A Waste of Time

Chapter 107: Muted Promise

Thirty seconds on Lone Tower—running out.

It was the only thing still keeping the Bats from chewing him however they pleased. When that thirty-count guttered and died, the edge of his defense would go with it; the beauty’s trap would close like a mouth.

She must be having a great time watching me from the dark, Daemon thought, marking the trickle of time the way a bead runner counts losses—calm fingers, cold math.

His minds raced, flipping through piles of thought, looking for a way out that wasn’t a lie. Options. Angles. Anything.

Even after saying he could live with it—letting Ippo take over the camp, letting him call the shots while leading the two servants forward—deep down something refused to yield. Don’t quit. A stubborn rock in the middle of a stream; water gnawed at it day and night, corrosion promised to win in the end, but not now. Not while the rock could still be a rock.

Sword. Blade. Spear. Great Axe. Hammer. Tower-Shield. Six arms, six answers. Every arc drew blood. The Bats that slipped past a clean killing line and writhed on the ground with torn wings or crushed ribs found no mercy—Daemon’s heel came down and turned squirming into pulp, venting a pressure he refused to spend anywhere else.

But the swarm wouldn’t let him breathe. Unrelenting pressure. Wave tactics. They poured at him in body after body, broke against the shore—the exact edge of his Weapons—and came again. The dark funneled them like a tide that didn’t understand the word enough.

End of the rope, he admitted to himself, not in panic but in truth. The small, layered hopes he kept—hope within hope—of pulling himself out of this abyss-like quagmire, were being pushed out of the present and into a near future he couldn’t reach. Not escape—postponement. A promise I can’t cash right now.

A loss and an embarrassment. The words sat heavy. A hard hit to my belief in my own hands.

He had built an image of invincibility—adventure upon adventure in Asura’s world, each victory stacking like bricks—then seen that reflection cast into the material world by besting a few Junior Cultivators of the Sect. Started to buy the mirror. Started to buy my own hype.Until he met Elder Ping, and she stepped into the center of an arena to be his opponent.

The swarm pressed. Lone Tower kept answering. His circle didn’t widen; his arms didn’t slow. Flesh burst under Hammer, joints split under Blade, bone gave way under Great Axe, Spear threaded what tried to hide, Sword set every line, Tower-Shield denied whatever still dreamed of getting through. He didn’t look down to admire or despair—only to place his foot where the ground would hold and the dead wouldn’t steal balance.

Now I’m at a loss, he told the dark, because the dark was honest enough to hear it. No card left to flip the script. Deck played, sleeves empty.

The seconds bled away—thin, inexorable.

Hold until empty. Then hold anyway.

Daemon was finally ready to face his demons instead of running from them. A loss on his record wasn’t unthinkable; life had dealt him worse. But one thing remained before he threw in the towel—something he had tried once with his maid, something proven and tested in battle.

If it’s defense I seek, then my options are limited. It’s either the big guy or the small one—and I’ve got to choose fast. His thoughts cut back to before his arrival in this world, to the one who had gifted him the drop of blood that became Ippo. The memory played, bright and insistent.

I’ll go with the small guy. He remembered how cool that figure had looked, blocking tsunamis conjured by a shapeshifting golden bird—one simple hand sign, a seal, and the waves broke like toys. He poured every shred of focus into reliving the moment he’d helped Yan Jia birth a pair of Martial Spirits—how effortless it had felt, as if the world itself wanted to cooperate.

But Lone Tower ended.

His attack speed dropped—noticeably. Gaps opened in his defense, small at first, then larger as the rhythm unraveled. He reached for the memory’s power…and nothing answered. No echo of the red ape he’d once witnessed in action. Not even a single hair.

The swarm didn’t care. It never would.

They pressed their advantage at once. For the first time, a Bat hit bare skin—fangs sank, claws dug, wings clamped tight. It held fast, refusing to be shaken loose.

“Phew…” Ping Xueling’s voice slipped into the dark as she materialized at a safe distance. “You really did a number on my babies. I reckon it’ll take a year for the swarm to recover to what it was.”

Daemon felt the drag immediately—movements turning heavy, reactions slowing. More bodies got through; more mouths tasted him.

The audience—blind until now within the layered darkness of Elder Ping’s making—finally saw the fight as the shroud thinned and light forced its way back in. Shadows dispersed enough to show the truth.

The giant was black from crown to heel, smothered in a sickening coat of Bats. They squeezed and writhed over him, fighting each other for a place to bite.

Villagers, merchants, guards, mercenaries—all the mortals—let out the same long, defeated breath. The ten Inner Disciples, for their part, were honestly relieved to see the mission’s target subdued by Elder Ping—even if it meant they’d failed to earn the reward themselves.

“Young Master Daemon!” From above, Yan Jia screamed, clinging to Kirin’s talon. The Soul-Snatcher Eagle hovered over the circle, and the girl looked ready to jump—only for her big brother to lock his grip and stop the reckless plunge.

“Kirin.” The giant bellowed from beneath the crawling black. “Take them and leave.”

The bird stared down with sharp yellow eyes, as if trying to read the expressions on his three faces but finding only a writhing mass instead.

Scree.

Kirin turned its head toward the campsite. There, it spotted Ippo standing beside Kyra and Kira, flaring Lightning-Cocoon to call it over.

Everyone watched as the eagle dipped, seized the two servants, and beat its wings for the sky—leaving the boy alone beneath the judgment of the Ten-Thousand Beast Mountain.

Among the merchants, Han Hongyu shook her head, quietly relieved she hadn’t struck any bargain with the boy the night before. Gong Chang and Lin Huan snorted; a rising star had fallen, and with it, any motive to court favor. Only Li Yue, the foreigner, showed a shadow of sadness—and regret that she hadn’t extracted and recruited him before the Sect’s heavy hammer arrived in the form of an Elder and her Disciples.

Qi Yuan, Patriarch of the Qi Clan, watched with everyone else as a long, grinding weight slid off his shoulders one inch at a time. The days after his ninth son Qi Ying’s public humiliation had been a vise of sleeplessness and shame. Let the Mountain punish him when he returns. Let the Sect punish us as well. So long as the Clan survives this—so long as we are no longer wedged between that boy and the Mountain—we can rebuild.

Across the churned earth, Elder Ping drew a slim Talisman from her Space Ring and fed it with Darkness Qi. Threads of shadow sank into its fibers; the air tightened—and then five colors bled together and sealed the giant inside a slick, marble-bright shell with no seams.

Faces in the crowd held steady on that sight—Old man Lou, Lin Qiu, Auntie Fan, Uncle Zhou, little Mei, Auntie Ming, little Xia, the Nie family, even Auntie Hoa, Da Niu’s mother. No one spoke as the five hues fused and set, a prison that looked almost beautiful from far away and like judgment up close.

A small shape slipped from a nearby branch: Elder Ping’s Beast-Companion, little Song. The bird angled in without fuss. Its talons pinched the rainbow sheen of the barrier and, with one clean lift, the sphere rose from the ground. The contrast struck any who had seen Kirin—the Soul-Snatcher Eagle that loomed over the circle; compared to that living cliff, little Song’s measured strength looked almost delicate, but it carried the load as if it weighed no more than a lantern.

Ping Xueling floated up alongside her companion, skirts whispering. “Let’s go.” The order snapped back over her shoulder to the six young men and four girls. “Time to return.”

Good, Qi Yuan thought as the colorful prison drifted higher in little Song’s clutch. At least now the Qi Clan isn’t trapped between a rock and a hard place—boy on one side, Mountain on the other. Today, we live.

No one cheered. The field hadn’t earned it. Dust lifted, and the day moved on.

Here's a link to my discord server if you want to talk - .gg/HwHHR6Hds