Chapter 462: Three Fragments, Three Rivalries

(Cognosticon here. As a reminder, this week's schedule will be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.)

For the first several seconds of the fight, Omilaena saw a chance to end it all: Jackal Thirteen was disoriented and separated from many of his puppets. She put everything she could into her first assault, desperately trying to finish him off before he could regroup.

It wasn't quite enough. She came within a hair of killing him, but her syringe missed his neck and his razor head sliced across her side.

So, as the puppets began to surround her, she found herself injured and outnumbered. The Masterful Crown patriarch floated in the center of the battlefield, golden walls slicing out from him and separating the battlefield into wedges. Omilaena's slice was one of the smaller ones, so she didn't have any other patriarchs to deal with, but Jackal Thirteen alone could be a problem.

"Annoying, aren't they?" The Jackal mercenary was buying time for positioning by speaking, but that might not be a bad idea.

"Just how are they paying you for this?" Omilaena asked.

"I only accept payment in power, and they offered me an impressive sort of immortality."

Without warning, one of the puppets lurched from out of the rubble, nearly catching Omilaena. She ducked underneath its attack and kicked it aside, and this time she was fast enough to use ice qi to freeze the next thread lashing out at her. All of the other puppets were in position, but she'd been tracking them and managed to flip away.

As she sailed through the air, she exhaled a cloud of poison toward Jackal Thirteen, forcing him to retreat. Of course his puppets pushed through, immune to the poison. She discovered that she could partially control the battlefield with clouds of poison, since that would determine whether her opponent attacked personally or used his puppets.

Unfortunately, that was basically just choosing her risks, because both were dangerous. Some of the puppets could use projectiles, and his threads could slice at her from anywhere on the battlefield, so the combination would slowly whittle her own.

"It seems like they already gave you immortality," Omilaena said once she got a second to breathe, then withdrew a jar of immortality elixir from her spatial satchel. "If you want more, I actually have a much larger supply."

Jackal Thirteen hesitated, staring at the jar and feeling its power, then shook his head. "I can just take that off your corpse, which is a better prize. Besides, the real payment they have for me is completing this sort of immortality. It's slightly flawed, as I suspect you're smart enough to see."

"Did they actually show you a method of completing it? Because to me it looks like it's just fundamentally flawed and they're pretending to have an answer."

His eyes narrowed, but this time he didn't hesitate. All of the puppets were in position and they hurled themselves at her at the same time that more deadly threads glimmered across the battlefield.

Maybe she was too untrustworthy, maybe he just didn't care. Omilaena took a deep breath and injected herself with one of her desperation cards. This could get much worse.

.

..

.

At first Kai had been focused on defending himself, trying to fight Xir Xan Khan as well as all his supporting cultivators. He'd taken multiple injuries that would have brought down most warriors, only kept moving by Behemoth's Heart. The heir to the Coiling Island sect was strong on his own, and unfortunately good at working together with others.

But Kai had been holding back, letting them get overconfident. When they tried to close in on him, he froze the lesser cultivators with Void Gaze, then exhaled Baleful Breath. The cloud of death roiled out over his section of the battlefield, covering the ground and slamming against the golden walls hard enough that they trembled.

All of the weaker cultivators were consumed, and for a moment Kai thought that he'd caught Xir Xan Khan as well, but then a beam of purple shot up from the cloud and Xir Xan Khan resolved floating over it.

"The patriarch of the Masterful Crown clan refused to listen to reason," Xir Xan Khan said. "If he had followed my plan, this would already be over."

"Then your plan failed, didn't it?" Kai said. The other man's eyes narrowed, but he didn't fall for the bait.

"I can't believe that a perfect woman like Zae Zin Nim, who should have had everything, would waste any time with you. What hold do you have over her? I don't know how you stole her from me, but I'm taking her back."

Kai set his feet within the darkness. "Have you even had a single personal conversation with her?"

"Silence! I don't have to listen to your childish view of the world!"

His opponent streaked forward, shifting to light and back in an impressive mastery of his greater flight technique. Kai anticipated the attack and dodged with Thunderbird's Wings, leaving his opponent to be struck by the shockwave. But Xir Xan Khan was tough enough to endure it and arced after him again, attacking before he could even hit the ground.

The two of them clashed multiple times in the air, battering one another in opposite directions. Kai found that he was faster, but his opponent was more agile, capable of curving at any angle with his greater flight. For a time they seemed to be fighting evenly, which would work in his favor because his stamina and regeneration were superior. Unless the others were losing their fights...

In his moment of distraction, Kai wasn't quite fast enough. Xir Xan Khan managed to grab one of his wings and slammed him into the golden wall. An instant later his palm struck Kai's back, forcing a mouthful of blood as the force slammed into his internal organs.

"This isn't a duel," Xir Xan Khan hissed as he pushed him further into the barrier. "You're a beast, and this is an extermination."

Kai transformed his wing, extending Manticore Quills where Xir Xan Khan was holding it. The young heir fell back, wincing in pain at the quills piercing through his hand, and Kai turned his head to unleash Baleful Breath.

It wasn't quite fast enough, as his opponent evaded with greater flight again, but when he reformed one of his legs was burned. Closer. Kai braced his feet on the golden wall and pushed off.

.

..

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Even though Patriarch Yul had completely transformed the battlefield, Zae Zin Nim wasn't immediately worried. This division relied on their arrogance, assuming that the three of them were only surviving due to their coordination. In fact, she believed in their individual strength and suspected their opponents got more advantage from superior numbers, so splitting them apart was not necessarily in their favor.

Case in point: in her wedge of the battlefield she was facing off against the matriarch who summoned lightning. Her technique was powerful, but it required time to generate. In close quarters, Zae Zin Nim could easily avoid it, or continue pressuring her.

The old woman had 1500 Power, so she would be an overwhelming Sky Soul in most situations... but that was no longer out of reach for Zae Zin Nim. Of course the matriarch had martial arts and many other qi techniques, but when they got in range, Zae Zin Nim's Brightwind martial arts pierced through her attempts at grand techniques.

She managed to land a palm strike and the matriarch flew back, crashing against one of the golden walls before regaining her stability with flight. Zae Zin Nim wished she could finish her off, but in that moment another enemy circled around: it was the patriarch who used the pursuing spheres, and he already had one charged: he released it toward her with Zae Zin Nim caught between golden walls.

As she tried to flee upward, she noticed that Nymidria was struggling to hold her own against the acid-using patriarch. Yet in that moment, the dryad looked up and caught her gaze through the golden walls. They were beginning to crack, with spiritual roots growing into them, so they only needed a little more...

Instead of trying to evade the sphere closing on her, Zae Zin Nim chose a much more dangerous tactic: she took it head on, softly redirecting the attack instead of blocking it. She effectively threw the sphere aside, into the cracked golden wall.

The explosion made the battlefield shudder and Zae Zin Nim would have been blown away if she hadn't used the Coldfire Corona to protect herself. She had planned to use a Coldfire Palm to strike while everyone else was disoriented, but she was too shaken and her mana was in use, so she just floated back through the air as she saw the devastation.

One of the golden walls had been blown apart and others around the battlefield partially dissolved. That surprised her until she saw that Nymidria was sending a storm of razor sharp leaves at Patriarch Yul, cutting through his robes and severely impacting his concentration.

With a moment to breathe, Zae Zin Nim spotted Omilaena in the middle of a desperate battle against the Jackal mercenary. She could definitely use help, but where was Kai? Zae Zin Nim spotted him a while later, chasing after Xir Xan Khan... the heir to the Coiling Island sect was running, but he didn't look afraid.

Instead he escaped the region of golden walls, not far from her, and cast some sort of jade talisman to the ground. Zae Zin Nim wasn't familiar with the artifact, but the spell inlaid in it seemed like communication, not an attack. A moment later, she realized that this was worse.

"Zae Clen Ban!" the heir shouted, "do you see? They can't win this battle without you, and they don't care about your daughter's life!"

"So disappointing." The voice was barely audible amid the sounds of battle, yet it sent a chill down Zae Zin Nim's spine. She stared as a misty figure began to form above the talisman. "As usual, there's no choice but to handle things myself."

It was too late to stop the teleportation: her father walked out of the mist and onto the battlefield.