Chapter 105: Like hell you will

The red beam of spiritual light sliced directly across the threshold of our narrow alcove, painting the stone walls in a sinister, bloody glow. The grinding, metallic screech of crescent glaives scraping along the gravel path outside grew deafening. Four paces. Three paces.

Lu Chen was completely frozen, his eyes wide with stark terror as his body locked up in panic. Jiang Wei’s knuckles tighten around the hilt of his azure blade, his breath catching in his throat.

“They’re right at the lip,” Jiang Wei hissed, his voice barely a breath. “If they take one more step inside, the tracking array will lock onto our life signatures. We have to redirect them, now!”

Before I could move a single muscle, Jiang Wei bit his lip until it bled, slapping his left hand onto the wet mud floor of the cave. He injected a precise, hyper-focused thread of his remaining qi directly into a hidden crack in the bedrock. He didn’t attack the demons; instead, he targeted an ancient, dormant defensive trigger built into the ravine walls—the Stone Echo Array.

Hummmmm.

A sharp, vibrating chime resonated through the rock formations roughly thirty paces to our left, deeper inside the foggy ravine. A cluster of loose boulders violently shifted and crashed down onto the path, creating a sudden, booming racket that perfectly mimicked the sound of fleeing cultivators.

The blood-red tracking beam at our cave entrance wavered. Outside, the leading Shadow Watcher stopped dead in his tracks, his massive horned helmet tilting toward the noise.

“Movement detected in Sector Five. Shift search coordinates immediately.”

“It worked!” Lu Chen gasped, a frantic surge of relief washing over his pale face.

But the victory was short-lived. The second Shadow Watcher—the commander of the advance patrol—didn’t move toward the distraction. His eyes flared behind his iron visor as his dark, heavy boots took a massive step right through the narrow mouth of our cave. His spiritual perception was too dense; the faint scent of Qing Yan’s fading Blazing Phoenix fire had already triggered his tracking sensors.

“False alarm in Sector Five,” the commander’s guttural voice boomed, his massive crescent glaive rising as he locked his gaze directly into the pitch-black shadows where we sat. “The rats are right here. Raise the signal—”

He never got to finish that sentence.

“Like hell you will,” I muttered, my voice cutting through the dark like ice.

Before his fingers could crush the black spiritual horn at his waist, the absolute, boundary-breaking speed of my Meridian Stage core erupted beneath my white and blue clothes. I didn’t just move; I completely bypassed the physical constraints of space. I appeared directly beneath the giant monster’s guard before his massive frame could even register my presence.

I didn’t use a blade, and I didn’t let my golden aura flare into a bright, visible flash that would alert the army miles away. Instead, I compressed every ounce of my Meridian pressure directly into the tips of my fingers, driving a lightning-fast, silent strike straight into the throat joint of his heavy obsidian plate armor.

CRACK.

The precise shockwave didn’t make a sound outside, but it completely shattered his vocal cords and severed his spiritual connection to the signal horn in a fraction of a second. His yellow eyes widened in primal, suffocating terror as he clutched his neck, gasping for air that wouldn’t come. With a swift twist of my wrist, I grabbed the collar of his heavy chest piece and dragged his massive eight-foot frame deeper into the black shadows of the cave, snapping his neck with a clean, muffled twist. He slumped onto the floor, out cold and neutralized before he could even drop his weapon.

“One down,” I whispered, glancing back over my shoulder with a sharp, arrogant smirk. “Fire Empress, your turn.”

The remaining two Shadow Watchers outside heard the faint, heavy thud of their commander’s body disappearing into the dark cave. Their tracking eyes instantly lit up with a furious, crimson glare as they raised their massive glaives, preparing to unleash a combined dark red demonic wave to level the entire stone cleft.

But Qing Yan was already moving. Hearing me call her Fire Empress in the middle of a life-or-death execution didn’t slow her down for a single second. Her battle-hardened pride as a high-tier cultivator took over completely. Her large, clear eyes flared into a brilliant, lethal crimson as she lunged forward from the dark, the deep slit of her red dress parting beautifully as she cleared the cave entrance in a single, fluid bound. Her long gold earrings clinked sharply against her neck as she wove an intricate, lightning-fast mudra with her slender fingers.

[Sect Technique: Hidden Ember Blindness!]

Instead of a massive, roaring explosion that would light up the night sky, she unleashed a highly precise, completely suppressed variant of her Blazing Phoenix Seal. Two tiny, blindingly bright sparks of white-hot crimson fire shot directly from her fingertips, traveling like silent needles through the thick white fog.

Pffft! Pffft!

The sparks struck the tracking eyes of the two remaining watchers with absolute, pinpoint accuracy. The intense, concentrated heat didn’t explode; it silently melted their spiritual lenses into liquid iron, completely blinding their sensory arrays in an instant.

“Ahhhh! My eyes!” one of the demons hissed, his guttural voice muffled as he stumbled backward, wildly swinging his heavy crescent glaive into the empty air, completely unable to locate our positions in the dark.

I slipped out of the cave entrance right behind her, my white and blue robes rustling softly in the mountain wind as I matched her stride perfectly.

“Beautifully done, Fire Empress,” I grinned, my hand extending as the golden light of my Meridian core tightly wrapped around my forearms like solid gauntlets. “Now let’s finish this before the main army realizes their watch dogs stopped barking.”

Qing Yan landed smoothly beside me, her hands still humming with the dangerous, white-hot heat of her fully restored core. A confident smirk broke through her flushed, breathless face as she looked at the panicked, blinded monsters in front of us. “I told you not to call me that, Barry! But… I will gladly help you clean up the rest of this trash.”