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The forest in front of us shifted to the right. It was as if someone had raked a scalpel across the backdrop of an old movie set and pulled apart the canvas. The trees slid off their stumps and crashed over on their sides. The crescendo of snapping branches accompanied the big reveal of a deforested path the length of a soccer pitch.
Quentin let out a low appreciative whistle.
“That’s pretty good,” I said to Guan Yu. “But can you do it on the run?”
? ? ?
“I’m not asking you to slow down,” the Great White Planet said in my ear, his teeth clacking together as he spoke. “But maybe you could give these old bones some consideration.”
“Cram it,” I said. I didn’t care how rough a ride I was, hopping from stump to stump. I never heard Yoda complain about piggybacking on Luke while he was somersaulting through the swamp.
I’d made it clear that dignity was no longer a priority to our group. That was why the Great White Planet was clutching to my back for dear life. I trusted Guanyin could keep up with a fast pace.
Ahead of us, Quentin and Guan Yu were having the time of their lives. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade danced in its wielder’s hands as it shredded through the forest, and sometimes not even in Guan Yu’s hands. I was pretty sure the warrior god could control the polearm without touching it. On more than one occasion it spun with a mind of its own, zooming in arcs to the left and right before returning to him.
The trees that took too long to fall out of our way were pounced on and obliterated by a squad of Quentin clones. He made up a single-handed offensive line that blocked for the rest of us, only instead of padded dummies, the obstacles were multiton piles of lumber.
Even Erlang Shen got into the act, whipping splinters out of the air with lashes of water. “You know that whatever is generating this qi will hear us coming,” he shouted.
“Don’t care,” I shouted back.
“I’m just saying, powerful beings tend to have good hearing,” he went on. “For example, gods can pick up on the sounds of distant, uh, vigorously combative romance, shall we say?”
My cheeks started to burn.
“At first I thought the two of you were locked in mortal struggle,” he said. “I almost went to check on you. For your safety.”
“Screw you!” I yelled.
“I don’t think I would survive the encounter!” he said gleefully. “I mean, I never heard the monkey make such a noise, even when I fought him to the . . . aaagh!”
A weird-looking spiky fruit the size of a pineapple smashed into Erlang Shen’s face from above. I looked up to see a Quentin, perhaps the real one, giving me a wink from a tree branch.
I blew a kiss at him. Dunking on people we both hated, together. The truest sign of coupledom there ever was.
? ? ?
The Great White Planet’s estimation was about right. Without my phone I had no way to time our exact progress. But I guessed roughly an hour had passed, once we ran out of trees.
I let the old god off my back and jumped down from the last stump. With the forest behind me, I gazed into infinity.
The next level of this game was an endless marble floor that housed absolutely nothing. The yawning expanse ahead of us could have been the size of a true continent. Polished flatness every which way you looked.
It was almost oppressive, how smooth and even the white stone plain was. The soothing effect of the campus’ flatness back on Earth was magnified here into the nerve-wracking thought that I was about to be pressed down and griddled.
The campus, I thought bitterly. “We have to go.”
“Genie,” Guanyin said. “I have a bad feeling about this. Something’s not right.”
I wheeled on her, suddenly furious. She’d been the one to say that we had to finish the Mandate Challenge in order to go home, and the thought of slowing down now caused me to lose it.
“What, do you want to quit again?” I snapped. “I have to get back to Earth, now! We don’t have eternity for you to piss away, figuring out what you want to do!”
There was a time I would have severely hurt someone for making Guanyin flinch the way she did now. I couldn’t stomach my own handiwork, so I turned my back on her and marched onward to the end.
I watched my feet the first few steps. They crossed over the boundary between forestland and stone plain. So far, so good. No barriers, death traps, or illusions.
We set out in a row, spaced apart from each other. The Magnificent Seven but down one. You could have scored our meaningful walk to a cowboy’s harmonica.
