Legend of The Young Master

Chapter 218: Consecutive Loss

The armored creatures were trying to overrun the defenders of the north tower, and Wuyi pointed with his spear. "Charge!" he called. With the charge, the Red Daoist appeared too.

While the Red Daoist faced a few monstrosities, Wuyi was head to head with an armored monster the size of Baijian. The complex interlacing of its front armor over the interstices of its six armor plates was like an obscene mouth as the thing reared back, its whole strength bent on a single, crushing blow from its great hammer, its body bent like a bow with the effort.

He set his feet and took the blow on his spear, rotated the weapon on the pivot of his opponent's blow, and slammed the spear into the middle of its head. His spear penetrated the thing's face, and it spasmed.

Behind his dying opponent towered another, wielding two long swords. Even as he watched, the thing beheaded Yun Ming's henchman, the two weapons coming together like a tailor's shears. Yun Ming leaped to avenge his warrior and took a pommel to the head that staggered him, and two lightning-fast blows followed it, literally beating him to the ground.

Wuyi's command sense was going a bit into panic. The Swamplings had stopped his warriors. It shouldn't have been possible. There was nothing in these demonic Wild that could stop twenty fully armored Qi warriors. Not to mention the Red Daoist was with them.

Wuyi paused and locked eyes with the thing standing over Yun Ming, and it knew him. He leaped at the double-sworded thing, but his spear remained lodged in his last kill, and he had to leave it.

Double Sword turned from his prey – Yun Ming – and faced him. It was yet another kind of Swampling – sleek, taller than Baijian and heavily muscled, with man-made armor covering all its joints and feral, organic armor that might have been grown or very finely forged.

At the edge of his peripheral vision, Meiying rammed a spear through the carapace of another armored monster and screamed her war cry.

One Qi warrior by his side was locked with another Swampling, his arms straining against it as another warrior stabbed his long sword into its armpit – rapid, professional stabs that made its limbs thrash.

Double Sword tapped its blades together and leaped at him with animal rapidity.

Wuyi snatched his dagger and trusted his armor. He entered between the blades, arms high, dagger in both fists, and the longsword blows crashed into his shoulder plates.

The hardened armor bent and split – only to cut into the rings of the first layer underneath, and the blades were held, though the force drove through the thickly padded leather under the layer, and still managed to bruise his shoulders...

But he swung the dagger overhand, two-handed through the Swampling's armor and into its neck.

Six times.

Its limbs spasmed, but its forearms tightened like a band of armor around Wuyi's shoulders. And it lit up with power, eyes glowing cool blue as it prepared—

He drove his armored knee in between its legs – nothing there to hurt, but his blow took it off balance, and he pushed his left foot forward and threw the thing over his outstretched right leg. Its wing cases snarled in his knee armor's flanges and ripped free. Its own weight accelerated its fall, but its limbs clasped him fast, and he fell atop it, his dagger a projection from his fists.

The triangular blade punched cleanly through it, and ichor jetted out.

He didn't stop, but pulled the dagger clear of the wound and drove it up under the thing's mandibles that were opening and closing with terrific force. They almost ripped his mask off his face, forcing his head around in a painful arc, and he was eye to eye with the thing – its eyes glowing with unfocused power. The thing wanted to use last amount of Qi energy left.

He countered with a lightning blow to its nearer eye-patch. He raked the point through the oblong eye – and again, and again, as a scythed foreleg reached for his face.

It was not going to die before it cast its spell.

He got his left arm under its head and slammed the dagger into its left eye – through the eye patch, through the skin and bone. He reached for its brain and conscious space, even as he stirred its brains with the blade...

And he absorbed the Qi of demonic quietly. While absorbing the Qi, Wuyi felt he had absorbed something else, something that this creature felt. Wuyi was not sure what it was, but he could feel what the creature felt. It was like he could observe things from creatures perspective too.

Creatures eyes went out.

He quickly got to his feet, his mind racing with calculations about his group's chances of survival in the current fight. For a brief moment, Wuyi could see and think like both sides in the courtyard.

But the situation had changed.

A third of his warriors were down—whether dead, wounded, or just knocked over, he couldn't tell. However, the enemy resistance was broken, and the edges of the battle were starting to resemble a hunt more than a fight.

His archers began to clear the walls, their shafts joined by the dozen archers loosing from the towers, and the pace of victory accelerated. A dozen of the white Swamplings scuttled down a hole. A man, half the skin ripped from his flesh and trailing down his back, screamed again, and an archer put a shaft into his throat with rough mercy, stopping his screams.

All through the courtyard, armored figures removed their masks and heaved air into desperate lungs.

Wuyi walked up a ramp of dead bodies to the door of the north tower where a young giant, drenched in acrid Swampling blood, stood leaning on a six-foot bill with a heavy steel head, coated in gore.

"Well fought, young Baoxin," Wuyi said.

The farmer shrugged. "It was Master Zhenying who held the door, Young Master. For most part of an hour, seems to me."

"Dead?" Wuyi asked.

The farmer shrugged again. "They dragged him into the pile," he said. "We fought 'em for the corpse but lost him when you charged their rear." He stood straighter. "Deserves finding, I think." He seemed to shake off his fatigue, and then he reached out, spiked an armored Swampling on the back-spike , and flung it from the pile like a farmer moving hay with a pitchfork.

Wuyi grabbed another. Dead, the Swamplings were curiously harmless—disgusting, but less insectoid, and more animal. He tossed one aside, and then another.

Meiying joined him. "What are we doing? Killing the wounded?" she asked, her voice a little too sharp and bright. This was a fight that men – and women – would relive too many times.

"Looking for a body," Wuyi said. He was down to waist level now.

"I've got his leg!" the farmer called.

Jia joined them, and suddenly there was Shen, and Yun Ming, blood still leaking from the joints of Yun Ming's shoulder. They hauled, and they found merchant's corpse but the corpse of the merchant stiffened, and he screamed. Merchant's armor was slick with Swampling blood, and human, and he popped out of the pile of corpses.

The flesh of his left foot was gone at the ankle, and blood was leaking too slowly out of the wound where sharp mandibles had flensed the flesh from his foot.

"Press the limb! Remove his leg armor!" Wuyi shouted.

The farmer already had a small knife in his great paw of a hand, and he slit the straps holding the armor. Meiying opened the catch and the leg armor came loose with a gout of fresh blood. Wuyi grabbed the stump of his leg. Meiying got her sash around the small of the ankle, tied it with strength. The blood stopped.

"Tie it off," Wuyi said unnecessarily. Every warrior in his group could be a leech in an emergency.

Then he took a weary breath and went for the wall.

In opposite side, Luding felt the dark sun kill Huajun, one of his important warriors, and he cursed. Cursed that he had been fooled again, cursed that every encounter seemed to go against him. The accession of power by the dark sun made him far more dangerous than he had been.

Luding reached out to the two Nomad leaders attending him and subsumed them, stripping their essences and their power, feeding on it. Their empty corpses collapsed to the earth. It wasn't much power, but sufficient for him to see and send.

The coming darkness was not his friend anymore . He needed some light, where he could deploy his superior numbers and his massed archery.

Then he sent his powerful senses questing for a subordinate. Found him deep in the earth under the stone fort by the water, with a hundred more of his kin.

"Break off," he demanded.

The sun had begun to slide toward evening. There were long hours until night.

Luding shook his massive head and torso. "Tomorrow," he said.