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Chapter 273: A Mad Escape
🕑 Added 2023-09-29 17:36:01 +0000 UTCThe storm was still ongoing. If anything, it had gotten even stronger.
“Come back here!” the turtler deacon roared, shooting sideways through the sky like a confused comet. His presence was a bright beacon at the edges of Jack’s Dao perception.
Jack didn’t reply. His full attention was devoted to running faster, to bending the air before him through the Dao of the Fist and achieving just that little bit of extra speed. His entire body felt devoid of energy, his Dao Tree was dry, but he still had to run.
The two of them crossed the sky, disturbing the clouds through mere speed. Jack didn’t know how fast he was going, but he’d created two sonic booms, so probably a little faster than twice the speed of sound. It was not his top speed, but he was injured and exhausted. His heart beat in his throat, the blood drummed on his temples. He wanted to puke.
The turtler deacon kept pace. Though traditionally a slower species, his superior cultivation more than closed the gap, as the deacon himself was doing to Jack. The distance between them was quickly shortening. Soon, the deacon would be within attack range.
Jack considered using his escape talisman, the one he’d gotten from the library of Huali’s estate. He would have to do it sooner or later, as there was no way to outrun this guy. However, he wanted to delay as much as possible. There could be more deacons approaching, and he needed them all to converge on him for his escape to be successful.
“Brat! Hold it right there!” the deacon shouted from behind, growing more enraged by the moment.
“If I was going to stop, I would have done it already!” Jack shouted back.
Apparently, that was not the correct response. The deacon raised his hand and slapped it down, unleashing a palm strike towards Jack. It didn’t reach him, exploding hundreds of feet behind him, but the ensuing shockwave ruined his balance and made him slightly slower. Before he could recover, the deacon had closed in.
“I told you to stop!” he shouted, unleashing another strike.
Jack had no choice but to defend. He turned and smashed out the strongest Meteor Punch he could muster, but it was not enough. The turtler’s palm strike broke through the meteor and crashed on Jack, if weakened by his resistance. He was sent flying into the ground at an angle, carving a line a hundred feet wide and destroying an entire section of the forest.
Immediately, Jack jumped up and kept flying away. He needed to delay. His Neutron Star Body had helped him survive the strike, but one of his arms hung broken, his current regeneration too slow to help.
At least, the turtler didn’t expect such a fast recovery, so he was a second too late to pursue, letting Jack open up the gap again.
“BRAT!” he roared, growing angrier every time he failed to stop Jack. “You’re courting death!”
Jack ran for his life. The pain and exhaustion were overwhelming him, sinking him into despair. His body was heavy and slow, his limbs refused to obey, the Dao around him felt sluggish. Yet, he persisted. He pushed through it all, his eyes gleaming with a madness so intense it would make Gan Salin proud.
The rain was growing stronger. He must have been flying towards its epicenter. By now, Jack was whipped by winds and droplets far fiercer than what he could find in Earth storms. These wouldn’t normally affect him, but he was so badly hurt that even the rain bothered him as it struck his bloodied face. His teeth still hadn’t regrown, nor would they if he couldn’t find a moment to rest, and his once-beautiful purple robes were now wet with his own blood.
He kept running. A mountain rose before him, its peak covered in slow, and Jack maneuvered around it. Since he was more agile than the turtler, this might give him a chance to open a gap.
As soon as he was at the other side of the mountain, the entire thing exploded. The turtler passed right through, having shattered the mountain peak with a single palm, and debris rained towards Jack. It wouldn’t reach him, but the sight was enough to make him raise both brows.
This guy destroyed a mountain without breaking pace! Just what kind of monsters did I offend!?
“Hold it right there, brat!” the deacon shouted. “The more you make me chase, the more you will pay later!”
Of course, Jack had no intention of stopping. He devoted even more of his being into running. By now, even the pain and exhaustion had faded away, replaced by a comforting numbness. All he could do was run. If he stopped, he might not be able to start again.
But no matter what he did, slowly but surely, the deacon was gaining ground.
Jack gritted his teeth. His eyes roved around in despair, looking for any avenue of escape. Seeing the stormy, lightning-packed clouds ahead, he turned upward and dove into them. Perhaps they could give him some respite.
“BRAT!” the turtler shouted. “Where do you think you’re going!?”
Jack had lost sight of the man. He entered the cloud and rushed ahead in a straight line, hoping to escape in the chaos. Instantly, he was beset by the mother of all storms. The humidity was suffocating. Lightning bolts crackled everywhere, and a few even struck him, making his already frayed nerves convulse painfully.
He hoped that, in here, the turtler would lose sight of him.
The clouds exploded. A tremendous impact hit the area just behind Jack, dispersing the storm for several miles. The air sparked with a hundred lightning bolts at once, and Jack could see the face of the turtler deacon closer than ever, gazing at him as angrily as before.
“I cannot be stopped by mere clouds, human!” he roared. “Fall already. Shell Sundering Sky!”
Jack didn’t see the attack, but he felt the danger. His hair rose. If he was struck this time, he really might die. In despair, he mustered every iota of strength he had remaining to teleport away once more, appearing three miles away.
The sky erupted behind him. All Jack saw was the shape of a turtle shell descending from the high heavens, large as a mountain, before a shockwave of titanic proportions hit him in the face. His nose broke. His ribs cracked. One of his legs was bent in an odd direction, and even the Neutron Star Body bent at the power of this peak D-Grade’s skill.
Jack was flung away so fast he broke the sound barrier again. He lost consciousness. No! he roared inwardly. I cannot stop here!
A split-second later, he awoke, still flying by the shockwave. It couldn’t have been more than a second, but he’d already crossed a tremendous distance. Luckily, his last-minute teleportation had made the shockwave hit him horizontally instead of smashing him into the ground as it otherwise would have.
Jack turned, borrowed the force of the shockwave, and forced himself to keep going. At the same moment, he reached into his pocket with his remaining hand and fished out the escape talisman—a wooden sign with the word ESCAPE written vertically on it in black ink. He couldn’t delay any longer.
The turtler had once again failed to immediately give chase. Seeing Jack wake up and keep running, his eyes widened, and he shouted out, “What the hell are you made of!?”
Jack gripped the talisman and prepared to break it. However, he was above the clouds now, and though his vision was foggy, he caught sight of two dots closing in from the distance. Shit, he thought with resignation. At the same time, he felt relief. He’d been right to delay. If he had used the talisman at the start, it was likely he would have stumbled upon one of the other enemies.
“Fine!” he shouted to earn some time and let the two new arrivals approach. “Say I surrender. Can you guarantee my life?”
“I guarantee nothing, brat!” the turtler shouted, approaching slowly. His gaze was stormy. A long green robe fluttered over his shell, while the front of his torso was open and covered in a softer exoskeleton. He walked on two legs. “Surrender if you want, or keep running. You cannot escape!”
“Oh yeah?” Jack replied. Through his pain, he smirked. The talisman was held tightly in his hand. “Watch me.”
The other two people arrived. Jack glimpsed at them quickly. Both were peak D-Grades—one a canine, the other a sharken. Of course, they were significantly faster than the turtler, crossing the remaining distance in the blink of an eye.
“What’s the matter, turtle?” the sharken glowered, laughing. “Can’t you even catch a low D-Grade yourself?”
“Shut up! You know I specialize in defense!” the turtler defended himself.
“So, this is Jack Rust,” the canine said, eyeing him almost hungrily. His eyes sparkled with madness. “You killed three of my underlings. I will make sure you— Hmm? Wait. You idiots! That’s an escape—”
Jack cracked the escape talisman. Space around him ruptured, and he was sucked inside with much more force than his own teleportations could achieve. He was spat back out a hundred miles away, so far that he couldn’t even see his previous location. All he spotted of the storm was a smattering of dark clouds in the horizon.
Even a deacon’s Dao perception couldn’t stretch this far—but that didn’t mean Jack was safe. Deacons were fast, and he was gravely injured. Moreover, he had no good way to mask his presence. They would surely search the wider area, and if they chanced upon him…
I must run, he decided with urgency. He flew away. The wind rapped against his broken arm and leg, sending jolts of pain with every movement, but he had no choice but to grit his teeth and endure. He had no more escape talismans. He needed to open even more distance and find a way to hide himself—maybe dig a hole deep enough that the soil would block the Dao perception of his pursuers.
He even dived into the forest to make himself less visible from afar.
The moment right before he did, he spotted a bedraggled, pained face watching him from afar—a prisoner clad in nothing but a simple gray robe, who ran away the second he caught sight of Jack.
Shit, he cursed. If the Warden really can see through their eyes, I’m doomed.
He changed directions and kept going. He maneuvered around trees, grimacing every time a branch struck his body. The miles evaporated under him. A minute later, he felt safe enough to poke his head through the foliage and gaze behind him—where he spotted two lines of light crossing the sky far faster than he could manage, with a third one trailing far behind.
NO! he screamed in his mind. Fuck! No! This is unfair!
There was no chance they’d flown in this direction randomly. They knew where he was, somehow. And they were coming straight for him.
Jack flew out of the forest and kept running. He was much faster above the trees than through them, but it didn’t change the fact that his pursuers were even faster. The distance was diminishing. Before long, he could make out the sharken and canine’s face if he looked back, along with their predatory grins.
“What luck you have, brat!” the canine deacon shouted from afar. “To appear right next to a prisoner of our master! You might have escaped otherwise, you know!”
Next to him, the sharken laughed. “Even the Dao wants you dead, kid. Just surrender already! The more you make us chase you, the more painful your death will be!”
Jack was drowned in injustice. He refused that explanation. How could he possibly be so unlucky as to appear next to a prisoner, of which there were only around a dozen per continent!?
Yet, reality was hard to argue with.
Does the universe really want me dead? he wondered. What did I do wrong!?
No. It’s not my fault. It’s the world that is wrong. Fuck luck. Fuck chances. Fuck the world. I will survive this, no matter what.
He still had the storage bead gifted to him by Master Huali. It was capable of releasing a strike with the full force of an early C-Grade. It was his only remaining life-saving measure, but he had to use it now.
He could sense the bead inside his clothes. He could activate it with a thought. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure how it worked. All he could assume was that the strike would affect everything in a certain direction, so he should wait for all the deacons to be as clustered together as possible. If a single one of them survived, Jack was dead. Even the Life Drop didn’t matter anymore—using it wouldn’t change a thing.
Since there was no point in running, he stopped. He turned to face his pursuers. With an arm and a leg broken, half his teeth missing, his face bloodied, and his body in tatters, he really made for a sorry sight. But he couldn’t care less. The Fist wasn’t about beauty. It was about power. Survival.
He stared down the three approaching deacons with fire in his gaze, mustering every bit of willpower he possessed. If they attacked with any sort of mind invasion, he had to defend himself long enough to use the storage bead.
The only problem was, the sharken and canine were flying far ahead of the turtler, who was the slowest of the three. Jack would only get one opportunity to bring them down. Could he hold on until the turtler arrived?
There was only one way to find out.
