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The line of demons had dissolved into a tide once more. We had to fight through the onrush of terrified yaoguai, elbowing them left and right to make way. I had to stop a couple of times to help demons that were getting trampled. They bled on my hands and sleeves from their injuries but kept running for their lives. They had no choice.
It was utter chaos. Hell broken loose. I didn’t want to think about what was happening at the front, where the portal was within tantalizing reach of the panicked survivors.
I nearly tripped over the first body. It was a long-necked turtle the size of a Great Dane, with a shell that looked like it was made out of diamonds, and yet it had been sliced cleanly in two.
Quentin caught me as I stumbled. “Why hasn’t it poofed into ink?” I shouted in his ear.
“That’s only what happens on Earth!” he said. “Anything dies here, it’s dead dead!”
The poor turtle. And it was only the first victim we’d found.
As the crowd cleared out, more and more corpses littered the ground. Animals and monsters of all types. Big and small, young and old. More than a few bodies cradled each other, as if they’d tried to shield each other, or be together in death. Every single one of them had been cut clean through by some kind of unimaginably sharp blade.
It was a slaughterhouse. A killing floor. Scores of demons whom I’d promised help, massacred. I thought it couldn’t get worse until I saw a corpse that had been slashed open from the front instead of the back.
It was the werewolf. He’d faced the unseen enemy in a futile attempt to buy time for the others. He’d died upright, on one knee, like he’d been trying to summon his strength for a final desperate counterattack. A Guardian until the end.
Hot tears welled up in my eyes. My fingernails bit into my palm, gouging into my skin until they met resistance and the pain vanished. I glanced down at my hand. It was glittering black. My arm was turning iron on its own, rage seeping into my fist.
Good, I thought. Because before this day was over, I was going to put my hand straight through whoever did this.
The world had suddenly become quiet. There simply weren’t any more living beings around, other than the gods of the mandate. The landscape was barren, devoid of movement and sound.
“There’s no trace of the enemy,” Guan Yu muttered. He gripped his halberd tighter. “No footsteps, no blood, not even any errant strokes. It’s as if the yaoguai fell apart of their own accord.”
“Someone tell me what this is!” I screamed. “Who did this?”
“I did,” a woman’s voice whispered right up close in my ear.
I jumped and spun around in the direction of the voice. “Did anyone hear that?” I said.
The only answer I got was another unfamiliar sound. One of the stranger, more bizarre auditory experiences I had been party to. Quentin crying out in pain.
A red lash bloomed on the back of his white shirt from shoulder to opposite hip. He fell to the ground and bled and bled.
Maybe time slowed, or maybe it was my poor reflexes like those the Great White Planet had criticized me for, but I didn’t move. The sensation of wrongness I felt in that moment went bone-deep, into my marrow. It paralyzed me.
Quentin had never taken a wound like that since we’d been together. It wasn’t the right kind of wound for him to take. The fight with his evil doppelganger, the Six-Eared Macaque, had busted his face up in an amusing, hockey brawl way. His near-death experience with Red Boy’s purifying flame had briefly petrified him, but that was almost like he’d been immortalized, preserved for the ages.
This was different. My boyfriend turned out to have rawness and pumping blood inside him. He had been breached.
“Look out!” Guan Yu roared. He knocked me to the side with his bulk and spun his weapon in a helicopter twirl. The edge of the guandao sparked as if it had made contact with another blade.
There was a sharp little zipping noise. Behind me, a rock the size of a trash can slid into two pieces, the top half skiing down the bottom half at an angle. It had been sliced through.
“Get down!” Guan Yu said to the rest of us. “As low as you can!”
He strode forward, somehow having determined the direction the attack was coming from. The warrior god began weaving his polearm through the air. His eyes were heavy in concentration, nearly closed, and he breathed deep through his nostrils.
More sparks flew from the business end of his halberd, each one accompanied by a clang and a ricochet whine. He deflected the invisible, slicing projectiles to the left and right, up and down, creating as much of a safe zone as he could for us.
But his task was monumentally difficult. Bloody slashes appeared on Guan Yu’s burly arms when he was a microsecond too slow. He could only protect so many angles. The other gods and I had to throw ourselves to the deck and belly-crawl into a wedge behind him.
The Great White Planet, prone on the ground, scribbled furiously with a fresh pen, doing his duty like a war correspondent under heavy fire. A puff of dust thudded into the sand near my head. I pulled up close to Quentin and curled my body around his.
Nezha was already working on his injury, and I sent a prayer of thanks to him that the young god knew how to do healing magic. “Looks worse than it is,” Nezha said to Quentin. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, his fingers and palms covered in blood. “If you weren’t Sun Wukong, the cut would have been deeper.”
