COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

Chapter 127 127 | Azure Intervention

The chamber beyond the broken corridor looked like the inside of a cracked jewel.

Mirror-pillars rose from the floor at crooked intervals, catching the shard's movements and throwing them back in flashes of white coat, silver hair, and killing intent. Every strike split into ten reflections. Every impact came back a half-second later from some other wall, so the whole place sounded like a war remembered by bad glass.

Eathan stayed low behind the broken prism where he and Chewie had ducked a second earlier. Thanks to the chaos, none of the Paladins seemed to have noticed them. More unnerving, though, was that the Ruthless Shard seemed utterly indifferent to anyone but his immediate opponents.

At the center of the chamber, the Ruthless Shard wore Bai Hu's face and none of his mercy.

Yang Mingze hit first.

He went in like a falling gate, both gauntleted fists wrapped in dense crimson qi. The shard met him without changing expression. One hand came up. The collision cracked the crystal under both their feet.

The man grinned through it, teeth red.

"There you are."

The shard answered by driving an elbow into his throat and kicking him hard enough to send him skidding through a row of mirror-columns. Glass broke around his shoulders in ringing bursts.

Yue Shiyin's fan snapped open.

Lines of pale script spilled into the air, weaving themselves into mirrored doubles and ghost-steps that boxed the fragment in from three angles. Yang Mingze moved at the same time, carving a crimson arc through the chamber, each thrust aimed not to kill but to pin, herd, corner.

The shard noticed none of that with any visible interest.

It cut through one illusion, let the second break against its shoulder. Then it caught Yang Mingze's arm under one hand and turned.

Snap.

The whole motion was clean enough to make Eathan's stomach knot.

This was Bai Hu without the pause before violence. Bai Hu with every cruel decision stripped of burden and left to stand on its own. No command, no restraint, no second thought. Just the part that knew how to end a fight and saw no reason to make a conversation out of it.

Glass shattered as Chen Mo crashed through a crystal prism, landing at his teammate's feet. Blood trickled steadily down his temple, but his eyes remained fever-bright.

"Extraordinary," he said softly, almost to himself. "You really never disappoint."

Yue Shiyin shot him a look sharp enough to count as a slap. "Focus."

"He is," Yang Mingze barked, wrenching himself back upright. "That's the damn problem."

Chewie's jaw tightened. Eathan could feel it without looking.

Their Commander's fragment drove the Paladins back another pace. Yang Mingze's sword caught the edge of his sleeve this time and tore the fabric instead of flesh. Yue Shiyin folded a prism around the shard's blind side; the shard stepped through it like mist and split the mirror from corner to corner.

For three Elite Paladins against one half-person, they were doing badly.

For one half-person against three Elite Paladins, the Shard was doing a little too well.

Chewie leaned close enough for him to hear her over the ringing in his ears. "The not-boss is enjoying himself."

Eathan didn't answer right away. [Calamity Radar]'s deep-scan outline still burned in his vision.

Fragment signature:

RUTHLESS

The word sat badly in his chest.

"That's only a fragment," he said.

Chewie's eyes flicked toward him. One beat later, she swore.

"Where's the real one?"

Exactly.

For one ugly second, they had been too occupied with the thing in front to ask the most obvious question. Their current White Tiger was nowhere in sight. Not nearby enough for him to feel that weird, stolen-current pressure his channels got whenever Bai Hu was within range. No half-step too close behind Eathan because the Attachment Shard liked familiar distances.

Just… this.

"We need the boss first," Chewie said, already shifting backward into the corridor. "No point trying to fuse that if the rest of him is off getting emotionally kidnapped by the maze."

He nodded once.

It felt wrong to turn his back on the fight. Worse to leave the Paladins (especially Chen Mo) in the same room as that shard. But if the actual Bai Hu was wandering the Sanctum alone in his current state, every other problem ranked below that one.

They slipped away while the Paladins still had their hands full.

The mirrors stopped roaring the moment they left the chamber and went back to whispering.

That was almost worse.

Without the noise of combat, the Sanctum's own breathing rose up around them again—the low thrum in the walls, the blue-violet pulse under obsidian, the soft rearrangement of paths that pretended not to move unless you looked away. Eathan pushed [Ledger Tap] back online and let its pale overlay stutter across his vision.

It was nowhere close to a perfect map, just faint lines of structure under the maze and the occasional flicker where a route had decided to lie.

Still, there was something.

He felt a pull familiar enough that he trusted it before he fully understood it. Bai Hu's current state had attachment running loose through him; maybe it worked both ways, at least a little. Or maybe Eathan was just getting very good at following disaster.

"Left," he said.

Chewie went left.

They crossed two slanting corridors, one chamber full of suspended mirrors that showed them walking a second too late, and a long black passage where their own footsteps refused to make sound. At the end of it, tucked into an alcove ringed by hanging prism chains, they found Bai Hu sitting cross-legged on the floor.

He looked up when they approached.

His glasses were gone. The pale coat had come loose at the throat, scarf sliding half off one shoulder, and one of his hands was resting on a broken prism piece he'd apparently been studying with the full force of his current personality.

More importantly, he looked real.

"There you are." Eathan breathed.

Bai Hu blinked once. "I've been here."

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Chewie put both hands on her hips. "That is not a reassuring report, boss."

He considered that with the same grave concentration he had recently devoted to floating kettles and regret tags.

"The mirrors were talking," he said. "They got repetitive."

That gave Eathan pause.

"What do you mean?"

Bai Hu looked somewhere just past his shoulder, searching for the right shape of the answer.

"It kept offering me things. Mine," He looked up again, expression unreadable. "But not mine. I didn't know them."

Eathan's throat tightened.

Of course the Sanctum couldn't hook him the same way. How was it supposed to use memory against someone who currently didn't own half of his own?

Chewie crossed to him and held out a hand. "Up."

Bai Hu pushed it aside and rose on his own. When he was fully upright, his gaze shifted past Eathan toward the direction of the chamber they'd just left.

His whole body changed by a degree.

A line of tension went through his shoulders. Not much, but enough to show them that he knew.

He knew.

"Boss," Chewie said, reading it too. "We have to bring you back there."

"No," Bai Hu said immediately.

The air around him tightened.

Eathan felt it in his own channels almost simultaneously: the qi current around Bai Hu pulling inward, then pushing out in rough little pulses, like something inside him had started bracing for impact.

"That's him," Eathan said. "You can feel that's you."

Bai Hu took one step backward.

"That thing back there—it belongs to you," Chewie added. "The Paladins found the fragment already. So you just need to push through. Clench your jaw, reclaim what's yours—"

"No." Bai Hu took a single step back. His fingers tightened on the mirror piece. "Let them keep it."

"That's not how your personality is supposed to work." Chewie frowned.

He looked at her, and for one second there was something almost wounded in the silence that followed.

Eathan saw it then—not stubbornness. Not refusal for the sake of refusing. He was afraid.

The White Tiger. Afraid.

At that moment, he was overwhelmed by an impulse to just do something impossibly stupid like promise it would all be okay.

But it would not be okay. They were in a cursed mirror labyrinth with Heaven's private hit squad and a detached personality fragment running around in one of the chambers. There was no version of this that qualified as okay.

So he settled for honest.

"Mister White," Eathan said quietly, "I know it hurts. But if that fragment stays outside you, it's still you the rest of the realm will blame for whatever it does next."

Bai Hu's eyes flicked to his face.

For a second, Eathan thought he'd gotten through.

Then the White Tiger turned and ran.

"Are you serious—" Chewie lunged after him.

The Sanctum, delighted by this development, immediately rewrote the floorplan.

A corridor folded between them like a shuffling deck. Mirror panels spun in from the walls. A path that should have gone straight split into four reflections, then six.

"Boss!" Chewie barked.

White flashed through one of the far prisms for a brief second, and Eathan immediately ran for it.

By the time he reached the next opening, Bai Hu had already collided with a figure coming the other way.

"Mister White!" He called. "This way—"

Mei Yuling caught him by the upper arm. Ji Renshu came in right behind her, spear already in hand.

For one bare instant, even the Paladin looked surprised. Then it vanished beneath work.

Threads of pale karmic light unspooled from her hand and wrapped around Bai Hu's wrists before he fully processed what had happened. He jerked once, startled, and the bindings tightened immediately.

Ji Renshu stepped into his line of sight with that infuriating calm of hers and said, "Commander White. Forgive the discourtesy."

The White Tiger stared at her. The maze-light reflected in his obsidian eyes.

Then he tried to pull free.

Eathan hit the mouth of the corridor hard enough to slide.

"Let him go!"

Chewie came in beside him like a released spring.

Ji Renshu did not even glance away from Bai Hu when she answered. "No."

Chewie's blades came up in a red-black arc that lit the mirrors. "Then we're doing this the ugly way."

She crashed into Ji Renshu before the woman had fully finished shifting stance. Sparks and shards flew between them as movements collided. The two of them moved like opposite schools of discipline—Chewie with violent intuition and fury refined into speed, Ji Renshu all exact lines and no wasted space.

Eathan aimed for Mei Yuling.

She expected that.

The earlier rhythm returned immediately, only sharper this time because the stakes had changed. He drove receipt talismans and reconstructed prism plates into her spacing, forcing angles and decisions. She answered with those same fine karmic threads, but now she was protecting a captive too, and that made her one fraction slower.

Eathan sent a trio of seals low to force her to move her weight. She took the bait, and he immediately followed with a barrier burst at shoulder height. Mei Yuling cut through the first construct, slipped the second, and had to abandon her hold on one restraint line to avoid taking the third in the face.

That was enough to buy Bai Hu a half-second.

He twisted, but the restraint only bit harder. The White Tiger made a short, rough sound—

—then the chamber shook.

Every mirror in reach rang once, all at once, as if somebody had struck the maze like a bell.

Divine qi rolled outward in a white-gold pulse, raw and unshaped. It tore through Mei Yuling's restraint pattern, blew apart three of Eathan's active seals, and hit Chewie and Ji Renshu hard enough to break their clash apart.

When Eathan hit the floor this time, the impact came with a mouthful of blood and the taste of metal.

And when he looked up, the entire Sanctum had become a ruin.

Broken prisms. White dust. Shards of reflected corridors hanging in midair like torn curtains.

And from that ruin, the Ruthless Shard appeared.

It emerged from the ruin wearing Bai Hu's face and every ounce of violence that face could hold. White hair loose, expression feral. Its eyes locked directly on the burst source—the actual White Tiger, half-kneeling among the shattered bindings, breath unsteady.

Yue Shiyin and Yang Mingze entered a second later from the opposite corridor, both bloodied, both breathing hard. Chen Mo came after them, steps coming to a halt as his gaze moving between the two White Tigers.

"….You have got to be joking."

Shiyin was the first to say it.

"There are two."

"Two," Chen Mo echoed, and the word in his mouth sounded less like confusion and more like awe.

Ji Renshu recovered before any of them.

"He's fragmented," she snapped. "Contain both!"

Mingze obeyed on instinct and threw himself at the Ruthless Shard before it could close the last stretch to its host.

He hit like a siege engine.

The Shard met him with one hand.

The first collision shook the chamber. The second put cracks through Yang Mingze's guard. By the third, blood had splashed the glass and Yue Shiyin was already moving in to keep his teammate from getting cut apart.

The Ruthless Shard fought without hesitation. There was something obscene in how natural it looked. This was not a stranger wearing Bai Hu's face. It was Bai Hu, just stripped down to the part that knew how to ruin people.

Chewie cursed and shifted to Ji Renshu's angle, only for Chen Mo to slide in front of her with that same awful brightness in his expression. Their blades met in a crack of light.

"Move," Chewie said.

Chen Mo smiled. "No."

He slipped around her on the next exchange—straight to the real Bai Hu.

"Boss!" Chewie's voice cut through the room.

Chen Mo reached him first.

His hand lifted, and fingertips brushed the side of Bai Hu's face with nauseating gentleness. Thin threads of pale mind-work spilled from his hand, reaching for the eyes, the nerves, the soft places in a fractured self.

"Look at me," Chen Mo whispered, eyes glowing. "Only me."

Eathan didn't think.

He moved.

[Karmic Insight] was still dead. [Soul Anchor] was already spent. No time for a clever answer, then.

He rammed [Receipt Printer] into Burst and fired on instinct. Seven talismans hit in a bright chain around Chen Mo's arm and shoulder. One yanked his aim half a degree off. Another burned through the first thread before it set. The rest detonated in a hard flash between him and Bai Hu.

Chen Mo staggered back with a sound that was half fury, half delight.

The White Tiger flinched away from the sudden light and lost what little balance he had—and Mei Yuling was there again instantly.

She caught him under the elbow and cinched fresh restraints around his wrists before Eathan could close the distance.

"Mister White!"

Mei Yuling's expression shifted by a fraction. Regret? Resignation? Annoyance at the universe?

"Orders," she said.

The mirrors answered her call. She stepped backward with Bai Hu and vanished into a line of refracted space that folded shut behind them like a wound knitting.

"No!"

The word tore out as Eathan lunged after them.

Chen Mo intercepted. He was fast. Faster than he had any right to be after taking that burst. This time, there was no pretense left in his face.

"You," he said. "Are exhausting."

Then he drove a blade straight at Eathan's throat.

Eathan raised the scanner on reflex and already knew it wasn't going to be enough—

Except, the strike never landed.

Just as the blade neared, something else had hit first. The sound rang bright and metallic through the ruined chamber, and Chen Mo's blade veered off-course and shattered against the floor in a spray of silver fragments.

From the broken shards, something old was moving through in the fractured light.

The next instant, someone stepped through.

Long robes in drifting shades of green and white. Hair like black silk with teal caught through it when the light hit right. Jade-bright eyes half-lidded with irritation and amusement in equal measure.

It was a face Eathan knew immediately and still didn't trust his own eyes for recognizing.

"Quine Long?"

For a whole second, the room forgot how to breathe.

Chen Mo actually took a step back.

"Azure Dragon?" he said, and for the first time since Eathan had met him, the obsession in his voice had to make room for something like disbelief.

Quine Long adjusted his sleeve with infuriating leisure and glanced at the ruined blade on the floor.

"My apologies," he said. "I generally try not to interrupt attempted homicide. It's rude to break the rhythm. But I'm rather fond of that mortal."

His gaze slid past Chen Mo to Eathan. The smile that touched his mouth then was familiar enough to make something in Eathan's chest unclench.

"Bai Hu tends to get terribly upset when people break his favourite toys," Quine Long said mildly. "And I," he added, looking back at the room full of blood, broken mirrors, Paladins, and fragmentary catastrophe, "have been in a terrible mood for days."

The jade at his wrists lit.

Across the shattered chamber, every loose shard of mirror answered.