Chapter 112: TO SPLIT UP

CHAPTER

112

TO SPLIT UP

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan didn’t know which was worse—the split between the snakes, or the earth armor on the white one.

What he did know was that things had just gotten a great deal more complicated.

He got moving immediately. Both Daojue and Meiyao were headed his way, and just behind them, bringing up the rear, were the two snakes—which didn’t look particularly smaller now that they’d split up.

Even if the snakes paid him less attention than empty air, a glancing blow would be more than enough to wreck him—and the chances of something like that happening had just, quite literally, doubled.

It was a close thing, getting through to the other side, past them—Daojue and Meiyao made it easier for him, drawing wide as they neared him.

He didn’t let them out of sight—he turned to look behind him as he rushed to the other side, and then turned around once he’d managed to put up some distance.

He barely got to stay put for a second, though. Daojue and the earth-armored white snake stayed behind, Daojue waving back and forth around its attacks. Meiyao, though, had barely reached the other side of the pocket before she rushed back around, in the direction Jieyuan had taken. And with her, of course, the green snake.

The corrosive one.

“Go to the other side!” Meiyao shouted at him.

“What—”

Her eyes, yellow and slitted, were widened, her narrow, elongated face feral. “GO!”

Jieyuan didn’t question Meiyao and was already running, keeping to the side of the pocket as Meiyao and the snake reached the spot he’d just been at.

DANGER.

Huaxin, screaming at him—like Jieyuan needed any more encouragement.

He kept on going. This pocket was larger than normal but nowhere near the size of the ones in Viridian Death City, and with the two ongoing clashes on either side of it, there was no such thing as a safe zone—no quiet middle.

And he got the impression he wanted to be as far away from the green snake and Meiyao as possible.

He kept his attention split between the two fights, and as he reached Daojue and the white snake’s side of the clearing, the green snake suddenly let out a shudder. Meiyao had just avoided its bite, but instead of going for another as it had every time so far, it went still, trembled.

And then that side of the clearing exploded in green gas. It seemed to come out of every inch of the green snake—and the next second both it and Meiyao were hidden from sight, submerged in a thick sea of dark green, corrosive gas.

And Jieyuan realized that just as the white snake had learned a new trick after splitting up, so had its green twin.

Heavens have mercy, Jieyuan gritted his teeth. Meiyao must’ve sensed this new ability and drawn it away—and between the three of them, she was the only one that could’ve survived in those conditions.

He’d thought the viridian mist was bad enough, but he’d take it any day, any time, but it might as well have been the harmless, inoffensive little brother of the corrosive gas.

He had to trust she’d be able to handle it. As for the other half of their problem…

Jieyuan focused fully on Daojue and white snake. Before, at least, Daojue had managed to wound it every other attack. None of those cuts had been significant, but they’d been something. With the earth armor covering it now, that wasn’t the case anymore.

When it’d just left the gas, the white snake hadn’t had much armor on its head—but it’d grown its armor since, and now only its burning yellow eyes and the white-scaled end of its snout were bared.

That didn’t stop Daojue from attacking—from the start he’d been targeting its eyes—but now his glancing blows didn’t produce any results. They just scraped against the smooth, solid earth armor wrapped around it, and though each time it chipped some of it away, immediately more earth would shift up from the rest of its armor to make up for it.

Jieyuan followed the movements of the fight, keeping far away, circling around the edge of the pocket. Separated, the snake seemed even faster—and it didn’t look like its armor got in its way any.

Worse—that had opened up other ways to attack. Jieyuan jumped as the snake suddenly spun around, whipping its tail at Daojue—and in the process almost catching Jieyuan entirely by accident.

Jieyuan came very close to falling into the curtain of mist, only just managing to keep away from it as he landed, the hem of his robe brushing against the denser mist. Adjusting his stance, he weighted the scales he was still holding, thinking through his options.

He could contribute to the fight—in fact, he was in a perfect position to do so. The snake still wasn’t paying him any attention, and it had its eyes uncovered—eyes he could target with the scales he’d gathered. He doubted his earlier attempt had been noticed, when they’d cornered the white snake in the corrosive gas. He still had the element of surprise.

That meant he had to make it count, though. Because it’d been proven the snakes could be drawn away from Daojue if you managed to harm it badly enough—like Meiyao had done it with the green one—so he’d only be getting one good chance at a surprise attack.

He needed to make it a killing blow.

“Daojue!” he shouted. “I need you to strike at it from above! When its head is near the ground!”

His earlier idea, forcing the white snake into a corner, giving it no other choice but to take one of the attacks, had worked. He just hadn’t taken into account it could split up and create its own armor, and there was no way he could’ve known that—though, in hindsight, Meiyao’s own earth armor should’ve been a hint.

They could go for something similar again.

And Heavens take it if it still had a trick up its sleeve.

If Daojue attacked it from above, it’d keep it from going up. The ground would keep it from going down. Jieyuan just had to handle the front, the left and the right. This was assuming that it couldn’t summon a barrier while it had its armor on, but it hadn’t done so yet, and if it could—well, then the whole thing was shot from the start.

Maeva, he thought. He’d kept her around this entire time, even if she had been quiet throughout the fight. Does you being better than me at everything extends to throwing things?

“I believe so, yes,” she whispered in his hear, no-nonsense.

Can you throw three—no, make it four things—at the same time, calculating their trajectories—

“Yes,” Maeva cut him off before he even finished the thought.

Even when he was talking to her like this, in his head, he sometimes forgot she could read the entirety of his mind, even the thoughts he didn’t direct at her.

What will you need?

“Everything down from your neck.”

You have it.

Just like that, Maeva took over, his body save for his head going numb and distant to him.

Jieyuan was aware, though, of the way Maeva shifted his stance, the way she adjusted her grip on the stacked scales he was holding in each hand. She swept his hands by his pouch, depositing some of the scales he was holding until he only had two left in each hand.

She further adjusted his hold on the remaining four scales. Working his fingers, she slid one in each hand forward so that he was pinching them between thumb and index finger. The other one she pushed back, slotting them between his two knuckles just under the pinched scales.

She did it all in instants, natural like someone who’d been doing this all their life.

Just where are you getting all this from? He’d never done any throwing before—not darts nor knives—in either life. He couldn’t think of any reference material Maeva could be using for this.

“You’ve seen people throw things before,” Maeva replied, quietly, making her voice sound like she was by his side. “And it’s all geometry and physics, when you come down to it. It’s like I keep telling you, your unconscious does all sorts of complex calculations all the time. I’m just making them conscious.”

It was sentences like that that made him doubt whether he’d ever be able to reach Maeva’s level. But he let it be—as always, Maeva’s incomprehensible skill worked in his favor. And as his old man used to say, it was fine and proper to bite offered gold, but once you had it confirmed you didn’t ask where it’d come from. Gold was gold.

Daojue kept the white snake engaged—not that the beast was giving him much choice in the matter. Maeva kept his body away, following the flow of the fight in a way Jieyuan hadn’t managed.

Nothing—no glancing attacks, no unintended twists—came even close to touching him. Maeva could predict the snake’s moves that if Jieyuan didn’t know any better he’d have thought she had her own form of Fatebloom Intuition, one that worked in the Dome.

Now he realized he’d been wrong, earlier. Maeva would’ve let him handle the snakes just as well as Meiyao and Daojue did. Even after everything, he’d still underestimated the things she could do with his body.

Now that he had some breathing room, he sneaked a glance at the other side of the clearing,  where Meiyao was fighting the green snake, though he didn’t take his eyes completely off Daojue and the other snake.

The gas was still there, though, hiding them from sight—if anything, it seemed even thicker, even denser. At its boundary he could see the plants on the ground steaming. The smell of it was almost a physical thing, stinging and burning. A mundane would’ve long since been reduced to tears.

But the gas wasn’t still. It shifted and turned wildly, sometimes more strongly, sometimes only faintly, dragged by wind currents—currents produced by some massive body he only caught brief hints of before it was swallowed again by the acrid green. He took that as a positive sign, though. It meant Meiyao was still hanging in there, giving the green snake trouble, keeping it occupied.

“Soon,” Maeva suddenly whispered, and he focused back on Daojue and the snake.

At first he wasn’t sure where Maeva had gotten that impression from, as Daojue was just dodging it as usual, weaving out of its rapid lunges, but then he noticed the difference. Daojue had stopped striking back. He was strictly dodging. He was also keeping close to the ground, and didn’t seem to be moving much farther from his current spot, doing some very narrow—and risky—dodging.

And as Jieyuan watched, he saw the armored snake also change its patterns. It kept low, slithering around like a proper snake—or as close it could get to one, super-sized and earth-armored as it was. No more rising off the ground for those plunging lunges.

Then it came, and Daojue got it just right—timing and positioning. The snake rushed past Daojue after a failed lunge and then sharply curved toward him. Daojue kicked off the ground, Gleaming End raised over his head, angled down. All of this while putting the snake’s head directly opposite Jieyuan, giving him the clearest shot possible.

In the split second the snake’s eye snapped upward to where Daojue was thrusting down at it, Maeva moved. She whipped his arms forward as she snapped his wrists, and the four scales were sent flying at the same time.

The scales flew so fast Jieyuan barely caught a glimpse of their trajectory. The snake’s eyes snapped onto him. And then there was a rippling of earth, and the snake dipped down—and disappeared.

DANGER! Huaxin screamed at him.

“What—” Jieyuan wasn’t sure who said it, himself or Maeva or both of them.

And then Daojue dashed straight toward him, moving as fast as he’d ever seen him move.

And then the ground under him erupted, and he was thrown into the air. There was a blur of movement as Daojue barreled into him mid-air, grabbing onto him. Right under them, the gaping maw of the snake surged from the ground under them.

But then the momentum carried them—him and Daojue—through the mist curtain right behind him.

And then, through it—into another pocket.