Emerson Fortier
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Chapter 28 - Tactical Advice
🕑 Added 2022-09-19 17:00:10 +0000 UTC“This is unacceptable behavior.”
Yi Cao pounded down the corridor, each footstep reawakening his injuries from Elleppu station.
Green lines flickered across the floor in front of him, but Yi Cao waved his hand at his ear, interrupting the technomancer magic before the pistol’s absurd spirit avatar could appear.
It huffed in his ear. “In emergency situations you should never give in to fear. By fleeing, you only delay what must inevitably devolve into violence.”
“Would you shut up?”
Since starting on the Pillars of Creation this was Yi Cao’s first chance to experience the improvements it had made to the limbs and musculature strengthened by new channels of spiritual power. It wasn’t much, but the new strength made him shoot down the corridor at an unaccustomed speed making his turns awkward as he swerved to avoid knocking over pedestrians, sometimes karoming off of the mesmeric stones that lined the concourse like obstacles or slamming into walls. The stones’ voices warbled at him as he sprinted by, images flashing in meaningless combinations of lights before he was gone.
Green lights flickered again and a smiling face materialized flying along the floor beside him. “Giving tactical advice during a state of emergency is part of my function.” It told him. “And, in my tactical opinion, an ambush would be far more effective at resolving this crisis than your current course of flight.”
Yi Cao swerved to dodge a crawling half man/half mechanical spider, thing. His shoe caught on a grating and he spilled across the floor on his face.
“This is a good spot.” The pistol told him. The face flashed, replaced by an arrow pointing towards a nearby door in the corridor wall. Cereal and Surplus Grains, the sign on its front read.
“Go here and wait for your pursuer to arrive.”
“Would you stop it?” Yi Cao waved the light away as he scrambled to his feet, he ducked behind a mesmeric stone and almost pissed himself as a colorful bird with eyes bigger than its head squawked at him about some “Emporium of Imported Salts! The best! The best!”
He glanced down the hall but saw no pursuer and ducked back behind the squawking stone. His cultivation had empowered his limbs, but he had yet to reach the second circle when his lungs and internal organs received the same treatment and his chest heaved for breath.
“How do you know he’s pursuing?” Yi Cao hissed to his gun.
“Know, hope, what difference does it make when you’re trapped inside a holster!” The pistol replied. “Now find a good position and put me in play!”
Yi Cao backed away from the stone, still surveying the hall. “No.” He said. “No.” He turned, when he saw no one openly following him, just a couple of shopkeepers and pedestrians looking his way, and he resumed his headlong sprint down the hall. “I need to hide.”
“Boring, boring, boring, BORING!”
The face flickered onto the floor again, this time frowning for all it was worth. “Use me!”
Yi Cao reached the hole in the floor that transitioned into a hallway with two floors instead of one. He’d never taken the transition at a sprint before and instead of the easy shift in direction he’d almost grown used to, he overshot the transition and flew down the center of the hall, caught in the competing gravities between the floors. He covered his face as he clattered through the drifting light tubes and collected trash, felt something wet splatter across his sleeve, felt himself spin before his body chose the floor opposite the one he’d leapt from.
He fell head first and skid while a handful of technomancers and men in orange jumpsuits snarled and jumped out of the way.
“I’m not going to ambush him.” Yi Cao told the thing at his hip and in his ear. He scrambled to his feet, lungs heaving, and threw himself further down the hall, ignoring the indignant shouts that followed him as he fled.
“Why not?” The pistol sounded close to tears. “I’d love to shoot somebody.”
He whacked the pistol, then grimaced in pain and shook his hand. “I don’t want to die.” He replied.
He spotted a corner and slid as he tried to stop himself on the tile. He caught himself against the wall with a bang then threw himself forward only to find the way cut off in a huge cube of a space with tables arranged on all six walls, a vast colorful structure of chutes and ladders at the center of the wall facing him while a fountain hissed along the wall that ran perpendicular above him.
“A glorious death is nothing to be afraid of.” The pistol told him. “I am specially crafted to make such a death glorious. Just imagine your enemy getting ripped in two, or filled with holes while you shout something glorious, or I could shout something glorious. Maybe, take that you filthy animal. Hehe. Oh, or fuck you and the hole you came from! Or just-” it made a long screaming sound in Yi Cao’s ear that made him wince. He covered his ear, as though that would reduce the sound of the clip already stuck inside it.
“Shut up!” He hissed. He glanced behind himself before he leapt onto the wall. It was a weird transition, abrupt enough that he stumbled onto his hands and knees before straightening to match the orientation of the fountain. Children screamed on the colorful construct near the center of the opposite wall, and Yi Cao made his way between the tables of adults watching the children while drinking tea or talking in a low murmur lost in the echoes of the screaming children and the hiss of the fountain nearby.
When the fountain was between Yi Cao and the entrance, he found a chair in a particularly crowded section of the weird three dimensional plaza and sat down. Green lines flickered and the sad face appeared projected onto the wire table in front of him.
“You’re never going to use me in an emergency, are you?” The pistol said.
Yi Cao waved a hand at the thing to disperse it. “Would you go away?” The face disappeared and Yi Cao looked around at the others occupying the chairs around him. “I’m trying to blend in.” He glanced back at the door to the plaza, through the streaming pillar of water.
“What exactly are we hiding from anyways?” The pistol asked after a while.
“Inscrypti.” Yi Cao replied. He grimaced. “A cultivator. One we met on the way in.” He looked at the people around him and tried to make himself match their relaxed posture, or the way some of them leaned over steaming bowls and plates of noodles, fiddling with little bits of tech. “Probably third circle.” He whispered to the pistol. “Maybe higher. Part of the Nine Spears Security Group.”
“What an intimidating name.”
A child at a nearby table screamed making Yi Cao jump and turn around only to find the child’s mother bellowing back at it in a sepulchral voice.
He turned back to his table and put a hand to his chest.
“Aren’t spears just pointy sticks?” The pistol asked.
Yi Cao closed his eyes. “Heavens above.” He whispered.
“I think we can take him.” The pistol whispered. “No matter how many sticks he brings.”
“Just shut up.”
The two sat in the echoing chamber as the battle between mother and daughter died down behind them and his hammering heart finally slowed. As he relaxed he took stock, gradually realizing that he would have to stay here until he was certain that the cultivator had left and made his way past this part of the concourse. It might mean that he had to stay there for a while.
“You shouldn’t have run from me.”
The voice behind him was pitched just loud enough to be heard above the screaming children and roaring fountain beside them.
Yi Cao’s heart thumped into his ribs again and he jerked around to find Su Xialu standing over him.
“For starters,” the cultivator told him, “because no one who cares is going to find you in a place like this if I decide you’ll be easier to work with dead.” He glanced around, hands at his side in a posture that seemed almost unthreatening. Almost.
Yi Cao’s chair clattered to the floor as he scrambled out of it. He froze as the man in front of him pierced him with his gaze and just stood there, staring at the warrior.
Xialu reached up with one hand to straighten one side of his thin mustache as he studied Yi Cao before he made a choice. “Let’s make this quick.” He said. “The source was not in your room, which means you have it on you. Give it to me.”
Yi Cao’s hand went to the pendant around his neck before he could stop it. He squeezed the stone then dropped his hand and stared at the cultivator.
“I don’t have it.” He said.
Xialu raised an eyebrow and Yi Cao grimaced.
The warrior extended a hand and twitched his fingers. “Right here.” he said. “And you get to walk away.”
Yi Cao should have thrown himself to the floor and thrown the pendant at the cultivator’s feet. His muscles twitched to do just that, but the hand that moved to clutch the source at his neck didn’t move to pull it off. He clutched it and held it close, half bent from the tension in his gut as he held onto the only gift he’d ever received strictly to advance his cultivation.
“Kill.” The pistol whispered in his ear. “Kill, kill, kill, kill. You can do it. Pull me from the holster and let me do the rest. Kill him. Let me kill him. Do it.”
“That is a particularly disturbing spirit.” Su Xialu remarked.
Yi Cao wanted to burst out laughing, or into tears, hard to tell which. He gave a strangled smile instead. There was no way Xialu should have been able to hear the pistol in the first place. “You have no idea.” He replied.
“I’m glad you realize it’s insanity.” The warrior remarked. He twitched his fingers again and glanced around. “Now, the source.”
“How do you know this isn’t an ambush?” Yi Cao asked suddenly.
Xialu gave Yi Cao a cool look. “This is no ambush.” He replied.
He twitched his fingers again and Yi Cao shook his head.
“I don’t have it.” He said again, clutching it.
“Do I look like a fool?” The warrior replied.
Yi Cao lifted the pendant, under his shirt so Xialu couldn’t see it and tried to smile while he blinked the sweat out of his eyes. “What, this? This is just, a gift, from my mother.”
“No doubt she treasures you deeply.” The warrior replied. “Now. Last chance.” He glanced at something along one wall, a piss bot, Yi Cao realized, tucked into its cradle behind a plate of glass. “I am authorized for violence.” Xialu told him, refocusing on Yi Cao. “No one will save you.”
Yi Cao clutched the source and stared at Xialu while sweat poured from him in buckets.
Xialu frowned. “The source.” He said, with more impatience, he stepped forward and Yi Cao skipped back, banging into an empty chair and almost knocking himself over in the process. His hands shook and the sweat on his face smelled weirdly of his crab salad in addition to the fear the forced it out of him.
“Or I’ll take it off your corpse.”
Somewhere in him, Yi Cao felt the spark of resentment he’d nurtured for most of his life flare into anger.
“I don’t think you will.”
Yi Cao’s lungs heaved in his chest, as though just that statement had taken all of his strength.
Xialu scowled and Yi Cao blinked away sweat to glare right back.
The man took another step towards him and Yi Cao scrambled away, keeping the table between him and the other man.
“Don’t be misled by my patience.” Xialu growled as he prowled towards Yi Cao and Yi Cao practically tripped over himself to keep him away. “There is only one way this is going to-”
He stopped suddenly and backed away.
“Su Xialu.” A new voice interjected. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Xialu’s scowl wiped away, replaced by the bland expression of stern disinterest he’d worn when he arrived. “Zihan, as I recall.”
Yi whipped around to see Zihan standing on a chair not ten yards away with his arms crossed, glaring at the other man. Curious bystanders glanced first in Zihan’s direction, then at the two men facing off across the table in their midst, before a few of the more normal looking, probably familiar with cultivators or cultivators themselves, got up and pushed away into the crowd.
Zihan stepped on the back of the chair to tip it down to the floor, using the drop to propel himself towards their table at a leisurely pace.
“Were you hoping to trade pointers with my disciple?” Zihan asked. He ignored Yi Cao and approached Xialu who backed away, putting one hand in the air.
“I brought no sword to this meeting.” He said. He glanced, again, towards the piss bot still sitting in its cradle, then back to the Young Master. “No need to cause a scandal. Merely words were exchanged.”
Zihan stopped when he drew level with the table and glared at Xialu, matching the warrior’s bland expression with a thin smirk of his own. “Did you have more to say then, Su Xialu?”
The warrior put his hands behind his back and glanced at Yi Cao with a frown. “Not at this time.” He replied.
“Not again, I should hope.” Zihan told him.
The cultivator studied Zihan, one hand coming out from behind his back to straighten the other side of his mustache. “Perhaps.” He conceded after a moment.
He bowed, abruptly, not deeply, but enough to show respect, first to Zihan, then to Yi Cao. “Another time, perhaps, he said, then turned, and with a final glance over his shoulder at Yi Cao, made a leap that carried him from the floor to the opposite wall, twisting to land just next to the gate leading out while the audience they’d gathered oohed at the display of strength.
Zihan snorted and turned to Yi Cao.
He looked the sweating boy up and down, then nodded, and turned back in the direction he’d come, leaving Yi Cao to tag along in his wake.
The girls waited next to what looked like a bar set into a wall that also served as a floor, narrow stone blocks set around it like too short fences, or tripping hazards, to keep people from missing the opening. They’d obviously watched the whole exchange and Bealtiel stood looking in the direction Xialu had leapt on his way out.
“I presume he’s the one that brought you here.” Zihan said as they approached.
Bealtiel nodded and turned to look at him while Zihan just stared at them.
“What?” Kalemal asked after a minute of silence. “Were we supposed to know you two were mortal enemies? He offered us a drink at a nicer place. Would you turn down that kind of offer?”
Zihan laughed and his face twisted into an icy parody of a smile. He wrapped one arm around both girl’s shoulders and pulled them towards the door. “Don’t do it again.” He told them. “Not while you’re in my employ.”
