Quentin and I rounded a bend and saw the flames. They weren’t sprawling, but more like a patchy film of flickering orange over the landscape. Had they been any bigger the fire department would have attacked them in force.
As they were, it was a controlled burn. And the person in control was the shirtless, bright red man sitting on the ground cross-legged, with his back to us.
We flanked him as quietly as we could, ducking behind shrubs and rocks. The gentle roar and crackling of the flames masked our footfalls.
His skin was the same color as an artificially ripened tomato. I thought he might have been meditating, but it turned out he was engrossed in a handheld video game. Every so often he would inhale deeply and then blow out through his mouth. The entire fire-line glowed brighter when he exhaled, like one giant tinder puff he was keeping stoked with his breath.
He did this absentmindedly, without looking up from his screen. It was a chore he’d been assigned.
Quentin and I hunkered down behind a boulder.
“That’s Red Boy,” he whispered. “How did you know he would be here?”
“Process of elimination,” I said. The way Erlang Shen had clammed up in the park under the influence of true sight made it clear—this was about what I couldn’t see rather than what I could.
“You think there’s more?”
I nodded. “I’m pretty sure the other demons who escaped Hell are hiding somewhere close by, using the smoke as cover.”
“Why would they be doing that?”
“Because I told them to,” Erlang Shen said.
We floundered around looking for him but couldn’t spot him. We needed to look up. He was hovering gently in the air behind us, two stories off the ground.
Quentin lunged deep. I didn’t hold him back. I’d learned my lesson with Tawny Lion to fight first and ask questions later. The Monkey King shot forth like a bullet, his big traveling jump weaponized.
Erlang Shen seemed to have expected this. He banked to the side, Quentin’s wild charge clipping him in the foot. The impact spun him around in the air like a top, but that was it. He came to a halt as purposefully as a figure skater.
Quentin’s arc was much less graceful. He went careening off at an angle, unable to control his motion once he was off the ground. He landed on the hillside, throwing up a puff of dust like a cartoon coyote.
The advantage that Erlang Shen had, being able to truly fly, was embarrassingly obvious. But to drive home the point, he swooped over to Quentin, grabbed him by the ankle, and flew back to me, using his speed to slam Quentin into the boulder. There was an awful cracking sound, a billiards break. It all happened before I could even move.
“Oh don’t look so horrified,” Erlang Shen said. “It takes more than that to put the ape down.”
Quentin staggered to his feet. The wind had been knocked out of him, but hopefully nothing else along with it.
“What are you up to, you hundan?” Quentin spat.
“He wants the Throne of Heaven,” I said. “He’s sick of being under his uncle’s thumb, so he’s going to take it by force. And to do that, he needs the weapon that nearly conquered the gods once before. A full-power Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
“The real version,” Erlang Shen said. He bobbed on the air currents above us as if he were a buoy in a harbor. “The staff, that is. Not this human you’re pretending to be.”
“That’s why you freed the demons from Hell and sent them after us, one by one,” I said. “This was some kind of sick training regimen.”
“Active recall combined with progressive overload,” he replied. “The best way to remember old skills and develop new ones. I even took care to send yaoguai you’d beaten in the past, so that your body would ‘remember.’ Hence why I needed the jailbreak.”
He’d been challenging me, ramping up the difficulty of my opponents bit by bit. I couldn’t have come up with a better study plan myself.
“Granted, I didn’t do a perfect job, since you don’t have all of your abilities back. You seemed particularly determined not to change size or split into copies. But you’ve baked long enough. I’m done waiting.”
“Oh, and speaking of baking,” he said. “Shenyingdawang! Could you spare a moment?”
I didn’t know who he was talking to until a voice rang out. “One sec. I’m almost at a save.”
Quentin’s face took on an expression I’d never seen on him before. Absolute fear. In one swift, fluid motion he threw me over his shoulder and started sprinting away. Fleeing.
Erlang Shen laughed at us instead of giving chase.