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CC: Chapter 90
🕑 Added 2024-08-16 13:17:08 +0000 UTC
Mah-Jung felt his Qi reserves deplete, pouring into his relentless assault on the XJ-V’s melting body. Then, with a spark of searing light, the machine-man rose like a steelclad phoenix.
“Impossible…”
It was the only word the awestruck Mah-Jung could mutter as the Cog fixed his glowing eyes on him, walking steadily through the infernal, killing heat of a Level 9 Temperer’sAun’El Rebuke. Within those eyes was nothin but pure, raw, killing intent. Potential to eradicate entire worlds and worlds beyond worlds focused completely on Mah-Jung and his fiery hands.
Mah-Jung breathed in more than just the pungent scent of his killing flames, however. For as the Cog garbed in light walked through the hellstorm, he saw not a machine made in man’s image, but a God trapped in an ironclad cage.
“Yuwa…”
The Cog leaped, his Dragon Tooth’s propelling him through Mah-Jung’s cloud of fire and whipping up a storm behind him. Mah-Jung let his hands go limp, trying to anticipate the machine-God’s next attack with a roundhouse leading into a Flame Whip.
But his heel met nothing but air as he spun to deliver the blow, and then intense, roaring pain radiated up his left ribcage.
He turned. He looked into the eyes of an angered God.
And he saw his own fear reflected back at him.
The next thing he knew he was skidding across the arena, stopping at a wrecked wall that had once been part of his home. The screams of his parents had now grown to an inexorable chorus of suffering. And through it all, the Cog crept forward.
He threw everything he had at the being. Dragon Tooth’s, Flame-Whips, and even a Flaring Dervish that would have cut the legs from under even the most stalwart of Dragon Disciples. Yet after each attack he beheld the Cog barely even stammer in his strut.
Then it happened again – a feeling of sharp, paralyzing pain shot through his nervous system, and he looked down to see the Cog’s fist embedded in his gut, charging a Lightning Claw that would end his life…
A Dragontail Swipe managed to knock the attack away, and yet still Mah-Jung’s whole body lurched in agony. He took to the skies, rocketing off high above the battlefield, hoping against all hopes that he could escape the illusory sphere the Regulators had constructed. Or at least get away from the screams of the dying…
But as he approached the nearest cloud and grasped for the edge of the illusory world, his desperate reflection was replaced by that of a machine-bound God.
And before his eyes, he saw the Cog’s palms flicker with brilliant, lambent fire. Then a flower of death bloomed out from his palms.
Aun’El’s Rebuke…
Mah-Jung didn’t try to resist, then. He closed his eyes, felt the fires of a billion dying suns wash over his body, and let his limbs go numb as the specter of death embraced him.
He heard his parent’s call out to him below in vain. He heard his own breathing condense into raspy, superheated breaths. He felt his bones hollow and break away to tiny fragments.
In the illusory skies above his decimated home, Mah-Jung fell.
…
This is boooooring!
Arha the Huli was getting irritated. She had waited so long to see her man kick the hardened butt of the pompous top level Temperer in Ramor-Tai. She’d even told her sisters they should show up in the mortal realm for once – because this would be a fight that would send ripples through both the mortal and spirit dimensions themselves.
Instead, she was sitting here watching a bunch of lights flicker in a great black dome. The rest of the Cultviators were sitting with their heads bowed, each one breathing in like they were all at this moment dancing in the Dao. But Arha, impatient as always, just didn’t get it.
“What’s with you weirdos?” she shouted at Feng-Lung and Fai-Deng’s tense faces. “You aren’t even watching the lights!”
Neither man opened his eyes, but both heard the little fox spirit’s cry and deigned, even in the intensity of what they were feeling in this moment, to give her an answer.
“…we are with him,” Fai-Deng said. “All of us. Can you not feel him, Huli?”
Arha cocked her head at the boorish Tiger. She was not about to be lectured in the ways of the Dao by him of all people.
But as she looked out onto the sea of faces surrounding the colosseum, Arha saw that no man seemed bored at all. Indeed, it looked like they were silently praying for XJ-V.
“Power…” Fai-Deng continued. “I…I did not know just how powerful the soul in his chest made him.”
“How can a mere man compete with a dead God?” Kai-Thai added – his jovial expression completely swapped for one of resolute awe.
“No,” came then the voice of Feng-Lung. “What we feel is not the might of a dead God, Brothers. That is XJ-V.”
His silent companions turned to him.
“But he is struggling to contain it…” Gira then broke in, her head similarly bowed in quiet meditation, watching the battle from beyond the physical sights of the colosseum. “If he doesn’t quit the battle soon, he may lose himself.”
“He won’t,” Feng-Lung said. “That’s not who he is.”
Arha agrees with Feng, even if she doesn’t know what’s happening! No one doubts XJ-V!
“Feng,” Fai-Deng cautioned. “He is slipping. I can feel it.”
He’s not the only one…Feng-Lung thought, momentarily opening his eyes to the mortal realm and fixing his sight upon that of the two wise Masters of the Dragon and Tiger sitting above them all, peering as they did into the illusory bubble that displayed this nightmarish final battle. Not even Feng had suspected they would go this far for the final bout.
“Who are they testing here, really?!” the Huli shouted up at them. “Arha is sick of old dusty men abusing her XJ!”
“No,” Kai said. “This is a final test, Huli. Perhaps it was what the Masters envisioned all along. It is up to the Cog to pull through and master his own desire to prevail…or lose himself in the process.”
Feng-Lung locked eyes with the morose face of Ori’un as he sat cross-legged beside the Masters. It seemed like this battle was no laughing matter for everyone in the entire monastery. No matter their grade, and no matter their background, every single Cultivator of Ramor-Tai knew that, today, they were witnessing history.
But Feng’s mind shifted to his own failure – his own childish need to avenge his mother which left him barefoot and angry in the snow, all those many years ago…
But this wasn’t about him. He knew that. And so he reasoned that for once he should take his anxiety, bottle up his doubt, and channel it towards the one person in his life who truly needed someone to believe in him.
Come on, XJ-V, he thought – his mind thinking the words with all the intensity of his Qi behind them. Show them who you are.
…
In the miasma of XJ-V’s fury, Mah-Jung was powerless.
He flexed his charcoal fingers, and tried to stand, before realizing that he was in the center of a crater carved into the ground by his landing. At the moment of impact his body had expended some of its last Qi reserves in an unconscious, reflexive Dragon Tooth, which had manage to keep him alive.
His bones were not broken as he thought. The pain of the scorching sun the Cog had delivered upon his body could no longer be felt. Yet still he could not rise. He looked over the lip of the crater that he knew would be his grave, and breathed a sigh of remorse.
“To end…” he wheezed. “Like this…”
He saw his parents screaming for him to run. The image replayed over and over in this evil realm spawned from his own traumatic thoughts. Again and again he watched his mother cry out to him to flee, to save himself, to survive at any cost. And again and again he watched her be cut down mercilessly by the man that had come to lay waste to their village.
He saw him now – standing high and mighty above the crater where his body was laid to rest. He looked down and stared with the same dark, brooding eyes he had all those years ago when Mah-Jung, seeing his mother’s severed hand in his, had risen to fight against him instead of running. He had been beaten, of course, bloody and crushed to a pulp. And yet still he’d kept on rising.
“There is spirit within you, little one,” the white-robed man had told him, his aqauline features wreathed in fire and blood. “There is a desire in you to live, Mah-Jung. There is anger. There is thirst. Such attributes are all too human.”
The High Eagle had then bent down and offered him a spectral hand – not a physical palm at all, but a beam of dazzling, purifying light.
And Mah-Jung, consumed by wonder and fear in equal measure, had accepted it.
Now he was looking upon the same man – the one who had offered him life when he should have chosen death all those years ago. Long before he had joined Ramor-Tai. Long before he even knew of the Gods who had once walked this world. Long before he ever knew who he was and what purpose he would serve.
“No…more…Jin’ra,” he told the sharp eyes of the Eagle soaring above him. “This time, I am…ready. I am ready…for death.”
“Then I shall deliver it to you,” a very different voice then answered him. “Let the light of Yuwa take you to a better place.”
Mah-Jung’s eyes widened as he saw the Cog’s form phase through that of the High-Eagle’s. He saw too the arcs of lightning traveling through his metal hands, practically flying off his fingertips to seek out and eradicate all life still remaining in this nightmare realm. The grass of his homeland was set ablaze, his parents’ screaming faces finally vanished, and he felt a distinct sense of peace as the God-possessed Cog aimed his fingers at him – each one charging a spear of blazing lightning ready to seek out his heart.
Mah-Jung closed his eyes as the lightning leaped towards him.
“Take me…” he told the God of the wastes. “Take me to…where there is no more pain…”
