Book 2: Chapter 28: Five Minutes of Life
Sen leaned up against the wall and pressed a hand to his side. He could feel warm blood trickling between the fingers. His side wasn’t his only injury. It wasn’t even his worst injury. At least, Sen didn’t think so. It was just the one that hurt the most at that moment. He’d rolled over a table in a desperate bid to avoid an attack and rolled that open wound right over some spilled salt. For something that people sprinkle on their food, it shouldn’t hurt so damn much when it gets into cuts, thought Sen. He thought he might have a minute before something found him, so he pulled out a healing pill from his storage ring and choked it down. In truth, Sen was astounded to be alive at all.
When Boulder’s Shadow released the illusion that Sen had been walking through, the buildings didn’t change very much. They were all still there and intact. There was just a lot more blood on them. The fact that Sen hadn’t seen any bodies was something he was working very hard not to think about much. Of course, that had been made easier to ignore by the absolute horde of spirit beasts that surrounded him. He’d only recognized a handful of them. There was a demon crane perched on top of one building. He spotted a spirit goat like the one he’d fought on the mountain, only this one’s lone metal horn was nearly twice as long as the last one he’d seen. There were even spirit frogs the size of small cows, and spirit oxen that let out moos that shook the earth.
“Oxen!” Complained Sen almost without thought. “Come on! I was nice to one of your mortal cousins not that long ago.”
Complaining or not, Sen wasn’t wasting time. He was getting two cycling patterns up and running even as he prepared to hide. He almost lost the threads of all of those things when the oxen, after seeming to consult with each other, withdrew.
The other spirit beasts started to let out protesting noises at the same time Sen called out a stunned, “Thank you.”
The largest of the spirit oxen let out a moo that sounded angry and glared around at the other spirit beasts. They all seemed to decide to be looking somewhere else at that moment. The small contingent of oxen vanished around a corner. The unexpected ox retreat seemed to throw off some kind of timing that the spirit beasts had going on because none of them made an immediate move. Sen decided to fill that void and cast the whole area into darkness. It was a calculated risk. Sen assumed that absolutely every one of those beasts would send an attack his way right after he blinded everyone. So, he needed a couple of things to go right. He flared his qi to give them all something to aim at while he sent a brutal arc of lightning at the beasts off to the right. Then, he hid and dashed in the same direction he’d sent the lightning.
Everything did not go right. A tongue of flame from something caught his calf, while a wind blade from something else opened a long cut across his chest. He felt other things just barely miss him. He didn’t know what they were exactly, but he felt earth qi, ice qi, and at least three other kinds of qi that weren’t immediately familiar. A tingling intuition made him lean left, so a column of water only spun him around and cracked a couple of ribs before he dropped to the ground. It turned out that was a lucky thing because it seemed that there was at least one spider spirit beast among them that wasn’t especially bothered by the dark. Sen felt the air move above him as his fall put him underneath the arc of its leaping attack.
Foregoing anything like subtlety, Sen cycled up fire qi and sent a massive fireball at the approximate spot it landed. There was a smell like burning hair, a furious clacking of what Sen assumed were massive mandibles, and a piercing sort of hissing wail that just went on and on and on. The limited omniscience that Sen got about his surroundings from the shadow blanket told him that the spider beast wasn’t moving, which might or might not be good, depending on whether it was planning another aerial assault. Fearing that he didn’t have the luxury of time, he lurched up into a staggering run. He dodged and weaved his way between the spirit beasts that didn’t seem able to see in the dark, lashing out at legs with the spear. When he sensed the spider move again, Sen grabbed the nearest spirit beast and hurled it into the path of the flying spider. The thing he’d grabbed had felt kind of leathery, so maybe he’d luck out and the spider and lizard would kill each other. Based on the noises from behind him, it sounded like they were trying.
He hadn’t gone to the right on a whim. Of all the nearest buildings, it was the only one that had an open door. He stepped through it and, slowing as much as he dared, he’d gone through the building and out the back. Then, he’d gone into the next building through an open window, only to discover that the thing he’d thought was a wall was actually a massive rock spirit beast. It had split his side open with a sharpened something. He wasn’t sure what and didn’t really care at that point. Sen had rolled over a table that had been covered in salt, suppressed a scream by the narrowest of margins, and eluded the rock beast by covering the floor behind him with ice. It had only slowed the beast down for a few moments as it adjusted to the slippery new surface, but that had been long enough for Sen to get away into the unnatural darkness.
He crossed a street, slipped into another building, and then let the shadow technique drop. He’d been holding it stationary and had reached the limit of his ability to keep it in place. He’d designed it to move with him, thinking he’d probably use it out in the forest where it would be difficult to keep track of it from above. In a town, with no forest canopy above, and true darkness still at least an hour or two away, well, it had limited value. It could hide him, but it also gave that terrifying tide of spirit beasts a very specific area to look in. He couldn’t rely on that technique and trying to modify it under the present circumstances seemed vaguely insane to Sen. No, he’d have to rely on other skills.
His most immediate problem was that he was bleeding, which would make it very easy for the beasts to track him. He didn’t have the time he needed to staunch the bleeding properly. He racked his mind for something else he could do to obscure that scent. Two ideas came to him. One that was workable and ought to buy him some time. The other one was stupidly dangerous for him if things went wrong but would probably turn out to be a necessity. Because of course it will, he mentally complained to whatever powers might be listening. He started with the less personally dangerous option and cycled up some wind qi. If he was going to bleed, he might as well make it as confusing as possible for the spirit beasts. He gathered up the scent of his own blood with the wind qi and sent it out in every direction. Air and wind qi were more flexible by nature than shadow qi, more prone to going everywhere, which dramatically enhanced the range of that technique.
He heard startled roars and shrieks and a lot of other noises he vaguely recognized as similar to sounds he’d heard on the mountain. The good news was that the sounds were now going in every direction. Thinning out the enemies could only work to his advantage. As a group, he had no chance of defeating them. Most of them weren’t foundation formation stage, at least not that he could tell. But they didn’t need to be. If they worked as a group, they could drag him down by sheer weight of numbers. He could only switch qi types so fast, which meant he could only defend against so many things at once. That was without even considering the physical advantages that the spirit beasts had. Even if he was on their level or close to it in terms of physical strength and speed, he couldn’t fly. He didn’t have teeth or claws. He didn’t have a poisoned bite and probably a bunch of other things he wasn’t even considering. No, he needed to keep them separated out. If he only had to face a few at a time, there was a chance he could make it to the wall. If he could make it to the wall, there was a good chance he could make it over the wall. He checked his dantian and had to reassess that prediction.
He’d burned through a lot of qi just getting himself away from them long enough to confuse the issue. Sen tried to figure out how long ago that initial confrontation with the spirit beasts had been. His heart fell. By his estimation, all of his antics and burning through around half of his qi reserves had only bought him an extra five minutes of life. He leaned his head back against the wall and searched for hope or wisdom in his memories. To his surprise, he found some.
“You’re going to face overwhelming numbers,” said Uncle Kho. “It happens to every wandering cultivator sooner or later. I’m hoping it will be later for you, but it will happen. What you need to understand is that what kills most cultivators when facing overwhelming numbers isn’t the actual numbers. It’s the fact that it’s mentally overwhelming as much as it’s physically overwhelming. Your mind wants to fixate on the size of the problem instead of generating solutions. If you can survive the initial contact, though, then it’s just like any other task. Break it up into pieces. What’s the biggest threat to your survival? Deal with that first.”
“The birds,” whispered Sen. “I need to deal with the birds first.”
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