Chapter 61 - Worse Than Death

“Ming Ru!” Chief Yun yelled, “What are you doing!?”

The old master from the Heavens Gate monastery was a familiar face to the police chief, from the seminars and training that the master had given to the police department over the years. It was a professional relationship, and not a very close one for Chief Yun, however there was no mistaking that the person in front of him was Ming Ru.

Ming Ru’s appearance was ghostly and translucent, with robes that fluttered furiously in an invisible wind. His expression was hard and cold, his eyes glowed with a silver light. The monk did not reply to Chief Yun’s words as he whipped the chain out towards Chief Yun’s spirit body at a blinding speed.

In the spirit realm, Chief Yun could only rely on his raw spiritual power, since none of his abilities were attuned to the spiritual realm as a Disciple of Spacetime. On the other hand, Ming Ru had the distinct advantage here as an Exalted of the Domain of Spirit.

Therefore, rather than fight directly Chief Yun used all his strength to resist Ming Ru’s pull on his spirit body while simultaneously opening up a Planar Door directly on his physical body. He felt an intense jerking sensation as his spirit body immediately flew into the rift to follow his physical body, just barely evading the silver chain.

It was pitch black as he fell out of the Planar Door in the middle of the forest. His vision was black and white as he grabbed onto Liette’s shoulder.

“Chief!” Liette cried. The gash across his eyes was bleeding profusely as blood streamed down his face.

“Stay with me!” Chief Yun yelled as he reached out to open another door.

He drew his hand back suddenly, canceling the door as a chained blade suddenly sliced through the air where his arm had been.

Now Chief Yun understood what he was facing. A Spirit Domain master who had the power to open portals in the spirit world. The legendary spirit chain technique that could strike from any angle!

It was a technique that could only be achieved at the Adept level. Although Chief Yun was already very powerful as a Disciple, he felt an incredible sense of helplessness against the monk. Ming Ru, when did you get so strong?

Chief Yun gritted his teeth, letting go of Liette to pull out his gun. His mind raced as he examined his options with fighting this powerful enemy.

Ming Ru seemed to have the ability to move at will in the Spiritual Plane, but not attack. This made sense from Chief Yun’s understanding - The physical body provided protection for a person’s Astral, Spiritual and Aetheric bodies. This meant that in most circumstances only the physical body was vulnerable to attack.

Ming Ru had just displayed some sort of ability to pull Chief Yun’s spiritual body out directly, but given that he was still primarily attacking in the physical world, that ability must be spiritually draining to use, or have specific requirements, or both.

Though the spirit world and the physical world didn’t overlap precisely, if Chief Yun could pinpoint Ming Ru’s location in the spirit world he could use the runic bullets in his gun to attack the monk.

From Chief Yun’s own experience with forming portals with Planar Door, he knew that the link between the portals was the weak spot of the ability. Ming Ru’s ability seemed to work the same way, though much faster and with smaller portals, sending his chain from the spirit world to the real world to attack from multiple directions. However this was Chief Yun’s chance. If he could lock on to the ‘link’, when it was made, he could locate the Monk, following the weapon’s chain directly to the monk’s location.

His spiritual intuition triggered as he dodged out of the way of a rift that appeared to his left. The silver blade launched past him, striking Officer Liette in the neck. The officer collapsed to the ground dead as Chief Yun aimed his gun at the location his intuition pointed him to.

Blam! Blam!

Two shots exploded into the air from his pistol towards a spot in the trees to his right. One of the bullets flew harmlessly into the night, but the second one contacted its mark!

Ming Ru let out a grunt as he materialized out of the spirit world, saturated blues and reds washing out of his body as he fell from the tree. His left arm sprayed blood from where the bullet had hit.

Chief Yun didn’t try to follow up the attack, but instead used the opportunity to reach out in front of him while grabbing the body of Liette. A rift opened up as he jumped through the hole, which rapidly closed behind him.

He landed in a field on the outskirts of the city. The gas lit streets of Noga could be seen not too far in the distance. Just as he felt relief from the sight of safety he felt a sharp impact on the back of his head. As Ming Ru fell from the trees, he whipped his chain out towards the retreating Chief. The blade had followed Chief Yun through the portal, its chain cutting off as the portal closed a fraction of a second too late.

Chief Yun fell forward to his knees, his eyes wide in shock as blood flowed down from his forehead where the blade remained lodged in his head. He slowly reached a trembling hand up to touch the blade, and finally fell to the ground and died.

~

Inside the woodcutter’s cabin, a woman with braided hair that resembled vines pulled herself out from under the broken floor.

She was known as Medusa, one of the leaders of the Marked Devout. At the moment that the police had assaulted the cabin she was in the crawl space below setting up traps. They had known that the assault was coming, but they weren’t expecting it to come during the night. Nor did they expect it to be executed with such sudden, violent efficiency.

With cold, wary eyes she observed the aftermath of the police assault.

The cabin was lit in a flickering green light that cast long, dark shadows that twisted and coiled. Several of the bodies had fallen from the ceiling, along with the eyeballs and vines of the Keeper’s Gaze, which now lay in clumpy mounds across the floor. Above the altar, a pulsating sphere of blood hovered. It had the appearance of a dark, shell-less egg as something chaotic appeared to be rapidly growing inside it. Medusa briskly passed the broken altar and the eyeballs, which were all focused on the black egg as they waved silently in an unseen wind.

She stepped over the dead Candidate boy in the monk robes, not paying him any mind as she headed straight to her fallen ‘sister’. The girl lay in a pool of blood, her eyes still open in shock. Medusa’s eyes narrowed as her lips tensed into a trembling scowl. She dug her nails into her palms as she silently mourned the death of her companion.

Medusa’s head jerked around as a moaning sound from across the room caught her attention. She looked over to see a black, translucent blob in the rough shape of a human body. The interior of its body was filled with twinkling lights that resembled constellations of stars. Parts of its body flickered in an out of existence as it dragged itself slowly towards the center of the room. Medusa instinctively took a step backwards out of fear.

This was an Exalted that had undergone corruption of its soul. Its mind had been warped and its humanity abandoned. Such an existence was extremely unpredictable and dangerous.

As Medusa looked at the blob, it seemed to notice her as countless eyes began opening inside the black mass and focusing on her. Without hesitation Medusa ran to the hole in the wall nearby and jumped out of the cabin, disappearing into the night.

The blob which used to be Officer Walt watched the woman leave without any prolonged interest. When the cabin once again fell into silence, she dragged herself with great pain across the broken, corroded floor of the room until she was next to the broken altar. She looked at the embryo growing in the floating black egg above her.

All the eyes in her body gathered at her ‘head’ as they looked up at it. She began rising up as an amorphous slime that only superficially maintained some features of a human body. Her head reached up, the mass of her body elongating to reach higher and higher until it was barely out of reach of the floating egg.

She stared at the egg, and a mouth grew out of her head facing upwards. A black, star-filled tongue licked her lips as she said one word in a distorted, agonized voice.

“Hungry...”

A hundred teeth grew spontaneously out of the mouth that suddenly ballooned into a huge shape and chomped down on the egg! The creature inside came to life and screamed as it waved half-formed tentacles about, but after two bites the star-filled monster had already swallowed it.

The pulsating energies of demonic Life raged through the star-filled monster as she suddenly grew to a massive size. The rafters and roof groaned as she became too big to fit in the room.

Crack! The entire roof snapped into pieces and the cabin collapsed as a giant black head that resembled a human’s emerged from the cabin. The head was connected to a writhing mass that resembled an octopus with dozens of legs. Vines grew out of her body, spontaneously forming and being absorbed as they squirmed. She turned her head around, her hollow, empty eye sockets were filled with dozens of tiny eyes.

Her eyes turned towards the west as she felt the spiritual pull of the residents of Noga.

“Hungry...”

A single, croaking word left her lips as she began writhing in the direction of the city.