Tian whipped his rope dart up and into the bug’s face. His expression didn’t even flicker when the centipede shifted slightly and the dart bounced off the hard shell. He had gotten very used to fighting all kinds of insects in the Wasteland. Centipedes were new to him, but he’d killed so many scorpions that he was sick of seeing them. Armored and venomous was now standard for the things he hunted. He knew how to kill this.

  Tian dropped Counter-Jumper and shifted to Light Body Heavy Hands. The rope dart was recovered in a flash and spun around his head in a blurring, whirring silver ring as he dodged to the side of the centipede. Which twisted to face him, clearly having no trouble keeping up with Tian’s movement.

  “Not good.” Tian thought. He smacked the dart into the centipede’s face, dropping his weight back to normal at the last instant. That hit with a much more satisfying CRACK! The bug disagreed. It charged straight in.

  For such a big bug, it moved unreasonably fast. The fangs snapped down, coming in on either side of Tian. They were a yellowed ivory color against the black and red of the carapace. Hard not to fixate on them. There was a fishy stench. Whether it was the insect’s breath or the venom, Tian didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. He whipped the centipede again, this time aiming for one of the fangs. He might have hit it if he was standing still, or the centipede was, but he was dodging and it was lunging and they both missed.

  “The legs are short and not really doing anything. Just kind of waving around. I don’t think they can pincer anything.” Tian was thinking as he moved. This thing was a few notches tougher than the scorpions.

  Tian was rushing left but had to jump with a yelp as the body of the centipede twisted and rolled towards him. He saw the head coming from above and behind. “It’s trying to wrap me up!” Tian’s thoughts were a jumble. He could only rely on Light Body Heavy Hands to carry him through. That, and the jumping games he had been playing since he was six.

  He hardly noticed when he kicked off the body of the bug, landed with one foot on a rock, kicked off the rock with the same foot, and whipped his leg around in an axe kick that knocked the centipede back a step. It’s just how the game was played. As was launching back off the centipede while landing a follow up attack with the rope dart. No need to think, that’s just what he had always done.

  The dart wasn’t even marking the centipede. Tian frowned. His dart had been effective against humans, but against anything armored, it didn’t hold up. “Tsch!” He whipped the dart forward again and snagged one of the hundred milling legs near the head. He rushed forward and yanked himself up into the air, light as he could be. The centipede tried to snag him out of the air, forcing Tian to twist on the rope and shift his position slightly. The smooth shell of the centipede rubbed against him, cool and hard as a buried stone.

  Tian wouldn’t waste a free shot. He slapped the side of the bug’s head, bypassing the armor and shattering the meat within. The centipede started to thrash, but Tian wasn’t done. He knew he couldn’t stay on the back of the bug for long, so the second he reached it, he slapped down as quick and hard as he could. He had no idea where the vital organs were, so he just aimed for “roughly the head.”

  There was a spurt of clear liquid from the centipede’s mouth, and the fishy stench intensified. The long body started to shake, then spasm, convulsing. Tian was launched twenty feet through the air, his light body drifting downwards as the centipede thrashed then, eventually, died.

  Tian fought to bring his breathing under control. He had gotten through the battle basically unscathed, but it had taken every skill he had, every scrap of martial arts he knew to do so. Those fangs were long. Very long. Still wet with who knows what venom. And it was actually longer than he thought, closer to twenty feet than twelve.

  A few things you should know about centipedes generally. First- they aren’t insects. They are arthropods. That’s not relevant to anything, but people get it wrong all the time and it bugs me. Geddit? Bugs me?

  “Yes, Grandpa.” Tian said in the long-suffering tones of children everywhere.

  The second thing you should know is that centipedes are actually very sensitive to the sun. Their shell really doesn’t protect them well from the heat, so they are almost exclusively night hunters. And you will notice that it is roughly midday.

  “Maybe it’s a different kind of centipede?”

  Given that it’s twenty feet long, yes, safe to say it’s not your standard critter. The second to last thing is, do you see where you smacked it a couple of times on the head? That faint darker pattern against the red and black that has emerged after death?

  Tian squinted. It was very faint. It looked sort of like the fires of Hell tried to invent their own language.

  Don’t know what that is, but it sure doesn’t look natural. Could be a bunch of things, actually, all bad.

  “Demonized?”

  Feels likely. It could also be some kind of Gu mark, or a shamanic summoning, or, well, a lot of things. But yes, demonized seems the most likely. But we should talk about thing number three now. Centipedes are, in nature, solitary. They don’t cooperate with other centipedes at all, and will quite happily eat each other.

  “Alright?”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Now seems like a great time to ambush an exhausted cultivator. That’s what I’d do. I’d wait until they felt like they were safe and then WHAM! Gettem!

  Tian jumped like he was electrocuted, pushing as much qi into Counter-Jumper as he could manage.

  I’m just talking hypothetically here. I don’t have any specific information. It’s just a really common tactic used by everyone from wolves to that dickhead banging the neighbor’s… screen door.

  “What’s a screen door, Grandpa?” Tian whipped his head around wildly. There was something at the very edge of his hearing, but he wasn’t able to quite pin it down.

  Like a normal door but made with a very fine mesh of wires instead of wood. Lets the light and breeze in, keeps the bugs out.

  Tian looked down at the ring he was delivering. The arrow was pointing in the same direction the noise was. A noise that sounded a bit like what he heard just before the centipede attacked, only over a much wider area.

  “Solitary hunters, you said?”

  In nature.

  Tian ran. He’d have to make a long detour.

  ____________________________________________________________________________

  Tian’s detour took him into a scorpion nest. He might be comfortable fighting them, but he’d never had to fight four on his own. He was gasping by the end, and desperately patching up his ripped protective gear. Some of those pincers came too fast to completely dodge, and a stinger as long as his chest was wide had slid down his back, barely missing stabbing him in the head. He quickly made a little shielded spot out of dead scorpions to hide him for a few hours. Long enough to drink some water and cultivate.

  He got two hours. Then a demonized bird flew down to eat the free food, and Tian had a desperate, frantic game of reflexes. Could he launch the rope dart when the bird was close enough to be hit by it, but not so close that he couldn’t dodge out of the way?

  No, as it happened. He could not. He killed the bird, but got smashed into the hard black sands in exchange. He didn’t think he broke any ribs, but there were a few that had him unsure.

  “No more rest.”

  Afraid not. I told you what would happen.

  “Do you see any other shade around here?”

  Nope. Still, though.

  Tian groaned and got running. He had a tent, but he had been fixated on the irrational idea that the thick, armored bodies of the scorpions would protect him.

  Eight hours later, Tian was lying on the top of a sand dune, looking down on what he was quite certain was a swarm of demonized centipedes. Swarm was the only word for them- there had to be dozens writhing out of the hole in the ground. All headed towards the depot.

  He didn’t even dream of trying to warn the Depot they were coming. If the Depot could somehow miss this, there was no saving it. Besides, there would be Inner Court Disciples stationed there. These Earthly Realm animals wouldn’t last a single move.

  Right now, he was a lot more concerned about saving himself.

  Quitting on a mission was more than just frowned on. The mission needed to be literally impossible to still complete, or the cultivators would be subject to severe discipline. The only examples of excused failures in wartime were things like natural disasters or verified appearances of higher realm combatants. And the latter wasn’t always an acceptable excuse.

  So a mere swarm of demonized centipedes, the very smallest of which was twenty feet long, was certainly not a valid reason not to complete the mission. The bigger problem was that Tian had already made repeated detours, now having traveled almost a third again further than he should have needed to reach the base originally. And the journey had already hit forty-eight hours. Strictly speaking, there wasn’t a time limit, but “failure to complete your duties in a timely fashion” would also subject someone to military discipline.

  He would have to make another detour, but after that, he would be running full tilt into whatever was thrown his way. It was idiotic, and dangerous, and he just couldn’t figure out a better way to handle it.

  “Brother Fu would be disappointed in me if I just gave up. It would be stupid to put myself in someone else's hands again too.”

  Tian slapped his cheeks and picked his spot. There was a long rocky ridge that ran in roughly the direction he wanted to go. The centipedes seemed to be avoiding it, which made it safer, though not safe. And it was damned tall with nearly sheer sides. That was worryingly exciting.

  He ran for it, feet barely kicking against the ground as he drove his extraordinarily light body forward. The centipedes didn’t seem too interested in him, but some would occasionally snap at him. He kept as far away as he could, but the dozens of centipedes had now reached up to a hundred, with a sea of legs and the fishy stench of the venom and the twisting, writhing bodies and he couldn’t run fast enough, couldn’t get on the ridge fast enough!

  “If I never see a damned centipede ever again it will be too soon!” He swore. The rope dart spun like a steel ring over his head and he smashed it into a crevice in the rock wall. A jump and a sharp yank on the rope saw him flying upwards and landing thistledown light on an outcrop.

  He yanked the dart loose, found the next outcropping, and got going. “I love this light body technique. Between this, and Snake Head Vine Body, climbing cliffs is easy!”

  Tian was a little over half way up when he heard a piercing whistle. The sound warbled and trilled, dipping and rising to an agonizing shriek. Tian craned his head around, trying to see where the sound was coming from. Up in the sky, so faint he was hardly visible, was a cultivator. Tian couldn’t see much. Black smoke seemed to twist around him. The whistle cried again, and from the high blue sky, a bird cried in answer.

  Tian looked around for somewhere, anywhere, to hide. He scrambled up as fast as he dared. There wasn’t anything on the cliff face that he could see. There might not be anything on the top of the ridge either. But the chances were at least better. The bird was getting bigger. Much bigger. It was filling up a portion of the sky, and only growing in size.

  The whistle played on, drilling through his ears and calling the bird towards them. Tian could see black smoke boiling off the bird now. He could see the blood red fire in its eyes. A demonized hawk, or maybe simply a demon. And no Earthly Realm one either. Tian flung the rope dart up and climbed with every ounce of his strength. Somewhere on the top of the ridge would be a place to hide. Somewhere up there would be a hole he could crawl into, a ledge to wedge himself under. Just so long as he got to the top. Just so long as he made it up there, he could be safe!

  The hawk slammed into the valley, a blast of hot air and poisonous qi blasting the centipedes into the air. With a happy cry, the bird inhaled. The hundreds of centipedes flew into its dreadful beak. And with them, Tian.

  And more importantly. Will he find out about the truth of these distant thoughts?