Chương 166: T4.5 Combat

5 Combat Leo cut through the London sky, Sunshifter humming beneath his feet, his eyes locked on Morimoto escaping ahead. Behind Leo, three Queen's Guards struggled to keep pace. They were Gold Core cultivators with standard police-issue flying swords. High Nascent Soul tier power. Good enough for patrol work. Not good enough for this. Morimoto had bonded with a La Ferrari Monza. The old man had been holding back.

Leo knew Morimoto had strong divine sense and was talented in formations, but he hadn't expected Morimoto to have the required 40, 000 SI to lifebond with a La Ferrari Monza. The Monza was Peak Tier Four, just like his Sunshifter. The gap between High and Peak was only one minor realm, but in aerial combat that gap meant everything. Morimoto pulled further ahead of the Guards with every passing second. Morimoto dove.

One moment he was climbing west, the next his Monza went vertical and plummeted toward the streets below. Leo followed without thinking. Sunshifter's nose dropped and the wind screamed past his ears as he accelerated into the dive. Morimoto leveled out at fifty feet. Rooftop height. The kind of altitude that turned buildings into obstacles and streets into canyons. Then he started zigzagging. Leo's breath caught. Morimoto had Third Person Perspective.

The signature lightning style movement technique that Leo had used to dominate the CFL. Leo's mind reeled even as he pursued the counterfeiter. He matched the zigzag pattern, his own G-force bleeding formations firing, Sunshifter carving through the same gaps Morimoto had just cleared. The old counterfeiter wasn't just a formations master. He was a T4. 5 flyer. Just like Leo, he had a Peak Tier Four flying sword as well as Third Person Perspective. Why hadn't Morimoto tried out for the NFL?

With these abilities, he could have made millions. Could have avoided the counterfeiting charges entirely. A jade slip whistled past Leo's ear. He snatched it mid-flight and read it with his divine sense. Withdrawing. Target exceeds engagement threshold. Prince Edward en route. Leo glanced back. The three Queen's Guards were peeling off. Banking south toward the city center. Their formations dimmed as they reduced speed, falling out of pursuit range within seconds. He understood.

It was an unwritten rule of law enforcement. You didn't chase cultivators who outclassed you. Gold Core guards had no business engaging a T4. 5 flyer. Leo pushed forward alone. The zigzag chase continued through the London streets. Morimoto wove between buildings, banked around cranes, threaded the gap beneath a footbridge with inches to spare. He banked left around a church spire, swinging wide to keep the G-forces manageable. Leo cut the same corner tight enough to scrape the brickwork. Leo followed. Matched.

Gained. His Sunshifter had G-force bleeding formations. Sixty feet between them. Fifty. Forty. Morimoto glanced back. Their eyes met for half a second. His eyebrows rose behind his spectacles. He hadn't expected Leo to close the gap so quickly. The old man gritted his teeth and pulled into a long straight ascent. His Monza's nose lifted, and he shot upward, abandoning the streets for open sky. No more zigzags. Just raw speed in a straight line. Leo followed.

They burst above the rooftops and the chase became a drag race. Two Peak Tier Four flying swords screaming west across London at nearly identical velocities. The gap stabilized at thirty feet. Neither gaining, neither falling behind. Leo's jaw tightened. This was the problem. His advantage was in the turns, not the straights. G-force bleeding formations meant nothing when there were no direction changes to exploit. In a pure drag race, Peak Tier Four matched Peak Tier Four. The London skyline fell away behind them.

Below, pedestrians stopped on sidewalks. Phones appeared. People pointed upward at the two figures streaking west. Tomorrow's headlines were already writing themselves. Leo glanced back. Edward's spiritual signature pulsed half a mile behind them. The prince was pushing hard. His sword was Peak Tier Four too. Leo could tell from the spiritual resonance. But that meant Edward wasn't going to catch up either. At this rate, Morimoto was going to escape with seven million of Leo's pounds.

Edward had better have something else planned. Morimoto climbed. Five hundred feet. Six hundred. High enough that the buildings below looked like toys, high enough that the wind cut through Leo's coat and made his eyes water. The city ended. Green fields stretched ahead. An empty highway cut through the landscape like a gray ribbon. And beyond the highway, arranged in a precise line across the sky, Leo saw them. Flak cannons. Twelve of them.

Barrels tracked Morimoto's approach, automated targeting systems locked on. Formation arrays activated along their housings, building charge, preparing to turn the sky ahead into a kill zone. The police had been busy. Leo grinned. The first cannon fired. A single shot. A warning, perhaps. The shell streaked upward on a pillar of T4 crimson light. Leo tracked it with his Omnidirectional Awareness. Watched it climb to intercept altitude. Watched the proximity formation activate.

A sphere of red light bloomed against the gray sky, expanding for half a second before collapsing into itself. Then came the shrapnel. Thousands of fragments burst from the explosion's heart, spiritual steel trailing faint lines of qi, spreading in a cone pattern that covered two hundred feet of airspace in less than a heartbeat. The warning shot faded. Shrapnel scattered into the distance, losing momentum, tumbling toward the fields below. Morimoto didn't slow down. The warning had been a courtesy.

The next volley wasn't. Eleven cannons fired in sequence. Detonations bloomed across Morimoto's flight path in overlapping patterns, each explosion its own cloud of screaming metal. The boom shook Leo's ribs, a rolling thunder that merged into one continuous roar. Shrapnel filled the air so thick that it looked like a solid mass, a wall of killing steel that stretched half a mile in either direction. No gaps. No path forward. Standard police procedure. Saturate the airspace. Force the target to surrender or die.

Leo watched Morimoto's response. The old man didn't surrender. His Monza's nose dipped and he dove toward the lowest point in the barrier, where two blast radii overlapped at their edges. His trajectory broke sideways at the last instant, threading a gap that existed for maybe half a second. He made it look easy. The cannons fired again. Morimoto zagged through the second volley the same way, his body shifting between fragments, his sword carving paths through spaces that shouldn't have existed.

But the flak slowed him down. Each evasion cost him momentum. Each zigzag bled speed he couldn't recover. Leo pushed forward. His Sunshifter screamed toward the first debris field. Fragments filled his Omnidirectional Awareness. Hundreds of trajectories, each one lethal, each one mapped in perfect clarity. He didn't bank. Didn't divert. Didn't do any of the things a sane cultivator would do when flying toward a wall of shrapnel. He flew straight in.

Sergeant Walsh of the Metropolitan Aerial Response Unit lowered his field glasses, cleaned them on his sleeve, and raised them again.

"Good grief, what is the lad doing?" The American flew directly into the kill zone. A fresh detonation erupted in the second flyer's path, and instead of breaking off, the yank passed through the fragment cloud without slowing down. Walsh's shoulders tensed. He waited for the body to tumble. For the spray of blood that came when shrapnel met flesh at those velocities. The American emerged on the other side. Intact. Accelerating. Gaining on the fugitive.

"Bloody hell." One of his gunners had stopped mid-reload, shell casing forgotten in his hands.

"Did he just..." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Eyes front, Constable." Walsh's voice came out steadier than he felt. The rest of the gun crew had frozen too, staring at their scopes like they'd watched a man walk through a wall. The fugitive was doing exactly what he was supposed to. Banking wide. Losing speed. Getting herded toward the secondary cordon they were establishing to the west. The American lad was flying straight through the middle of it.

"Sergeant, do we adjust fire?" Walsh's hands tightened on the scope housing.

"Maintain pattern. He'll break off." He didn't break off. The next volley bloomed directly in front of him. Walsh saw the explosions. Saw the shrapnel spread. Saw the American's silhouette disappear into the debris cloud. He waited for the fallout. The crimson flash of a Nascent Soul emergency shield. The ring of shrapnel striking Tier Four armor. Hopefully the lad had something top-shelf on him. Something. The American kept flying. Walsh blinked. Adjusted his field glasses.

The lad was threading another volley now, and this time Walsh caught it. The tiny shifts in posture. The fractional adjustments that moved vital organs out of fragment paths. He wasn't dodging the explosions. He was dodging individual pieces of shrapnel. In all his years of aerial policing, Walsh had never seen anything like it. He'd seen Gold Cores tank shrapnel on barriers. He'd seen Nascent Souls rewrite the blast radius entirely with their domains.

He'd never seen a Foundation Establishment cultivator weave between individual fragments like they were standing still. His second gunner was staring at the same scope feed.

"Sarge, did he just..."

"All units." He keyed his comm.

"Shift fire west. I want a full cordon between here and the Welsh coast. Suspect is making for international airspace."

"What about the American, Sergeant?" Walsh looked at his scope again. The lad was closing in on the fugitive.

"He's not our problem. All guns, priority tasking. Seal off the western corridor, Holyhead and south. I don't want that old bastard reaching the Republic." The acknowledgments came through. His crews adjusted their firing arcs.

"And get me a name on that flyer. I want to know what the hell we just watched."

Leo closed the gap to Morimoto and pulled his chain hook from his dantian. The weapon materialized in his right hand. He swung. The chain arced toward Morimoto's trailing leg. A clean attack. Good timing. The kind of strike that would have gotten a nod of approval from Niki. Morimoto zagged left. The chain passed through empty air. Leo's arm jerked as the momentum carried through, throwing off his balance. His Sunshifter wobbled. He had to abort a flanking maneuver just to stabilize.

His old formation teacher hadn't even looked back. Leo reset and attacked again. Same result. The chain reached for Morimoto's shoulder and Morimoto simply wasn't there anymore. Third attempt. Fourth. Each swing met nothing but wind. This was the problem with peer-to-peer combat. In the CFL, Leo's opponents moved in straight lines and predictable curves. They couldn't see attacks coming from outside their field of vision. They couldn't process threats fast enough to evade. Morimoto had Third Person Perspective.

He saw Leo's attacks forming before the chain even left his hand. He read the setup, calculated the trajectory, and positioned himself outside the threat zone with casual precision. Leo's chain work was good enough to catch Foundation Establishment cultivators who didn't know better. Against a T4. 5 flyer, it was useless. Fine. Different approach. Leo gathered qi in his spiritual sea and shaped it into a ball of Scholar's Ink. The technique that had won him the Ivy League championship.

The technique that had killed the Follower in the Everlasting Empire ruins. He fired. The ball of ink streaked toward Morimoto's back. Morimoto zagged. The ink passed two feet to his left and dissipated into the wind. Of course. Scholar's Ink worked by overwhelming a target's divine sense with forgeries. But to overwhelm someone, you had to hit them first. Against an opponent who could see spiritual attacks forming and evade before impact, the technique was worthless.

All of Leo's techniques were useless against the old man. A new spiritual signature blazed into his awareness. Coming fast from the southeast. Edward. The prince pulled alongside Leo, then pushed ahead. Two against one. Morimoto on the run. This was going to work. Edward attacked first. His sword materialized in his right hand and he closed with Morimoto from the left, forcing the old man to evade right. Toward Leo. Leo swung his chain. Morimoto dropped altitude and the chain whistled over his head.

Edward adjusted, diving to cut off the escape vector. Leo repositioned above. They were herding him. Boxing him in. Whichever way he turned, one of them was already there. Morimoto's zigzags grew tighter. More desperate. He couldn't evade two Third Person Perspective users simultaneously without losing ground. Edward pressed the advantage. His blade swept toward Morimoto's ribs. Leo saw the impact through his divine sense. A clean hit that should have ended everything. Light flared. Not blood.

A pane of jade-green qi snapped into existence around Morimoto's torso, absorbed the strike, and shattered. A small slip of jade spun out of Morimoto's jacket, its surface crawling with spent formation script, and burst into powder midair. A talisman. Not his cheap laundry talisman. This one was T4. Talismans were single-use formations etched onto jade, charged in advance by a formation master, fired with a flicker of qi.

The whole appeal was that the formation did the work, so a Foundation Establishment cultivator could trigger a Nascent Soul-grade barrier. They were spell arts in a bottle, and each one cost a fortune. Which raised the obvious question. Where did it come from? Leo checked Morimoto with his full awareness, the same sweep he'd been running the entire chase, and got the same answer. Coat, shoes, spectacles, smug grin. Nothing else. Then he found it.

A seam of pure blankness along the jacket's inner lining, a region his divine sense slid off like water on glass. Thornwood. The old man had lined his pockets with the same composite the casino used on its cards. Everything Leo thought he knew about Morimoto was just what Morimoto had let him see.

"Eddie!" Leo shouted.

"His coat is full of those!"

"How many?"

"It's Thornwood-lined, I can't..." Morimoto's hand dipped into the jacket. Edward broke high on reflex. Leo broke low. The talisman that came out was already burning, and the sky between them filled with arcs of scarlet qi, spinning crescents that crisscrossed the gap in overlapping patterns. Leo threaded the space between two arcs by a margin his nerves disagreed with. The net dissolved. Another pinch of jade powder scattered on the wind. And Leo caught Morimoto's expression as it happened.

The old man looked physically pained. He watched the spent talisman disintegrate the way a man watches a hundred-dollar bill blow into a storm drain. Morimoto called out.

"Do you have any idea what I paid for that?" Leo didn't know how many talismans Morimoto had in that jacket. But every spent talisman was a pound of flesh off the old counterfeiter. If he couldn't stop Morimoto, at least he could make him suffer. Edward had reached the same conclusion. He pulled wide and high, his hand flashing signals Leo didn't recognize, then gave up and just shouted.

"I'll herd, you strike!" Herding a T4. 5 flyer sounded ambitious. But Edward flew like a man with a plan, his pass angles cutting Morimoto's sky into smaller and smaller wedges, never committing far enough to eat a talisman, just pressuring, squeezing, until the only exits all pointed in one direction. At Leo. Morimoto came toward him weaving. Leo prepared the chain hook. For once, the battle favored him. The old man had two options. Burn another talisman or pass through Leo's reach.

A jade slip whistled out of Morimoto's sleeve and arced toward Leo's head. Leo snatched it on instinct. Messenger slip. He read it with his divine sense without breaking his attack line. Mr. Chen. Hostilities benefit no one. Proposal: stand down, suffer a brief and convincing equipment malfunction, and I will transfer four million dollars upon my safe arrival. A generous figure. - M. Leo read it twice. Four million. Dollars. The man owed him seven million pounds. Pounds.

Plus an inverse derivation technique he'd dangled at the blackjack table like a treat above a dog. He crushed the slip in his fist.

"It's SEVEN. MILLION. POUNDS!" His chain hook swung in a wide arc, forcing Morimoto to evade downward. Leo followed, his G-force bleeding formations firing, converting the sharp dive into horizontal momentum. He closed the gap to eight feet. The chain came around again. Morimoto zagged left. Leo was already there. For one instant, he had the old man cornered. His chain hook descended toward Morimoto's sword arm. Morimoto's body shifted. Not a zigzag. Something different.

His posture changed, his spiritual pressure reorganized, and suddenly he was flying in a straight line at maximum acceleration. Leo's eyes widened. Morimoto was dropping out of Third Person Perspective. Unlike Omnidirectional Awareness, the technique split your attention. Morimoto couldn't hold the outside view and run complex qi work at the same time, so the old man was trading his evasion to free up his hands. For what? Morimoto drew a talisman from his jacket with both hands. With care.

Even at this distance Leo could read the reluctance in his shoulders. Whatever this one cost, it made the chain-net look like loose change.

"As the poet said." Morimoto pressed it to the Monza's spine.

"Parting is such expensive sorrow." The talisman flared. The air around Morimoto changed. Leo felt it through his divine sense. Purple T5 formation-light flared along the Monza's spine and the air ahead of Morimoto split apart, peeling back like a wake in reverse. Air resistance reduction. The Monza's full output suddenly pushed against nothing. Morimoto left. One instant he was caught between two T4.

5 flyers, the next he was a dwindling glint streaking west at a velocity that made the entire chase retroactively embarrassing. Leo poured everything into Sunshifter and watched the gap double anyway. Edward's signature flared beside him, straining, and the gap doubled again. The glint sank toward the horizon and was gone. Leo flew straight for another ten seconds out of pure spite. Then he let the sword slow, banked down through the gray sky, and landed in a sheep field somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Edward touched down beside him a moment later, hat gone, hair wrecked, breathing hard.

"Please tell me," Leo said, "that you have a Nascent Soul ready to intercept him." Edward sighed. He sheathed his sword in his dantian and looked west, toward the horizon where Morimoto's signature was fading.

"He'll make the Irish coast within the hour at that speed." He straightened.

"And the Republic's official policy on requests from the royal family is to stick two fingers up and tell us to piss off." A sheep wandered between them and began eating. Leo looked at the empty western sky. Seven million pounds, a special divine sense technique, and his dignity, all currently doing four hundred miles an hour toward a country that would greet him with a Guinness. He exhaled and rolled his shoulders.

"Well. Look on the bright side. Today was pretty uneventful." He gestured at the field, the sheep, the total absence of witnesses.

"At least I won't be in the papers again." Edward turned his head slowly.

"Again?"

"Mm."

"Leo. The Ascot." Edward's eyes narrowed.

"You were involved in that as well, weren't you. What did you mean by seven million pounds?"

"It was completely Morimoto." Leo put a hand on his chest, indignant.

"I was swindled. Lied to. Exploited by a career criminal." And that was simply the truth of it, Leo decided. The victim was not a responsible party. The law probably said so somewhere. Never mind whose Scholar's Ink had been sitting in Ever Enduring's spiritual sea at the starting gate. He was a victim of the Royal Ascot incident, a victim of the Hippodrome debacle, a victim of today's events in the skies, every bit as much as Edward. More, actually. Edward had only lost his dignity.

Leo was out seven million pounds. The sheep surrounding them raised their heads. The whole flock turned east at once, ears swiveling, and Leo sensed it half a second later. A signature inbound, low and fast. A spiritual thoroughbred at full gallop. Ever Enduring came over the hedgerow at sixty feet, golden contrails streaming from his hooves, in all his considerable magnificence. A saddlebag hung across his back. It was bulging. A luggage tag flapped from the strap.

Leo activated his ortho-k vision and and read the tag as the horse banked west. K. MORIMOTO. Ever Enduring held course toward the Irish Sea with the unhurried confidence of a horse who knew exactly where he was going and had been promised something good when he got there. Leo watched the contrails fade.

"Eddie." Edward didn't answer. He pinched the bridge of his nose and stared west. Tomorrow's Sun was practically writing itself across his face.

"Eddie. Why does the horse have Morimoto's luggage?"