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“Tactical genius, huh?” I yelled at Quentin over the noise of the demons’ animalistic baying.
“Quit turning this into a contest!” he snapped at me, before running off to help his friend.
Bad air between us or not, I had to go prevent my boyfriend from being killed. I joined Quentin and Guan Yu in their charge. We didn’t want to receive the attack flat-footed.
Nezha fell in beside me. “Uh, Erlang Shen?” I yelled, trying to remind him that we had a prisoner that needed watching. I knew Guanyin had stayed behind, but I wanted at least two gods on him at all times. The Great White Planet didn’t count.
“He can’t keep up in those restraints,” Nezha said happily, completely missing my point. “He’ll have to miss out on the glory!”
I was going to kill these idiots, assuming the yaoguai didn’t beat me to it. It was too late to go back. The tsunami of demons made our little god squad look like surfers paddling into a hurricane.
While the vanguard of burliest yaoguai came straight at us, maintaining eye contact and hurling threats at the top of their lungs as they came closer, the rest went for the left and right as fast as they could, trying to outflank us, trailing streams of black blood and ooze in their wake. With their numbers they could have surrounded us almost immediately, but they hobbled and limped along without trying to shut the jaws of their trap.
Something didn’t add up. And I had near zero time to figure out what. I zoomed in on the nearest demon stragglers.
They were injured. In some cases, mutilated, slashed up by sharp blades just like Ao Guang and his spirit soldiers. I hadn’t noticed it earlier due to the wonky shapes that yaoguai came in, but these demons already had their asses kicked by the same force that attacked the army of Heaven.
They weren’t the Yin Mo. They were fleeing the Yin Mo.
“Stop!” I screamed as I sprinted ahead of my group, my lengthening legs giving me the speed advantage. “Everyone stop!” I increased in size as I ran, planning to become a mountain in the middle of the battlefield that would keep the opposing forces apart.
That would have been cool and impressive and gotten everyone to listen to me right away. Instead, I tripped like a clown.
Growing while running threw off my center of balance, and I faceplanted in the dust, tumbling head over heels from the momentum of my still-increasing mass. I heard terrified screams from the yaoguai who might have thought I was trying to roll over them.
Luckily I skidded to a spread-eagled halt before I turned anyone into paste. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Quentin and the gods had stopped charging, possibly out of sheer embarrassment for me. It was a good thing phones weren’t common with this crowd. On Earth I would have been turned into a meme before I could catch my breath.
“Okay,” I said, my voice booming over the alien landscape. “Everyone just give me a second here.”
The good thing about being this size was that compliance was immediate. Not a peep came from anyone as I got to my truck-sized feet and cleared the debris from my clothes. What appeared to me as pebbles lodged in my waistband were more like boulders that crashed to the ground, sowing more fear in my audience.
“Sorry!” I said. “Not trying to hurt anyone—I’m coming down, okay?”
The yaoguai and gods gave me plenty of space as I reduced to my normal size. They were clearly more afraid of my incompetence and lack of control than anything else, but whatever. I got the effect I wanted.
“Who’s your leader?” I said to the demons. “Who’ll speak for you?”
I saw the sea of demons part ways around one of the toughest-looking warriors, who was pretty much a straight-up werewolf with no extra bits. He glared at me with suspicion, his lips curling to reveal dagger-like fangs. His muscles ripped under a hide that was scarred and pitted from countless fights.
But as I approached the gray-furred beast, he held out his hand in what I thought was a strange palm-up salute. He got down onto his knees and pressed the back of his knuckles to the earth. At my look of confusion he pointed to the dirt in front of him.
There was a moving speck on the dusty ground. I had to get down on my hands and knees to make out the features of a thumbnail-sized ant yaoguai.
For his size, the little guy was pretty brave. The tiny demon stared at me, only inches from my nose, pure defiance in his compound eyes. Four of his arms were crossed in front of his thorax.
“Why did you stop?” the yaoguai asked in a wizened, disproportionately deep voice. He could have narrated a nature documentary about himself.
“Why did you start?” I said.
One of his antennas served as an eyebrow, raising slightly into the air. Reluctantly, he gave up his information.
“We . . . had heard this place contained a rift that would let us escape this plane,” he said. “But tears in the fabric of reality are inherently unstable. We weren’t sure the rumor was true until you arrived. Once you and the gods made your presence known, we had to act quickly or lose our chance.”
“You’re not here to fight, are you?” I said. “You’re running from the Yin Mo.”
Tiny snorted, which shouldn’t have been possible without a nose. “Several of us were here to fight. We thought the gods were coming to close our one way out, so our vanguard was willing to sacrifice themselves to hold it open. Our bravest and strongest were prepared to die so the rest could make it to safety.”
I glanced around. The wounded demons leaned on one another for support, or simply gave up and sat on the ground in miserable huddles. Their earlier ferocity had been born of desperation. They were scared and broken, much like the remnants of Ao Guang’s army.
