Chương 120: Death on the Doorstep, II

Wu Hao stared out at the mansion, taking it in properly for the first time. It was opulent, or maybe it was more accurate to say that it would have been opulent once. Some efforts had been made to shore it up against the ravages of time - a part of the vines climbing over the fence had been trimmed away, and someone had gone through the other little cottages that had been set up on the property and given them a few licks of paint. It didn't hide the rest of the damage, though.

There were no servants that Wu Hao could see, and neither could he see an example of recent industriousness. The only part of the mansion that had been left in good condition was the manor house itself. Others might have been able to further wax lyrical about it, but Wu Hao just saw it as a big boxy sort of thing. It had walls, and it had side cottages, and it had a small garden that had long since become wild.

An array ran like a dome of flickering energy across the house, but there were significant holes in it that lingered for a while before closing again. They were too high as of yet to try and jump through, though. And it had guards. Wu Hao was hiding near one of the fences, having decided to approach it from the side rather than trying to smash his way in. In addition, he'd waited until night. The reason for this was simple: night wasn't much of an impediment to him, when it came to fighting martial artists.

Or whatever thing that these guards were. It didn't seem to be much of an impediment for them either, considering that shadow vision technique, but that was something they had to consciously activate and which required qi to use. That meant that he could ambush them. Besides, waiting until it was night had given him the time to work on a few more things before heading over.

Wu Hao had bought something to carry his spear, this time, although it wasn't more than a set of straps which went across his back and allowed him to carry the spear while his hands were kept free. It had drained yet more of his money, but he had figured out that he could start economizing the moment that this wasn't a life-or-repeat-life matter. He looked around carefully, inspecting the mansion just one more time, and then he restricted his breathing to the minimum.

With his other hand he drew out a thin piece of paper - the absolute shittiest talisman he could have made with his limited funds, with paper as thin as a sword's edge and with ink that was ready to run if so much as a drop of water came anywhere near it. The talisman was pushed over to the side of the fence, where it stuck to its side. Summoning up his qi, Wu Hao forced a connection to the broader array.

What he wanted wasn't to destroy the entire array - there'd be something that caught that and would notify every guard on the estate, causing them to swarm him. He wouldn't survive that. But that didn't mean he couldn't mess with things to get in. The talisman he had slapped onto the side of the fence began to blur and burn as he pushed qi into it, carefully increasing the amount so that it wasn't too obvious what he was doing.

Then, feeling like he was trying to grab something squishy and very much amorphous, he pushed with his qi, using the talisman that he'd created just for this. The array shifted, before sliding sideways. Its holes, once up in the air where it'd take a mightier martial artist to get high enough to jump through, were now hovering just above head height. Wu Hao stared at it, considering, trying to weigh how long he had, when his moment finally arrived.

Pushing qi to his feet Wu Hao leapt forward in a silent rush of footsteps, careful not to let even a single item of clothing or a bit of his body hit against the parts of the array that were still functional. He landed, stumbling as he tried to uncontort himself from the pose he'd touched down in, and then sank to his belly moments later, crawling behind a nearby cottage before anyone could see him. Then he waited.

Wu Hao had very carefully chosen this exact spot because, of the regular patrols that went through and around the estate, this place was the farthest from all of them, and he was out of the sight of any prying eyes. Trying to calm his heartbeat, Wu Hao spied around him to see if there was anyone else around. He hoped there wasn't, because if there were then he'd have to kill his way through the rest of the estate as well.

The signatures that he'd felt in the distance, all infected with that thick shadowy mud, stirred. Wu Hao's heart beat in his chest and he would've cursed at himself for being so heavy-handed. He gathered qi, still lying low on his belly, and guided his spear smoothly into his hand. The guards raised a signal to the inside somehow - he felt an answering pulse of qi in response from the mansion. More qi signatures in the house lit up in the next moment.

That made a total of ten guards that he'd seen in total, three of them second-grade and the others all third-grade. Two of the second-grades still stood at the entrance, but it was clear that they too had received the command. One of them turned swiftly on his heel and came marching up to the mansion, meeting several third-grades as they came trooping out of the mansion. Wu Hao cursed again, just for good measure.

Behind him the talisman burned itself out completely, the paper twirling slowly to the wet ground as the qi that kept it 'alive' ran out. Above Wu Hao's head the dome shifted again. Which meant he was locked in. He watched as the guards spread out, the third-grade moving to each corner of the mansion in winding, twisting steps that took them through the bushes. They moved with ungainly steps but with surprising speed.

Wu Hao had chosen this spot - a part of the estate that might have once been a beautiful terrace with high walls that had since grown mossy. Whatever happened here was hidden from the prying eyes of the other guards, and now he was waiting for one of the men to come closer. It took achingly long, but in real time it might have taken a minute or two at most. When finally the man was within range, Wu Hao didn't hesitate.

He rolled out from behind the wall he'd hidden with, then jumped as high as he could in the air without smashing his head open on the covering's roof, qi already gathered to complete the last stretch of the loop he needed. The spear spun before it came alive like a living thing in Wu Hao's hands, accelerating suddenly as its tip seemed to gain a massive amount of weight, enough to pull Wu Hao into a tumble instead of his intended neat jump. Perhaps as a consequence, the guard jerked away at the last moment.

Wu Hao's hammer blow didn't land on its head, but instead crashed into its left arm. The sheer power of the impact smashed into it, with the ringing crack of breaking bone and tenderizing everything else. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Nonetheless the man that he'd just tried to kill reached out like he didn't even feel the injury that Wu Hao had inflicted.

Dodging more on reflex than anything else, Wu Hao saw that the man had tried to reach out for Wu Hao's throat with fingernails that looked sharpened for exactly this kind of purpose. The loss of his left arm had unbalanced him, though, and with that loss of balance had come Wu Hao's chance to evade the attack. He responded by spinning his spear, moving it into an improvised variation of the Heart Piercer starting position.

One foot back for stability, one foot forward for the first step to take, both hands back - there! As the stumbling thing reached out for Wu Hao again with its purpled fingernails Wu Hao's speartip flicked out forwards, launched like an arrow from a bow. He'd started his attack later but reached his opponent first, piercing straight into the thing's throat.

Then he jumped up and forwards, using what little weight he had to push the thing back until it fell back, his spear still sticking out of its neck, with Wu Hao hanging onto it. The thing hit the ground with another muted thud. Wu Hao would have checked again if anything had noticed his presence here, but he had to assume they had. He had to move swiftly. He had to assume this life was already gone, also. He just hoped that they'd have the decency to kill him quickly.

Wu Hao ripped the mask away while the thing that he'd pinned to the ground struggled to pull itself away. It couldn't, but at the same time it didn't seem to even register that parts of its body had been crushed into a mangled mess. Beneath the mask, there was that fleshless jaw. Now that Wu Hao could inspect it properly his sight honed in on the small patterns of qi that had been inlaid, using a bizarre sort of ink, along its jaw and throat.

As he watched dispassionately, the patterns flared up slightly as the thing moved, summoning up the environmental qi and pulling it into its throat, where another set of arrays pulled it deeper until it landed in the thing's core. Or, no - there wasn't a real core. There were just intricate arrays painted on the thing's heart, which looked close enough to a really rough core that Wu Hao might have confused the two. Wu Hao stabbed it again, ripping through every qi array that he'd seen.

It shrugged off the stabs to its throat and the crushing of its limbs, but the moment that the tip of his spear cut through the arrays on its heart it sagged back and the qi burst from it, as if it had been a martial artist that had just died. Instead of flying up, though, the qi seeped into the ground, while just a little bit of it bled into the air in swirling patterns that spoke of emotions Wu Hao couldn't put the time in investigating right now. And, then, another pulse of qi. Fuck.

There weren't many other spots to try and hide within the estate, though. Not unless he got inside, and he had no clue what the inside would look like. He could make up a vague route based only on what his qi senses had told him, but that didn't tell him if there was anything in his way or even what he'd find. There was nothing for it except an attempt to dash into the mansion, then.

Guards were amassing near the front doors again and he could feel qi stir again as they realized one of their fellow things wasn't there anymore. Pushing as much qi to his feet as he could, Wu Hao relied on the Dragon Gate Ascending Movement Art that he'd tried to customize. It felt, in a way, slightly like skating: with every push he accelerated more, flying over the rough ground of the estate at a high pace.

Behind him he heard the noises and felt the pulses in qi as the men turned to him, gathered their qi, as they activated abilities to make sure they saw him properly, but he had to ignore all of it. He came closer and closer, reach nearer to the mansion itself, beads of sweat running down his back as he tried to reach the first window he saw, attempting to simply burst through the glass and roll and head inside. Shadows congealed, forming into deep pools that dragged at his feet and clung to his ankles.

He could rip off their clumsy grabs with just an application of qi, though, and when the window was achingly close he jumped, exploding the qi at his feet in a burst of speed that sent him rocketing forward. Too late he realized that the point wasn't to drag him down but to prepare the shadows. Three spears thrust outwards from the pool of shadows and ripped through his body, impaling his thigh, another tearing into his chest. Wu Hao turned as blood dripped from his mouth.

The entrance to the mansion was right in front of him. He had been so close... The guards with the spear approached. They didn't speak - not to wonder what Wu Hao was coming to do here, not to sneer at him for getting caught so easily. Even without their masks down to expose their decaying flesh, their blank black eyes spoke of a lack of any conscious act. Nothing for it, then. Wu Hao raised his spear. Perhaps death was inevitable, but that didn't mean he had to accept whatever death was given to him.

Ignoring the fact that his muscles were screaming in pain and his insides had been shredded, Wu Hao reared back. The spear felt impossibly heavy in his hands and he almost laughed at the thought of the money he'd spent on it being wasted yet again, but sheer spite kept him moving. His spear aimed straight at the second-grade martial artist in front of him. He pushed all of his remaining qi into the required loop, fought to make sure his arms didn't fall to his sides or to let his knees buckle, and let it go.

There was a flash of silver, and then there was a moment where no one seemed able to move. Wu Hao's spear had gone straight through the second-grade martial artist's core, and there it had stopped. Because the second-grade martial artist had stopped. The rest of its functions still remained, but its makeshift core had cracked and died and qi had ripped its way free out of the thing's chest through the hole Wu Hao had made. He had killed it in a single blow. There was a distant whine of outrage. Wu Hao smiled.

At least he'd learned something. Unable to muster any more strength he lost his grip on the spear, and the next moment another black spear had flashed, nearly invisible in the moon's shallow light, and Wu Hao once more knew nothing but a comforting darkness.