by Pegaz
He let go of Chris and carried on running. With the slightest hesitation, Chris ran after his father. His eyes darted to where his father’s right arm should have been and saw instead that it was a bloody mess. Fear bubbled up in his chest, causing him to run faster.
John was surprised that Anthony and Chris chose to flee, but with Sarah in his arms, he couldn’t give chase.
Gritting his teeth as he looked down at the unconscious Sarah, he put his hand over Sarah’s right ear. He pulled her head against his chest, being sure that her other ear was covered; then, he pushed Toxin Power into his throat, lifted his head up into the sky, and screamed from the top of his lungs.
“I WILL KILL YOU! I SWEAR IT!”
John’s voice caused vibrations in the surrounding few hundred feet. His voice even caused the ground surrounding him to have spider web cracks. In the distance, a swarm of birds were startled and cried into the sky as they flew away.
Returning his threads, John looked around and found a tall, thick bush. Placing Sarah on the ground, he put the chest with the built-in contraption inside the bush. He then placed the stone teleport rune to his master’s private planet inside it. Filling the chest with the deadliest poison he could generate without causing the materials to melt, he then picked up Sarah and teleported to his master’s planet.
Before long, Sarah was tucked into her bed within a cultivation cave underground.
Hopefully, she will wake up soon. If she hasn’t woken in three days, I’ll need to take her to somebody with some medical knowledge. With the skills she has, her organs, skin, and bones should heal almost instantly… I need to get the puppets down here to guard her, too.
John decided to go back to the Sword Sect in the meantime. He needed to find and kill the spies that sold him out. Regardless of who they were or what position they held, they were going to perish.
He wrote a note for Sarah. In the text, he instructed her to not use the teleport rune until he returned. While he didn’t know for sure that she would wake up while he was gone, he didn’t want to take the chance of her teleporting inside his Storage Space that couldn’t keep living things inside alive. He kissed her forehead and then left the cultivation cave for the teleport rune.
On the other side, he picked up the stone teleport rune and the chest and placed them inside his Storage Space. Finally, John flew towards the Rogue sect’s teleport room to get back to the Sword Sect.
Chapter 53
Spies
It took John less than an hour to return to the Sword Sect’s public planet and another hour to teleport to the Sword Sect’s base planet. When he finally arrived at their house, he used his stone teleport rune to his master’s private planet. When he arrived, Sarah was still unconscious. John picked her up and brought her back to their house.
Carrying Sarah through the sword section, he walked inside the first medical building he encountered. Almost immediately, an old woman told John to put Sarah on a bed inside and then proceeded to examine her. John explained what happened as best as he could.
“So, lightning hit her forehead,” she mused. “I’m sorry to say this, but I’m surprised she’s even breathing right now. I don’t know if we can call her lucky or unlucky. Your wife did not die from the wound, but she has slipped into a coma.”
John felt a hitch in his breath.
“We do not have enough resources to keep people who are in comas alive,” she explained. “Even if we did, it would only get more expensive as time went on. In my 820 years of medical practice, I’ve seen nobody come out of any kind of coma. I’m sorry, but you need to prepare yourself for when she passes.”
John grew angry at the old woman but didn’t act out. Instead, he picked Sarah up and brought her back home, ignoring the old woman’s plea to leave her there to die peacefully.
She doesn’t know we’re Siders. If we weren’t, then maybe I would have no choice but to listen to her.
Arriving at his house, he ordered his fighter puppet to pick up Sarah’s fighter puppet and to follow him. They went back through the stone teleport rune to his master’s private planet. Once he was back in the cultivation cave, he placed Sarah back into bed and ordered the puppets to guard her. Then, he sat down on a chair to think.
The nano armour should have protected her from the lightning, so what caused her to slip into a coma?
After ten minutes of thinking, John lifted his head in realisation. The brain produced electrical signals that communicated information to the body. Perhaps the lightning messed with these signals, causing her to fall into the coma. Would the system even recognise that the signals were malfunctioning? Could it heal on its own? There were too many unanswered but important questions.
First, I need to make sure Sarah can survive long enough... Because of the absorption skill I’ve shared with her, she doesn’t have to drink and can survive months without food.
But to John’s dismay, there was no skill to stop her from starving to death. They didn’t have the medical knowledge of Earth, and John could do no better. All he could do was strive towards rank 4 and hope a new skill to wake her up gets created. If he did that, though, he would have no way to keep her from starving to death as it would take over five years for the final level to finish and get rank 4.
He spent another hour trying to think of any other solution but couldn’t.
No other choice! I need to kill to gather sins and transfer them for time. I know the perfect targets and their location!
John concluded this was the only way to save Sarah. Even someone with almost a millennium’s worth of medical practice had no way of helping her. All he wanted was a peaceful life with Sarah, but now he needed to kill enough people to get over five years worth of time from sins. Five years of time with the 100:1 transfer rate was over fourteen billion sins!
John was ready to kill to save his wife, but there was one thing he needed to do first.
Fred and Frank were alone in the hall talking, Alisha nowhere in sight. That was when John walked in uninvited. Without even greeting the two men, John began to explain the events that had come to pass. After he told them about Sarah being in a coma, John made his demands.
“I want the spies inside the Sword Sect belonging to the Anti-Assassin group,” John said without pausing. “I know you know who they are.”
“Why would they want to kill you?” Fred knitted his brows. “They shouldn’t know about you being a Rogue sect member in the past.”
“Because of my wife’s past!” John snapped, his speech growing heated. “Chris Han was here watching the tournament! It was him who tried to use her as a cauldron! It was him and his father that attacked us! Your tournament exposed us to him!”
With that, all of the pent-up frustration in John came to surface.
“The tournament that you invited me and my wife to take part in to use us for your benefit!” he spat with rage. “You invited our enemies to watch us. You asked us to kill the gryphon! You let the Anti-Assassin spies set us up! I’m not massacring both of you right now because you didn’t know about Sarah’s past, and that’s the only reason! And if I find out that you DID know, well, then I don’t care how nice you were to us in the past; I’ll do everything I can to destroy the whole Sword Sect!”
Fred and Frank’s faces both paled.
“I’ve already got the Rogue sect and the Anti-Assassin sect hunting me,” John continued with a growl. “So I don’t care if another sect queues up to get annihilated at this point! And I can already guess why you left the spies alive. It was to feed false information or to get information out of them, right? How did that work out for you? Get anything useful in return for my wife’s life?!”
“John,” Frank tried to interject but was overpowered.
“I’m guessing not, from the expressions on your faces.” John’s rage could not be quelled. “So cut the bullshit and let me handle this!”
Both men had their mouths open, shocked at John’s outburst.
“You’re r
ight.” Frank was the first one to break the silence. “It hasn’t worked so far. We haven’t gotten any information. But that doesn’t mean it won’t.”
“Fine, I’ll compromise!” John grit his teeth. “I only want the person who sold us out! You can make the other spies watch to teach them a lesson. Maybe they’ll feel threatened enough to drop more information.”
“We’ve known about the spies for decades.” Fred sighed. “We’ve received a few pieces of information out of them before... But I think they’ve gotten smarter, or maybe they’ve found a new source of information. I’ll order somebody to round them up and bring them here. You can kill the person who set you up as a warning to the others.”
Everyone’s eyes were focused on Fred, who clenched his fist and took a bow.
“My son and I are sorry for what happened,” Fred said in all sincerity. “But please believe me when I say it is all a coincidence. We want you to be loyal to the Sword Sect. This incident would ruin any chance of that happening.”
Less than an hour later, a grand elder walked in with nine people chained together. John looked them over and counted two of them wearing the robes of an elder. The other seven people were disciples. Among them were four Outer, two Inner, and a single elite disciple.
John searched through all of their faces. Most of them were hanging their heads down, depressed at being captured. There was only one who had his head raised.
That person was staring at John, stunned. Noticing his facial expression, John smiled under his mask.
“So it was you,” he said quietly. “Never thought we would return and demand your head, right?”
In the heavy silence that followed, John approached the man. With no show of hesitation, John stabbed the man in the neck with his black nails, pushing a special poison inside of the man. The man immediately lost his voice, but everybody could tell he was screaming in agonising pain. With a blank expression, John just stood there, watching.
What surprised everybody there though, was that John left without killing him.
“Where are you going?” Fred shouted after him.
“To gather something that might save my wife,” John replied and left the meeting hall.
He reverted his mask back to its earring form, his actual face on full display. His new clothing changed to his silver armour and he walked to the teleport system.
A few minutes later, the other eight people they chained together dropped onto the floor, unable to move in the slightest.
John had used his threads to insert poison into their nervous system without anybody noticing. The poison would cause them to become like patients with locked-in syndrome. They would die of thirst and hunger because nobody would know that they were alive. Or, if the sect disposed of their bodies before that happened, then they would be buried or burned alive.
Chapter 54
Revenge
Two months later, John finally arrived on the Anti-Assassin planet. The route he took was one of the ones that Sarah had shown him, and it did the job easily enough. As soon as John arrived on the planet, he generated two tiny round balls from two hundred units of Toxin Power for his Explosion attack. He placed one on the rune beneath him, as well as on the rune beside that one.
As he continued to travel through the building, he continued to place similar traps. In total, there were six runes. No one would be able to leave the planet when they’re destroyed.
When all traps were armed, John teleported away a few hundred feet onto a street. Taking a deep breath, he clicked his fingers and activated the explosions. Six blue fire pillars rose into the sky from each direction, mayhem breaking out almost instantly. Among the screaming and running people, John enjoyed the show for a few minutes before teleporting away.
At a different part of the scrambling city, John observed with his Life Vision and Immortal Eye. The results shocked him.
???
Rank: 4
Level: 2
Sin: 403,204
???
Rank: 3
Level: 9
Sin: 280,492
???
Rank: 5
Level: 2
Sin: 1,294,498
The list went on. All the people around him had alarmingly high sins. John twisted his mouth into an expression of disgust. The Anti-Assassin group must have had hired the scums of the universe. They made the Assassin group look like good guys in comparison. He didn’t understand how the Anti-Assassins could act high and mighty when they were a sect full of criminals. They had no right to preach about “the value of all life.”
John kept searching the city but didn’t find who he was looking for. Determined, he opened the world map in the system. The city he was in now was over five hundred miles away from the capital. That distance wouldn’t take too long to fly, so he created a sword as a decoy and took off.
As he flew towards the capital, he made his earrings change into a mask then changed the mask and robes to have the Anti-Assassin sect’s colours. It was probably best to be discreet about his identity; he wanted to blend in with the crowd.
As a stray thought, John wondered why the Adventure Guild would have a world map of a private planet like the Anti-Assassins headquarters. Perhaps in their map collection was a map of his master’s private planet, too. He would have to go back and check later.
An hour passed, and John arrived at the capital city. He scanned the whole place with Life Vision and Immortal Eye.
Chris Han
Rank: 6
Level: 2
Sin: 1,982,284
Anthony Han
Rank: 8
Level: 7
Sin: 24,294,946
Jason Hendrix
Rank: 9
Level: 5
Sin: 42,983.593
Found them. Jason Hendrix, that’s the name of the person Anthony mentioned. This was Sarah’s master back when she was in the Anti-Assassins.
It scared the Han family to do anything to Sarah behind Jason’s back, and now I know why. He’s higher ranked and, according to the sin levels, much more sinister. I’m an atheist, but I thank God Sarah left their cruel hands before anything happened.
All these people need to die regardless. But Chris Han, I want to kill by my own hands. I even have a plan that will punish him to my satisfaction.
John’s mask was sheltering his Life Power from anybody’s senses. He was currently flying miles in the air, watching Chris Han like a hawk. He was waiting for him to be alone.
It wasn’t until three days later that Chris took out a sword and flew out in the direction of the city that John had come from. There were no teleport runes between the two cities, to John’s advantage. Egging to sate his desire for revenge, John increased his speed and overtook Chris. He waited for him mid-air between the two cities.
While he waited for Chris to come to him, he took out both the nano long sword and short sword. With his Scan skill he found a small cave underground, so he altered his plan to use the cave. As Chris was flying closer, John held his breath and got ready.
When Chris flew into range, John teleported and swung the long sword down, causing Chris to travel directly into the swords path. It was too late for him to react in any way.
The longsword slashed through Chris’ neck and beheaded him.
John quickly stored the nano swords in his Storage Space, then grabbed Chris’ head and body before they fell to the ground. He immediately teleported into the cave, taking the fresh corpse along with him. Inside the cave, John took out the stone teleport rune to his master’s private planet and teleported with Chris’ head and body in his arms.
When he arrived on the planet, he was inside his master’s old house. He then teleported a few times to arrive inside his own room at the cultivation caves underground. On his way down, he used the telepathic communication to his fighter puppet with the order to destroy itself.
‘Ding!’
Your fighter puppet has been destroyed.
John ignore
d the message and quickly used the Create Fighter skill on Chris’ body. The body turned black; the dark substance stretched out to cover Chris’ head, and the head got dragged towards the body, becoming whole again. After it became whole again, the body convulsed.
John cracked a smile at the convulsing corpse. His plan had worked. He needed to wait about six days for the fighter puppet to be complete, and then he could put his plan to destroy the Anti-Assassin sect into action.
With the body still convulsing, John left his cultivation room and entered Sarah’s chambers. He walked past Sarah’s puppet which was standing guard near the door and stopped alongside the bed.
Sarah was still in a coma. John could hear her breathing, which gave him some relief. He sat down on the bed and removed her mask, placing it aside. A soft gaze now in his eyes, John lowered his head and gave her a gentle kiss on her lips. Resting his forehead on hers, he thought about the situation at hand.
In the past, you told me about the people who thought me and Lisa were the modern “Beauty and the Beast” with a “Romeo and Juliet” ending. Yet, here you are, the “Sleeping Beauty” of legends. If only a kiss could wake you up, I would kiss you for eternity. But I’m no prince charming, and if you ever found out that I called you a princess, you’d beat the shit out of me.
When the new puppet is complete, I will do something you might not agree with to save your life. Please forgive me in advance but I have no qualms towards what needs to be done.
For the next six days, John accompanied Sarah. He talked to her about anything he could think of, trying to pass the time. He just wanted her to know that she wasn’t alone, even if she was unconscious. On the seventh day, early in the morning, John noticed through his Scan skill that Chris’ body had stood up.
Come here.
With his Scan, John watched the new fighter puppet walk out of his room and into Sarah’s room. It stood a mere five feet away from John. The puppet had completely healed its neck, leaving no scars at all. If John didn’t do it himself, he would not have believed it had been decapitated.