Chapter 52: Fierce Battle

-Lu Bu POV-

Decimation followed their every footfall, their every movement, as Paragon of Jinzhou and Titan battled for supremacy. Spatial ruptures and supersonic arrows making a mockery of the surrounding land as they traded blows.

Lu Bu had managed, with the aid of the automatons, to push the battle away from populated areas and closer to a rural zone of the city. Lu Bu sent a rain of explosive arrows hurtling towards the fiend before him but was parried by regions of altered space, turning dozens of trees into a collection of splinters.

The pale titan flashes forwards, a clawed hand grasping at Lu Bu’s heart.

Ching!

A hurriedly drawn sword deflects the blow, the action sending waves of error messages through his systems as he attempts to parry the immense blow.

He is only partially successful, as the hit still sends him flying over the treetops. He lands roughly, rolling across the bare earth and muddying his fine clothes. Lu Bu scowls, he was not as skilled with the sword but it still hurt his pride that his swordsmanship had been proven to be not enough in the face of the monster’s brute strength.

He can see scorching rays of light through the branches and leaves, the automatons that obeyed the city’s V.I. desperately attempting to divert attention. Alas, the beast didn’t even turn to regard them.

For fucks sake, how long had he been fighting this thing?! Surely enough time for reinforcements to show up!

His instincts screamed at him, and he once more lunged to the side. Blackness met his sight, as the section of the forest he was once in was deleted from existence.

He rolled into a crouch, his bow flickering upwards as he let loose another twelve shots in less than a second. The form of the enemy flickered like a heat haze as all shots seemed to bend away from them.

He cursed aloud. Fighting against a very clear master of spatial manipulation as an archer was fucking horseshit! The only way it could worse was if the creature could use that ability to rip him apart from the inside out, a power it had yet to show…for now.

The creature sauntered closer, clearly in no rush and feeling no pressure from his attacks at all.

Lu Bu grimaced, before closing his eyes. His systems greeted him as he quickly rifled through possible solutions. His creator, long may the bitch rot in hell, had left him with more than a few goodies, but unlike the neurotic Taizong Lu Bu had yet to read them all in detail.

So that’s what he did, using his accelerated thinking to quickly sort through and memorise everything his body was capable of. Schematics and lists of materials that made up his body, while potentially useful for later, were set aside. Local history and science, made to help him adjust to the current era, were ignored in search of a weapon that could hurt the thing before him.

Then he stumbled upon it. A contingency, something the blue whore had never actually expected he would need – going by her notes on the subject. Yet included it she had. His synthetic pulse leaped as he read through the document.

This would work! Oh, the risks were horrible to be sure! But his situation wasn’t exactly winnable without a little risk.

Initiate Overclocking? [Y/N]

He accepted, feeling his reactor roar to life and his electric fibre musculature quicken with extra energy.

Overclocking mode was, in summation, a form of released limits. Usually the twelve Paragons operated exactly at the limit of what their self-repair systems could get away with. This could rise and fall depended on what material they had ingested to fuel such a system, but the results were always far above human baseline.

Yet that was not their limit. Their forms were weaved with magic and legend. The thread that made their muscles were at the maximum possible for tensile strength. Their cores were an endless font of pure power that would put fusion reactors to shame.

Yet their bodies could not keep up with their strength forever. The magic and energy might be unlimited, but physical reality still limited them. Joints would crumble under the pressure exerted upon them. Fibers would snap, tear and melt from the sheer energy pouring through them.

Hence the existence of the limiters placed upon them by their creator.

The ones he had just turned off.

He screamed. The force of it shaking the trees around him and briefly causing the approaching monster to stop and observe him. His skin was blistering, bubbles forming within the life-like polymers that aped at an epidermis. The air around him wavered from the intense heat he was emitting, steam pouring from his open mouth and curling up around his face.

Five minutes. He could fight like a god for five minutes before melting to death.

It would be enough for reinforcements to come. Besides, everybody loves a good self-sacrifice story, it would be much easier to get those fools to trust him with a performance like this. In that sense, he felt oddly thankful to the being before him.

His mouth curled into a demonic looking grin.

The arrows hit the beast, sending it hurtling backwards before it had even seen him drawing his now smoking bow. The projectiles pierced deeper this time, reaching dozens of meters within the hardened hide of the titan.

He crouched, and disappeared. The ground cratered where he had been, only now reacting to his forceful lunge.

He reappeared behind the monster, who was still flying backwards. Another volley killed that momentum, and then another sent it flying back the way it had come.

Lu Bu spit out a smouldering tooth, the piece of synthetic bone bubbling and spitting on the ground – but the archer had already disappeared, a sonic boom heralding his arrival above the creature.

An arrow punctured the beings finger, sending it spinning towards the ground. The impact cratered the earth, uprooting trees and sending pieces of rock flying.

Lu Bu didn’t stop, didn’t even hesitate. Hesitation was weakness, weakness was death.

Hundreds more arrows rained down, further reshaping the earth and turning a once lush and verdant forest into a wasteland of mud and viscera.

It also obscured the monster from sight, forcing Lu Bu to cycle through his vision setting to once again lock eyes with his prey. A pause that lasted a millisecond.

But a millisecond was far too long on this battlefield.

The fluctuation of air behind him was his first clue something was off. His second was the fist that sent him sprawling across the mud for hundreds of meters. His hand lashed out, grasping at a stray boulder that had fallen here from their furious battle and using to arrest his movement.

He looked up to see the beast leering down at him, the once pale and flawless skin now cracked and burned in hundreds of places. He raised his bow, only to find the fiend at his left instead.

A swipe of the beings claws forced him to dodge, but the sheer force of their passing forced him to stumble – the muddy water at his feet now hissing and bubbling from the heat his burning body was giving off.

Again and again he tried to aim his bow, tried to hit the thing, but it was always just out of reach.

The monster had learned, and was now toying with him.

A claw swipe here, a backhand there. A dozen lazy strikes forcing him to scramble out of the way. He couldn’t keep dodging forever, even now he could feel himself slowing down, joints locking up in places – fusing together from the sheer heat he was producing.

Finally a hit connected, a claw speared him through. The sharp edge breaking straight through his half melted chest.

Lu Bu gasped, an action he quickly regretted as smouldering lumps of metal and unnamed fluids leapt from his mouth. He sputtered as the creature raised him high, preparing to cleave him in two.

Lu Bu tried to move, tried to say something. He couldn’t, the damage was too much.

He could feel the beasts finger curling, preparing to end it.

Then, the beasts head snapped to the side as a round moving dozens of times faster than the speed of sound struck the beings head. The noise of the hypervelocity slug finally and mercifully destroyed Lu Bu’s auditory sensors as he slipped off the monster’s blade-like finger.

He fell and hit the earth with a wet sizzle, with only the barest lucidity required to finally halt the overclocking mode.

His core slowed down, energy no longer beat like a drum through him. Molten metal still poured from a dozen opening like blood from a wound, and the hundreds of errors and warning messages told him he was in for a long recovery period.

Lu Bu wasn’t in the right state of mind to care. He was still reeling, mind struggling to catch up with what had happened. He could feel thunderous vibrations echoing from the ground he was laying on – the last of his tactile sensors weakly clinging to life.

Darkness approached, emergency shutdown procedures blared into a mind that was too muddled to make sense of what was going on. There was only a choking sensation from where melted metal blocked the passage of his throat. He tried to breathe, a wholly unneeded remnant of humanity.

‘Is that you Cao Cao? Ordering my death again? Fucking…coward,’ were the last maddened thoughts of a mind once again reliving his death, before his body mercifully shutdown and blackness encroached upon his vision.

When he awoke it would be to an entirely different Jinzhou.

-Jing Ke POV-

“And how is the brute faring,” Taizong’s lackadaisical question came from the radio at his waist – a very handy invention, that.

“Not great. He activated his overclocking mode, and while that seemed to work for a while, he’s currently on the defensive and is flagging fast,” Jing Ke replied matter of factly, as he watched through the scope of his rifle – another great invention of these times.

“That’s good, make sure to only intervene if he’s about to die.” With that last order the radio cut out, leaving Jing Ke in silence.

He truly didn’t know what to make of the man. One second he would act with benevolence he would have expected of a buddha and then he would coldly order truly horrendous crimes. The only thing he was sure of was that the man no doubt had his reasons for this order, for keeping reinforcements from reaching Lu Bu in a timely manner.

The man was someone Jing Ke had kept a special eye on, for what should be obvious reasons. The man wasn’t overtly tyrannical, and his every action seemed to be for the benefit of Jinzhou, so Jing Ke had not yet turned his blade upon the city’s ruler.

How long that would last was anybody’s guess.

Through he scope Jing Ke watched the final minutes of Lu Bu’s battle against the unidentified parahuman that had somehow breached the barrier and circumvented the protection from parahuman powers that the city had been given from their shared benefactor.

He saw every time Lu Bu raised his bow, and every time the tall, pale, figure slid out of the way of his aim with impossible grace. Jing Ke narrowed his eyes, observing every detail with sight that could pin an insects wings from miles away.

The being wasn’t teleporting, though it had shown itself to be capable of it. It also wasn’t moving, the motion was too sharp and left no tracks behind – no displaced air or tracks upon the ground.

Jing Ke’s eyes widened slightly as he realised what the being was doing.

It was bending space to move! Instead of moving it was forcing the universe to move around it!

It didn’t matter how fast Lu Bu was, and he was incredibly swift, not when the pale giant could move as fast as thought.

‘Plus, that kind of movement completely ignores inertia and friction. I don’t think Lu Bu would stand a chance even if he was technically faster.’

A spear-like finger to the gut settled the showdown, as Lu Bu’s broken form was hoisted into the air like some demented trophy.

Jing Ke frowned, orders or not he didn’t appreciate someone being treated so disrespectfully. Taizong had better have a good reason for this inaction.

Sure, Lu Bu was rude, smelly, brutish, ugly, arrogant, had bad taste in alcohol, chose a fucking bow instead of getting with the times, called Jing Ke a ‘skulking sneaky bitch’ one time, kept blaring music at twelve in the morning and-

…Huh, maybe he should let Lu Bu get torn in half?

No, wait, the Taizong would lecture him.

Not worth it, better to save the asshole instead.

He adjusted his scope and aimed towards the skull of the celebrating giant, who was clearly eager to rid itself of an annoying pest. Jing Ke’s breathing slowed and the world grew still.

The world became calculations to be solved, not the irrational mess it so often was. Wind speed, distance, velocity and a dozen other factors flittered through his mind, teasing him with possibilities.

Jing Ke in life wasn’t a sniper in life, he had lived long before the invention of such a weapon. Yet it didn’t matter, he was more legend and myth than reality at present. He was an assassin, one of the most famed in all of history. So, of course, he knew how to use a gun – he had known even before his database informed him of them.

If only he had one of these back then, maybe he wouldn’t have failed.

He let the errant thought slip away, solely focusing on the target before him.

He pulled the trigger, and death was unleashed.

The bullet left the chamber with all the fury of a lightning bolt, tearing across the horizon and snapping back the head of the giant that had sought Lu Bu’s death.

Which was understandable, but still not something he could allow.

Lu Bu falling face first into muddy water with his ass pointing directly towards the heavens did much to brighten his mood.

The ashen figure of the giants prone form flickered, and between one blink and the next it had regained it’s footing and was now looking directly at Jing Ke. Despite being miles away he had no doubt it saw him clearly.

He gave it a little wave, and then pulled the trigger again.

The air surrounding the titan flickered, space folding upon itself as the creature surrounded itself in a barrier of impossible geometries.

The bullet hit the barrier, swerved as if it had a will of its own, and proceeded to once again nail the giant right between the eyes. For the second time it’s head snapped back as the force of a railgun shell knocked it to the ground.

This time it did not immediately rise again, stunned and confused that the bullet had still hit its mark.

As much as Jing Ke wished that he was simply that good, it was not the case. The sniper rifle he was holding in his hand was one personally crafted by Yà Lì Shān Dà, the one who had gripped him tight and raised him from death. As one of her creations he had been gifted with immense strength, speed and durability.

Despite this, when he was first raised, they had done little to lift his blackened mood – for how could they. He had failed after all, he had been unable to kill his target. The most famed Chinese assassin? What a joke.

He had lamented for days because of that failure, unable to appreciate the second chance he had been given. When Yà Lì Shān Dà had found him in the streets, cursing his inability to get drunk, she had sat down and listened to him. He had cursed her, heaped no end of insults upon her shoulders.

She had taken them all with no complaint, only appearing wearily accepting – as if she had expected it in some fashion.

Then she had talked. Much of it he couldn’t remember, the memories too clogged up with malaise and self-induced cranial damage. But a single line cut through the darkness, a single sentence he still remembered to this day.

“I don’t know your story Jing Ke, oh I know the history but I don’t truly know it. Did you attempt to kill the king in an attempt to save the Yan stat? Did you do it for money? Or perhaps you just really disliked King Zheng? Either way, you’re letting the past blind you to the realities of the present.

If you wanted to preserve the land that took you in then consider that you now have a new home, one that is threatened by a much larger force. If you wished for fame and riches then there is enough here to beggar the people of your time. If you simply hated the ruler of your time then you should know an even worse emperor is at the head of China now.

You regret won’t fade if you continue down this path, so why not try giving this whole ‘guardian’ thing a try? If you don’t like it, you could always try to kill the current emperor!”

The simple wisdom had left him slightly dumbfounded, but what truly shook off the clouds of misery that had encumbered his sight wasn’t that. It was the fact that Yà Lì Shān Dà, someone who likely held more influence than Taizong, had been willing to lie down in the gutters with him and show him the way out.

For a man so used to rigid hierarchy and orders with little expectation of reward it had been…more than he could fathom.

Oh, and then the goddess had gifted him his rifle – spun from thin air – and told him to ‘go, do a crime.’ He hadn’t understood the logic, but had obediently knocked over a trash can on his way back home.

The reminiscence passed in the blink of an eye and, when the titan stood back up to once more observe him, Jing Ke was giving a far more obscene and mocking gesture than a simple wave.

He then proceeded to shoot at it a couple more times, just to show it he cared.

-Alexander POV-

“WOOOO! FUCKING SNOW!!!” I whooped in joy as I flung the snow into the air, the frozen water coming back down in clumps which Renji had to step around to avoid being hit.

Y’know, like a bitch.

“This is my first time seeing snow…it is not an unpleasant sight,” Renji said, staring at the white powder as if it held the secrets of the universe. “Should we make a snowman? I’ve read on the internet that that is what you do when it snows.”

Or he could just be contemplating snowman building, man his demeanour makes it hard to read him sometimes.

“Well I guess I could magic up some carrots, pebbles and a scarf.”

“Don’t forget a top hat!”

My lips curled into a indulgent smile at that. “Oh? Snowmen have top hats? That wasn’t the tradition where I came from.”

Renji nodded, as sure of this sacred snowman building method as he was of gravity. “Yes, top hats only. No other head wear is acceptable.”

“Well if that’s the case I’ll whip one up. Perhaps you should start rolling the snow up while I do that?”

Renji nodded, crouching down to begin building the body before pausing and looking up. “Ahem, on second thought maybe we should be doing something more important? The fate of the world is at stake. Who knows, maybe a catastrophe is unfolding as we speak!” Renji’s cheeks were slightly flushed as he said this, perhaps only noticing now the childishness of the situation.

I waved him off, not willing to let Renji miss a moment of fun for some far off worry.

“Renji, as much as I meme on Earth Bet, there’s absolutely no way things have gone to shit so bad we’d have to stop this. Seriously we’re fine, just go have fun!”

With that last piece of encouragement Renji turned back to rolling snowballs while I began weaving matter into different forms of clothing. Today was a good day.

AN: Epic battle POG! Let me know how the fight scene went, because I wasn’t too impressed with my last attempt and I’d like to know if this was better. I think it was, but who knows?

So, another paragon takes to the field and you all get a good look at their power levels. If I had to give an exact WOG on how strong the Paragons are I’d say Triumvirate+ (not counting Eidolon) in that they can fight an Endbringer level opponent on even footing for a while, one on one, and not lose immediately. Because make no mistake, if it had been an army of parahumans fighting Mary’s Titan so many of them would have died in the first minute.

In other news Alexander and Renji finally get to the South Pole and immediately begin to fuck around!

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment!