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That was easy for him to say. Guan Yu hadn’t been dicked around by Erlang Shen and his plot to conquer Heaven by using me as a weapon. I cursed Guan Yu’s stupid warrior’s code of righteousness that prevented me from tearing the traitor god apart limb from limb while he couldn’t fight back.
“What is this bullcrap?” Quentin shouted at the Great White Planet.
“I explained everything!” the Great White Planet said. “Were you not listening a moment ago?”
“This is a trick!” I said. I tried to mash my big toe into Erlang Shen’s eyeball.
“If it’s a trick, then it’s being played on me as well,” Erlang Shen said as Nezha dragged him backward, farther out of my reach. “Do I really look like I’m the one in control at the moment?”
“Everyone CALM DOWN!” Guanyin yelled.
In this case, “everyone” mostly referred to me. I stopped struggling. Guanyin motioned with her hand at the Great White Planet, indicating that he needed to take another turn speaking.
“As I made clear,” he said. “Despite my strident recommendations to the contrary, a number of influential members of the pantheon decided that the best successor to the Jade Emperor would be someone who shared his bloodline. But the Jade Emperor has no children. Erlang Shen is his next closest relation.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” I said. “He was going to overthrow Heaven itself! He’s a traitor!”
“In the Jade Emperor’s absence, the narrative played out a little differently in the minds of the court,” the Great White Planet said, making a face at having to relive the memory. “Most of his crimes took place on Earth, far away from their sight. So it was easier for Lei Gong and the others to interpret his actions as a hero’s mistake on the way to redemption through the Mandate Challenge. After all, who better to replace the Jade Emperor than someone who’d earnestly tried once before?”
“Tamade!” Quentin shouted. “I knew they were stupid and hidebound, but not that stupid!”
“On the contrary, Erlang Shen’s backers are feeling very wise indeed.” The Great White Planet snorted. “After all, true masters of the Way find wisdom in the counterintuitive and illogical.”
I wanted to find these geniuses who thought Erlang Shen’s personal journey was more important than Guanyin’s record of service. And I wanted to show them with my fists exactly how much I hated them. “The only reason why his crimes aren’t such a big deal to the gods is because we kept the fight from reaching their doorstep!” I said.
“I know, right?” Erlang Shen said. “I was going to slaughter the other gods like cattle, and now they’re praising me for being a visionary! To think that I could have simply waited for my moment to claim the throne. The troubles of being ahead of your time, eh?”
Guan Yu caught my fist from behind again. He had good reflexes for a big guy.
“Look, I’m as surprised as you by this turn of events,” Erlang Shen said. “One moment I’m in Diyu having my intestines twirled around a white-hot metal fork as one of the infinite tortures that await family betrayers, and the next I’m being hauled to Earth for my shot at unlimited power. It’s very disorienting, so you could be a little more sympathetic to my situation.”
“I’ll kill you,” I said coldly. It was less of a threat and more of me matter-of-factly stating a solution to my current problem. I’d done it once before, and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.
“You can’t,” the Great White Planet said. “No lethal harm can come to him while he’s in those restraints. And like it or not, he is an official candidate to receive the mandate. He must accompany us to face the challenge if succession is to be legitimate.”
I felt like weeping. I had gone through several low points during my career as a demon hunter and then as the Shouhushen, but this was the most I’d ever felt like straight-up quitting. I’d have preferred to march Erlang Shen straight into the assembly of Heaven and let the monster loose. Every god would have seen exactly how wise they were in an instant.
I looked at Guanyin. If someone was going to stop me from declaring war right now, it was her. She’d tried to warn me about the frustrations of dealing with the celestial pantheon, but I hadn’t listened.
The goddess was amazingly, astoundingly calm when she should have been more enraged than any of us. She wore her cool, logical face, a Vulcan calculating the most amount of good.
“Well, we’re not leaving him here on Earth unsupervised,” she said with a final shrug. “He could hurt someone.”
And that was it. As if that were the only important thing, preventing harm to dogs and children that wandered too close to Erlang Shen, like he was a sharp stick. He could take someone’s eye out!
She saw me staring at her. “What?” she said. “I’d rather he be surrounded by a group of us somewhere far away from Earth than keeping him on the same plane as humanity.”
Guanyin didn’t spare a word for this injustice inflicted upon her. Only others mattered, as usual. I couldn’t tell if I loved or despised her for it right now.
“Then Quentin and I are coming with you,” I said. “There is no way I’m letting this bastard out of my sight until this business is over and he’s back in Hell.” I shot a look at the Great White Planet to see if he had any objections that I could summarily overrule. If he did, he held his tongue.
Erlang Shen’s throaty chuckle added the punctuation mark to her decision. “Oh, this is going to be fun,” he said. “But now that the matter’s settled, I have a different question. Why is this uniformed gentleman approaching as if he can see us?”
I turned slowly, keeping an eye on Erlang Shen. He could have told me my own name and I would have treated the statement as a trick.
But sure enough, a security guard was hustling over from across the lawn, on the double. Several people on the sidewalk were watching our motley gathering, whispering and pointing to each other, and at least two were in the middle of uploading video selfies with us in the background. Dawn had turned into morning while we’d been arguing, and the apartment courtyard seemed to have come to life.
An uncomfortable silence passed through the group as the white-shirted guard slowed down at a cautious distance. He began muttering into a shoulder-mounted walkie-talkie as he approached.
