“Thanks,” Quentin coughed. “Genie, let go. I’m fine.” He tried to get to his knees, but I grabbed his head and mashed it back down to the ground. Like I believed him. What was with everyone close to me declaring they were fine after nearly dying?
Eventually the ricochets started to land farther and farther away. “Heh,” Guan Yu muttered, oblivious to his own dripping wounds. “I have your pattern figured out.”
Whoever was attacking us seemed to agree. They took one last potshot at Guan Yu, which he blocked easily, and then they stopped.
Quentin glanced up at his warrior god friend, and then at me. “See?” he said with a weak smile. “Tactical genius.”
I was as angry as I was relieved. “Do you have to joke every time you get hurt?” I said.
We dragged ourselves to our feet. We’d weathered the storm, but just barely. The deadly barrage of what I could only guess were invisible blades from afar must have been what murdered the yaoguai. Ao Guang’s people, too. No wonder they’d been scared of the Yin Mo, a completely unseen death.
“General,” Nezha said to Guan Yu. “You’re bleeding.”
“I lack the time to bleed,” Guan Yu growled. He gazed at a dot on the shimmering horizon. “Our enemy approaches.”
Someone or something was heading our way. Erlang Shen, who had hit the dirt with the rest of us, inch-wormed his way to a kneeling position. “I think, as a precaution, you should take off my restraints,” he said. He flexed against the bindings, making a little jangle.
“Shut up,” I said. I zoomed my eyes in. My golden-eyed sight may have been magic, but at this level of magnification, spotting a target without any landmarks nearby was as hard as getting a telescope to land on the exact right star in the sky. I dialed in, catching bits and pieces of a blurry shape, over and undershooting as I tried to compensate.
A delicate breeze blew in my face. I blinked to shield my eyes from dust and lost my focus.
“Genie!” Quentin said.
“Don’t distract me! I almost had it!”
“Genie, it’s right in front of you!”
I was going to yell at him that backseat true sight drivers needed to shut their traps, but he turned out to be right. The thing I’d been trying to spot was now only fifty yards away, visible to everyone. I’d missed it travel more than a mile in the time it took for a gust of wind to pass.
It was a woman.
She was square-shouldered but lithely tapered, her frame suggesting the tightly bundled power of a dancer. She was wearing a form-fitted suit that covered her from neck to toe. The under-layer was made out of a fine black weave that looked like it could stop bullets. Over her muscles and vitals were rows of matte armor scales. They were hinged like vents and flapped slightly open at random intervals to let small hissing jets of steam out.
Her face was covered by a mask that was part ninja’s and part scuba rebreather. The top half hid her eyes behind mirrored lenses, and the jaw section had a series of valves that forebodingly looked like they could be cranked up past eleven to provide some terrible spike of power.
She resembled a warrior sent back in time from three centuries into the future. The whole getup was unbearably badass. It was honestly the most badass-looking outfit I’d ever seen.
Too bad I’d have to wreck both it and the wearer. “Who are you?” I demanded.
In lieu of an answer the woman slowly, languidly cocked her wrist, pointing at each god, Quentin, and me
in turn. She was making a show of counting us. One, two, three, four, five, six.
“No more?” she whispered.
Judging by her voice she was the one who’d spoken directly in my ear before, despite being so far away at the time. Even now I shouldn’t have been able to hear her so easily given her soft, ethereal tone and obstructed mouth, but her words tunneled straight into my brain. I almost looked to make sure she wasn’t standing right behind me, her hands gripping my shoulders.
“Why are you doing this?” I said. This wasn’t a parlay like with the yaoguai. The time for that had long since passed. I merely wanted to understand the monster I was about to take down.
She didn’t respond. She held her ground like she was waiting for something more interesting to happen.
We were at an impasse. I glanced at the gods to try and see how I should be reacting. They were perfectly still, with the bridled tension of duelists unwilling to make the first mistake. Personally, I took the woman’s inaction as our moment to strike.
“We could rush her,” I whispered. “There’s more of us. I could—”
“Don’t!” Quentin said harshly. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”
The standoff was broken by the sound of feet digging into the sand. Guanyin came running up to join us. I could tell from the pain on her face that there’d been carnage near the portal. She wouldn’t have come unless the rift had closed early.