."
"Maybe I'm just stacking the deck," he murmured. Maria smirked.
"You'd need to. But no. This. You don't have jack shit for this."
"I still have my wall."
"Sure. But that's not going to last forever, and I can find a way through eventually. I have time."
Silence.
"So. How about we try something else? You come out now, you start running… that's a head start for as long as it takes me to find Lyssa and kill her so she can regenerate. Not bad odds."
"And return empty handed."
"Least then you get to return. Because if you don't, I will get past this eventually, and then you're dead."
More silence. He'd vanished from sight now altogether, and the leech wall was fucking up her qi-sense. She settled.
"Come on. Last chance. Three. Two…"
Still nothing. Okay.
Leech walls were great defensive tools, but they were expensive. She had to find a way past. The ragged ground, littered with scorch marks and burn scars, suggested Lyssa had hit it already with some kind of fire attack, probably to try and go under. It was the go-to strategy, but it also clearly hadn't worked. He must have anchored it too low.
But.
The qi cost was going to be exorbitant. Everything about this set-up said he'd been operating on a limited output budget; he wouldn't be pushing so hard to get her off-balance otherwise. So how likely was it that the wall would cover all 360 degrees?
She gritted her teeth and kicked off, fire qi lancing out of her back for speed and another burst punching out of her hand to lick along the edge of the leech wall. The flames guttered and died as they brushed against it. She kept going.
Still there… still there… still there…
Curving-
The width from her hand to the wall was increasing as the wall curved away and around. She turned with it, heart sinking.
Still there… still there… still there-
Wall. The farmhouse wall. He'd anchored it there. It might keep curving in and around, but…
Fuck it. Limited options. The lunged forward, threw a punch, and watched the wall shatter underneath her first. She coughed up a burst of flames through the gap…
And felt nothing. No leech wall.
She had him.
Maria was through the gap and swinging, spitting fire as she went. There was the briefest flicker of the scene inside before battle began – Lungslice, helmet up, already dropped into a defensive formation, and Lyssa slumped in a corner, not moving. Her bull sleeves were shredded and bloodied in the doorway. In that last fraction of a second, Maria let her eye burn into Lungslice's face.
You want me angry, you son of a bitch? Alright.
BURN.
And then she let the rage take hold, and the world shattered into a mosaic of violence.
---
"Inside. In, girl, unless you want the heavens to fall on you!"
Yung Sun was not a particularly complicated man. By and large, he wanted to be left in peace with his witling knife and some tea. That felt acceptable, given he'd retired. If more people wanted that, then the world would be a simpler place. Yet despite that, here he was, thousands of miles from home, in the depths of contested military territory, with two (three?) cultivators off in the distance killing one another. And his entire family, all the way down to little Wu, was here with him.
How the hell had things gone so
wrong?
But there wasn't time to worry about that. Daiyu was still taking far too long to get inside the house. If their honourable cultivator escort had ordered them inside, then inside they would go.
If only because he had no idea what else to do.
At last, Daiyu was ushered inside, crying quietly. Sun hushed her gently.
"Easy, now, my dovekin, easy," he murmered. Her mother was hovering close by, a stricken expression on her face. Sun smiled gently. This bit he knew how to do. "It's alright. See? Safe inside."
Daiyu sniffled a little, her face buried in his shoulder.
"Where'd did she go?"
Sun winced. Who 'she' was, was obvious. He didn't have an answer for the question.
"I can't claim to know, dear heart. But I'm sure she'll be back soon."
"But-"
"I know. I know. It's a little frightening, isn't it? But we'll be alright. And then we shall be in the desert. You can see the scorpions, remember?"
Daiyu nodded again. At last, she let herself be coaxed away by her mother. Sung Yun watched her go before he let his gentle, grandfatherly smile drop.
Gods. What the
hell were they going to do?
"Father," came a voice from his shoulder. He turned. Tien, his son, gave him a worried glance. "The… thing."
"What thing?"
"On the horizon. The distortion that-"
"Yes, yes. What about it?"
"It's moving."
---
Damn it damn it damn it
damn it.
This was not how
ANY of this was supposed to go.
Lungslice brought his arms up to defend, letting the blows rain down on his shoulders and blades. It didn't make much of a difference – Maria's fists hit him like sledgehammers, the shock of her strength running through his body and leaving him shaken and numb. Worse, the fire was spreading; his robe had been scorched into ash already, and he could feel his chitin starting to crack.
She'd been too
smart. He'd not had direct contact with her before; even during Shu Cangquiong's ridiculous raid, he'd been more focused on hitting the treasury and then retreating. The girl, he'd assumed, was just another frontliner. Dangerous, certainly, but not impossible to manage. Instead, he was facing a fucking
hurricane. Heat, soulsteel, and brutality, conjured into the shape of a cultivator and beating on him like a damn drum. She didn't even get
angry like a normal person. There should be sloppiness, gaps he could exploit, but no; she fought him with the technique of a lifelong veteran, married to the aggression of a fucking berserker.
The only thing he had over her was focus. He was fighting her. She was fighting him
and trying to get to her sister. If she made it, all Maria would have to do was deliver one half-decent strike to kill Lyssa, drag her back into their shared body, and then wait. Lyssa would be back up and about in half an hour, and then Lungslice (if he survived that long) was truly screwed.
He could admit it. He had miscalculated. Time to make an adjustment. Speaking practically, there was no way in hell he could win this. Maria was a better straight fighter than he was. To beat her, he'd need much more prep time than he had. The original plan – catch and eat both – had been beaten when she'd resisted his attempts to goad her into the leech wall. Time to pull out.
How, though? If he ran, she'd follow. At best, he'd only have a few moments while she reabsorbed her sister. He needed to slow her down somehow.
Punch, blocked on his forearm, redirected just in time – a jet of flame lances out of her wrist, the heat scorching his helmet as it goes past –
The fire. She was a Golden Devil. They were slow. The only reason she wasn't was how she used the fire. And that was pressure points.
You could
close pressure points…
He kept up his defensive stance, redirecting and blocking as much as he could. Her arms would be good, but her back seemed to be where a lot of the push came from. He'd have to catch that. But how to-
Block, uppercut to his jaw. The force took him off his feet and into the air, head spinning for a moment. Maria –
Turned towards her sister. He saw the light, blue white, blossoming in her chest, running up her throat and building in her mouth. A fireball. She'd scorch Lyssa into ash and pull her back in to regenerate. It was quick, effective, and she'd be able to focus on him.
But she'd turned to do it.
Well. Don't look gift horses in the mouth. He flicked out one finger, aimed –
Don't miss don't miss don't miss-
The fireball bloomed from Maria's mouth, rolling through the space towards Lyssa and growing as it went –
Don't miss don't miss don't miss-
And fired.
The qi blast was needle-thin, the attack closer to acupuncture than artillery. But it worked. He watched it lance into the main pressure point on her back and lance it shut. Maria's eye widened. The fury in it intensified. He'd have to work fast…
WOOOOMPH
The fireball took out Lyssa, the corner walls, and a chunk of the floor. The shockwave rattled through what was left of the ruin, shredding the walls as it went. They were in the centre of a scar on the landscape, now, shredded and burnt material everywhere.
Lungslice barely managed to stick the landing, staggering a little. Maria was on him in seconds. He was going to-
And then something shuddered behind him. Maria froze. Stared.
He turned.
The distortion swallowed them up before they could even scream.
---
Hoooo boy I have so much more to write and the fates are so close.
@no. @Kaboomatic @TehChron may I have a threadmark please?
]. and wow that game is seriously additive. I some what glad that only now I can play it (and that is free^^).
