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Chapter 30: A Slayer Mission
Last Updated:
2023-11-28 21:03:11
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Dragon-kissed Chapter 31: The Labyrinth
“It’s a water maze,” Sasha muttered, mystified. “I should’ve known…” “How can you tell?” “See the floor? It’s sloping.” “Isn’t water good news? It’d melt the whole maze.” “Not these walls,” Sasha said, feeling the texture of the entrance wall with reverence. “This is perma-ice. Hard as diamond. There are almost no air bubbles inside the ice crystals. Our Clans combined their powers and spells to create this thing of perfection. No jutsu, fire or otherwise, is powerful enough to break it.” “Well, good thing water flows downhill. Let’s just make sure to stay on top.” “We can’t. It depends on the layout of the maze. And if I know my father, these walls shift to create various designs and give the illusion of having no beginning or end. You remember the musical box I gave you? There are magnets underneath this labyrinth.” “Great,” Aki said sarcastically. “Is there any good news at all?” “The good news is,” Sasha said with a smile and tried his best to look confident. “I’ve prepa
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Aki quickly executed the hand seal of Rin, the Diamond Thunderbolt, and chanted: “I am empowered with vital energy.” She projected a dome-shaped cushion of compressed air over Sasha, effectively blocking the second kukri chop of the ice monster. “What is that thing?!” “It’s an ice golem!” Sasha screamed from where he had fallen on his butt on the ice. Aki flicked the rope into a loop around her forearm and tugged with all her might. “Let’s get out of here!” she screamed. The blank-faced and empty-eyed golem pierced through with its other weapon: a trident. Following the principle of daishō, meaning “big-little”, it was armed with one mid-range and one short-range weapon in its upper hands, while both lower hands were empty and served only to support. These were the optimal choices of weaponry for such a four-armed warrior. The lower hand could lengthen and shorten the trident in the heat of battle while the opposite hands could pass the kukri blade up or down. And with th
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The next thing Aki knew, she was sliding backwards. She heard a deafening crash. It sounded like the ice wall had shattered into a million pieces in spite of what Sasha had said about its invincibility. When she finally opened her eyes, she couldn’t see a thing. Someone (Sasha she hoped) raised an Everlite crystal to survey the damage and a confusing sight greeted her. The opposite wall was still intact except for a few cracks and yet there were a hundred pieces of ice scattered on the passageway’s floor. “Did we win?” Aki asked over her shoulder to Sasha, who was crouched next to her still prostrate form. Sasha nodded. Amid all the debris and stretching away from the point of impact, Aki could make out a slide made of ice. She had managed to pin the paper talisman to the golem’s forehead after all, and Sasha had gotten both of them to safety by generating the slide. With the sealing talisman in place, the ice golem had shattered. “Yatta!” Aki screamed. “See! What did I tell you?
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“Cat’s Cradle?” Sasha asked incredulously. “That’s right. There’s a total of six designs the maze keeps coming back to. So far, I’ve identified, in this order: Eagle’s Claw, Turtle, and then…” She drew a figure on the palm of Sasha’s glove with her index finger. “That’s the Canoe. Well, at least for children in the northern tribes. What else?” “So, Canoe, then Cup and Saucer, then Cat’s Eye, then Lightning. It goes back to Eagle’s Claw after this.” “That’s fantastic, Aki! I never would’ve thought! You’re a genius!” Sasha gave Aki a sudden hug, literally taking her breath away and making her blush again in the dim light. Then, Sasha crouched and drew the layouts by scratching the surface of the ice floor under them. He lined up the cat’s cradle figures in chronological order and erased mistakes with a sweep of his hand following suggestions from Aki, who peered over his shoulder. “It makes perfect sense. Cat’s cradle figures are always the same orientation because the anat
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The passageway was deathly silent. If earlier Sasha had felt slightly annoyed by Aki’s constant chatter and whining, now he missed them. He missed them so much the enormous feeling welled up inside him and turned into tears in his eyes without his permission. Sasha burst into sobs and dropped to his knees. He knew he shouldn’t let Aki see him in distress so openly because for sure that would empty her already waning willpower. But there was no helping it. She was going to die if he didn’t do anything. He had to do something. He couldn’t just watch her die! They shouldn’t have entered the vault in the first place. It was a terrible idea. By agreeing with her plan, he had placed both their lives in grave danger. What were they thinking? They were just kids. Why did they ever think they could do this? If the grownups themselves had a hard time doing it, how much more would they? If only his or Aki’s parents were here. If only an adult was here – any adult – to tell him what to do. S
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He felt his knuckles connect with the ice. He did not hesitate or slow down in the slightest. He didn’t entertain the idea that the ice was tougher than his hand or that his fingers would break. It was all in the mind, his father had taught him. If he put his mind to it, he was capable of achieving anything. The world was his canvas. He didn’t decelerate his punch against the surface of the ice. More than the snapping shrimp’s shock wave, he imagined his fist as the head of the extinct water dragon Kuma-wani, the Bear-fish, going through the wall as if it was made of liquid. This was the crucial follow-through. In his mind’s eye, Sasha saw the dragon’s massive head ramming the wall and smashing it into a thousand pieces. When he finally opened his eyes, his grave expression turned to dismay, and then horror. He hadn’t prepared himself for the contingency of losing even his last sliver of hope. In reality, he wasn’t able to fully extend his arm. Sasha merely produced a webbed crate
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“OK, here’s what we’re gonna do. This challenge looks like it’s been designed with white Slayers in mind and you’re the lighter and nimbler one, so you’ll be the ball. Is that OK?” “Yep, wouldn’t want it any other way.” “If my calculations are correct, the acoustics inside will be nasty. Sounds will bounce back late, loudly, and repeatedly. It’ll feel like you were in a jungle, or even a war. You won’t be able to use echolocation like we did in the maze. Instead, you need to narrow your focus and block out all the noise. Trust only what you see with your eyes and not what you hear.” “All right. Make my concentration as narrow as the tip of an arrow. Roger that.” “The good news is, it looks like they gave up on the idea of having movable flipper bats. I can shout out instructions to you from down here, through the small hole on either side where the flipper buttons were supposed to go. The bad news is, my message will be delayed cause I’m not speaking from halfway up.” “I can wo
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Just like the maze, the pinball challenge was very different from Aki’s expectations. As soon as she stepped into the arched doorway, she was whisked up to a height of a hundred feet. Aki didn’t mind because she wasn’t afraid of heights (she was much more afraid of the dark) and like she told Sasha, she had done bodyflight training countless times. However, and this was what bothered her most of all, she felt something unusual just as she was floating on top of the column of winds. All her powers had been nullified. She could only think of one explanation for this. The whole pinball challenge was enveloped by some kind of Anti-enchantment Spell, which was very bad news for Aki. This meant she wouldn’t be able to perform any ki techniques, including Karamijutsu (body-lightening) or even the unpredictable Teleportation, which she had been counting on if worse came to worst and she was falling down the bottomless pit. Now, she doubted if she could even clear the thirty-foot jump from th
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“’Tis a sin tah suffer such a numbskull as ye live,” Captain Fang said, “but it appears we be a perfectly even match. Ye know as well as I do ’tis futile tah resort tah our mother element.” The pirate could barely stand in his exhaustion and was leaning on his sabre. Sasha was also down to his last reserves of energy. He was poised low on the ground, ever ready to strike with his shinobuken held horizontally in front of him, his left hand behind. “Were we in a trainin’ dojo where ye’ve been raised,” the captain said, “no one would claim victory… BUT HITHER IS NOT A DOJO!” Captain Fang thrust his amputated right arm and released the harpoon on the end of it. As a matter of fact, Sasha had earlier grabbed a handful of salt when he tumbled forward across a drying pan. Now he swung his left hand from behind him and flung the salt to the captain’s eyes like a sumo wrestler purifying the ring. Sasha felt a certain amount of pleasure when he heard the captain utter a pained squeal. In a s
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In the afternoon, after their cheerless and tasteless brunch, the captain came down to the brig to grace them with his presence. Aki was right, the four most important people on the ship were: Captain Fang, the Dark Emperor, Kosano and Yuriko; in that order. But because they were pirates, it was easy to imagine incessant politicking among the last three. The entire crew was of course curious about the young Slayers who had kicked their butts, but they were under strict orders to stay on their posts and perform their duties. Nevertheless, Aki recognized Zaterra and Ganzorig; the first was endlessly cutting his nails with a dagger. Temujin also noticed his cork backpack slung on Zaterra’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s mine!” Temujin shouted, gripping the dragon-bone bars of his cage. “Finders keepers,” Zaterra replied and stuck out his tongue. “Give it back to him!” Aki demanded. “Be yer companions knowin’ yer secrets in this here bag?” asked Kosano. Temujin fell quiet. “Cat got yer ton
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They were held in separate cells down the ship’s brig. Aki’s and Sasha’s were adjoining while Temujin’s was across from theirs. Each cell had an additional feature. For instance, Aki’s had a water barometer to monitor the slightest change in atmospheric pressure if she attempted to form winds inside the ship. Sasha’s had a quicksilver thermometer to keep the room temperature in check. Last, apart from confiscating his flint and steel, the pirates put Temujin in a cell with the fire-proof bones of a red dragon for bars. In case the prisoners showed any signs of defiance by using their powers, the pirates also had a weird-looking contraption like an electrically charged spear. Sasha figured it was a weaponized version of the Leyden jar. If it touched their prisons (the conductor), it would discharge tens of thousands of volts. This last piece of technology suggested a link between the pirates and Tamerlane’s research on the fifth element, but all of them pointed to the fact that the cap
