Chapter 111: SHOOT AND FAIL

CHAPTER

111

SHOOT AND FAIL

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan had just gotten a foot forward before Daojue appeared by his side, grabbed his arm, and pulled him back.

Jieyuan tried to shake him off—not really thinking, running on instinct—but stopped as a long brown shape rushed out of the dense cloud of poisonous gas, the green fumes parting around it.

Meiyao—wearing some kind of earth armor. Smooth, solid earth wrapped her around her, crown to toes, open only at her face. Her skin looked slightly reddened, like she’d spent too long under the sun, but she didn’t look hurt otherwise.

In some parts—near her waist, over her shoulder, around a leg—her earth coat looked rough, cracked, clay-like, but with each step she took, more earth rose up from the ground, rolling up her body and replacing the damaged bits of her armor-like casing.

As that happened, Jieyuan caught flashes of bare skin—it seemed like her robes had been completely destroyed—but like her face, none of it looked ruined as you’d expect from an acid shower, just reddened and little raw.

She was moving as fast as before, and the next moment she was on his other side. Jieyuan didn’t take his eyes off her. “Are you—”

“I’m fine,” Meiyao said. There was a sibilant, hissing quality to her voice, and as she spoke her tongue—forked and inhumanly long—slipped out of her mouth for a moment, brushing against her lips. “I’m resistant.”

Her yellow, slitted eyes lingered on him for a moment, before she looked back to the snake. “The white half isn’t, however.”

Jieyuan looked back, and saw what she meant. The snake hadn’t followed them. The white head had reared back completely, curving so sharply that part of its body disappeared into the curtain of mist behind. A tall, wall-like mound of earth had also appeared in front of it, blocking any more of the mist from reaching it.

The green head, on the other hand, was leaning forward, trying to lunge but failing as the white head pulled back. Its mouth was open, fangs bared, growling. The ruined stretch of scales Meiyao had left on the side of its mouth bled profusely.

Where the green scales touched the mass of gas the green head had spewed nothing happened. On the rows of white scales, on the other hand, Jieyuan could see some darkened, slightly molten blotches where it must’ve touched the gas.

As for the gas itself, it’d expanded outwards and up, almost into a wall between them and the snake. The snake would have to draw fully back to the side or go all the way around it to avoid it, but the two heads seemed to have very different ideas on what they wanted to do, leading to some bizarre stalemate.

Something of an idea came to Jieyuan, there and then. He’d already noticed that the two heads didn’t share much of a connection besides being joined together—when one was wounded, the other didn’t seem to react—but now he had proper confirmation. And also something of a plan.

If something good had come out of any of this, it was confirmation of how Divine Nature Resonance worked on Orangesoul beasts. Meiyao’s chromal weight must’ve risen accordingly, otherwise she wouldn’t have survived the corrosive gas. Not just that, her earth armor didn’t register to his soulsense—and it couldn’t be mundane, if it’d resisted the gas too. She’d also used her earth-coated saber to harm the snake.

That meant that Gleaming End wasn’t their only weapon against Orangesoul beasts anymore. And between Meiyao and Daojue, plus the two-headed snake’s partial weakness to its own powers, Jieyuan was pretty sure he could work out a way to get them out of this alive.

But they’d be better off stacking their odds first.

“Daojue,” he said, not taking his eyes off the huge snake. The white head had started hissing, and the green head, like it’d realized something was wrong, had drawn back and looked over at its twin. “Seems like Gleaming End’s what got us into this. Can it get us out? Its gear-skills—”

“It refuses.”

Jieyuan glanced at Daojue. “Why?”

Daojue said nothing, which didn’t surprise him. But Jieyuan noticed the tight way he was gripping onto his spear, and a similar tightness to Daojue’s face, around the eyes. It seemed like Daojue wasn’t taking his spear’s lack of cooperation any better.

Gleaming End was out, then. But Jieyuan hadn’t been counting on it. It’d helped them out in Viridian Death City, but did nothing during the ambush in front of the Gleaming Stone Palace. What he had in mind wouldn’t need it, even if its gear-skills would’ve made things far easier.

“All right,” Jieyuan said. “That doesn’t matter. I’ve got a—”

The green head suddenly lunged forward, even as the white part stayed put. It slammed down straight into the thick gas it’d spewed, before sweeping its body aggressively to the side. And as the gas met its body, it was pushed in the opposite direction, dragged along—clearing out the area in front of it.

And then the wall of earth collapsed, crumpling into nothingness faster than a second, and the snake—both heads—surged toward them.

Again, Jieyuan couldn’t do much more than throw himself to the side. Daojue and Meiyao took the opposite direction, and the the beast swerved towards them. As the massive snake neared them, the green head snapped at Meiyao, while the white one lunged at Daojue.

Off to the side, Jieyuan watched as both Meiyao and Daojue managed to dodge, attacking back as they did, Daojue with Gleaming End and Meiyao with her earth-clad saber. But neither was given any rest as both heads lunged at them again in tandem—again, the green at Meiyao, and the white at Daojue.

It was a complete reversal from how things had been at the beginning, with the green head intent on Daojue and the white one under Meiyao’s control.

“Meiyao!” Jieyuan shouted. Neither head was paying him any mind, and he might as well use it to his advantage. As he spoke he pulled back the two limp lengths of rope he was dragging along with him—his and Daojue’s had been cut early on, and his and Meiyao’s when she took that acid shower—so they wouldn’t get in the way. “The snake can’t understand us, right?”

Meiyao flowed around another lunge. She didn’t look at him as she shouted back, “It can’t!”

“Good!” Jieyuan said. “Can you do the poison thing too?”

“Yes!”

“Great! But don’t use it yet!”

All right. He had almost much everything he needed—there was just one last thing he needed to know. How well the white head could manipulate earth. If it could cover itself, Jieyuan imagined it’d have done so already, but he needed to be sure. Of that, and of how many barriers it could raise at the same time.

“Meiyao, Daojue,” he called. “Try to attack the white head at the same time!”

If either Meiyao or Daojue listened, they gave no indication. Meiyao just kept avoiding the green head’s attacks, and Daojue the white head’s. Right now Meiyao was even faster than Daojue, even though she was still at fourth-sign Redsoul—resonating with the snake had increased her agility tremendously.

Jieyuan kept his eye on them and his body well out of the way as man, woman, and beast moved all around the pocket between dashes and slithers and jumps.

Until he had confirmation, they couldn’t go forward with his plan, so there wasn’t much more for Jieyuan to do. But he didn’t feel right, just hanging back like that while Meiyao and Daojue did all the work, risking their lives. Without taking his eyes off the snake—Meiyao and Daojue must’ve heard him, and more than once Meiyao had managed to sneak in an attack at the white head, but never at the same time as Daojue—he scanned the clearing again. There had to be something else he could do, that he could be doing, some other way for him to help.

And then his gaze fell on the scales. White and green ones, shard-like, littering the ground. There was one just to the side of him, and he skipped over him, dropping into a crouch. He couldn’t feel it with his soulsense—they’d be at the same soulsign at the beast it’d come from. Meaning they could also be used to harm it.

There were two ripped scales within arm’s reach. One white, and one green. The white one was bigger, a jagged, plate-like slice of keratin—assuming the snake’s biology was anything like a mundane’s own, at any rate. Reflective. The green one was smaller, not much bigger than his thumb, and about the same shape, longer than it was wide, and tapering to a sharp edge at the end.

He considered both for a moment, confirmed that the grass the green scale was lying on seemed whole and largely undamaged. He then sheathed the Shifting Feathers—they wouldn’t be of much help here, and if he was right these scales would be significantly more useful—and risked giving it a brief touch it.

When the metal of his gauntlet didn’t start steaming or corroding or anything like that, he grabbed onto it properly, and lifted the green scale up. It was heavier than he’d thought it’d be—but nothing he couldn’t throw, even if he didn’t have a cultivator’s augmented strength. He got a feel for its weight, nodded to himself. Then he picked the right one up, just in case.

He’d just gotten back to his feet, and was scanning the ground for more scale shards, when it finally happened. Like a reed rippling in the wind, Meiyao bent out of the way as the the green tried to bite her head off—and the very next moment, she swung her saber at the white head, just as it was coming down on Daojue from above. Daojue, who thrust Gleaming End at it even as he avoided the strike.

The earth barrier rose so fast off the ground it practically blinked into existence, and stopped Daojue’s thrust dead. The angle didn’t let Jieyuan get a good read on it, but he saw only a bit of earth being chipped away as the tip of Gleaming End hit the brown mass. Meiyao, on the other hand, continued on unhindered, but the white head twisted to the side, so all she did was cut a thin line under its mouth.

Meiyao disengaged immediately, just in time to avoid the green head’s new assault. Daojue, meanwhile, drew back just as the wall of earth disappeared as fast as it’d come into existence, and kept pulling back as the white head came at him again.

The earth barriers themselves were as bad as Jieyuan had feared. Snap-quick and borderline unbreakable. It was a solid defense, which wasn’t good for them.

What was good was that it’d only put up one barrier. This wasn’t enough to tell for sure whether that was its limit, but it was good enough that Jieyuan reckoned they could risk it.

“All right!” he shouted at Meiyao and Daojue. “Here’s the plan! Meiyao, focus on the green head—get it to breathe out that poison again. Annoy it, use your bloodskill to influence it, do whatever it takes!”

He didn’t stop moving as he spoke, picking up more of the the shards he’d spotted.

“Once you do that, use that poison yourself, at the white head!” he continued. “But from the opposite direction! And then attack its eye! Daojue, attack the white head too at the same time! Throw Gleaming End if you can’t get close!”

Jieyuan didn’t say anything else. The idea was simple—focus on the white head and take it out first—and the plan wasn’t complex, but he wouldn’t have trusted any other redsouls to pull something like that—he wouldn’t have trusted himself to pull that plan off, not even with Maeva helping him. Redsouls had no business surviving Orangesoul beasts, let alone controlling the flow of battle against one the way he wanted.

But Meiyao and Daojue were surviving it just fine, and if anyone could pull that off, it was them. He wasn’t sure if Meiyao even counted as a redsoul right now, as she was.

Like with before, neither Meiyao nor Daojue responded, but he was sure they’d heard. He continued to pick up more broken scales, prioritizing the corrosion-resistant green ones. He was planning on making his own contribution to the plan—and he could also see uses for Orangesoul scales outside of this fight.

A whole minute passed. Normally that little time would go in a blink, but to Jieyuan it felt like an eternity. And he wasn’t even in the thick of it, like Meiyao and Daojue were. By now he’d already collected several dozen scales of varying sizes—most of them went to his pouch, but he kept some of the smaller ones on hand, stacked together—while Meiyao and Daojue had managed a few more shallow cuts.

He never took his eye off the fight, though, and that was why he was prepared when the moment came. Meiyao and Daojue managed another collective, timed attack on the white head—and as it summoned a barrier, this time blocking Meiyao, she jumped off it and caught the green head off guard, ramming her saber into its snout.

The reaction was immediate. As a great torrent of blood spurted from its nose, the green head reared back. The base of its head expanded, swelling round-like—and then it breathed out that deep green gas.

Meiyao disappeared inside it for a moment, but then she broke out of it on the other side, still mid-air—she must’ve jumped back off the earth wall for support—and shot past the white head from above, putting herself on the other side of it.

The white head, meanwhile, was just drawing back after attacking Daojue.

Still up in the air, Meiyao jerked her head back. Her cheeks puffed to an inhuman extent, like a frog, before she let out her own rushing stream of corrosive gas. And just like that, the white head was cornered—one side the quickly expanding gas the green head had just released, and on the other side, Meiyao’s.

Not just that, the green head hadn’t stopped moving, and was lunging where Meiyao had gone—dragging the white head along with it. Daojue, meanwhile, retreated—but as he did he pulled his arm back, and let Gleaming End fly toward the white head.

Jieyuan had drawn back his arm, a green shard in hand, and he launched it toward the white head just a beat after Daojue threw his spear.

The next moment the two clouds of gas—Meiyao’s and the green head’s—met, and the white head was lost in the thick of it. Meiyao’s feet had barely touched the ground as she launched herself into the dense clump of gas

That was it. Three different attacks, and encircled by corrosive gas on all sides. Even if the white head survived it, it’d still be so badly damaged it’d—

The green head burst out of the column of gas, slithering rapidly out of it, hot on Daojue’s tail. The next moment Jieyuan realized something was wrong—because it kept on going, more and more green-scaled snake flesh slithering out of the gas, with not a hint of white on it.

Jieyuan stared, uncomprehending. But then a small, brown shape—Meiyao—shot out from the gas in the opposite direction. And right behind it, giving chase, was a massive shape the same color, and if Jieyuan wasn’t stumped before, he was now.

But then he caught sight of the white scales at the front of the huge brown mass—rough, half-melted, slightly darkened scales—and he finally understood what he was seeing.

The two-headed snake had somehow split into two separate snakes. And, worse—now that it was free, the white one had conjured an earth armor just like Meiyao’s.