NOVEL NEXT Chapter 89: Lament, Ancient Gods [Interlude]
Hei Xingyu swung.
Blade-strewn hands sent forth rippling waves of infernal rage. Heat blasted her off in floods, turning the torpidity of cold decay into radiant flames. The virulent marshland, once soaked with moisture, has rapidly succumbed to an eerie, relentless dryness. Brown mud and greenish swamp water were desiccated to beige dust within seconds.
Rather than a sweltering heat raked with clammy humidity, it was as if every ounce of moisture in the air was sucked into the conflagration of her blazing form.
The Avatar's body wilted. Steam hissed off it as its clammy skin shrank in on itself, crinkling like dry sheets. Its detestable shape seemed to almost fold inwards as the ropey muscles of its tendrils shrieked and died, corroding to desiccated lumps of fused bronze and pitted brass.
It was not just the rot that was being burned away. Somehow, the fires were transmuting its flesh into metal.
The Plague Leech wailed in pain, but the Decaying Greyroots laughed with exuberant joy.
"I see… I see!" It chortled madly, its voice clearer than ever before. "I should have known… Disciples dared not stray from their master's shadows! I greet you, Patron Saint of Grafted Swords!"
Fingers of fiery bones erupted from Xingyu's back. They grew and grew, becoming long-spindled spikes. Each bristled with a hundred edges — swords growing upon swords.
Wings of fire and steel, of a span several metres long. They reached out like the claws of a vengeful goddess.
With a powerful sweep, Xingyu rose to the sky.
Solidified muscles of burnished bronze strained and broke off as the screaming Plague Leech lumbered forth. Its speed was a fraction of what it had been before, but still, it was frighteningly quick. Flesh crackling, its enormous tentacles swung with lurching flops, all missing as the ardent angel weaved between the blows without preternatural agility.
With each pass, the giant tendrils collapsed, seared off by the sword-grafted arm of the living sun. The beast wailed and swiped, demented flesh freezing in place as more of it was transformed into severing steel within the transmuting light emitted by the Sword-Grafter of Legend.
Xingyu fought with terrifying skill. Hers was a mettle tested in the crucible of the greatest war, forged under the shadow of a great Devourer to become his bride blade. Outmatched and left with minimal defences as ever more pieces of itself were sloughed off, the Plague Leech was unable to avoid Xingyu's assault for long.
More tentacles fell, dissolving into molten oozes of metal and burning maggots. An opening soon presented itself, and Xingyu took it. Her sword arm thrust, and a mass of melting metal plunged itself into the cankerous body of the Avatar.
Jets of fire plumed from her back as she rocketed to the side, her incendiary blade still embedded in the screaming beast. A flaming trench was carved by the blade arm of Xingyu as she lanced herself across the God Beast's monstrous gut. The laughter stopped, and now only screams filled the air as large sections of its body dripped off in ruined fragments of iron.
It was the first fatal blow struck. It would not be the last.
Again and again, Xingyu lashed at the beast. Each strike was an incandescent blow that saw the rotting, moulding skin of the Plague Leech transmuted to metal. Rather than flesh, entire slabs of bronze, iron, and steel began to break off, leaving the once-mighty Avatar reduced with each passing of the ardent angel.
Xingyu fought as a demigod reborn: relentless, powerful, and with a speed few cultivators of the province could match. Fire streaming from bladed wing tips, she swooped again and again, confronting the Avatar of a Dead God with blistering fury.
Desperate, the Decaying Greyroots called upon the very swamp itself to save him. Poison talons burst from the Blighted Bog — growths of rotting roots summoned to protect the chosen form of their master. Raging giant toads, horse-sized flies, and all manner of malodorous monsters or possessed corpses rose from the boiling muck.
They rushed to the Plague Leech's aid, sacrificing themselves in droves if it would buy their lord another second of unholy life.
It mattered not. Xingyu smote them all with contemptuous swipes of her blade, turning them into gobbets of fire and metal. Blistering black smoke and piles of sharpened brass surrounded the duelling Ancients as armies of monsters — any of which could have laid low entire lesser Sects — were burned and transmuted in an instant.
"Such fury… Such passion…" the Botulvorn Beast chuckled in pained gasps. "Had you always fought with such zeal, Maddened Maiden of the Grafted Swords? Or was it the regret of your lord's death that has kindled this rage?"
The headless angel did not reply. She merely raised her bladed arm and slashed once more. A rain of melting fire erupted from the newly-carved trough of the Avatar's gut. Its entire body was reduced to barely half of its original size, and what remained of its flesh was being rapidly reforged into warrior's bronze.
Powerful as it was, it was undeniable that it was dying.
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Xingyu readied herself for the final strike.
"Alas for you… Fury is not enough."
The ground beneath her exploded.
Xingyu's wings flared to give her height, but it was too late. An enormous behemoth of writhing flesh burst from the dried earth, slobbering flecks of pestilence everywhere.
A second Plague Leech Avatar had awakened.
Unlike the other, its flesh was fat and still a mucus green, wet with diseases and unholy vitality.
"Reduced I may be in death… but I am still the mightier by far!"
Hundreds of black-clawed tendrils reached for the ardent angel. Though her efforts were commendable, evasion was an impossible task. A single scratch, then another, until a total of fifteen cuts were incurred on her blazing form.
The effects were immediate. Her fiery body condemned most of the pestilence inflicted on her to smouldering extinction, but the touch she suffered was that of the Botulvorn Beast. Poison was the Dead God's hallmark gift, and even reduced as it was, its toxins still bore the trace of Divinity.
Xingyu was mighty in life, but in death, her abilities were but a pale shadow of what she had once wielded. Her current body, too, was made lesser by the reanimation Arts of a separated Divine Corpse, the Beheaded Phoenix. Thus, as the paralytic agent of the second Avatar ran through her body of melting swords, she began to slow.
The first Beast — severely injured as it was — was not finished yet, either. Now, outnumbered and wounded, she fought a losing battle.
"A Dead God I may be… but this is my Domain! My very grave!" the two Beasts crowed in unison, bellowing roars joining as one. "A pale imitation of my true power, yes, but it suffices for a foe like you! My strength comes from the very land, whereas you… Your lord wanes and suffers even as we speak!"
The ardent angel had no head — only a flaming orb of fire above her severed stump — yet even so, her panic was visible in the way she turned jerkily to face her lord.
Hei Feng remained in the open hollow, skin pale and face bloody from the bleeding in his facial orifices. He did not look long for life.
The Divine Art — [Severed Heads Apostles] — was a technique that relied on the strength of the summoner to sustain their summons. Naturally, the stronger the summon, the greater the strain on their spiritual systems.
Feng was only in the Ninth Step of the Foundation Realm — commendable for his age, but that achievement mattered little in the face of what he had called upon. The ardent angel he had cast from his soul was strong enough to do battle with an Avatar in the higher Steps of the Nascent Realm.
The battle had not yet lasted even thirty seconds. Should it reach a minute, the Young Master's expiration was near-guaranteed.
Xingyu — even with that lesser shell of fire — knew this.
"What will you do now, student of the Morning Star?" The voices rose as one, as if the entire swamp were speaking. "The obstinacy of your lord's will… is no substitute for true cultivation. And the obduracy of your sword arm… is no substitute for true strength!"
True strength?
Despite the encroaching foulness and the worsening of her wounds, Hei Xingyu — no, Lin Daiyu — laughed.
"Ignorant pest," her distorted words echoed. "What would a God know of true strength?"
[Art of the Maddened Maiden — An Execution for Crimson Pearls]
The ardent angel descended. The twin Beasts raised their diseased limbs to counter.
Her movements were slowed. It did not matter.
Her powers were waning. It did not matter.
"What would a God know of human strength?!" she screamed.
Before her stood a forest of flesh. Before her stood the enemy of her lord.
And so, Lin Daiyu — bride blade executioner of the man once known as Zhong — destroyed them with her tears of crimson pearls.
Her cries were akin to an ocean of swords. They plummeted into the virulent green of decaying roots, parting the way forward. Unyielding horror gave way to martial loyalty, and in one stroke, Daiyu struck.
"In the name of my lord, I cut you down!" She roared.
The crimson blade tore through the newer Plague Leech. Healthy and hale it might be, its body stood no chance of surviving the Maddened Maiden. From head to bottom, the newly-raised Avatar was cleaved in half, motes of pustulant yellow and bloody red aswirl as it died.
Upon the severed edges of its body, red-petal flowers of crimson steel bloomed by the hundreds, brilliant and reflective glimmers of luminous ruby pearls whose beauty had not been seen since the Great War.
It was an Art that had not been used in over a millennium. The bloody mist of blossoming red once foresaw the execution of God Beasts and renegade Immortals alike. Such was its singular lethality that the mere glimpse of Crimson Pearls flourishing upon dying deities was the fear of all who witnessed it.
One Plague Leech died. The other, however, was saved by the slimmest of luck.
The bountiful bulk of the first-struck Avatar had redirected the blade by the smallest of degrees. Combined with the injured Plague Leech's smaller stature by the dint of its wounds, it survived the killing stroke, if only just.
The cleaving edge of red mists slashed away half of its remaining mass, but failed to sever the head.
"No!" Daiyu snarled.
"Oh ho! The dead heaven's smile on me!" The Plague Leech was screaming in horrid agony — its remaining mass almost entirely wrought in metallic flames — but the voice of the Decaying Greyroots was nothing but jolly. "You have failed, Maddened Maiden! And now… I claim my prize!"
The Plague Leech was a whisper of its original size and strength, but still it lived on with a snarling fortitude worthy of its dark patron. The creature conjured forth a growth of flesh, seeking out the pair of wounded youths lying in the hovel. The ardent angel tried to intercept, but the fire in her wings guttered out, and she fell to the earth.
Daiyu could only watch helplessly and in horror as the Avatar of the Botulvorn Beast plucked the pair of children up from the hollow…
And tossed them into the feculent maw of its mouth.
"To devour the Devourer…" The Beast's booming, malefic laughter echoed throughout the swamp. "A thousand years of Sleeping Death was worth it for this moment! May the woeful tides of Samsara claim his soul, and may the Dragon's second death be one of wretched infinitude!"