Chapter 7- Red Blood on Blue Cobble Streets

The two daoists rushed up the cobblestone road like a flash flood. The monsters attacking the city were hideous things, slobbering venom, their spines coated in yet more venom, their claws carrying more venom still. Their qi was a twisted, horrible thing. Not the same as Gu, but close enough to make Tian grimace. He speared one with his rope dart, hauled the heavy thing over, and with a grunt of effort managed to saw it in half.

“Some kind of constructs made of meat. Not corpses, but that isn’t natural.” He had barely broken stride to make his investigation, but that still let Hong get yards ahead of him.

“They all look identical, of course they aren’t natural!” Hong conducted her own examination in the form of stabbing. Her red tasseled spear flickered out piercing heads and chests with clinical precision, finding exactly how much force to apply and exactly where to apply it to transform unnatural life into wholly natural death.

Tian had just enough time to see one of the monsters turn and bristle before it exploded. Venomous quills scythed across the street. Tian jumped, avoiding some and blocking more by quickly spinning his rope dart, but some still got through. The evil qi was quickly torn apart by the Hell Suppressing Art, and he could feel the venom struggling to make inroads into his refined body. Which just left disease. He could feel some disgusting sickness latching on and trying to corrupt his mortal body.

He didn’t grin. The disease was having even less success than the poison, but the blast hadn’t been aimed at him. It hadn’t been aimed at Liren either. The street had been filled with running mortals. Now it was filled with dead and dying mortals, each of whom would be a new source of illness. He shuddered to think of stray quills that lodged in rats or dogs, spreading and going undetected until far, far too late.

Thousands of these monsters. Scattered all over a large city. Even if there were hundreds of cultivators in the city, which there absolutely were not, it was already a horrific massacre. The kingdom would have to take action, which meant that the Ancient Crane Monastery would have to move some of its forces away from the battlefield, at a time when they were already desperately shorthanded.

The battle had just started, and Tian couldn’t help feeling that the heretics had already won.

Too complicated, make it simpler. He couldn’t fix every problem. He could kill the monster in front of him. Then the next. Then the next. Eventually, he would run out of monsters. He saw another monster curling up to explode. He flung out his Heavenly Swallows, the invisible darts burying themselves into what he hoped was the creature’s brain. He must have hit something useful, as the monster fell apart in a mess of meat. Pale wobbling sacs of some stinking fluid burst in sharp jets, making flesh sizzle when the droplets fell.

Tian frowned and yanked his darts back with a flex of his will. No damage, thankfully, but he wouldn’t be trying that twice. He could feel corrosive liquid on them already. He wiped them as best he could and stowed them in his storage ring. His rope dart was already spinning around his head, ready to slam into the next target.

He bit back a curse. The liquid, whatever it was, was already soaking the dart and parts of the rope. He had no good way of guessing how much damage it was doing. So far, his vital energy was flowing normally through it, but by any measure, the situation was very bad.

Tian and Hong battled towards the Temple in their usual formation- Hong leading the charge, with Tian following close behind. She breached whatever was in front of them, and Tian widened the gap. If there were a lot of enemies, they would split the group and roll them up in pieces. If not, they would happily fight one on one. Two on a literal army, though, was a bit much. Some of the quills were bouncing off Hong, but more were sticking in. What made it agonizing was that the monsters were scattered over the whole city. Even though they were killing dozens as they ran, the number was nothing compared to the horde.

The Crane sent another memory down to Tian. “They are converging! Noble district! Shift north, follow the Crane. The Temple has mobilized, and local cultivators are pitching in too.”

“Are they any use?”

“Better than the mortals.”

The two kept pushing the pace, focusing on reaching the largest concentration of targets as fast as they could.

“The guards are fortifying around some kind of local shrine, local cultivators mixed in. Hundred and fifty monsters and increasing fast.” Tian fed Hong the updates from the crane as they came in.

“Plan?”

“Punch through their line. Whatever they are trying to kill, we protect. I’ll get inside, try to figure out what it is. You mess them up outside, Crane will support.”

Hong grunted. Her spear had never stopped moving. Neither had Tian’s dart. He kept pouring as much vital energy as he could spare into it, hoping that it would help prevent corrosion. He had a growing obsession with washing it.

There were close to three hundred monsters gathered around the shrine by the time they got there. It had been bare minutes, but something was calling them over. According to the crane, they were converging from all over the city on this spot.

“Punch us through!”

Hong drew back her spear, crouching low. There was a spiraling accumulation of fiery vital energy around her, less stable than it should be, but strong. Then an explosion. The stones shattered under her feet as she ran through the monsters. Skewered, smashed, slapped to the side, the monsters were removed at speed. Tian and Hong were catching more of the quills in their skin, the poison and disease load building, but it would keep. The shield line was in sight.

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“ANCIENT CRANE MONASTERY IS HERE! WHO DARES RIOT BEFORE ME?!” Hong roared and spun back towards the monsters. Her spear was a roaring blur in the air. The monsters melted away beneath it. Hissing puddles of corrosive liquid and rotting flesh, needles stabbed into the pavements, into shields and armor, into her. All suppressed. All pressed down under the blazing yang spear of Hong Liren.