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Sexy Sect Babes: Chapter Twenty Six
🕑 Added 2022-08-16 03:01:49 +0000 UTC“Now, I know I don’t have a great ear for names, but I’m pretty sure that sect leader back there wasn’t who you said she would be.”
The trio were walking back through the gates of Jiangshi.
“No, she was not. Lady Cui should be sect leader of the Marble Cloud. For Yin to be leader now?” Ren shook her head. “Something suspicious is going on.”
Jack frowned. “So we’re still thinking they were trying to obfuscate how many people they had? I’m still only counting eight cultivators.”
And he doubted his little bombing run was that successful. His drones were barely tray table sized. As a result, they hadn’t been carrying particularly heavy explosive payloads. Hell, half of them had been carrying incendiaries rather than flat explosives, in the hopes of causing as much confusion as possible.
“Even in the interest of perpetuating a deception, no sect leader would allow another to assume the mantle,” An said simply.
Ah, this was another ‘face’ thing.
“So you think those missing cultivators are, what, dead? Possibly in a tussle between siblings?” As he spoke, he glanced at the nervous and waiting rows of militiamen and women on the wall.
He could only pray they wouldn’t break when it finally came down to a real fight.
“Perhaps.” Ren allowed, albeit reluctantly. “Such a thing is not unheard of.”
“It’s not common either though.” An added, in a display that was about as close as he’d ever heard the cat-woman get to agreeing with Ren.
Which meant he was inclined to take their skepticism at face value – even if it surprised him. He’d half been expecting murder to be the number one way to get ahead around here. It seemed that wasn’t the case though.
“Alright,” he sighed. “Our plan accounted for the possibility of another group being in hiding anyway, so we’ll continue as if nothing has changed.”
Both women nodded and An darted away, presumably back to her position near the town center. Ren chose to hang back though.
She paused before speaking. “Why didn’t you say that you killed Men?”
“Why would I?” Jack turned to look at her. “I didn’t see anything to be gained from it.”
“It’s… the truth though?” Ren was flabbergasted. “And as a relative unknown, being known to have defeated the rising star of the Marble Cloud Sect would have been a not insubstantial boost to your reputation.”
“To who?” he asked. “A bunch of people that are hopefully going to be very dead soon?”
Ren frowned.
He shook his head. “By contrast, if I kill this lot, it might be enough to make the next group who come to shit in my porridge back down.”
Ren winced at the descriptor. “You didn’t want to scare them off?”
“Perhaps.” He shrugged. “As you said, I’m an unknown right now. Crushing a sect leader might give me some breathing room.”
She looked down at the ground. “Kill the head of one of the ten families, no matter how new to the post, and you will certainly have earned yourself that much. Even the Overseer of Ten Huo would be obligated to step carefully in her dealings with you.”
He grinned. “Good.”
Though as Ren turned to leave, he noticed something.
A woman had just popped up over the wall. She was clearly a cultivator. Even if her little display of acrobatics in scaling the wall hadn’t proven that, her choice of dress did.
How did she get so close? He wondered.
Even if the mines hadn’t been activated yet, the militia should have gunned her down.
“Ren, wait!” he called after the departing dog woman.
He didn’t stop to see if she obeyed, as he kept his focus on the strange goings on at the wall.
Befuddled – and not a little worried – he waited for some outcry from the men and women on the wall. There was none though. They continued as they were before, staring nervously out across the no man’s land between Jiangshi and the Marble Cloud Sect army.
Was this that ‘killing intent’ thing again? Leaving his people paralyzed?
But no. The members of the militia on the wall weren’t frozen. They were still moving around. It was nervous shuffling for the most part, but that still counted.
They definitely weren’t acting like people under the effects of a cultivator’s killing intent. And he’d certainly seen enough of it in the past two weeks to know what it looked like. More to the point, Ren would surely have sensed it.
No, something fucky was going on here.
“Do you see that?” he asked quietly.
Ren glanced around in confusion. “What, my lord?”
Huh…
As he watched, the ‘invisible’ woman hopped off the wall and started walking towards him. Her steps were measured, but unhurried. No one saw her though, as she tiptoed across the main street. She actually had to step around two men dragging supplies to avoid being bowled over.
She was a few meters from him when she slowly started to unsheathe her sword.
In response, Jack sent a neural command through his suit and felt something settle into his hand.
“My lord?”
He ignored Ren’s question, as he kept his gaze on the mystery woman, thankful for the featureless nature of his helmet. She didn’t seem to have realized that he could see her.
Though she had paused when he summoned the massive double barreled gun into his hand.
He didn’t aim it at her though. Instead, he turned away, back to Ren. Not that it made any difference on his cone of vision. His suit had read his intent and pivoted its internal sensors in the mystery woman’s direction.
“Ren, do you like my new gun?” he asked.
Perhaps if he wasn’t distracted, he might have cringed a bit at that line. Or how woodenly he’d delivered it. He couldn’t help it though. He wasn’t an actor.
“It’s… nice?” Ren – the ever polite merchant – responded, cocking her head at him.
“Good.” He muttered. “That’s good.”
The mystery woman had relaxed a bit when he turned away from her, and as he’d starting talking, she’d resumed walking.
She was barely three meters from him now.
Yeah, that’s close enough, he thought.
He squeezed the trigger, with the barrel of the gun tucked into the crook of his elbow – and coincidentally, pointed right at the interloper.
Which was part of why he’d needed her to get so close. It wouldn’t have been an ideal firing stance even if he’d been using a proper weapon, let alone the powder-based monstrosity in his hands.
Fortunately, recoil wasn’t much of a factor when you were clad in a space age mining suit. Nor was accuracy too much of an issue when your target was leisurely walking toward you.
Ren jumped as the gun in his hand went off.
Quite literally.
She skidded backward, drawing her sword in a motion so smooth it was practically art.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t looking at her.
Well, she wasn’t as tough as Men, he thought as the corpse of the mystery cultivator hit the ground with a wet slap.
His shot had hit her right in the face – and given the calibre he was working with – there wasn’t much left of it. Or anything above her neck, to be honest.
To her credit, she had tried to bolt in the literal microseconds between him pulling the trigger and… impact.
Which had likely contributed to her corpse doing a rather morbid backflip before it hit the ground in a rather dramatic fashion.
The response in the surrounding area was immediate as people jumped to attention, first in response to his gunshot, and then to the cultivator corpse that had seemingly materialized out of thin air.
“Assassin!” Ren shouted, her voice carting clearly over the alarmed shouting of the nearby militia.
“A very dead assassin,” Jack opined, calmly and clearly.
Those words, and his own lack of alarm, seemed to calm down everyone in the immediate vicinity as they realized that whatever danger existed had also been dealt with.
“It seems so,” Ren murmured, eyes flitting from the corpse to him. “If the presence of Lady Cui were not proof enough, this is. Something is rotten in the Marble Cloud Sect.”
“Why?”
And god was he happy that he could finally ask that question. Pretending to be a mysterious Hidden Master was fun, but pretending to be a clueless foreigner – who was also a Hidden Master – was significantly more convenient.
Ren eyed him in confusion, before a small smile tugged at the corners of her lips.
“Ahh, sometimes I forget you are not of the Empire.” She nudged the corpse with a silk slipper. “The Misty Step and other ‘shadow techniques’ like it, are shunned in the Empire. They would be useless against an instinctual cultivator and as such may only be used against other Imperial cultivators.”
She frowned. “Not in battles or duels where cultivators may sharpen themselves against one another - seeing a net gain for the Empire - but through cowardly surprise attacks, where neither side may gain any greater insight into their Dao.”
“Right.” Jack nodded along as if that made total sense to him.
“How did you see them?” she asked looking up.
“How did you not?”
Answer a question with a question. Obfuscate his lack of competence through metaphorical bullshit. That was the way of the Johansen. And fortunately for him, Ren took his complete lack of an answer exactly as he’d hoped, as her gaze turned contemplative.
Still, it was a pretty decent question. One he was slowly beginning to suspect he had an answer to, given his own ‘encounters’ with killing intent. Or lack thereof. Either that, or perhaps the video feeds in his suit were immune to whatever strange magic shit was going on?
He didn’t know, and as the radio in his ear barked to life, it seemed he didn’t have any longer to think on it.
“Get back to the reserve,” he instructed Ren, jolting her from her reverie. “It seems that our opponents know their assassin failed and have no intention of waiting the full hour they promised us. The mortal components of the Marble Cloud Sect have started to advance.”
“Those honorless dogs,” Ren hissed.
He resisted the urge to point out how racist that sounded in a world with literal dog people – and how Ren was one herself. Or how he wasn’t too honorable himself.
“I’d say this works out better for us anyway,” he said, glancing toward the walls, where his people were lining up their rifles. “Those mortals will be exhausted after marching all the way here. That hour would have given them some time to catch their second wind.”
Ren nodded, a look of illumination coming over her features as she stared at him. It seemed that the idea that the mortals approaching them would need rest had never occurred to her. Which, as much as anything else, had been why he’d been so insistent that Kang was put in charge of his almost entirely mortal army.
Ren departed, hopping over the rooftops of the nearby buildings in that bizarrely weightless fashion that cultivators seemed capable of sometimes using.
“Kang,” he called.
“Yes, my lord?” The man responded distractedly.
“See if we can’t blunt our foes’ enthusiasm.”
Jack could almost hear the smile that stole over the other man’s features.
“With pleasure, Overseer.”
Almost immediately, he heard shouts being bellowed out by his radio equipped sergeants on the walls.
“All militia! Aim!”
Hundreds of revolver-rifles came up as one as Jack started walking back up the stairs of the wall. As he reached the top, he looked across the parapet at the unwashed masses coming towards them. Nearly three thousand people, armed with little more than farming implements and without a shred of training.
Most had probably been farmers before they were leveed into the Marble Cloud Sect’s poor excuse for an army. Forced to leave their homes and march through corrupted animal infested lands, driven by a ruling class of superhumans that cared not if they lived or died, only that enough of them reached their destination.
He wondered how many of them had families waiting for them at home? How many of those families depended on the men across from him? How many orphans and widows would be made in the next few seconds?
Another man might have felt some guilt about that. About the fact that most of these people would die in no small part due to his actions. Actions that he had undertaken not in the name of some nebulous greater good, but sheer ego.
Jack was not most other men though. After all, it took a certain kind of callousness to want to be king – or whatever the local equivalent of that might be.
He supposed he’d find out.
Just as soon as he was done here.
Provided he survived.
“Fire,” he said.
All across the line, guns fired as one booming volley, forever changing the future of warfare in the Celestial Empire.
-------------------
Kang knew how this would go.
The conscripts would go first. That was how most conflicts started.
If this were a game of Xiangqi, then the militia were pawns in a very real sense. Disposable pieces, not intended to kill, but to act as a screen and a means to lure other more valuable pieces out of position. Where they would in turn be attacked by the more valuable pieces of their foe.
So it was that the militia formed the frontmost ranks of the army. And were the first exposed to the terrible new weaponry Master Johansen had created.
He’d known they were powerful. He had, after all, spent the previous winter seeing the previous iteration of his newest weapon used against corrupted beasts.
He had, however, never seen a gonne used against massed ranks of human beings. Let alone nearly 500 hundred of them, each capable of firing six times before needing to be reloaded.
The battlefield was a cacophony of noise as the front ranks of the enemy all but disintegrated under the massed fire of the Jiangshi militia. Such was the suddenness of the carnage that confusion, rather than fear, seemed to be the prevailing emotion amongst the enemy in those first few seconds.
Which he could well understand.
The enemy had been well out of bow range. A relatively small distance in the grand scheme of things, but for a soldier on a battlefield, it may as well have been an absolute.
Yet these gonnes had changed that. And now the enemy militia were paying for it.
After a few seconds of shooting, the captains within the army seemed to connect the crackle and smoke coming from the walls with the wave of death spreading through their army. And while the exact specifics of what was killing their people no doubt evaded them, the fact that they needed to respond was as ingrained a reflex as any other.
And for a mortal on the battlefield, there were only two real options.
Attack. Or retreat.
And with their own cultivators stood behind them, not yet committed to the fight, attack was the only real option available to them. From the enemy, horns sounded loud and proud, prompting the militia to charge.
Too early, Kang sighed. Much too early.
A charge was a far more delicate prospect than most realized. Never mind that some men would struggle to sprint two hundred meters without leaving themselves breathless when they actually reached the enemy, men also ran at different speeds. And a good charge relied on every man arriving at roughly the same time, creating a single resounding blow.
As it stood, the militia would break up and become a thousand pebbles pattering against the walls, rather than a single condensed hammer blow.
Though given we’re on a wall, I suppose it’s redundant, Kang thought as he watched the front most ranks of enemy come on, more falling by the second. They would have had to stop at the base of the wall anyway.
To either hoist ladders or wait for a cultivator to break down the gates – or the wall itself.
Still, it’s bad warcraft, he thought.
Worse still, the enemy charge was even more staggered by the fact that while some of the conscripts charged, others hesitated, unwilling to charge into what undoubtedly seemed to be certain death. Those cowards – or perhaps just realists - either formed an obstacle for those behind… or were trampled by their more dutiful kin.
Either way, it created chaos in the enemy ranks that quickly brought the whole charge to a halt as those who advanced faltered when they saw that not everyone was charging with them.
And all the while, the guns on the wall continued to fire.
The finger-sized bullets fell like rain upon the enemy, dropping more and more bodies to the ground with every passing second. Already the grass outside town was slick with pools of blood from the dead and dying that lay strewn across the uneven battlefield. The enemy were packed so tight that it was impossible to miss, with some shots penetrating multiple individuals before their momentum was spent.
It was all too much.
It took less than twenty seconds from the first shot being fired for the Marble Cloud Sect’s aborted charge to become a rout.
Kang could barely believe it as at first, he watched one or two individuals turn back - but in seconds that panic had spread through the entire force. They started to flee in any direction that wasn’t toward the town.
He had little doubt the cultivators of the Marble Cloud Sect were already trying to reassert order through careful applications of killing intent, but it would be useless. Just as one could learn to ignore the paralyzing effects of killing intent through exposure, sheer terror served too.
And though the cultivators were no doubt cutting down those who tried to flee, the fact remained that there were only eight of them. And it seemed the mortals would sooner try their chances with the cultivators than attempt to brave Jiangshi’s guns.
“Cease fire,” he called.
It took a few seconds for his order to be heeded, the heat of battle making his people sluggish to respond. He also didn’t need to look over the walls to know that there’d no doubt be the usual post-battle vomiting from first timers – which would in turn set off others.
He gripped the pistol at his belt. Regardless of the changes Master Johansen has wrought, I doubt that much has changed.
With this battle, he knew that warfare across the Celestial Empire was irrevocably changed.
He stared out across the field of dead, and off towards the rapidly disintegrating Marble Cloud Sect army. But as much as things change, they also stay the same.
------------------
“Advance now!”
Yin’s sudden shout seemed to snap her second out of her stupor.
“Pardon?” the woman asked dumbly, still spellbound by the… insanity they had just witnessed.
“Take our reserve guards and advance now! Before the militia completely quit the field.” Yin hissed as she gripped at the reins of her horse.
“The guards?” Her second shook her head. “My lady, we can stop these cowards. My people will keep them from fleeing too far.”
“Fool.” Yin shook her head as she gestured to the mass of humanity that was streaming off the battlefield. The only thing that was keeping the cowards from trying to flee toward them were the ranks of her personal guard forming a bulwark between her command unit and the rest of the army. “They’re totally broken. They fear whatever… that was more than us. If we intend to reach the walls without suffering the same fate, we need to move now!”
Her second wasn’t a fool. A little slow on the uptake perhaps, but realization came over her face as she saw what Yin was saying.
“Captain!” the woman shouted to the nearby mortal. “Instruct the guard to advance. Now!”
To their credit, the ranks of her personal guard did not hesitate. At least not much. Still, they made for a markedly different sight as they advanced as a single black armored square – in some cases, pushing the fleeing militia before them.
Satisfied, Yin looked around to the rank of her initiates, who were all staring nervously at the distant walls.
“Do not fear.” She instructed. “We need only get on the wall to render our foes’ new weapon moot.” She turned to her second. “You saw it right?”
She nodded. “They are using some kind of… repeating crossbow.”
Yin nodded, even as she frowned in distaste.
The bow. The weapon of savages and criminals.
“We need only get on the wall. Amongst them. The weapon is dangerous, certainly, but only as dangerous as the mortal wielding it.”
Realization seemed to form on the faces of her fellow cultivators. “Which means they aren’t dangerous at all outside of an open field.”
Yin nodded triumphantly.
“Exactly, so long as we can get amongst them, superior skill will see us victorious. Now move!”
Her people put haste to their steeds and charged – toward where the guards were already beginning to take fire from the distant wall.
Yin charged with them, fury smoldering in her heart.
These new weapons were powerful, of that there was no doubt – and the last thing this hidden master would do on this earth would be to tell her their secrets - but ultimately, they were still in the hands of mortals.
And that meant they would be no match for true cultivators.
She still had that thought in mind when she heard a click from beneath her feet. It would have been inaudible were it not for her enhanced senses, more than capable of filtering out the crude crackle coming from the walls. Then she heard another, from a meter or two away. Then another. And another.
Soon the clearing was filled with a deluge of clicking sounds.
“Wha-”
Then something exploded and her world became pain.
--------------------
Kang couldn’t believe it.
Five hundred guards. Nine cultivators on horseback.
All dead.
They had failed to even get within fifty meters of the wall.
The very ground had erupted as one – and when it happened, it was such a surprise that more than one member of the militia had fallen backward off the wall.
At least now I know why Master Johansen had us burying ‘plates’, he thought, staring out at the man who stood motionless on the wall.
Bodies lay strewn across the battlefield in a grizly tableau. Though to call what remained ‘bodies’ might have been an exaggeration. The massive explosion had left little beyond… parts.
Guards and cultivators alike had died without so much as clashing blades with the militia.
It was… inconceivable.
Was this… really it?
--------------
Her leg was missing. Something was in her guts. She couldn’t see.
Something had exploded beneath them. Which had set off more explosions.
She couldn’t hear anything.
Where were her people?
She knew not.
She did know that she was dying.
Was this the end?
She felt so cold.
All her plans come to nothing. She was going to die in some nowhere town.
Had she killed her sister for this? Her own flesh and blood?
No.
No.
She wouldn’t allow it! She had given too much!
Something inside her shifted. Not in her broken physical body. Something in her soul.
Her Dao.
And as if in response, she felt a pulse. Another still lived. Like her. So weak that she couldn’t feel it before, but it flared to life in response to her… burgeoning breakthrough.
She was evolving. Instinctive ki surging within her.
Buoyed along by the most basic instinct of all.
Survival!
Comments
Weed Pigeon
Cultivator Fights remind me of CS:GO HvH. Both stupidly op but yet it's the little calibrated things that make the difference.
AG
I like this chapter but to be fair I just like it in general when the protagonist bodies the antagonist
Alex LordThorsen
I'm just going to put a counter weight in the thread by saying I liked the setup and the payoff in this chapter. One of the downsides if weekly released works like this is that the author doesn't get to figure out where they're going and go back and edit things. So the format inevitably leads to some pacing issues. But even with that said I liked this chapter and it felt very satisfying given the information as established earlier.
CM
Okay so there's alot here to respond to. Let me begin by saying this is exactly how I expected the first round of this battle to go and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is the culmination of the last month and 12 thousand-ish words where we see the anxiety Jack has of not being strong enough to stop other cultivators from taking everything from him. So he spends all that time making technological advances to defend the town and arm his troops. The training they went through to become an effective fighting force able to fight back against the spirit beasts and cultivators. Jack has also been shown in that time that Ki doesn't affect him. Bei the assassin had just a few days earlier taken out the head of the Marble Cloud sect, and then spent the rest of the time on a forced march with little or no sleep. Sure she's a cultivator, but I'm guessing that she wasn't functioning at 100%. Then when Jack notices her she's on top of the wall along with how ever far away Jack was from the wall. As far as her superior hearing I don't think it would have matterd because of how Jack talked to Ren. "“Do you see that?” he asked quietly." Ren is a cultivator so Jack "quietly" asking her he can use his helmet to adjust his volume to just loud enough that only Ren can hear it with her cultivated hearing. So, between Bei not hearing Jack, being pushed to get to the town quickly with little sleep, her overconfidence and arrogance I can see why she never suspected that she was spotted and walked right into a face full of a shotgun blast. Unless she has some other Ki skills, but we've never been shown any so why would there be. Bei wasn't stupid, she just had no reason to question how she knew things were going to work out. She hops a wall walks up to Jack and kills him, the end. As far as her knowing that Jack knows about her how would she know? He has a helmet on. "thankful for the featureless nature of his helmet. She didn’t seem to have realized that he could see her." She has no clue she's beeb spotted and is being watched at this point. The only thing novel about her is that she invisible to mortals and cultivators. For Jack who can see her that ability is worthless and should pose no challenge for him at all. I'm not sure how you can say the mines don't matter when they took out Lady Cui and most of, if not all the other cultivators. Those mines weren't for the "Nearly three thousand people, armed with little more than farming implements and without a shred of training." His walls and guns were more than enough to take them out. The drones didn't matter? Sure, they only directly inflicted some casualties on the mortals, but they caused Lady Cui to loose 2 of her disciples (corrupted cultivators?) along with injuring the rest. More importantly they caused major panic in the mortals and some in the cultivators that destroyed their morale. It also caused Lady Cui to break camp early and force march them all to Jack's town leaving her force even more weakened. I'm sure she also lost quite a few more mortals in that march because she didn't stop to fight any of the spirit beasts that attacked them. (We know this because that's one of the things she was complaining about her sister doing.) So yeah those drones were very effective. In looking back at the bast few chapters it looks like Lady Cui lost a lot of peasants. "The mortals had scattered to the four winds, or at least, the peasants had." So yeah if she had never lost those peasants from Jacks drone strike there could well have been more then enough to over run the walls. Sure we didn't see much of Kang in thia first battle, but it's not over yet. So we'll just have to wait and see how the subplot of Kang getting to command the army and through Jack, Ren and An plays out. From all of this set up there should be no FIREWORKS. Jack over prepared for this whole encounter and his plan went off perfectly. There should not be any chaos on Jack's side because he has a well trained and disciplined army. The guns did their job of removing the peasants. And at this point they couldn't have accidentally set off the mines because Jack hadn't remotely armed them yet. He was waiting for Lady Cui and her cultivators to act. Sure, battle is chaos, but Lady Cui's army never had a chance to do anything other then run into a wall of bullets and explosions. The only one to make it to the wall was Bei and she didn't have a chance either. There's no way Lady Cui could make an advantage anywhere in this chapter. There's no way this was an even fight, or a long drug out slug feast. This was Glass Jow vs. Tyson and Glass Joe got knocked out with the first punch. The part where it all comes off the rails is the next chapter when Lady Cui evolves into her second form. The only hesitating we've seen Jack do is developing a relationship with Ren and An. Jack has been going all out for getting ready for this fight. The whole agency of the enemy didn't happen this chapter because they were so overwhelmed by Jack's forces. The end of this chapter is where the crescendo starts to build when we see Lady Cui start to evolve. Next chapter you'll get your hanging on for moment after moment, and the chaos that ensues. So, yeah, I think this has been incredibly well written and the groundwork has been just as great. The pieces were all set up nicely so that each one had an additive effect on the next. This is like the build up on a song where it pauses for just a moment before the beat drops and the main chorus hits. The great boss battle happens in the next chapter. This chapter is still building to that. This chapter didn't come out wrong, it's just the last step before the climax.
CM
I enjoyed this chapter and it played out exactly how I expected it to. It's the cumulative effect of the technology, time, and training Jack introduced to his people and to the defense of his village (the superiorly constructed walls and the mine field that Jack can remotely arm / disarm), how over prepared Jack was because of his anxiety, all the psychological trauma he's inflicted on them and his natural resistance to their abilities. This was the only realistic way for this first round of the battle to conclude.
Daniel Hardman
hey at the end of the day your the one paying for all this
Arkyrion
I have to disagree with you where Bai is concerned. I agree with you that she is dangerous, mysterious, and powerful. And entirely confident and almost entirely reliant on her Misty Step technique. The citizens of the Empire possess and are effected by Ki. The idea that someone, let alone the enemy leader, could simply *ignore* such a basic law of her reality (without resorting to instinctive cultivation, which seems to come with its own issues) likely never entered Bai's mind. It was impossible, even by cultivator standards. On top of this, she was riding high after effortlessly killing her mistress, all the while contending with the degenerative mental effects of her enlightenment. Coupled with the natural arrogance that seems part and parcel of cultivation, Bai was dealing with a perfect storm of Fucked.
Argamenta
this is going to do wonders for his trade deal with the empire
Crit Happens
I agree with Pv2. However, I believe people disagree with Pb2 because they are using this story as a form of self-insert escapism and thus don't care about such nuances and only about whether they feel powerful. It is a common trait of the harem fandom.
HereForHFY
I think that the chapter did a good job of showing how anticlimactic superior firepower actually can be against an opponent with no idea what's in store for them. There is no glory to be found, no great insights, just death.
Marcin
But but but.... Jack for sure read some xiangxia novels... :D ?
Pwntatochip
Poor guy failed to adhere to rule 13. "All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal."
Blue Fishcake
I feel this is worth commenting on. This chapter was supposed to be set up as; Cultivators run into outside context problem for the first time. It naturally goes poorly. Next chapter is intended to be; Tech man runs into outside context problem for the 'first' time. It naturally goes poorly. Essentially, in this scenario, Jack is supposed to be the evil overlord who finally has the plucky young adventurer beat. Only for, against all odds, that plucky young adventurer to start pulling on the power of love and friendship. Because that shit can't be prepared for or quantified within Jack's worldview. Just as guns and mines couldn't be for the cultivators.
RepossessedSoul
While it is nice to see both a chapter and a fight where 'punch magic' is beaten by tech I have to feel like this fight was underwhelming. Yes the mines were hinted at, yes the use of expendable troops was elaborated on, but there was no build up to things. This read like a PowerPoint had been given three hours of polish before a HS presentation. Yes you did your ground work and the slides are well done but the presentation doesn't have any tension. There didn't ever feel to be a threat to the main character or the town. The tension just wasn't there. This was both satisfying and disappointing at the same time. Yes I love that this story has ranged advantage curb stomping melee, but there needs to be something more than just push over battles. Which is what this felt to be. If the point was to just demonstrate that the MCs forces were so far beyond the ability of the cultivators, when fighting in their element, then you accomplished that. But if this was an attempt to show a threatening force it kind of fails. I still like this series and want to read more, but you can do better. You have done better. I can't wait to see you proving me wrong with my assumptions in the next few chapters.
Carlos Torres
Didn't Jack say he's read The Evil Overlords Handbook? I'm pretty sure one of the rules was double tap with arrows, cremate, then have a priest consecrate to prevent revival.
Pv2
Well, first off I'd like to apologize for how forceful my rhetoric was at the time. I had to write that all on break, and was still riding hot off the frustration of... well, let's call it a perceived let-down, so I screwed up in adopting an appropriate tone. I've made some edits to try and correct that, though I almost certainly missed a spot. Or five. Second, none of what I said is meant to be a criticism of people for enjoying the chapter more than I did. Nobody has to defend themselves from me, or justify having a different opinion. There's nothing wrong with that - and the last thing I want to do is be a snob at people for just wanting to chill out and have a good time. Ultimately, my frustration is that after all the build-up that this battle has had, that I feel it had the pieces to be knock-your-socks-off amazing. Not because I think it's shit or anything, but because I want to read the best story this story can be, and it's uncomfortable to see the shape of what could have been and think that it just won't happen. I don't know what he's going to write in the next scene, chapter, whatever. I stand by my position that it's probably not plausible to recoup the opportunity costs of leaving this one as it is, even if it otherwise turns out excellent and makes good on most or all of the buildup this didn't. I stand by my position that this battle deserves a rewrite, and despite putting my foot in my mouth and everything else I still hope I'll have the chance to discuss it if FishCake is open to that. I could be wrong, but, well, that's a given, right? It's just my opinion, after all.
Matt Barron
I don't agree with much of what you brought up but I can't be assed to spend the effort as you seem incredibly confident that you are perfectly right about everything. Your statement of how winnowing the enemy didn't matter being an example. The whole point of a drone strike like that is to reduce the enemies numbers but it also invokes a lot of psychological damage. The drone attack sped up the enemies advance greatly which reduced the stamina of all involved AND messed with their minds. So before the army even got to the town they were losing. I could go on but meh.. Cultivators have been framed as arrogant and rigid this entire story so the assassin who just got pumped up in power is going to be arrogant....
Matt Barron
If I was Jack by this point I would be double/triple tapping anything resembling a cultivator and burning the corpse because punch wizard bullshitery. One would hope that the assassin experience would of taught him the need for a sensor network around the town and outside it's walls. Would also be a superior supplement to the spotters.
Daniel Hardman
well i enjoyed it, and the story isnt done yet, feels like youre jumping to conclusions pal.
The Fire Piper
Love it. Thank you for another fun filled chapter of mayhem!
Rodney the Paladin
Yeah, but like- that's your opinion... man.
Pv2
I'm not going to sugarcoat this - reading the result, if I had to peg a cause to your difficulty writing the chapter, it was because you ultimately settled on a series of events to which the things you've spent the last month and 12 thousand-ish words setting up do not belong, and are utterly wasted on. The assassin is just the most in your face example, and could be compared to, well. Like a TV cliffhanger that's established just before the commercial break, and then resolved with no consequence immediately after the commercials end. Not even because she was caught off guard - she was just stupid in a way that flies in the face of her specialty. Johansen doesn't know about instinctual cultivators, and I recall that they're established as having even stronger senses than normal, so he doesn't actually have a way of deliberately asking Ren if she could see her without the assassin knowing. It follows that her not overhearing the question was pure, unacknowledged luck. Even once accepting that she hadn't directly overheard, we're talking about one of if not the highest ranked espionage-focused cultivators of the sect, someone who was built up over multiple chapters as dangerous and mysterious... only for the mystery to be quashed as irrelevant and probably uninteresting. To suspend disbelief at the exchange I have to swallow that she's inexperienced or just *bad* at shadow-dancing, at trying to gain advantage in the game of "know they know I know" and maneuvering for advantage before the start of a fight against someone without actually setting it off. That she's just THAT much of a chump in her fundamentals, even though by rights she should be incredibly proficient in it, certainly more-so than what Johansen would have from his days as a street tough. Even though as a cultivator who fundamentally eschews Face and instead focuses on dirty tricks she should be a completely novel and difficult challenge for the protagonist to overcome. And, well, I suppose that set the downer framing me as I read the rest. We learned where and how the mines were set up, and how they functioned. Didn't matter. We learned all about the drones and how they'd been winnowed out by wildlife. Didn't matter. We went through a whole plot about the camp being winnowed down ahead of time. Didn't matter, they were taken out as a group and it would have gone the exact same way if the drone harassment had never happened. The largest change to events coming from all of that simply seems to be that the commoner levee is more exhausted, but the firing line was never strained in the first place. We went through this whole subplot about Johansan passing command to Kang and secretly allowing that to include himself and through that the other cultivators - which Johansan is incredibly trepidatious about, pressing against his experience with cultivators and his feelings for where Johansan's deviation from that norm end. You didn't put pressure on that situation or pose its development as important to the fight in the slightest. You spent most of the story establishing how Johansan is completely inexperienced in command and is just barely winging it even in personal-scale fighting using his instincts from his history as a street thug, and how that frequently forces quick adaptation in the face of cultivator doctrine that is far more prepared for the shape of his capabilities than he expects. This should be going off like FIREWORKS in combination with Kang's tension and the presence of an assasin cultivator that only he can see. These elements and their trajectory, if allowed to act naturally, could not HELP but explode into a massive conflagration of chaos and miscommunication that would in part fall to Kang - held down by his apprehension at command over Johansen, and his ability to break past that - to recover from, all while the enemy screen marches on the gates and threatens forcing the detonation of the mines early, upon which the cultivators would get a chance to adapt, in turn forcing the two allied cultivators into action. ESPECIALLY if the assasin gets word back to them about it, herself having been able to avoid the mines and thus clearly knowing they're there. And because of her same skillset, she'd be the first to notice if Johansen held back to not hurt his mortal soldiers and exploit that, making her ability to at least get off the walls if she so desired a certainty - and her ability to sow chaos by making the actions needed to pursue and attack her look exactly like ones that would be used to punish or execute an insufficiently effective mortal group of soldiers. And ever, the levee marches forward, every drop of the above chaos compromising the effectiveness of the fire line that keeps them at bay. Battle is chaos, every action rippling outwards to create pockets of advantage, disadvantage, and opportunity that officers can only try to recognize and exploit to shift the tide. Fights as a storytelling medium establish a correlation between a person's ability to fight and achieve their objective and development of their character arc - making actions that they'd be hesitant to do otherwise the most advantageous and pushing them past that hesitation or signalling they've already grown from it. The agency of the enemy and the clash with them adds a pressure to this that can build to a crescendo, moment after moment hanging not just on physical capability, but on who they are as people, and how that ties into what even brought them to blows. Whether that's Kang held back by his distrust (relative to a non-cultivator) of Johansen and apprehension at commanding Ren and An - or Johansen, whose lack of deep care for other people and mounting frustration erodes his effort avoiding friendly fire could lead him to break the morale of his own troops and reveal some of his cards before he should to cut the gordian knot if he doesn't come to a self realization or Kang doesn't get over himself enough to be firm in reeling Johansen in. In ways like this, a fight can deliver on narrative arcs that themselves have little or nothing to do with fighting, and add a deep pathos to the spectacle. The pieces were all there. They're just... set aside, if not discarded outright. I know there are people praising this right now. But to take all of this setup and come out with something merely "okay" that can and has been done in this story already with almost no framing or groundwork at all is just... it's so, so much less than this set piece's potential, and it renders an uncomfortable amount of the buildup into fat that could better have been cut out entirely. I strongly, strongly feel it should be rewritten. A great boss battle at the end can help, but not to the extent of undoing the problems with this segment. I'll have more time in the evening to elaborate, if you're open to that. But even if you're not, and don't think my ideas can help, please trust me when I say that this battle came out wrong but is so, so so very worth doing right.
Chargcake
Faster chapters pls
