IWYTBW - Chapter 57
Chapter 57
Big Things Always Happen at Reunions
“Can you figure out a way to lure them away?” She Xin asked.
“I don’t know,” Li Youdeng admitted. “I really don’t. Not confident at all.”
“First off, we can’t get close,” She Xin stated. “The ship’s sensor grid has a minimum effective range of thirty meters. Get any closer, and we risk detection.”
Li Youdeng considered. “Okay, how about drawing the snake out of its hole? Make some noise, get one of them to come investigate…”
She Xin drawled slowly, “You’ve played too many video games. They’ll pinpoint your location, fire a capture projectile, and you’ll be paralyzed, waiting for death.”
“So, sneaking in is out. Luring them out is out… What about pretending to surrender?”
She Xin gave her a look. “Do you have any idea how pirates treat unidentified captives? Once they figure out why you’re here, they’ll shoot out your limbs with ray guns first, then haul you inside like a sack of vegetables.”
“Son of a bitch,” Li Youdeng muttered darkly. “Do they really need to be that paranoid? If they’re going to be that cautious, why not just weld themselves into iron chastity belts!”
“Forget it,” she grumbled. “Looks like in situations like this, someone just has to go for broke.”
She gripped her long wooden staff. Even Yi Zhen, upon seeing it, couldn’t identify the type of wood, only noting the grain resembled gentle, flowing clouds. Truthfully, She Xin, with his defensive capabilities, was better suited for the vanguard role, but he was agonizingly slow – he and Yi Zhen represented opposite extremes.
Li Youdeng pulled on her gloves. After a moment’s thought, she slid the golden vambraces off her arms, placing them carefully on the ground. Then, she fished three Blood Tribulus darts from her pocket and presented them to She Xin. “Yi Zhen gave me these. Know how to use them? I’ll create a diversion. You move fast, slip into their ship!”
She added emphatically, “Remember, I can’t buy you much time.”
She Xin’s lips pressed together. He took the darts and nodded grimly.
Li Youdeng exploded from their hiding spot. The tip of her staff erupted in brilliant light, a beacon piercing the bright daylight. The two Bonecrusher guards spotted her instantly. Thermal beams crisscrossed from multiple directions, weaving a deadly net of crimson energy. Anyone caught within it would be incinerated into charred ash.
Evasion was impossible. Never mind that she was primarily a spiritual counselor, a support role on any battlefield; even a seasoned combat pilot might struggle to escape such a comprehensive trap.
But she wasn’t planning on escaping.
Her staff was dark, unadorned, ancient-looking, reflecting no light. Li Youdeng raised it high above her head and performed the simplest of motions: a downward chop.
Had she been wielding an axe, the movement might have seemed fitting. Yet this bladeless wooden staff struck with the force of a legendary weapon capable of sundering mountains. Raised in silence, it descended with the unstoppable momentum of a wave cleaving the sea. It tore through the energy net decisively, carving a momentary void through the overwhelming barrage of fire!
Across the forty-meter distance, her lithe form moved with surprising agility, like a swift snow rabbit. Yet her attack was shockingly broad and powerful. She leaped high, bringing the staff crashing down.
The Bonecrusher guard snarled, raising a thick arm to block. Their hide was rhino-tough, their bones like steel – they were walking fortresses. Against such defense, a mere wooden staff should shatter; even a heavy sword might break before their bones did.
—The crack of bone was deafening, like a clap of muffled thunder. The Bonecrusher didn’t even have time to scream. The staff hadn’t struck a humanoid fortress; it had smashed into soft butter. Meeting no resistance, it drove straight through, pulverizing the two-meter-tall Bonecrusher into a flattened heap of gore!
A series of sharp cracks echoed from Li Youdeng’s own bones. She spun instantly, launching the staff from her hand. It flew like a sea dragon bursting from the waves, impaling the second Bonecrusher through the chest, slamming him against a thick tree trunk and shattering both into pieces.
In the blink of an eye, two murderous, battle-hardened pirates lay broken like paper dolls, effortlessly crushed.
Li Youdeng gasped for breath. In those few short moments, a dense network of livid blue and purple capillaries had bloomed across her exposed skin, like frost spreading across thin ice. She looked simultaneously frozen and incandescent, as if a kettle boiled furiously within her, the steam threatening to rupture her skin and erupt like lava along with her blood.
She staggered forward, the few dozen meters transforming into an agonizing trek. Each step seemed to worsen the internal damage ravaging her body. Finally, she reached the golden vambraces lying on the ground. She snatched them up, slowly, painstakingly forcing them back onto her arms.
They worked. The simple, yet alluring, bands acted like a potent ward, swiftly forcing the terrifying symptoms back beneath her skin. The frost patterns receded; the violent bruising faded from view. Li Youdeng dragged in a breath, then exhaled shakily. Her eyes and lips remained unnervingly blood-red, lending her the terrifying visage of a Rakshasa demoness. It would clearly take time for her appearance to fully return to normal.
“Two minutes… twenty-three seconds…” Li Youdeng sighed wearily. “Progress, I suppose.”
She walked slowly towards the gruesome remains and retrieved her staff. Everyone, Yi Zhen included, assumed it was merely an amplifier for her mental abilities. But enhancing her spirit was only a secondary function. Its true power lay in its astonishing weight – a metric ton, to put it simply.
She flicked the gore from the staff, then frowned.
Why hasn’t She Xin moved yet?
*
Having finally bypassed the ships’ control room security, She Xin found himself facing four Bonecrushers aiming incinerator cannons directly at him. His expression remained placid, but his mind was utterly blank. Fuck.
He and Li Youdeng hadn’t been wrong about seeing guards, but their assumption had been flawed. This was likely a twenty-member search party: sixteen deployed, two guarding the exterior… and four guarding the interior. She Xin possessed no life-sign detection gear, and his mental power couldn’t pierce the control room’s shielding. He was, quite simply, screwed.
More crucially, he couldn’t activate his Heavenly Retribution System.
The Starlight Disrupter device, nicknamed the ‘Star Ring’ was a colossal construct employed by the Golden Hind for planetary-scale plunder. Pirates of their caliber had long graduated from petty starship hijacking; their ambitions encompassed entire worlds.
Since the pirates had incorporated the Bonecrushers as a primary attacking force, the Star Ring’s interference field had been upgraded to specifically block Desnian brainwave transmissions. This was how She Xin knew with certainty that the invaders were the Golden Hind – his desperate calls to his homeworld simply vanished, absorbed into the jamming field as if lost in another dimension.
His earlier bravado to Li Youdeng – claiming he’d call down Heavenly Retribution if discovered – had been a lie, offered solely for her peace of mind. Unable to contact his people, how could he possibly unleash such power? Reassuring his friend, fulfilling that duty, was all he could do.
The targeting lasers of the incinerator cannons converged on the space between his eyebrows. The Bonecrushers’ small eyes widened, their dark red pupils burning with bloodlust and predatory glee.
“Desnian… a Desnian brat?” one hissed, his voice rasping.
“NO!”
A Blood Tribulus dart shot from She Xin’s hand as he spun and bolted! The dart, shaped like an ethereal blue lotus petal, disintegrated mid-air, spraying razor-sharp fragments in a fan towards the four pirates. Three instinctively batted them away. The fourth didn’t react quickly enough – or perhaps, simply didn’t bother. With the Star Ring active, any small projectiles still functional relied on primitive mechanics or manual force. Compared to potent thermal weaponry, the pinpricks they inflicted seemed laughably insignificant, like mosquito bites.
A fragment nicked the Bonecrusher near the eye, drawing a thin line of dark, viscous blood. He merely let out a savage laugh, echoed by the mocking bellows of his comrades.
They possessed evolved intelligence, their own civilization, but it was an intelligence born of slaughter, a civilization built on the hunt. Even the destruction of their homeworld, a consequence of their kin’s recklessness in provoking the mighty Desna Star System, hadn’t prompted introspection. Scars were badges of honor for warriors like them; such a minor scratch wasn’t even worth acknowledging, let alone treating!
But the blood rapidly shifted to an unnatural, dark blue… and his laughter died abruptly.
Where the fragment had struck, a tiny, perfect ice crystal bloomed at the corner of his eye. It spread rapidly along the wound, forming a chain of glittering frost.
A faint creak emanated from his eyeball, the sound of something freezing solid, then shattering. His companions watched in stunned silence as he pitched forward, crashing heavily to the deck. He didn’t move again.
He was dead.
The remaining three whirled, roaring furiously, and charged after the fleeing She Xin. Thankfully, a shred of tactical sense remained; they refrained from firing their wide-area incinerator cannons within the ship’s narrow confines.
She Xin screamed, “AAAAAH!”
The Bonecrushers roared back, “AAAAAH!”
The instant She Xin slammed through the outer hatch, a streak of deadly light shot past him, striking down from above!
Yi Zhen materialized from swirling black mist, a whirlwind of contained fury within the corridor. A single hand-chop severed the lead Bonecrusher’s throat. Yi Zhen used the falling corpse as a shield, jamming the muzzle of its own cannon, then struck again, and again. His arm became a god-slaying spear, punching through sternum and heart, piercing the remaining two in rapid succession!
Death descended from nowhere. The feared Assassins of ancient Earth, legendary masters of the unseen kill, could scarcely have been more terrifyingly efficient.
“Yi Zhen!” She Xin gasped, heart pounding, relief washing over him. “You’re here!”
Yi Zhen stood amidst the carnage, offering She Xin a smile. She Xin froze. He sensed it instantly – behind the smile, something else lingered, something not entirely congruent with the simple joy of a friend’s reunion.
“Are you hurt?” Yi Zhen asked, his tone casual. “Saw the commotion over here, decided to check it out… Didn’t expect to actually find you.”
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