Chapter 13 #3
Alex swallowed the lump in his throat, trembling hands stilling as he placed them upon the spurting wounds and strove to embrace the very techniques that desperation had allowed him to forge after a caravan’s defenders had fallen to gut wounds so very like this one.
Vicious, debilitating wounds promising a slow, lingering death that Dongfang Hong’s troops seemed to specialize in, sadism and cowing their foes ingrained into every facet of their being as soldiers.
“I tried, Alex. I promise you. I just… They were Bronze and I’m a basic and I—Heaven’s mercy, what are you doing?”
“I’m cleaning your entrails with pristine water and packing them back inside. Please shut up, Li Li. I’ve only done this twice before, and I like batting a thousand.”
“What are you talking—”
Her words cut off in a guttural scream when Alex calmly dripped four ruby drops onto the wound from a precious vial he had ironically claimed from the very enemies so devoted to slaughter, at which point Li Li began to tremble and froth at the mouth.
And just seconds later, after she choked back gut-curdling screams, it was over.
“You bastard!” Li Li sobbed even as her eyes teared with gratitude and relief. “That hurt!”
Alex nodded sympathetically. “I know. Please hold out your tongue, Li Li.”
“Oh no, not again.”
“I mean, if you want to internally bleed out and enjoy a slow, lingering death after coming so close to a full…”
“All right, fine!”
The other girls looked on with wide-eyed awe as Li Li shivered and allowed Alex to place a single drop from his vial onto her tongue.
“Did you see the way he cut those men down? He was a… I don’t know! For a second, I thought we were all going to be swept away by a spring flood.”
“We haven’t had rain in three years!”
“I know. But he definitely moved like a force of nature.”
But Alex refused to be comforted or embarrassed by those words. Feeling only shame. Not for the one he had been able to save, but for the two mortal girls who had already perished. Girls who had been unarmed and defenseless. Cut down as if their hopes, dreams, and lives meant absolutely nothing.
Cut down by sadists who would gleefully claim this city and all the desert lands.
Alex felt a towering fury building up within him, clenched fists upon the hilt of his fangtian ji now crackling with currents that had the survivors nearby whimpering and flinching away as Alex strode to the far gate.
The gate that he, like an absolute fool, hadn’t sealed as tightly as if death were coming for them all.
And two innocent souls had paid the price for the madness of bloodthirsty soldiers and one unforgivably stupid fool.
“It’s not your fault.”
Nili’s voice, so different from her bitter accusations of minutes before.
“The hell it’s not. I could have done better. I SHOULD have done better!”
“You cleared out a full platoon of Dongfang Hong’s Bronze elites.
I saw the bodies, Alex. No one who isn’t a Deep Silver should be capable of that.
Not without backup. Certainly not a lost fool who is as much a clueless child who barely looks older than my clueless daughter as he is any sort of divinity.
A boy who doesn’t even know where his soul will blow off to, in the endless sands of time between one life and the next. ”
“And none of that matters, Nili. I should have sealed the door. I should have cleansed the far passage of any trace of threat before taking out the nest!”
Nili sighed. “And by the time you were done, the soldiers making a barracks of a JiangHu safehouse, MY safehouse, would have discovered the freed girls, cut down my cub, and probably me as well. So don’t you dare blame yourself, Alex.
You’re no wujen. Not this time around. There wasn’t that much you could do to seal a door against a Bronze soldier’s strength, or the enchanted cutting blades he might or might not have on him.
Not without being there to cut them down yourself.
Which you did. To the best of your insanely gifted ability. ”
Alex glared at the dark passageway from which the soldiers had emerged, readying himself for what was to come.
“I’m cleaning out this nest, Nili. And I won’t stop. Not until it’s done.”
Nili wasted only a moment cursing stubborn fools under her breath.
“Very well, Alex. You do that. I will lead the girls to safety via routes that not even these monsters have uncovered. Certainly not the bastard of a goat I had once trusted with my sanctuary, willing to sell out Wanshi’s children for his own advancement.
And then we will have to return to make sure that no traitor remains to give the game away and doom us all. ”
Alex gave a curt nod, trusting the former JiangHu head to do her part.
He knew there were countless strategies they should be going over, contingencies they should be planning for. But not now. Not when seventy innocent souls, some clearly broken, many others still believing in dreams of love and happy endings, could hear them.
Not when the dying screams of innocent victims were howling so furiously through his soul in a cacophony that could only be silenced with the death of his enemies.
So he ignored the whispers and murmurs at his back as he entered the ancient tunnel and readied himself for what was to come.