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Fates Parallel Chapter 133 - Destruction
🕑 Added 2021-10-01 19:42:46 +0000 UTCYoshika tried to regain her bearings. As she looked around, she met her own eyes and the world seemed to snap back into place. The uneasiness faded as Yoshika felt both of her bodies again. Her domain was still split in two by the barrier, and she was unable to sense anything beyond it, but the bond that made her whole had been maintained somehow. She let out a sigh of relief. Yoshika now knew that the connection between Jia and Eui went far beyond just their domain. Perhaps before their breakthrough, this would have severed their connection again, as it had with Yue, but she was stronger now.
In perfect synchronization, she leveled a glare at Dae with both sets of eyes, causing him to sweat nervously. He couldn’t have known what forcibly severing her domain might do, but it had uncomfortable parallels to Yue’s betrayal. She gave him some credit for the fact that it hadn’t been malicious, but she was absolutely going to be having words with him later. The fact that they weren’t attacking meant that the barrier was similar to the one Jia had faced against Tae In-Su before—blocking things from both directions. Looking up, she saw that it was a single barrier being split in half, rather than two distinct formations—they closed together at a single point in the center of the formations anchoring it.
She had to hand it to Dae, it was the second most formidable barrier she’d ever seen—not counting the grand shield formations around Goryeon cities and the academy—second only to the one his master had drawn during Yoshika’s breakthrough. She tested it the same way she had Tae and Sun’s barrier during Jia’s qualifier, but found none of the weaknesses. It stopped mana and matter alike without exception. Not even the air could enter or escape—in fact, the formation was slowly draining the air out from within it. Dae was planning to wait it out until she either surrendered or passed out from suffocation.
She wondered if he had accounted for the indomitable force of Eui’s Six Arms of Asura. She approached the barrier, standing face to face with the nervous mages, watching her warily as she ignored the booing crowd—sealing your opponents wasn’t a very popular way to win a duel, apparently. Focusing the element of raw destruction into her body, then focusing it into her first, Yoshika struck out at the barrier with all the force she could muster. The destructive power of her ki—was dispersed harmlessly. Yoshika stared at her fist in disbelief while Dae exhaled a shaky sigh of relief.
“Oh, thank the ancestors that held!”
His voice was muffled by the barrier, but even if it had blocked sound entirely she’d have been able to read his lips. She couldn’t help herself, she had to ask.
“How? Even if it doesn’t break the entire barrier, my attack should have at least gone through!”
Dae scratched the back of his head, chuckling awkwardly in what had become a very familiar gesture.
“Hehe, I probably shouldn’t tell you, but the design of this barrier is based on my master’s work. Like the grand shield formations, it disperses attacks throughout its entire surface. You either break the formation maintaining it, starve it of mana, or overpower the entire formation in one strike. The formations are outside the barrier, starving it is completely impossible from the inside, and I doubt that even you can muster up enough power to annihilate the entire formation in a single blow, Miss Yo—erm, Miss An. I believe that this is our victory!”
Dae was grinning ear to ear. He was so proud of himself, and Yoshika couldn’t help but smile at how cute he looked, wagging his tail happily like that. She schooled her expression, shooting an icy glare at Tae In-Su to cover up her momentary lapse. Taking a deep breath, Yoshika considered her options. She wasn’t ready to give up, not yet. This was her moment, and she couldn’t let Dae take it from her, no matter how good a friend he was.
The more she thought about it, there was really only one option she had at her disposal. Unlike Dae, she lacked the expertise or resources to make powerful single-use talismans. Jia’s lightning nova talisman had been the only one she had, and she hadn’t had time to replace it. The Lightning God Transformation was also unlikely to succeed where Six Arms had failed—more likely she’d simply break herself on the formation. Finally, none of her spiritual techniques came even close to being able to break it—only the Awakening Dragon came close, but there was no way she’d be able to outmatch the mana absorption of the shield, and it would take forever even if she could. She thought that perhaps it might be possible to slip past with Steps of the Stalker—some remnant of Jia’s brief fusion with Heian told her it should be possible—but she’d used a lot of her shadow essence during the qualifier, and she’d rather save what she had left for a true emergency.
No, there was only one thing left, and for once it wasn’t something she had never tried before. She had in fact tried it extensively, over and over again for the last few months—and failed every single time. There was a reason Eui hadn’t attempted to use the fifth arm of her Six Arms of Asura technique during the tournament—and it wasn’t an overabundance of caution. The simple fact was that Yoshika had been trying to master it for months, and each time it had led to a deviation that could only be stopped by intervention from Jia’s core.
She was a little nervous about the idea of trying to use it now, given that Jia’s core was cut off from Eui’s body by the barrier, but she was emboldened by the fact that she had managed to remain whole in spite of that. Yoshika wouldn’t even consider it in the middle of an actual fight, regardless of her history of battlefield inspiration—it was just far too dangerous. Luckily, the two mages seemed confident enough in their barrier to simply outwait her, so she had time to focus carefully.
Yoshika sat down and began to meditate. As Ienaga had demonstrated, she didn’t yet know how to tap into the embodied ki that made up part of her bodies, so like most of the ultimate martial techniques, the fifth arm required her to gather up a large amount of her ki to release all at once. Destruction was a fickle element even in the most optimal conditions, and it took all of Yoshika’s concentration to prevent it from going out of control—and the more she gathered, the harder it got. During practice, she’d lost control of the technique before even concentrating enough of her ki on more than one occasion. Yet the truly difficult part was what came afterwards.
The ultimate form of the Six Arms of Asura—and the fifth arm was the ultimate form, since the sixth arm was incomplete, and mostly theoretical—would see Yoshika releasing a huge amount of destructive ki within Eui’s body. Without an outlet, it would turn its power in on the user no matter how well Yoshika controlled it—many masters had died attempting it. In truth, Eui herself would have likely died trying to master it if not for Yoshika’s twin cores protecting her from the worst of the backlash, but it was impossible to completely negate the backlash of the fifth arm—it was just too much power at once.
Dae began to sweat nervously as he watched her meditating rather than giving up. He casted a spell that made his eyes glow—Yoshika recognized it as one that he used to visualize mana without his aura—and went pale at what he saw.
“M-Miss An, I thought you hadn’t yet mastered that technique. Are you sure what you’re doing is safe? T-this is just supposed to be a friendly competition, hehe...”
Yoshika suppressed a smirk. He was right, of course—it probably wasn’t worth it—but Yoshika didn’t think of it that way. It wasn’t really about pride, winning, or losing. This was a challenge! She always made the most productive breakthroughs under duress! That was why she was constantly trying new things in the middle of combat, and why she was so determined to use this opportunity to try a technique that had been eluding her for so long. Begrudgingly, Yoshika had to admit that she could kind of understand Elder Qin’s hands-off approach to teaching—this kind of advancement under pressure was exactly what he wanted.
She stood once more when she had gathered as much of her destructive ki as she could without losing control. Sweat beaded on Eui’s neck and forehead as she struggled to maintain control, and even Jia’s body was trembling from the sheer effort of concentration. There was nothing left but to do it. Knowing that things were going to happen very quickly, Yoshika used Absolute Awareness to sharpen her senses to the absolute maximum as she released the built-up ki within Eui’s body.
Instantly, Eui was surrounded by a dark red and black aura that seemed to drink the light in rather than shed any itself. The stones under her feet crumbled to dust, and her hair was whipped about by a vortex as her aura consumed even the air surrounding her. Eui had become an avatar of destruction, but the power wasn’t satisfied by only the ground and the air, and as she knew it would, it began to consume her flesh as well. She wouldn’t be able to hold the technique for long—maybe a second at most before it destroyed her entirely. Yoshika called forth wood-element qi from within her dantian to stave off the destruction of her own body, but it was a trickle of water against a raging forest fire.
She had no time to waste, and Yoshika acted as fast as her body would allow. She focused her power into a fist and struck out at the barrier, unleashing the destructive force upon it. The translucent yellow wall of energy warped where she struck it, sending waves through the pyramid-shaped structure that rippled across its surface until they converged on the opposite side. The barrier’s magic was unable to withstand Yoshika’s power, shattering like glass and dispersing its mana into the air. The two mages flinched back in shock, but they moved glacially slowly to Yoshika’s enhanced perception, and she had no intention of giving them time to regroup.
With a single lightning step, Jia’s body appeared next to Tae In-Su and sent him crumpling to the floor in a flurry of pressure point blows. She caught his limp form in one arm before grabbing Dae around the waist and carrying both of them with her as she leapt from the ring.
“Shield!”
Dae was startled by the sudden shout from Jia as she ended her Absolute Awareness technique, but quickly moved to comply with her one-word command. Months of teamwork training meant that he didn’t hesitate or ask questions, hastily casting a spell that surrounded the three of them with a shimmering bubble of force.
The reason became obvious as the energy in Eui’s body reached a peak, with uncontrolled bursts of red and black essence carving deep furrows the ground around her. Yoshika couldn’t maintain the fifth arm any longer—she had to purge the remaining ki before it could cause any further damage to her. Raising her head up into the air, she screamed—half in pain, and half from effort—as she forced the energy outward in a violent explosion that threw dust and debris in all directions, bouncing harmlessly off the formation in place to keep the audience safe.
A complete silence fell over the arena. When the dust settled, all that remained of the ring was a massive crater, with Eui standing in the center, bloodied and panting for breath. Did this count as a success? Yoshika had managed to expunge the destructive energy from her body before it could wreak too much havoc on her body, and she hadn’t needed her cores to do it. On the other hand, she’d only just barely managed to sustain the technique long enough to deliver a single blow, and the collateral damage was—-significant. It was progress, at least. A moment later, almost as an afterthought, Do Hye’s voice called out.
“M-Miss An is the only remaining fighter! Lee and An win the doubles tournament!”
The crowd erupted in cheers, the disinterest in the fight and the disappointment in the anticlimactic barrier the mages had deployed completely forgotten in the face of the sheer spectacle of the power that Yoshika had displayed. Dae stared at the crater in awe before turning to Yoshika, in Jia’s body.
“Ancestors! What—what was that!? Is that the fifth arm you’ve been practicing this whole time?”
Yoshika hesitated for a moment, just as surprised as he was at the devastation that the technique had caused.
“Um, yeah.”
Dae blinked once, glancing back at Eui before meeting Jia’s gaze again.
“I’m glad you’re on my side!”
---
“Did I not just tell you not to attempt that technique!? I’m certain that I said it not even two days ago! I even complimented the restraint you showed by not attempting to use it before it was ready! Did you take that personally!?”
Yoshika was a bit downcast as Ienaga dressed her down. She’d never seen the martial arts instructor lose her temper like this, and she regularly struck students with a wooden training sword hard enough to draw blood. Somehow, the words hurt a lot more.
After her victory, Yoshika hadn’t even had time to celebrate before being called by the deans to discuss the outcome of her match—particularly the extensive damage to the grounds and her reckless use of a dangerous technique. Magus Hwang didn’t seem to care much—more interested in studying the phenomenon than anything—and Elder Qin had the same scowl he always did, but Master Ienaga was furious.
“I did not give you that manual so that you could almost kill yourself in the middle of an exhibition match! It was supposed to teach you restraint, something you clearly don’t have at all. If we can’t trust you not to use such a dangerously reckless technique without mastering it, then you are a danger to yourself and others, and I cannot in good conscience allow you to continue participating in the tournament.”
At that last statement, the other deans stirred. Hwang cleared his throat, interrupting Ienaga’s tirade.
“Ahem! Erm, let us not be too hasty, now. Nobody was harmed, and the training field can be repaired. We weren’t going to use it for the team division anyway.”
Elder Qin swept his gaze coolly over everyone present before speaking in a measured, but imperious tone.
“Banning them from further participation is overly harsh, especially given their already limited freedom. If we wish to speak of reckless endangerment, then perhaps I should remind Master Ienaga who exactly provided Miss An with the technique in the first place. Nevertheless, the power demonstrated by Miss An during the last match is clearly unsuitable for competition. I propose that we ban the use of Miss An’s ‘fifth arm’ outside of controlled training environments—preferably well away from buildings or people.”
Magus Hwang quickly agreed, but Ienaga frowned thoughtfully before responding.
“Fine! But any further practice of the fifth arm is to be done under my direct supervision—no exceptions. Am I understood?”
Yoshika wanted to keep hanging her heads, but she made the effort to meet Ienaga’s eyes as she responded in chorus.
“Yes, Master.”
“Good. You’re dismissed for now, but don’t think you’ve heard the last of this. I’m disappointed in you, Yoshika.”
Yoshika winced. Only Ienaga had acknowledged her for who she was, yet that acceptance added more weight to her words and only served to make Yoshika feel even worse. In hindsight, it really had been a stupid decision. If the barrier hadn’t broken, it might still have blocked Jia’s core from stopping the deviation, or there might have been too much energy left for her to safely purge, or she could have just fucked up and died. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, and Yoshika had ignored all of them. She had wanted to rise to the challenge—to thrive in the conflict as she always did—but though she had denied it at the time, she really had been motivated by pride. The disappointment of her mentor cut Yoshika deeper than even the blade Ienaga always carried at her hip could ever have managed.
She was so dejected as she returned to her home that she failed to pay attention to where she was going and nearly bumped into someone. She silently berated herself, reflexively extending her domain to watch the area around her only to find it blocked by a much more powerful domain surrounding the man she’d nearly run into. She immediately snapped to attention, looking up at the man to see him staring right back at her.
He was a tall and slender man, who stood with his back rigidly straight and his hands behind his back. He wore red and gold robes that radiated with power that gave Yoshika the impression of a blazing fire, and his long black hair was tied in a top-knot in exactly the same style as Yan Zhihao. He stared at her with cold, narrow eyes, and his hawkish features were an expressionless mask as he regarded her. His domain was controlled as tightly as his posture, held in a perfect sphere around him that gave Yoshika a feeling of strict discipline and unwavering determination. The man—who was almost certainly from Qin—was followed by an entourage of five men who gave Yoshika a feeling of deep dread.
There wasn’t anything outwardly remarkable about the men. They wore nondescript white combat robes in the style of Qin, and though they had varying heights and builds, they all had the same blank expression on their faces. What truly made Yoshika uncomfortable was the fact that all five of them had domains—reigned in even tighter than the leader’s—and their domains all felt the same. Not like they shared a domain, as Jia and Eui did to form her own, but rather it was as if each of them had followed precisely the same path down to the letter. No room for interpretation, no room for self-expression. As cultivators, they were each completely identical. The domain itself seemed to be one of unquestioning loyalty and dedication.
After a tense moment, Yoshika realized that she’d been staring. Since the man was meeting Jia’s gaze, Yoshika spoke with her voice.
“Um, my apologies. I should have been watching where I was going. Pardon me.”
She tried to squeeze past, but one of the men moved to block her. The leader spoke, his voice as icy as his gaze.
“You are Miss Lee Jia, correct? And Miss An Eui? I saw your match today—a remarkable performance.”
Yoshika bowed awkwardly in greeting.
“Yes, that’s us. May I ask who it is I have the privilege of speaking to?”
She was glad that she’d learned a little bit of Qin etiquette from Yue, though she was sure she was messing it up anyway.
“Of course. My name is Yan Ren, and I represent the Great Awakening Dragon Sect of Qin. If you are not too busy, I would like a moment to speak with you.”
Yoshika tried not to let her panic show on her face. She failed.
Shit!
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Keith Rice
ARGH WEEKEND CLIFFHANGER QQ
