Chapter 1030: The World Is a Kaleidoscope (12)

The sailors on deck were cleaned up in the blink of an eye.

Still beaming with a bright, refreshing smile, Qing headed straight for the stern cabin that rose up like a building.

BOOM!

It looked like she was merely pushing the door with the sole of her foot, but the kick itself was ferocious beyond belief.

The door flew right off its hinges.

The door, of course, might have had grounds to feel wronged.

It should have been pulled open.

So why smash it by pushing?

Would it have helped if someone had pasted up a sheet of paper saying PULL?

But Qing came from a bloodline of door-destroyers.

Not just one little sign saying PULL— even if the entire door had been plastered over with messages saying PULL, PLEASE PULL, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PULL, she still would have pushed it.

Because that was simply the blood of her people.

Beyond the shattered door, a pitch-dark corridor entered Qing’s vision.

Well, of course it did.

The day was bright outside, but with the lights out indoors, no light came into the interior, so naturally it looked like utter darkness.

But only for a moment.

A transcendent human body meant transcendent night vision too.

Qing’s pupils swelled huge, like a cat’s, and though the corridor had been black a moment ago, before long it resolved itself into a dim, murky shape.

Narrow corridor. Rooms of unknown purpose lined both sides.

Wide enough for maybe three people to pass through shoulder to shoulder.

At the far end stood sailors jammed so tightly into the hallway they looked almost wedged in place, shoulders pressed flush together.

Like they were taking some kind of group portrait:

four lying down at the bottom,

four crouching behind them,

four bent at the waist behind those,

and four standing upright at the very back.

Sixteen sailors in total.

And sixteen gun barrels, all aimed straight at her.

Ah.

Guns.

Right.

The Western bastards used guns...

Qing’s heart turned cold.

With her background being what it was, there was no helping it.

She knew exactly how dangerous guns were.

She knew their power all too well.

So Qing nodded.

Okay.

I’ll just head back out, then.

The sailors’ eyes said, Like hell you will.

Then at the same time they bellowed—

“[Fire!]”

RATATATATAT!!!

Gunshots filled the corridor.

At once, thick black gunsmoke rose in all directions, acrid and choking, a fog of powder so dense you could not see an inch ahead.

“[Reload, reload!]”

At the gunner’s shout, each man’s hands moved fast and practiced, stuffing iron shot into the muzzles of their flintlock muskets, skilled but urgent.

A trained gunner could fire four rounds a minute, and though the East India Company was categorized as a trading concern, in actual role and scale it was closer to a navy—

No, it was simply a navy.

The trained marines hurried their reloads, glancing again and again beyond the blackly churning fog of black-powder smoke.

And then—

DOOOONG...!!

A deep, gentle bell-tone rang out, large and sonorous, utterly unlike anything of the West.

And then—

“GAAAH!” “AAAGH!”

Screams burst out from every side as one section of the formation collapsed in a heap, bodies tangling together.

Then again—

DOONG, DOONG, DOONG...!

Like several bells being struck in rapid succession, the tolling rang out again and again.

Some men were flung away.

Others coughed blood and collapsed across the prone gunners below them, knocking down the men standing behind them as they all tangled into a mass and fell apart.

The firing line crumbled in an instant.

And even through that collapsing mess, the senior gunner still managed to keep his seated firing posture.

Maybe that was what it meant for a veteran to earn his pay.

The senior gunner slowly exhaled, staring through the shifting fog of gun smoke with extreme concentration—

And in that instant, a human figure tore straight through the smoke.

Far higher than the gunner had expected.

A high arc, almost enough to brush the ceiling.

The gunner’s muzzle snapped upward.

Under that extreme concentration, the rushing figure’s face—beauty so striking it was hard to believe she was Eastern—filled his vision in magnified clarity.

When a target looked big, that was the sign of a hit.

He pulled the trigger.

BANG!

Got you.

The certainty flashed through his mind at the same moment, and under the superhuman concentration of that instant, the whole world seemed to slow.

In that slow world, the black lead ball wobbled left and right as it crept forward along its irregular path.

A characteristic unstable trajectory from a round without rifling.

But at this distance, it was not enough to miss.

Then it happened.

Even inside that endlessly slow flow of time, the woman’s eyes moved sharply.

They focused precisely on the lead ball flying toward her.

Then she raised an arm.

She stretched out a hand white enough to gleam even in the darkness, as though she meant to catch the rushing bullet with her bare fingers.

A breath slipped from the senior gunner’s nose.

Ha.

Catch a bullet with your hand?

It wouldn’t work even if she tried, and even if it did, her hand would just get a neat hole blown straight through it—

Then the senior gunner’s eyes bulged wide.

*****

The moment she saw the gun barrels aimed at her, Qing’s heart had dropped straight into her stomach.

Given where she came from, that was unavoidable.

The instant she heard the shout to fire, Qing kicked off the ground and sprang up.

Both arms thrown overhead, all ten fingers plunged deep into the ceiling, and there she clung upside down, flat against it.

This was also one of the Divine Thief’s secret techniques.

Humans, unexpectedly, had a massive blind spot above and below their line of sight.

So if someone was coming around a corner, you simply stuck yourself to the ceiling instead.

A true shift in perspective that only the Divine Thief could have devised.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

The sound of splintering wood burst out almost all at once.

Still clinging to the ceiling, Qing glanced at the bullet marks left in the wooden wall and estimated their power from that.

Mm.

If it gouged in that much...

If I got hit by that...

Mm.

The wood got dug in about a thumb-joint deep, so then...

Mm.

Mmmm, no idea.

Of course she had no way to tell.

Qing’s body was not a chunk of wood, so seeing a thumb-joint-deep gouge in timber did not actually let her measure the true force of the impact.

Still, if a master thrust with a blade wrapped in aura, a wooden wall like this would be pierced easily enough.

So maybe this was far weaker than that?

Then again, a master’s thrust relied on the cutting force produced through the application of martial energy, so if she really wanted a comparison, she ought to compare it with modern firearms from her homeland.

A flintlock musket was basically a shrunken cannon.

Its penetration was terrible by nature; its power lay in sheer brute impact.

Qing did not know.

And even if she did not, no one else would either.

Who in the world knew something like that, and if they did, where would they ever use it?

Still, one thing was certain.

If one of those hit her in the chest again, it really might explode something.

She needed to find something to pad herself with.

That lesson had been learned through suffering.

What kind of useless cushioning was this, being that weak?

Shouldn’t it be all springy and bounce things off with a boing-boing?

Once that wave of gunfire passed, all that remained was the harsh smell of burned powder and thick black clouds of smoke.

Qing dropped down, shot both hands out, and spammed long-range palm strikes from the Tathāgata Divine Palm.

Then she sprang up again and plunged into the smoke, cutting her way through it.

At that exact moment, one of them still managed to raise his gun fast.

And their eyes met.

Then—

BANG!

Qing shot her hand out—

and in her grasp—

WHACK!

The back of Qing’s hand slammed hard into her own forehead.

To her transcendent eyesight it had looked like nothing more than a small crushed bead, but the force packed inside it was like the punch of a strongman.

She had caught the bullet, yes, but the unforeseen impact had made her smack herself right in the forehead.

Her palm felt fairly numb, and because all the force had concentrated into one point, the center of her hand stung as though it had been gouged.

But that was all.

Just numb and stingy.

Qing dropped back to the floor.

She knocked aside the Westerner’s distorted, horror-struck gun barrel with the back of her hand, then reached out with the other hand and clamped down on the wicked wrist holding the gun.

CRACK!

“GAAAAH!!”

Apparently screams sounded the same whether they were in the language of the Central Plains or Dutch.

Qing seized the other wrist too and crushed that one as well, then turned her gaze toward the rest.

No, really.

Pointing a gun at a person?

And actually firing it too?

These bastards were complete trash.

People like this absolutely should not be allowed to hold guns.

Wouldn’t the world only benefit if they were made permanently unable to hold one at all?

In the dim, nearly black corridor, inside a ship reeking of burning powder, the grinding sound of bones being crushed echoed out—

along with screams desperate enough to seem like they were trying to drown that sound out.

*****

Flagship, Golden Lion.

A sailor came running in a panic to report to the first mate, who had been watching the bombardment from the third gun deck.

“First mate, it looks like something’s happened to the United Company!”

“What kind of problem? Did it catch fire? I told them over and over to be careful when firing incendiary rounds.”

“It’s not that, sir. All the masts have gone down. They’ve been sending signals, but nobody’s responding. We sent a lookout up to check.”

“What? The masts went down?”

The first mate frowned.

This Eastern weather was so damned hot that hell itself might have felt cool by comparison.

It was hot and humid, and on top of that there was not even the slightest wind, so the whole world just steamed in place.

And with no wind at all, the mast broke?

Even if someone had deliberately hacked at it with an axe, it would take half a day at minimum, and several men would collapse from exhaustion during the process.

That was how sturdy the masts of a newest-model sailing ship were.

“Stop the bombardment first! If it starts drifting, the ships could tangle together, so stop the bombardment! Pass that order immediately, and bring me someone else!”

“Yes, sir!”

The signalman who had rushed in ran back out just as urgently, and the first mate was in the middle of issuing follow-up orders to another signalman who had been called in—

when it happened.

A lookout came sprinting in, face drained white, gasping for breath as he shouted,

“Mutiny, sir! It’s a mutiny aboard the United Company!”

The first mate’s brows twitched sharply.

Mutiny?

What mutiny?

How the hell did mutiny suddenly enter the picture?

Mutiny always had warning signs.

And those signs only came when something had already gone wrong.

They were not in the middle of a voyage.

Other than the murderous heat making everyone irritable, there was not even any real problem right now, so what was this nonsense about mutiny all of a sudden?

“The whole deck is covered in blood! They’re all lying there soaked in blood! There isn’t a single one left who looks intact!”

“What the—”

“They’ve arranged them there on purpose! Put them on display half-dead, right where everyone can see!”

“What are you—”

“We need to bring the ship alongside and wipe those mutinous sons of bitches out with guns and steel right now! This is no time to be firing cannonballs at those monkeys!”

The lookout shouted with veins standing out in his neck.

Well, for a sailor, mutiny aboard ship was the most vile and filthy thing a sailor could possibly do, so the lookout’s rage was understandable enough.

The surprising part was not that it happened, but that it happened so often.

Then again, the character of men who lived by the sea had been infamous since old times.

Was it not a long and glorious tradition reaching even into Qing’s homeland?

A ship was an isolated little society floating on the sea, and by its very nature all kinds of inhuman things happened aboard one.

And the sailors packed onto it abandoned the ways of man with astonishing ease.

That was why mutiny was the worst of all.

Doing foul, dog-like things while aboard ship was just the sort of thing “we” all did together.

But betraying the men who sailed on the same ship as you and turning a gun barrel on your own shipmates—

that was unforgivable.

At that, the first mate ground his teeth hard.

“Damn it. Turn the ship. The flagship comes in on the starboard side, Zeelandia on the port. We board from both sides at once. Ready the marines, and have the rest of the fleet seal it off fore and aft. Right now!”