by F. C. Yee
The poor turtle. And it was only the first victim we’d found.
As the crowd cleared out, more and more corpses littered the ground. Animals and monsters of all types. Big and small, young and old. More than a few bodies cradled each other, as if they’d tried to shield each other, or be together in death. Every single one of them had been cut clean through by some kind of unimaginably sharp blade.
It was a slaughterhouse. A killing floor. Scores of demons whom I’d promised help, massacred. I thought it couldn’t get worse until I saw a corpse that had been slashed open from the front instead of the back.
It was the werewolf. He’d faced the unseen enemy in a futile attempt to buy time for the others. He’d died upright, on one knee, like he’d been trying to summon his strength for a final desperate counterattack. A Guardian until the end.
Hot tears welled up in my eyes. My fingernails bit into my palm, gouging into my skin until they met resistance and the pain vanished. I glanced down at my hand. It was glittering black. My arm was turning iron on its own, rage seeping into my fist.
Good, I thought. Because before this day was over, I was going to put my hand straight through whoever did this.
The world had suddenly become quiet. There simply weren’t any more living beings around, other than the gods of the mandate. The landscape was barren, devoid of movement and sound.
“There’s no trace of the enemy,” Guan Yu muttered. He gripped his halberd tighter. “No footsteps, no blood, not even any errant strokes. It’s as if the yaoguai fell apart of their own accord.”
“Someone tell me what this is!” I screamed. “Who did this?”
“I did,” a woman’s voice whispered right up close in my ear.
I jumped and spun around in the direction of the voice. “Did anyone hear that?” I said.
The only answer I got was another unfamiliar sound. One of the stranger, more bizarre auditory experiences I had been party to. Quentin crying out in pain.
A red lash bloomed on the back of his white shirt from shoulder to opposite hip. He fell to the ground and bled and bled.
Maybe time slowed, or maybe it was my poor reflexes like those the Great White Planet had criticized me for, but I didn’t move. The sensation of wrongness I felt in that moment went bone-deep, into my marrow. It paralyzed me.
Quentin had never taken a wound like that since we’d been together. It wasn’t the right kind of wound for him to take. The fight with his evil doppelganger, the Six-Eared Macaque, had busted his face up in an amusing, hockey brawl way. His near-death experience with Red Boy’s purifying flame had briefly petrified him, but that was almost like he’d been immortalized, preserved for the ages.
This was different. My boyfriend turned out to have rawness and pumping blood inside him. He had been breached.
“Look out!” Guan Yu roared. He knocked me to the side with his bulk and spun his weapon in a helicopter twirl. The edge of the guandao sparked as if it had made contact with another blade.
There was a sharp little zipping noise. Behind me, a rock the size of a trash can slid into two pieces, the top half skiing down the bottom half at an angle. It had been sliced through.
“Get down!” Guan Yu said to the rest of us. “As low as you can!”
He strode forward, somehow having determined the direction the attack was coming from. The warrior god began weaving his polearm through the air. His eyes were heavy in concentration, nearly closed, and he breathed deep through his nostrils.
More sparks flew from the business end of his halberd, each one accompanied by a clang and a ricochet whine. He deflected the invisible, slicing projectiles to the left and right, up and down, creating as much of a safe zone as he could for us.
But his task was monumentally difficult. Bloody slashes appeared on Guan Yu’s burly arms when he was a microsecond too slow. He could only protect so many angles. The other gods and I had to throw ourselves to the deck and belly-crawl into a wedge behind him.
The Great White Planet, prone on the ground, scribbled furiously with a fresh pen, doing his duty like a war correspondent under heavy fire. A puff of dust thudded into the sand near my head. I pulled up close to Quentin and curled my body around his.
Nezha was already working on his injury, and I sent a prayer of thanks to him that the young god knew how to do healing magic. “Looks worse than it is,” Nezha said to Quentin. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, his fingers and palms covered in blood. “If you weren’t Sun Wukong, the cut would have been deeper.”
“Thanks,” Quentin coughed. “Genie, let go. I’m fine.” He tried to get to his knees, but I grabbed his head and mashed it back down to the ground. Like I believed him. What was with everyone close to me declaring they were fine after nearly dying?
Eventually the ricochets started to land farther and farther away. “Heh,” Guan Yu muttered, oblivious to his own dripping wounds. “I have your pattern figured out.”
Whoever was attacking us seemed to agree. They took one last potshot at Guan Yu, which he blocked easily, and then they stopped.
Quentin glanced up at his warrior god friend, and then at me. “See?” he said with a weak smile. “Tactical genius.”
I was as angry as I was relieved. “Do you have to joke every time you get hurt?” I said.
We dragged ourselves to our feet. We’d weathered the storm, but just barely. The deadly barrage of what I could only guess were invisible blades from afar must have been what murdered the yaoguai. Ao Guang’s people, too. No wonder they’d been scared of the Yin Mo, a completely unseen death.
“General,” Nezha said to Guan Yu. “You’re bleeding.”
“I lack the time to bleed,” Guan Yu growled. He gazed at a dot on the shimmering horizon. “Our enemy approaches.”
Someone or something was heading our way. Erlang Shen, who had hit the dirt with the rest of us, inch-wormed his way to a kneeling position. “I think, as a precaution, you should take off my restraints,” he said. He flexed against the bindings, making a little jangle.
“Shut up,” I said. I zoomed my eyes in. My golden-eyed sight may have been magic, but at this level of magnification, spotting a target without any landmarks nearby was as hard as getting a telescope to land on the exact right star in the sky. I dialed in, catching bits and pieces of a blurry shape, over and undershooting as I tried to compensate.
A delicate breeze blew in my face. I blinked to shield my eyes from dust and lost my focus.
“Genie!” Quentin said.
“Don’t distract me! I almost had it!”
“Genie, it’s right in front of you!”
I was going to yell at him that backseat true sight drivers needed to shut their traps, but he turned out to be right. The thing I’d been trying to spot was now only fifty yards away, visible to everyone. I’d missed it travel more than a mile in the time it took for a gust of wind to pass.
It was a woman.
She was square-shouldered but lithely tapered, her frame suggesting the tightly bundled power of a dancer. She was wearing a form-fitted suit that covered her from neck to toe. The under-layer was made out of a fine black weave that looked like it could stop bullets. Over her muscles and vitals were rows of matte armor scales. They were hinged like vents and flapped slightly open at random intervals to let small hissing jets of steam out.
Her face was covered by a mask that was part ninja’s and part scuba rebreather. The top half hid her eyes behind mirrored lenses, and the jaw section had a series of valves that forebodingly looked like they could be cranked up past eleven to provide some terrible spike of power.
She resembled a warrior sent back in time from three centuries into the future. The whole getup was unbearably badass. It was honestly the most badass-looking outfit I’d ever seen.
Too bad I’d have to wreck both it and the wearer. “Who are you?” I demanded.
In lieu of an answer the woman slowly, languidly cocked her wrist, pointing at each god, Quentin, and me
in turn. She was making a show of counting us. One, two, three, four, five, six.
“No more?” she whispered.
Judging by her voice she was the one who’d spoken directly in my ear before, despite being so far away at the time. Even now I shouldn’t have been able to hear her so easily given her soft, ethereal tone and obstructed mouth, but her words tunneled straight into my brain. I almost looked to make sure she wasn’t standing right behind me, her hands gripping my shoulders.
“Why are you doing this?” I said. This wasn’t a parlay like with the yaoguai. The time for that had long since passed. I merely wanted to understand the monster I was about to take down.
She didn’t respond. She held her ground like she was waiting for something more interesting to happen.
We were at an impasse. I glanced at the gods to try and see how I should be reacting. They were perfectly still, with the bridled tension of duelists unwilling to make the first mistake. Personally, I took the woman’s inaction as our moment to strike.
“We could rush her,” I whispered. “There’s more of us. I could—”
“Don’t!” Quentin said harshly. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”
The standoff was broken by the sound of feet digging into the sand. Guanyin came running up to join us. I could tell from the pain on her face that there’d been carnage near the portal. She wouldn’t have come unless the rift had closed early.
We didn’t have time to confirm it though. Guanyin’s arrival triggered a response in the strange woman. Our opponent reached up to the side of her mask and flicked its latch with her long, delicate fingers. As she removed the mouthpiece, it made the puffing noise of air pressure being equalized. The goggles were next, but she kept her eyes closed as they came off, like she wasn’t ready to face the daylight yet.
She was beautiful on the level of a goddess. Her thin face and expressive mouth gave her a sad, lonely composition out of a Baroque oil painting.
“Take off my restraints,” Erlang Shen suddenly yelled. “Do it now!”
Asshole wouldn’t stop screwing around, even at a time like this. I could hear shuffling in the dust, which was probably Quentin fanning out. Quentin moved to flank her while her eyes were still closed. I knew my partner’s tactics well. We had our disagreements in our personal lives, but in battle, we were a well-oiled machine, always knowing what the other was—
“Tian a!” Quentin yelled.
That wasn’t what he said before a fight. I risked a glance back at the group and was completely stunned at what I saw.
The divine beings standing on my side weren’t moving into attack formation. They were backing away. Guan Yu, Guanyin, Quentin, all of them. There was fear on their faces. Outright fear.
Nezha was trying to get his body in between the woman and the Great White Planet. Gaining points was not the goal here. He was ready to sacrifice himself to protect the old man.
Guan Yu hunched over defensively with his weapon held in front of him, the massive god determinedly making himself as small of a target as possible. Guanyin, who could stop time by looking at it funny, was mumbling to herself, fingers kneading the air, powering up for a defensive spell bigger than I’d ever seen her cast before.
“What is going on?” I said. “Someone answer me!”
“Take off my restraints!” Erlang Shen screamed, a hysterical edge in his voice. “The clasp on the side of my hip! Break it!”
I didn’t have time to make sense of his statement before Quentin, Quentin of all people, who had been mortal enemies with Erlang Shen long before the rest of us, who had hated him before it was cool, reached over and smashed the locking clasp that kept him powerless and imprisoned.
The individual beads of iron that served as Erlang Shen’s shackles dropped to the ground. They’d been linked together with some kind of binding magic. It was gone now. I could feel a ripple of power emanate from the god, blood coming back to an unused muscle. Erlang Shen flexed his hands before his face with an incredulous expression.
“Why did you do that?” I shrieked at Quentin.
“Because we’re going to need his help!” Quentin said. “That’s Princess Iron Fan!”
Maybe I had heard the name before, but in the shock of the moment I could hardly remember my own. “Who is that?”
Erlang Shen could have seized the opportunity to run, or attack us, or simply take a celebratory stretch after being bound for so long. But instead his first action as a free man was to take a stance and clench his teeth like a Viking coming to terms with Ragnarok.
“She’s Red Boy’s mother,” he said.
22
The woman opened her eyes. At first the cold, solid gray color filling her sockets made me think she had them rolled back into her head, or that maybe she lacked irises entirely, but tiny wisps and tendrils of fog began to bleed from her face like weightless tears. The shape of her eyeballs was made up of two spherical vortexes, spinning in place to keep their cloudy vapor contained.
Her eyes weren’t living tissue. They were miniature roiling storms, thunderheads inside her skull. If this was Red Boy’s mother, then she was part yaoguai and part weather system.
Princess Iron Fan inhaled through her nose. The clouds in her eyes unfurled and shot forward.
The ground between her and us unzipped, ripped open, disemboweled itself, the flying guts of the earth marking the progress of a wind unlike any I’d ever seen. To call it a straight-line hurricane that threatened to blow us off our feet was selling it laughably short. It was a solid mass—a writhing, angry wyrm that promised to tear us apart where we stood.
I used the split-second we had left to throw my hands over my face. The Great White Planet was right; my reflexes were terrible, and I had to pray that the invulnerability of the Ruyi Jingu Bang would save me.
The impact didn’t come. I looked up to see the wind parting around an invisible sphere surrounding all of us. Guanyin. The goddess was really leaning into her just-completed barrier spell with every ounce of her might, her center of gravity far beyond her toes.
“I’m gonna need you big strong fighter types to think of something quick!” she shouted at us. “I can’t hold this forever!”
The gale outside peaked, sending giant cracks into the protective magic that spiderwebbed all around us, turning the shield opaque with damage. “Genie, get down!” Quentin yelled. He threw his arm over me and plowed his other hand into the ground.
“But what about—”
The barrier shattered. Guanyin, who had held the spell to the very end to buy us time instead of protecting herself, went flying into the air along with the shards of her magic.
“No!” I screamed. I tried to break free of Quentin’s grip and go after her, but even with the wind dying down, catching a face full of it was nearly enough to snap my neck. Quentin had to catch me again by the wrist like I’d fallen off a sheer cliff face.
I dangled sideways, helpless, until Princess Iron Fan’s attack subsided. With the air still once more, this was our chance to fight back. But instead of getting a unanimous rally from our side, I had to bear witness to one of the most disheartening sights I could have imagined.
Erlang Shen, the god who’d nearly destroyed my world and my life, had dropped to the ground and was crawling away on his hands and knees as fast as he could. He was so desperate to stay low and out of sight that he was practically huffing the earth like a pig, scraping the gravelly sand with the side of his head.
After his big to-do about his restraints, I had expected more from him. Hell, I’d expected more from Erlang Shen as an enemy in general. It felt like his cowardice reflected poorly on me, the person who’d handed him his biggest loss.
At least Guan Yu was still game. He stepped up, pointing his blade at Princess Iron Fan. I was worried he was going for a too-obvious bull rush, but his motions took on a delicacy I hadn’t expected from the burly god.
“Have a taste of your own!” he shouted.
With
a clean stroke that started from the soles of his feet and flowed all the way through his perfectly synchronized joints, Guan Yu slashed the air toward the yaoguai. A green, crescent-shaped slice of energy flew out of the guandao’s cutting edge. A laser bolt, curved sideways.
Princess Iron Fan wasn’t impressed by the mimicry of her technique. Right before she was eviscerated, she batted away the visible light with a flick of her wrist, using a cushion of air to avoid contact. The glowing slash went angling off to the side the same way Guan Yu had deflected her long-distance blades of air.
I detected a faint, mocking smile on her face. Anything you can do, I can do better.
Guan Yu didn’t quit. And he never stopped the motion of his weapon. He sent a barrage of projectiles at Princess Iron Fan, each one culminating from a different point in the smooth, almost artistic form his motions produced. The yaoguai was forced to use both hands now. She parried the attacks left and right until the ground around her had been slashed to ribbons.
A bloodcurdling war cry sounded behind me. At first I thought a sound as frenzied and hungry for battle as that could have only come from Quentin, but it was Nezha, his eyes glowing with eagerness to fight. The young god stamped his heels, and two spinning rings of fire, spoked like chariot wheels, sprouted from his ankles, elevating him into the air. He clapped his hands together, and when he pulled them apart, a long, deadly pointed spear appeared out of nowhere like a magician’s scarf. Nezha arced skyward and couched his lance at the yaoguai.
“Genie!” Quentin said. “Give me a bump!”
We’d talked about this maneuver once before. As a joke. On a lazy afternoon, not too long after we’d saved the city from Red Boy and were still drunk and infatuated on the fact that we’d gotten together, the two of us had snuck up to the school roof for a cloud-watching session. With my head in Quentin’s lap, my lips still warm from his, I’d posited that as high as he could jump on his own, he could get still more power if I gave him a boost from the ground.