Demon Wolf

Wolf thought the list’s one hundred-odd names represented the field hospital’s patients and guards. He never would have dreamed they signified the net of five hundred Brilliant Gate’s disciples closing in on him.

Wolf frowned, hearing a rustle. He awakened his senses, and in the stretched flow of time he moved to bite his lip.

Ten of them are close. Several others are milling around as well. I can’t grasp their exact count. 

“Two dozen. At least. And all of them are approaching me.”

Time continued to flow normally. Wolf’s flat fangs clamped onto his lip and Eviltongue materialized in his hand.

“I should try to leave the leader alive.”

Wolf nodded at his good idea and lunged into the bushes. In eight steps he faced a woman wearing Brilliant Gate’s deep red.

Surprised, she opened her mouth to shout, her eyes wide. But before she let out a sound, Wolf slapped her.

Shocked, she failed to erect her Qi defense, and the steel-like palm shattered her jaw and sent her tumbling to the ground, dead or unconscious.

She should be alive. The next four raised no doubts. Eviltongue cleaved their heads and bodies. Before the group reacted, half their number was down on the ground bleeding.

Why are they unarmed? If they are guards who noticed an intruder, they should’ve come swords swinging. What’s happening?

As Wolf wondered, Eviltongue reaped another life, and the survivors overcame their initial shock. An unarmed woman shrieked, another drew her sword, while two turned to run.

“Those could be dangerous.” A hammer appeared in Wolf’s hand for a brief instant before it screamed through the air, hurtling towards the furthest fleeing enemy.

With a wet squelch, the woman’s body burst, but Wolf only caught the red shower in the corner of his eye. He was busy, slashing Eviltongue at the screamer and kicking at the armed opponent’s abdomen.

The woman chose to take the blow and hack off Wolf’s leg. Thick Qi barrier protected her abdomen, shining through her robe, as her blade chopped downward, towards Wolf’s hip. Unfortunately, she had overestimated her power.

Wolf’s kick catapulted her, sending her flying like a rag doll with her innards destroyed. As Wolf cut the scream short, the sword-wielder smashed into a dark-brown bark. Wolf ignored the crunch of shattered bones, and shot after the stumbling, panicked survivor.

She used the trees to her advantage. Her effort bought her three scant seconds before she too breathed her last.

No time to rest. Wolf grit his teeth and lunged into the bush to his right, coating himself in Qi.

“Ten! They massacred them!” Wolf had annihilated two more groups in quick succession, before someone ran into the aftermath of his slaughter.

“Use lethal force! Earth Pavilion played us! Wolf Hillman is leading a host of attackers!”

They know my name?

“They know my name?” Both Wolf’s Mental Aspects had the same thought, but while this information confused the Mental Aspect piloting the body, the one focused on nothing but thinking understood immediately.

“They got Jakob.” This cold, calculated conclusion sent Wolf’s mind into a haze.

Brilliant Gate’s disciples no longer charged towards him empty-handed. They wielded swords, sabers, and daggers, their strained gazes straying left and right from him, more afraid of his nonexistent reinforcements, than the lone, fragile bait.

The delicate man butchered them without mercy. Limbs and heads flew, while blood painted the verdant forest red.

“Retreat! There are too many of them!”

“Regroup!”

Behind Wolf, groups of attackers ran across savage scenes of his violent outburst. Seeing the carnage, they assumed multiple attackers had butchered their comrades.

Like a mad dog, Wolf gave chase, his actions fascinating the second Mental Aspect, who observed and memorized everything without judgment.

“One hundred and ninety-four,” it counted the corpses as they fell, noting both the intensity of their baleful auras and the terror adorning their dying faces.

“These women are professional bandits, murderers, and pillagers.” He had no other way of explaining the disgust the blackness of their souls evoked.

While one Mental Aspect recalled his travels with his father, the rational, second, Mental Aspect had long since deduced this was a trap. According to his guess, Brilliant Gate’s disciples had found his jade id hours or days ago.

“One hundred and ninety-five. They probably believed they could take me out with numbers. They can actually. If all of them turn around and bury me in their bodies, eventually they will overwhelm me. It’s just a question of how many they need to throw at me before they fill my holdingring and immobilize me. One hundred and ninety-six.” Intrigued by the thought, Wolf’s Mental Aspect ran the numbers, eyeballing the number at around two thousand median human corpses. “At least every other has a holdingring. I can pack them in their own rings, so it’s a moot point.”

“Where do we regroup?” Wolf heard a shout asking the reasonable question. In a world without landmarks, without poles, where could they regroup?

“Everyone! Head towards his original location!”

“That’s good thinking. Assuming they can find the correct direction after running around these few minutes.”

Wolf decided to trust their competence. He abandoned his quarry and ran back towards the site where he encountered the first group of Brilliant Gate’s disciples.

“This was a trap.” A feminine voice entered Wolf’s ear. “He is leading a group of at least thirty.”

As Wolf reached the ring of Brilliant Gate’s disciples, he confirmed that someone at the center was delivering a report.

“They’re here!” a dozen girls and women shouted, shaking their blades towards him.

“The first ones to lose courage are the thieves and bullies.” Wolf glanced at those quaking eyes, smelling their terror. “Why is that? Do they project their sadism onto others? Do they fear their reincarnation’s karma? Do they fear they would be born as victims, rather than the oppressors?”

As the current of time slowed, and as he ran into the midst of his enemies, Wolf recalled men and women who faced death with trembling knees, pissing themselves, as well as those who reached their ends with dignity. There is no dignity in dying.

“But, the manner in which you die can be upright.”

Nonsense. Those Northshield soldiers I killed when Dad died were brave men. But upon realizing they were throwing their lives in vain, they turned around and fled.

“Not all of them.”

Their leader begged Dad for mercy. His terrified voice still haunts me. The only ones facing death without hesitation are the insane. Madmen tired of living or with some defects. Everyone else fears starting over; all their loves and hates wiped away by the river of oblivion. Now, stop distracting me. There are over seventy, with Ten know how many incoming.

Wolf plunged into the ring of flesh and steel. Book appeared in his left, and a dance of death began. He swept with both his blades, striving to open enough space to fight while his enemies converged on him.

Blood, fingers, teeth, and heads flew. Wolf kicked damp dirt into the oncoming attackers’ faces, dodging and bending like an acrobat delivering death onto them.

“Watch out for that corpse,” the second Mental Aspect warned against a carcass, which left Wolf’s focus for a split second. Wolf sent a surge of Qi into his leg, kicking the slippery obstacle into a freckled girl’s feet, tripping her a moment before Book pierced her eyes.

A blade coming from a blind angle bit into Wolf’s flank. The pain of steel passing through his flesh served as yet another form of perception, and Wolf pivoted while the invading Qi blazed within the wound like a pyre.

He decapitated the brown-haired attacker, noting the shock in her eyes. He had little time to focus on her. A whistle entered his ear, signaling that the sweep at his head, which he had glanced in the corner of his eye a split instant ago, was about to reach him. He ducked under the sword and hacked the woman’s torso in half.

She was older than him, and rather than fear, he saw triumph in her eyes, as her mind failed to catch up with her reality.

Wolf’s thigh flashed with pain, but with his weight on the leg, he could either take the low blow, or topple over. He clenched the muscles, but the slightly reinforced flesh failed to stop the surging Qi, despite him trying to condense defenses of his own.

The blade stopped once it struck his femur, and Wolf shifted his weight. He glanced down at the short woman who kept low and struck below the height he monitored in fights with manlings.

Wolf ignored her dagger and tightened the half ruined muscle, kicking the sneaky bitch in the face. The blow shattered her skull and sent her dying body tumbling into her allies, but the strike tore Wolf’s quad even further, spraying blood.

In a smooth motion, he yanked the knife from his flesh and flicked it into an incoming enemy’s eye. Still at the center of a whirlwind of steel, Wolf tested his leg, and while it could handle his weight, each further move would aggravate the wound.

This limp is dangerous. Wolf swallowed the healing pill he had stashed into his mouth, and in moments felt the warmth course through his torso.

sleepydad88 Random Roll -

Spoiler

A bunch of stuff, the number of corpses, how quickly they cooked up an escape plan, how quickly they realized Wolf’s force was overwhelming…

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