“You aren’t done yet?”

Sage’s voice was calm and even. He wanted her to know that this was only the tip of the iceberg. There were still many trump cards he had yet to play. With his Foresight he had chosen the path of least resistance at every step. He’d lost one of his Soul Fragments, and burned the skin off his arms, but otherwise the cost had been quite low on his side. Each of her methods had been dealt with quite easily, save for that terrible aura. Working around that single ability of hers, he had slowly torn her down piece by piece.

The holes in her body multiplied again as a third volley of shots from the Shard Rifles tore into her. He didn’t intend to give her any chances. Even as pitiful as she looked at the moment, he planned to completely annihilate her. They’d had a long and terrible battle the first time they met and yet she somehow survived it. There was no way he was going to let it happen again. While he found massacring the uninvolved families of his enemies to be distasteful, he found no problem in utterly destroying his enemy. For him, it was a matter of degree. The family of his enemy may hate him, but will they all act upon it? No. Some of them may stew with rage and raise a future generation to seek revenge, but will all of them? Should he condemn dozens or hundreds because of a few bad apples? It was just too extreme.

People should be judged by their own actions, not by what they might do, or what others in their situation had done previously.

Hei Bai’s black robe concealed the damage to her body from sight. Only, the number of holes in the dark cloth had turned it into a tattered mess. He was quite sure that her flesh was in no worse a state. Surprisingly, Hei Bai’s look was not one of defeat or a loss of hope. Instead, she looked even more focused and angry than before. When the fourth volley ripped through her body, she threw her head back and burst into laughter.

That is the manic laugh of someone at the end of their rope.

“Xiezi, run!”

While yelling he pushed off the ground, hopping back and forth, jumping on empty space and ascending vertically with a zig zag pattern. To her credit, Xiezi didn’t hesitate, immediately fleeing from where she was standing near the border of the murderous aura. She’d still been trying to find a way to reach her Uncle Zhuo, but she threw that aside to escape at his command. As on edge as she was, she was not foolish enough to bother asking questions. Standing near that aura was like standing under a giant guillotine, and the instant anything seemed off she wasted no time in fleeing.

The terrible power around Hei Bai fluctuated. It pulled inward, suddenly shrinking around the old woman before disappearing entirely. A casual onlooker might think it had been dispelled, but that state only lasted for a few seconds. Hei Bai’s body suddenly lost all cohesion. It was like the flesh and bone she was made of was suddenly turned into a liquid. She was like a water balloon popping in slow motion, instantly losing whatever it was that contained her and everything that she was merely splashed onto the ground.

In time with that splash, a wave of power erupted from her. Like a shockwave expanding into every direction, that energy washed over the world around her. It traveled equally in all directions, but the ground channeled that power into something more like the pressure wave of an explosion. Sage chose to ascend to avoid that greater shockwave as he was much closer than Xiezi was. The giant scorpion dispersed much of the energy heading in her way and thankfully she was far enough away to have time to leap into a small depression to avoid the oncoming energy.

That wave of energy was not a physical force. It carried the vicious aura she had been releasing in all directions along with the entirety of the Qi that was contained within her body. Sage had seen it with his Foresight and there was nothing he could do to avoid it completely, doing all he could only to reduce the effect. As it was, his skin was currently crawling. Creating a sizzling noise and starting to soften. That terrible aura was like a poison, spreading through his body and he reacted in the most extreme fashion, releasing the flames of the First Light onto his own body.

He released the safeguards of his own body and the white flames washed over him. Burning away the outer layers of his flesh. Just like he’d done earlier for his arms, he sheathed his body with a layer of Blue Icesilver. Unfortunately, his own arms were now almost completely useless. He’d put away the crossbow and used his arms to shield his head and that power had sunk down nearly to the bone. Cutting away the affected areas tore away much of the flesh of his arms. Without any outside assistance, his arms were likely to become like the victim of a shark bite, with severe muscle damage. If he didn’t have a fast healing ability, he couldn’t even be assured of regaining use of them.

Hei Bai detonated herself, but at that moment, something else formed in her place.

Sage had already seen this happening, which is why he hadn’t lowered his guard. He was climbing higher into the air to buy him a little more time to recover, and also to pull attention away from Xiezi. It was all he could do to help her right now.

Where Hei Bai was previously standing, there was now darkness. It looked like no living thing he’d ever seen and more like a splash of paint frozen in mid-air. A freeze frame of a bottle of black ink being smashed upon a wall. After a few seconds, it was no longer frozen and the liquid blackness started to shift. A lack of light in a liquid form, it slowly took on the shape of a humanoid. It’s face had no features. No mouth, nose, lips, ears. Then a single feature formed. A white sphere formed where its right eye would be and a red skull appeared upon it.

The inky light split and a mouth split its face in half. It split the whole head of the thing in half, a mouth that ran from ear to ear, or at least it would be if it had ears. Like the mouth of a crude puppet, it opened and closed without any sound coming out. Instead a voice was transmitted through vibrations of Spirit Sense.

“Again. You force me onto a path I do not wish to walk. Perhaps you are merely an agent of destiny.”

The dark creature’s single eye looked down at its own body, examining the vague shapes on the ends of its arms. Less like hands and more like mittens it writhed in what might be a roar or a screech, but without any sound.

There was a flash of light and the many Shard Rifles released another volley, the crystals moving at absurd speeds punched right through the dark shape. Only this time, it was like trying to punch holes in smoke. The liquid darkness swirled and refilled the holes that were made, seeming completely unfazed by the attacks. Instead Sage felt a sharp pain ripple through him when a dart of darkness scraped against the side of the Soul Clone. It was only barely peeking its head out of the ground to aim the Shard Rifles, but it had to retreat after suffering that attack. With its own attack negated and being easily injured by this creature that Hei Bai had become, the Soul Clone had become a liability.

Well, this is getting interesting.