190. Second Ambush

Despite the shock of the situation, Alistair quickly slipped into Tranquil Mind, assessing what had happened with the rapid ease of someone who had been through dozens of life-or-death fights.

A bullet fired by a gun of the old Earth wouldn’t have been even close to fast enough to strike him. This was clearly the work of a gun-based cultivator, and a powerful one at that. That they were able to disguise their attack nearly perfectly, bypassing even his innate Karmic sight, was nothing short of masterful.

Alistair dug his heels into the snow and pressed his hands against Jindor’s back to arrest their momentum. [Reality Sense] let him detect the severity of the man’s injury.

Whatever the man was made of, it was even tougher than the Steel Body. The bullet had buried itself around an inch into Jindor’s abdomen, blood trickling onto the snow, but he was still in fighting condition.

“Show yourself, Kadeus!” Jindor shouted, his voice projecting for miles, filled with righteous anger. “You are a coward and traitor, and you will die by my hand.”

“I think not,” Kadeus responded, his voice coming from all directions at once. “That was just the beginning. Do you know how many—”

This time, Alistair was prepared. He eschewed all the other aspects of [Reality Sense], hyperfocusing on nue. In the visualization the Skill created, the world turned black and white as he felt the psychic web connecting all thinking creatures materialize before his eyes.

The moment Kadeus’s killing intent entered his field of perception, he moved. The bullet, while traveling at ridiculous speeds, was far slower than the speed at which the killing intent rippled through the two color world.

The levels gained from the previous zombies brought his Agility to over 1,200, yet his speed of thought would simply have been too slow without [Monk Motionlessness]. His body move entirely on its own accord, responding to the danger with minimal movement.

Even as his mind was still racing to catch up to his body, he activated [Mindshift]. There was no specific ability that led to his decision—merely a deep instinct that had been developed from experience.

Alistair reached Evangeline before the bullet did.

The second shot came a tenth of a second after the first. To a normal human, it would have been near instantaneous, but for Alistair, he had enough time to form thoughts upon his arrival.

Now that his guard was raised, he combined reflex and cognition, kicking Evangeline’s chest. A streaking purple bullet grazed his pant leg, missing his skin by a hair’s width.

Alistair stood on high alert as Evangeline and Jindor recovered from the attacks. After a few seconds, nothing happened, and he wondered if Kadeus was pissed that he hadn’t been able to take out him and his sister with those two shots.

“I didn’t think I’d meet another cultivator of that caliber in this dump,” the man said, betraying no emotion in his voice. “I’m impressed. What has this man offered you to help him? I know that you just met him. What are you, Peak Foundation? If you help me kill him, I can help you to Adept and give you something worthwhile for your troubles.”

“Sorry,” Alistair said. “You seem like a bad guy and I already told this guy I’d help him.”

“So be it,” Kadeus replied. “Even if you do make it to the nearest large station, I suspect you won’t like what you’ll find.”

The voice faded away, echoing into the eye of the storm. Slowly but surely, the blizzard grew, their circle of respite from the snow shrinking.

Still, Alistair didn’t let up his full nue sight in the slightest, also burning a small amount of Karma just in case. Once the blizzard was about to swallow them whole, Jindor spoke.

“Based on his words, I suspect he’s truly gone. Keep vigilant, but we should also be moving.”

“What do you mean?” Evangeline asked. “What was he talking about?”

“I think we’ve become a part of something far above our pay grade,” Jindor said, shaking his bald head. “I said I would be able to defeat Kadeus and I can, but we have an incompatability. His talent would have been scouted before, considering I am one of the foremost of our generation in talent. Since I had never heard of Kadeus before, I can only assume that he was smuggled here.”

“What?” Alistair exclaimed. “Who would do that?”

“I cannot say,” Jindor said. “…It could be a human experiment from by the tentaculites or even a hidden bastard. Or from a neighboring universe.”

Could they be working with the Man in Shadow’s organization? Or could they even be the same group, or perhaps they’re separate altogether?

Alistair stopped his rampant paranoia in its tracks. “Is there anything special about this planet?” he asked. “If they’re assaulting the large stations, wouldn’t that alert higher-ups? They can’t stand against the full might of the Empire with only a few infiltrators.”

Jindor shook his head. “The planetary core is corrupted. If they have an Adept who possess any Nodes along the Greater Dao of Death, they could easily lock down the planet and stop all teleportation.”

“We’re screwed then,” Evangeline said, shaking her head. “Why did I follow you here, A—Zhiyong?”

“Eventually the Empire will realize something is wrong,” Jindor said. “We just have to survive until then. I’d say our best bet is fighting with any survivors. It’s clear they made a coordinated strike, so I’d expect numerous other small stations to have been taken.”

“So nearest large station it is?” Alistair asked, aware that the blizzard was almost upon them.

“It’s certainly what Kadeus is expecting, but I still think it’s our best chance. Those who choose to venture to Nuevo Inverino won’t go down without a fight.”

Alistair and Evangeline shared a glance and nodded. Whether they liked it or not, they were along for Jindor’s wild ride.

Over the course of the next two weeks, they trekked toward the nearest large station, using the mental map within their cloaks as a guide.

Nuevo Invierno was far, far larger than Earth—based on how fast they traveled and how many large stations were on the planet, Alistair had to assume it was over five greater in radius.

When the storms grew worse, they sought shelter in various cave systems native to the planet, warming themselves with their Mana.

Of course, the entire way there, they were assaulted by zombies. They came intermittently, sometimes hundreds of thousands in the span of hours, other times only several dozen in a two days’ span.

On top of the titans they saw before, there were enormous undead drakes that quaked the ground with their very movement, requiring dozens of [Force Fists] to take down. Nothing that put their lives in danger, but the constant threat of Kadeus sniping them out of thin air kept them on constant guard and slowed down their journey.

By the end of the two weeks, Alistair had reached level 78, a number he felt quite confident in. Even considering the slow down as one reached the bottleneck, he was on good pace.

They knew they were approaching the large station when the temperature warmed up and the storm quieted down. Around each large station, which were the size of small cities, they had a climate control machine.

It wasn’t long before they encountered the army.

If Alistair thought that there were a lot of zombies in their previous assault, he was merely lacking perspective. With [Reality Sense] he could feel the auras of millions upon millions of zombies surrounding the large station in the distance.

They dropped down, cloaking their aura as they spied on the army from two miles away, hiding under the snow. Alistair noted Jindor’s near-perfect cloak, only surpassed by his old friend Red Harmonia.

“It seems we’re not too late,” Alistair whispered. “What’s the plan?”

“I’ll stay here to pincer them from behind,” Jindor said. “After seeing your abilities, I’m confident you can create an opening through their core. Their stronger fighters will be attacking the station.”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll take Yaxin with me.”

Evangeline took the lead, her eyes glowing white as she started dancing. Pure affinity Mana and Dao energy emanated from her hands, pulsating with a beat that felt similar to the own tune he had found while fighting.

She painted with her hands, forming a light blue Lamborghini Aventador out of her Mana and Dao energy. Alistair jumped in, taking shotgun.

While Alistair had trained in the ways of the first, Evangeline’s specialty was spirituality, which meant a masterful control of Dao energy. While he could produce far more raw output of Dao energy, her manifestation was far more real.

Her Lamborghini was an abnormal type of proto-Domain, one that she could move and interact with at an unparalleled degree for their cultivation.

She stomped on the gas pedal.

The sports car went from 0 to 100 in less than a second, leaving a blazing cyan fire in its wake. Zombies were crushed and burned to ashes in the path of the speeding vehicle.

Alistair felt chunks of ice and various forms of energy beams strike the walls of the car, but Evangeline’s proto-Domain proved resistant to any such attacks. They continued to pick up speed, turning into a blur of light.

Despite their speed, Alistair’s detection range allowed him to intercept larger threats to their speeding car, delivering [Lightning of Justices] down upon titans and mages in the army. It took around a minute of full-speed at 500 miles per hour to approach the large station, showing just how enormous the enemy front was.

Evangeline stepped on the brakes as they got within a mile of the metallic walls of the station, arresting their momentum with enough force to kill a lesser cultivator.

“You ready?” she asked, as the incoming attacks on the proto-Domain increased. “We’re relying on you here.”

“I’m always ready.”

Evangeline let the car dissipate, and all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of mages from the artillery section of the army fired beams of energy. Pure death, lightning, fire, disintegratio, rot, force, magma, and more rained down from above and every other angle. At the same time, there was an immeasurable swarm of zombies not two feet away, willing to sacrifice their lives in the maelstrom of Mana.

Dev’rox activated his ancient spell, an omnidirectional portal opening around Alistair and his sister. A second portal opened above, facing directly at the army.

The imp’s connection to Alistair strained as he used over 1,000 points of Mana in one go. The sheer amount of opposing Mana they were trying to transfer was unlike anything they had attempted before, even if the absolute distance between the two portals was only around ten feet.

It was well worth it. Thirty seconds of attacks spewed through, coming out the other end to devastate the undead army.

Whoever was commanding the mages soon realized their mistake, shutting down their attacks, but it was too late. There was a delicious irony—by the time they stopped their attacks out of fear of redirection, Dev’rox’s spell ended.

With a mighty slap on the ground, Alistair called down the most powerful [Lightning of Justice] he had ever cast, imbuing a large chunk of his Justice Node.

Golden lightning billowed down from the sky with a thunderous clap, creating a lesser version of the gong sound of his [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment]. The lightning burst upon impact with the ground in a flash of brilliance.

The bolt split into three smaller splinters which then split into three more and then three more again, spreading around the surviving troops. A single Dao-empowered usage of the Skill cleared out thousands upon thousands of zombies surrounding them, giving him and his sister time to scale the wall.

There were still dozens of zombies climbing the enormous metal wall protecting the large station. There were holes everywhere, created from hours of weathering attacks from the enemy, which they slipped into with ease.

Alistair had never seen such a battlefield before.

Now that he thought about it, all his life-or-death struggles were carefully orchestrated, part of the Pathfinder AI’s initiation. An actual war was something else.

There weren’t any civilians on Nuevo Invierno, but the vacant eyes of the dead still gave him pause. Zombies sauntered over them without a care in the world, as they lined the streets and climbed over the metal scaffolding across the buildings.

“GET OUT!” a loud voice bellowed.

Alistair grabbed Evangeline by the waist and jumped on to the roof of one of the buildings, kicking off zombies like a dog flicking a fly off its coat. Where they were just standing, mud billowed up from the ground and slathered a thousand-foot section of the protective wall, covering the hole that they just slid through.

“What the fuck are you doing over here? No one who is below Peak Foundation is supposed to be on the front lines.”

Alistair was somewhat surprised when he detected the source of the voice, a small woman with glasses and a bob. She was on the street, giving them the stern look of a teacher admonishing her students.

“We just arrived,” Alistair said. “Didn’t you feel it?”

“That was you?” she asked, raising both eyebrows at once. “I thought those were our reinforcements.”

“I don’t know about official reinforcements, but do you know a Jindor of the Black Star Sanctuary?”

The woman nodded. “Of course. I’m Haley, by the way.”

“Zhiyong, and this is my sister, Yaxin. What’s the situation like?”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” Haley said. “We need to hurry back now.”

Haley’s previous statement about those weaker than Peak Foundation not being allowed on the front lines turned out to be slightly misleading. While it was true that the weaker members were ordered to shelter in the core unit, that was actually the center of the battle.

Whoever was controlling the army of the undead knew that the core unit contained the heating system that kept the worst of the cold away from the station. Alistair had already felt the temperature and climate outside—this large station was in a particularly cold region of Nuevo Invierno. He doubted that even he would survive for more than a couple hours in those kind of conditions.

They didn’t have enough cultivators to defend the entirety of the large station’s perimeter, which was the size of a small city, so they continuously rotated some of their strongest troops in a repeating pattern. By the time they returned back to stage one, the zombies would break through again and wreak havoc.

Haley had already cleared the streets on the way toward the wall, so their trip back was relatively uneventful. She sniped any stragglers with sharpened strands of mud that reminded Alistair of Pharaoh’s sand spires.

They passed by gargantuan towers of shifting metal, exhaust coming out of corners like a steampunk flying machine. Alistair thought that with [Reality Sense] he was good at picking Mana out, but Haley would find zombies in the most random places, like hanging off a pipe 2,000 feet away and end them with a single flick of the wrist.

“It’s the particulates,” Dev’rox said. “Feel it. Mud affinity particles everywhere, forming a web of information.”

Alistair focused on the nigh-omniscience he possesed in a thirty-foot radius, and realized Dev’rox was telling the truth. He had always been able to feel it, it was just about paying attention. There was a slight change in the mix of ambient particles, a regular distribution of mud particles in a matrix layout, all tracing back to Haley. A sensory Skill that even Alistair could be jealous of.

They made it past the steampunk section and out into a open-air field. It looked as if crops once grew there, but there were black fires and zombies walking through those fires without a care in the world.

A prickly feeling touched the edge of his thousand-foot perception sphere as he felt a massive amount of Mana moving behind him.

Not Mana… Alistair realized. People?

Alistair turned around by instinct despite [Reality Sense], staring at the magnificent sight before him. The sky was nearly blotted out by zombies, titans, and direwolves.

“That’s another issue,” Haley said as she dealt with any zombies approaching them, crushing them between slabs of hardened white clay. “They keep catapulting thousands of zombies toward our desiccation core with kinetic mages. You want to deal with it, or me?”

Alistair gave his sister an impressed look. “If you want me to handle that, it’s going to be messy. Your Mana pool probably exceeds mine.”

“I wonder.” Haley scrunched her nose. “I think you have Mana that far exceeds what you should for that muscular physique.”

“I get that a lot. But I’m not just a muscular body, you know.”

Haley didn’t respond to his jab as she gathered her Mana. Mana pool measuring contest aside, one thing that was for sure was that all her meridians were unblocked and wider than his, allowing for a far more efficient usage of Mana.

The ground rumbled beneath them as a hand as large as a football field broke through. Alabaster white and smooth as as a marble, the clay hand flew up. Descending from the clouds, an identical clay hand came forth, yearning for its counterpart below.

Alistair was already in awe of how much Mana one instance of the pair of hands used, when two more palms emerged to the left and right of the original, each with their mirror image above.

“I call this one ‘Tripartite Meeting’.”

The six hands met simultaneously—the noise of the collision created a shockwave that demolished any flying bodies not in the clasp of the hands. Tens of thousands of undead were smushed to true death in a single moment.

Alistair and Evangeline took it as their cue to deal with the few remainders. He spammed [Lightning of Justice] like a video game, while his sister threw hybrid orbs of Dao energy and Mana that exploded on contact.

“You feel it too, I’m sure,” Haley said, giving Alistair a look as the last of catapulted zombies were electrocuted.

Alistair nodded. The woman had caught on fast to his sensory abilities. Between her and Jindor, Nuevo Invierno had cultivators that weren’t to be trifled with.

But besides that, what they had both detected was a colossal amount of Mana move at an almost imperceptible speed toward the station center.

Justice Quest—the leaf that allowed him to vaguely detect when innocent lives were in danger—flared. A calamity was about to occur.

Alistair willed his body into action, activating [Mindshift] twenty times in a row, traveling almost nine miles in twenty seconds.

The central unit of the large station was a cylindrical tower so wide Alistair couldn’t see the horizon from his vantage point. The copper-colored metal gave off a primeval heat, spreading evenly into the air despite the immense magnitude. He clocked the affinity as desiccation, an advanced tertiary Mana affinity comprised of sun, fire, and earth.

One of the most inherently deadly affinities to living organisms that employed aqueous solutions in their biology, Alistair recalled from his textbook on Praetei’s ship. Also utilized in heating systems, most commonly on extremely cold worlds due to the efficiency of the combination. Cultivators are typically unbothered by a lack of humidity within the atmosphere.

The doors to the heating cylinder were already blown of the hinges, leaving a jagged hole that Alistair slipped through.

“Adept.”