Chapter [B5] 28 — Fallen Divinity

Chapter [B5] 28 — Fallen Divinity

The Black Tortoise pushed through the infantry like a grinding wheel, relentless and unstoppable. Its relatively low speed was our only saving grace, otherwise we’d have lost more ground than one formation’s stability.

Demons were still pouring up out of the rifts, still falling in droves but steadily gaining ground. Every defender was another hole that couldn’t be replaced.

Warriors scattered to get out of the way as the turtle stomped its way forward, screaming warnings and firing uselessly against its impervious shell.

“Focus on the Tortoise!” I shouted, already running across the sky.

If it reached the packed formations behind the pike wall, the casualties would multiply in a breath.

I dropped, angled my domain so I didn’t crush anyone under my descent, and hit the ground in front of the beast hard enough to send dust straight up. The dirt under my boots settled in a flat circle as I spread my stance and pushed back.

The Black Tortoise’s head thrust forward. The lower jaw was the sharp front edge of an armored plate. The shell’s rim churned the air and pressed it into a wide band that flattened bodies and lifted shields from hands.

I forced that band to split around me and poured Qi into the ground to thicken the soil, stop the rolling surge, and keep the beast from advancing. If it rolled, it would crush a corridor through the troops before any of us could pull them out.

I did not give it that option. My domain set friction, weight, and the angle of force. The Black Tortoise’s push lost efficiency and settled into a slow grind rather than a flood. That gave our forward lines enough space to breathe.

Yin’s crews adjusted angle and timing. A new set detonated near the forelimb joints, but the force spread along the plates and slipped off without opening a purchase. Xuanwu’s body, its shell… It was too sturdy and reliable, worthy of being a Tortoise. That reliability worked against us now. The bombs did little more than mark soot where they had kissed the edges.

Sheldon and Ash leapt at it. Ash went straight for the shell seam out of habit. His claws dug for a gap that wasn’t there; the plates had tightened to eliminate leverage. He growled, winds swirling as he tried to wedge a current under a rim and pry it up. The shell shifted, accepted the pressure, and closed tighter.

Sheldon held position just outside of the forelimbs’ range and sent waves of Chi straight at the head. The first wave was broad and flat, the kind that unsettled senses and made targets misjudge distance. The Black Tortoise did not blink. The second wave was tight and fast, a hammer that struck the snout and drove it a fraction upward. A third followed the second on the tail of the same rhythm, catching it before the return and lifting another fraction. Small wins—but enough to change the angle and expose the mouth more clearly.

Liuxiang unleashed her poison Chi towards the beast’s mouth. She had a bell-mouth tube already sealed to keep the mixture stable. Sheldon snapped his fingers without looking, and the air between his hands became a short tunnel that led from the tube to the target. The first draft blew straight down the throat.

The Black Tortoise gagged, coughed, and stumbled in a way most people couldn’t afford to in the middle of a war. I saw the signs: the blink rate changed; the foreclaws dug into the ground with less precision… It wasn’t down, but the reaction told me the mixture had reached the membranes.

Before we could insert purification pills into it, the Azure Dragon streaked across the field with a high shriek. The air ahead of it sharpened, then snapped with a dry crack.

Liuxiang pivoted on instinct, but not fast enough. The blast cut a neat, long gouge across her side and tore flesh away; she staggered, one hand gripping the tube to keep from spilling. Her breath hitched once, and I felt the flare of her cultivation locking her bleeding. The wound smoked around the edges where dragon fire had rimmed it.

Her side had half its flesh blasted away. Luckily not her head, so she could still think and try to heal herself with her cultivation, but the sight made my heart skip. A medic sprinted toward her with gauze soaked in a neutralizing wash. Liuxiang pushed the tube into his hands and snapped at him to keep the seal on while she worked. Even half doubled over, she reached for a pill from her sash, crushed it between her molars, and forced the powder under her tongue to accelerate clotting.

Many more soldiers were pulverized. The Azure Dragon’s first sweep had been a test; the second wasn’t. It lined its path across the densest cluster of pikes and released a curtain of force that inverted shields and fractured the first ranks at knee height. The tops of the pike shafts jarred up into faces; men went down hard. Zhang had told the officers to keep formation spacing generous because of exactly this worry—that if there were clustered sections, then breaking just one section would allow fear to cascade fast.

The ranks held, but the cost was blood.

I turned toward the Azure Dragon with a feral snarl, about to take it down when Zhang grasped the dragon and shouted, “Brother, focus!”

He was right. I couldn’t let anger take over. I breathed once, tight but complete, and forced the heat back into a channel I could use. I pivoted back to the task in front of me. Grabbing the pills, I stuffed them into the Black Tortoise’s mouth.

The first handful were the standard white purification pills that triggered on high miasma concentration. I flattened them with Qi, slid them between his teeth during a cough, and guided them past the tongue. They dissolved faster in the mucus there and released threads that climbed toward the sinuses and down along the esophagus.

The Black Tortoise tried to clamp his jaw. I set a wedge of pressure at the hinge and kept the gap open a finger width more than he wanted. My Chi traveled with the pills, mapping blockages and pools.

The miasma volumes in Xuanwu felt like static regions with no proper exchange, the way he’d become under the Demon God’s control. I pushed into those regions and opened narrow paths toward the mouth and nose where my seals could catch the discharge.

As it resisted, I snatched a few more bombs already lit and stuffed them into the beast’s mouth, making it roar in pain as explosions tore its neck and opened space for more pills. I didn’t toss them deep; I set them to burst in the back of the mouth where the cartilage met the edge of the shell’s throat guard. The aim was not to destroy tissue; it was to break the rings of constriction the miasma had set up so we could reach the deeper channels. The blasts were tuned for tearing ligaments, not shattering bone. The shell transmitted the force along its inner ribs and away from the skull. To humans the sound would have been a flat crack; to my senses, the specific structures we wanted loosened. The gaps opened, and I rolled more pills into those spaces before the tissues could tighten again.

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Even through the chaos, I wondered how history would see this event. Barbaric, perhaps, blowing apart a Divine Beast’s cords into bits. No matter. It was necessary. I used my Chi not only to expel the miasma but also to contact Xuanwu’s spirit.

Reaching for him was not like reaching into a stranger. I knew the texture of his presence from months of dealing with him. Slow to move when he didn’t need to move, exact when he decided, steady even in pressure. The miasma inside him stirred at my presence, as if it recognized doors opening and wanted to block them. I opened them anyway and put weight behind them.

Xuanwu’s spirit, even as it was about to fall into slumber, recognized having been with me so long and followed my command to turn human. The shift started in the joints. The plates flexed, softened, and slid across one another. The limbs reoriented for a gait on two legs rather than four. I held the neck steady so he wouldn’t thrash and break men’s ribs when the spine shortened.

The conversion left him gasping, hands on his knees, blood and spit stringing from his lips as the last of the shell plates retracted. Even in that shape, his veins were dark along the edges, threads of black standing out under the skin. I pressed my palm to the center of his chest and pushed again, broad and even. Granny Lang slid to my side and fed pills into my free hand without comment. Sheldon knelt at Xuanwu’s back and set an anchoring paw between the shoulder blades to steady the purge paths I’d opened. Liuxiang, pale but upright, pushed a damp cloth against Xuanwu’s neck where the earlier charge had burst tissue; her other hand steadied the jaw.

The Black Tortoise let out a groan before collapsing. I caught his shoulder and lowered him to the ground so his head wouldn’t strike a rock. Medics hauled a litter close. We laid him on his side so he could breathe easier. Seeing him breathe without miasma filling his body loosened something in my own chest.

I turned to the Azure Dragon, which Zhang had dragged into the sky, and launched myself after it.

He had the dragon in a spiral that alternated between narrow and wide turns to keep it from aligning a clean line of attack. His gravity Chi pinned the dragon’s center of mass just off true and forced it to fight its own angle every time it tried to stabilize. It was textbook Zhang: constraint with just enough slack to invite the target to overcorrect, then punish the correction.

I reached altitude and cut across the dragon’s mouth just as it drew breath for a deep burn. My Third Law—Resonance of Chi—worked best when the target produced a rhythm I could latch on to. The Azure Dragon’s fighting style had always been rhythmic. I bent my listening toward its breath and the coil of muscle along the spine. Once I had the base pattern, I imposed dissonance.

The flame buildup stuttered, then collapsed inward with a cough that threw the dragon’s head to the side.

I sent a wedge of Chi between the teeth and kicked in behind it. A few pills followed my kick, flattened to slip past the tongue and stick against the palate where absorption was faster. The dragon bucked. Zhang hauled on its neck with pressure rather than hands, and the arc of the buck slowed for a count and a half.

Good enough. I shoved another set of pills deeper.

The dragon rolled and tried to slip out of Zhang’s grip by spearing straight up. He matched the rise, shifted the gravitational vector sideways, and swung its head down like a weight at the end of a rope. It hit the air it had just heated and hissed as the heat licked its own muzzle. I rode the swing, landed on the back of the skull, and drove my fist into the ridge where the jaw muscles anchored.

The impact sent a shock through my elbow. The dragon’s mouth opened full in reflex. I dumped three more pills into the throat and followed them with a short burst tuned to pop the miasma pockets just ahead of them.

Each pocket burst left a dark smoke that tried to reverse flow back into the tissue. I slapped seals above the openings to force the flow out through the mouth and nostrils.

Zhang gripped its neck, using his gravity Chi to wrangle it, and I hammered it until it calmed. The Azure Dragon’s eyes had been glassy and focused on orders a moment before; now they blinked unevenly as the purifiers took hold. I kept the Third Law on the edge of its breath, interrupting heat before it could organize. The dragon coughed, gagged, and flexed its whole body in a series of throws that would have torn a lesser creature in half. Zhang’s grip tightened.

We brought it down in a controlled fall, Zhang using his gravity Chi masterfully. It struck the ground with a double thud—chest, then flank—and rolled once before Zhang’s domain locked it still. I slid off the skull, landed at the jawline, and set my palm on the warm scales. The miasma had pooled under the scales along the throat where heat liked to gather. I pressed, spread my Chi under the plates, and pushed again. Pills released in sequence, each bead finding its target. The Azure Dragon’s body loosened in stages. First the pouch under the tongue softened. Then the muscles along the neck relaxed. Then the breath slowed.

It collapsed to the ground and turned human.

I caught the shoulders and eased the body onto a blanket someone shoved under my knees. The face that looked up at me was familiar, streaked with soot and sweat, the eyes clearer every breath. I set a seal on the sternum and one on the navel to keep the purge flowing out rather than settling. The Azure Dragon coughed again and managed a single word that was more breath than voice. “Thank—you—”

“You’re welcome,” I mumbled, even as I looked back at the White Tiger. Now that the immediate threat was handled, we had to take care of the last Divine Beast.

I leapt to its nearly decaying body. The earlier purification had taken the edge off but hadn’t finished. The miasma had retreated to deeper pockets in the spine and jaw where the earlier leaf-talisman cuts had not reached. The smell near the wounds was wrong: almost like it was beginning to rot. I set my hand under the jaw and reached for the first pocket. It resisted like a knot in a rope that had been pulled tight and dried. I narrowed my Chi to a thread and pushed through the center of that knot. It loosened. Black lines crawled under the skin toward my seal. I opened the seal a finger wider and caught the flow in a catch-basin shaped out of Chi.

Liuxiang hovered a pace away, silently watching the perimeter. When I needed another set of pills, she already had them in her hand. I pressed the last bead into a puncture wound near the collarbone, felt it slide along the tissue, and release the final wash. The miasma under my palm slackened, then lost cohesion altogether.

Reaching in, I expelled the miasma and let it convert to human as well. The White Tiger’s human form came in a jerkier change than the others, the body reluctant to release the structure it could still use for fighting.

When the last plates retracted, I lowered the body to the ground and checked the airway, then the pulse. Both were present, weak but steady. The skin under my hand had the temperature of a fever, but it was stable rather than climbing.

“Take care of them,” I said, looking at Zhang.

He nodded without words, already shifting his domain to cradle the three unconscious forms separately so no one tripped and fell into them. He gestured to the medics with two fingers, and they moved in with litters. The battle noises widened again in my ears as focus loosened: the rhythm of drums, the hiss of alchemical mixes burning where they should, the crack of ruptured plates where they shouldn’t, the shouted counts that held lines steady.

I stepped back and rolled my shoulders once to keep the tension from locking my breath, then turned toward the next task I had to handle.

The Tree of Life was already struggling. The glow along the inner bark had shifted from steady to irregular, like a heartbeat forced into a rhythm it did not choose. Each pulse drove a stain deeper into the root lattice that held the Demon God suspended. Smaller feeder roots shook and then stilled, only to shake again as they rerouted power to compensate for corruption. When the larger roots flexed, flakes of dark residue shed and fell in a fine rain.

I leaned into the bond I shared with the Tree and felt the strain against its anchors in the earth and stone below the ruined palace grounds, the same grounds where its roots had formed a cage around our enemy since the day it rose to cover the sky.

It was only a matter of time before the Demon God broke free. Moments, not months.

Ready or not, I took a deep breath, here he comes.