Chapter 27: The Sound She Shouldn't Have Heard
One years later.
Zhu Zhuqing did not waste breath on panicking.
Panic can cause mistakes. Mistakes will make the chance for failure to increase.
For to be alive, in her case, was worse than dying on the road.
So she ran.
Her feet touched the root, stone, branch, earth. Then they left them again before the weight could settle long enough to slow her down. The trees thinned and tightened by turns around her, the road long gone behind, the path ahead where people not use usually.
Behind her, the pursuit did not fade.
Three.
No—four now.
One had taken the lower route through the underbrush. One kept to the trunks at her left. Two stayed farther back, patient enough not to rush while waiting for the exhaustion would do its work for them.
This is a professional team.
That irritated her more than it frightened her.
Family hounds.
Not random bandits. Not wild opportunists. Not the sort of men who could be shaken by doubling back once or vanishing into a bad patch of woods.
They knew who they were chasing. And they knew what awaited if they returned without her.
Zhu Zhuqing breath stayed even by force.
Her side hurt. Not badly yet. A shallow cut along her upper arm pulled whenever she changed direction too sharply. Her calves had begun to tighten. She ignored all of it.
A branch whipped across her shoulder. She ducked beneath a second, planted one foot on a sloping root, and launched herself over a low wash of rock where rainwater had chewed the earth open months ago.
The man on her left stayed with her.
That made him the fastest.
Kill the fastest one first if she had to but it will be hard as most of them stronger than her as she only a Soul Grandmaster while three of them are Soul Elder and one of them a Soul Ancestor.
The thought had barely settled when a voice came from behind the trees.
"You won't make the border before dark."
Young. Male.
Zhu Zhuqing did not answer.
She cut right instead, deeper into arough ground where the brush rose higher and the tree roots knotted close enough to break an ordinary runner stride. If they wanted a clean chase, they would not have it from her.
Another voice came, closer this time.
"Stop running."
That one made her mouth flatten.
Whoever trained them should have taught them not to say stupid things in the middle of a hunt.
She kept moving.
A thrown blade hissed past her shoulder and struck bark ahead.
Too close.
The next one might be better aimed so she need to move faster.
She changed height, not direction—up instead of aside, one foot against the tree, push, twist, land on the next low branch, then down again before the branch could betray her weight with a crack.
A safer routes.
For three breaths.
Then she saw the gully ahead.
Not deep enough to kill a chase. Narrow enough to become a trap that might help them chase her.
Her eyes flicked left.
The trunks there were closer. Harder footing. Worse visibility.
Better odds.
She turned into it immediately.
Brush tore at her sleeves. Dead leaves slid underfoot. Something small darted away from her path. The air smelled damper here, older, less touched. Not a forest path anyone sane would choose in haste.
Exactly why she chose it.
She heard one of the pursuers curse when he lost clean footing behind her.
Another stayed silent.
That one was the dangerous one.
Zhu Zhuqing touched the trunk ahead with two fingers and swung around it, letting her body flatten into the turn before bursting forward again. The movement pulled at the cut on her arm. Warmth ran down toward her wrist.
Manageable.
For now.
Then the undergrowth ended too abruptly.
She stopped on instinct rather than thought.
The ground ahead dipped into a hollow surrounded by old trunks and exposed roots. Not open enough to call a clearing. Too open for her liking.
And the pursuers had already spread.
One behind. One left. Two farther back, closing.
They had not trapped her cleanly yet.
But they were close enough that the next exchange would decide whether this stayed an escape or became a fight.
Zhu Zhuqing lowered her center.
The world became very simple.
She need to gauge the distance, the first target she can take then the second one. And how much damage she need to endure to kill them. It good that her martial spirit focus on agility.
The man to her left stepped out enough to be seen.
He wore no family crest openly, but he did not need one. His posture and the style of their fight already given her enough clue.
"You've run far enough. There no need to continue the chase."
Zhu Zhuqing finally spoke.
"Then come closer."
He smiled once, thin and humorless.
"Then I will obliged."
As though she were a thing to be retrieved.
Her hands flexed once.
The man behind her moved first, trying to cut off the retreat line. Too impatient. The left-side hunter came a half-breath later, angled to force her into the other two.
Better.
They did know what they were doing.
Pity.
She moved toward the impatient one.
Not because he was the true threat. Because the others expected her to avoid him.
Her first step was low and silent. Her second was her claw that manifest from the martial spirit Hell Civet.
Steel flashed at her wrist. She knocked it aside, entered his guard, and drove her elbow hard into the base of his throat. Not enough to kill. Enough to break his next breath and fold his posture.
Then she was gone again before the man on the left reached striking range.
The hollow exploded into motion.
A blade cut bark where her neck had been. A kick took dirt instead of her knee. Someone hissed in pain behind her and tried to recover.
Too many opponent that can coordinate with each other.
Zhu Zhuqing landed on a root, glance toward the back, and finally saw the real problem.
They were not trying to kill her quickly.
They were trying to force her into spending everything she had before taking her alive.
Her mouth went cold.
For the first time since the chase began, she begin to doubt whether she will be able to make it.
And that was when she heard it.
"Zeios Igalima raizen tron."
The words were not loud. But in this place that devoid of the usual sound of the city, that sound echoing in this area.
None of the hunters moved for one beat because none of them had expected a human voice there—certain, controlled, and completely untouched by the scramble around them.
Zhu Zhuqing turned.
At first she saw only light.
Not golden. Not white. Not the clean brightness of a noble spirit skill shown for intimidation.
This was darker than that—black and green cut together, like some violent thing had come out screaming that the chaos is not enough.
Then the song began.
"Keikoku merodī…"
The voice carried on, the rest of the battle song flowing with it.
And something dropped into this area.
Not just fell. It drop with high speed in front of her.
It dropped like a blade that entering the sheath with that kind of momentum.
He is standing there while holding something of bend stick at the side.
The first thing Zhu Zhuqing understood was that the weapon was a scythe.
No— a sickle changing as she watched it, lengthening, reshaping, curving into a reaper line that looked less forged than summoned from the act of cutting itself. Four shoulder units flared behind the figure back, not wings, not quite, but something mechanical and predatory enough to make her instincts screaming danger at once.
The nearest pursuer barely got his martial spirit weapon up.
The scythe hooked under it, tore it aside, and the return cut opened his chest in one smooth line while hauling backward.
Too fast.
Too close.
Too merciless to be an accident.
The second pursuer shouted and lunged from the right.
The newcomer did not retreat. He turned into the attack. The shoulder unit on one side burst with a short violent thrust, jerking his body half a step off the ordinary path of movement, and the scythe haft slammed into the attacker ribs before the blade finished the motion across his side.
The man spun away, blood already falling.
Zhu Zhuqing did not move.
For the first time in several minutes, she had no idea whether stepping forward or back would increase or reduce her chances of survival.
The song continued.
"Kirikizandeagemashō…"
The figure moved with it.
Not elegantly. Not beautifully. Not like the Star Luo styles she knew, where there is sharpness and restraint that made each strike look inevitable.
This was different.
This scythe user fought like someone entering a scene halfway through and deciding the ending belonged to him anyway. The scythe hooked, dragged, reaped. When the blade line should have overextended, the weapon changed shape just enough to recover. The shoulder units fired again—not long enough for flight, but enough to distort timing, change entry, and turn what should have been a miss into almost a kill line.
The third pursuer tried to disengage.
The scythe caught his sleeve. Then his shoulder. Then the ground behind his feet.
For one impossible instant, it looked as though a guillotine line had appeared exactly where he chose to retreat.
He understood it too late.
The next cut dropped on him.
The last of them did not attack.
He backed away instead, eyes wide, weapon half-raised, all confidence gone now that the story now belonged to something he had not prepared to face.
At least one of them is thinking correctly.
The singer turned.
Until that moment, she had only seen motion, weapon, pressure, killing rhythm.
Now she saw the person inside it.
Too young, at first glance, for the kind of presence that had just broken trained pursuit like rotten wood. Dark hair. Hard breathing hidden beneath the flow of the song. Armor unlike anything she had seen in Star Luo or Heaven Dou—black-green, edged with violent green light, built around the scythe and those strange shoulder units like a relic made for execution.
He seem almost the same age as her.
And his eyes—
Not wild.
They were calm in the worst possible way, as if the fight had simplified the world.
He looked at the last pursuer once.
"Take them with you." The man said.
Hearing this her pursuers then gather his comrade.
They then fled the area.
The singer did not chase them.
The music of the song ran on for another breath, another, then quieted, though the pressure of it remained in the hollow like the echo of something ritual and dangerous.
Zhu Zhuqing stayed where she was.
The stranger with the scythe looked at her at last.
Measuring.
That was somehow felt more unsettling than the fight.
She realized then that the four men who had been hunting her had stopped being the most dangerous thing in the place the moment he arrived.
And that the one who had interrupted her death was not, by any ordinary standard, safe.