We didn’t have time to confirm it though. Guanyin’s arrival triggered a response in the strange woman. Our opponent reached up to the side of her mask and flicked its latch with her long, delicate fingers. As she removed the mouthpiece, it made the puffing noise of air pressure being equalized. The goggles were next, but she kept her eyes closed as they came off, like she wasn’t ready to face the daylight yet.
She was beautiful on the level of a goddess. Her thin face and expressive mouth gave her a sad, lonely composition out of a Baroque oil painting.
“Take off my restraints,” Erlang Shen suddenly yelled. “Do it now!”
Asshole wouldn’t stop screwing around, even at a time like this. I could hear shuffling in the dust, which was probably Quentin fanning out. Quentin moved to flank her while her eyes were still closed. I knew my partner’s tactics well. We had our disagreements in our personal lives, but in battle, we were a well-oiled machine, always knowing what the other was—
“Tian a!” Quentin yelled.
That wasn’t what he said before a fight. I risked a glance back at the group and was completely stunned at what I saw.
The divine beings standing on my side weren’t moving into attack formation. They were backing away. Guan Yu, Guanyin, Quentin, all of them. There was fear on their faces. Outright fear.
Nezha was trying to get his body in between the woman and the Great White Planet. Gaining points was not the goal here. He was ready to sacrifice himself to protect the old man.
Guan Yu hunched over defensively with his weapon held in front of him, the massive god determinedly making himself as small of a target as possible. Guanyin, who could stop time by looking at it funny, was mumbling to herself, fingers kneading the air, powering up for a defensive spell bigger than I’d ever seen her cast before.
“What is going on?” I said. “Someone answer me!”
“Take off my restraints!” Erlang Shen screamed, a hysterical edge in his voice. “The clasp on the side of my hip! Break it!”
I didn’t have time to make sense of his statement before Quentin, Quentin of all people, who had been mortal enemies with Erlang Shen long before the rest of us, who had hated him before it was cool, reached over and smashed the locking clasp that kept him powerless and imprisoned.
The individual beads of iron that served as Erlang Shen’s shackles dropped to the ground. They’d been linked together with some kind of binding magic. It was gone now. I could feel a ripple of power emanate from the god, blood coming back to an unused muscle. Erlang Shen flexed his hands before his face with an incredulous expression.
“Why did you do that?” I shrieked at Quentin.
“Because we’re going to need his help!” Quentin said. “That’s Princess Iron Fan!”
Maybe I had heard the name before, but in the shock of the moment I could hardly remember my own. “Who is that?”
Erlang Shen could have seized the opportunity to run, or attack us, or simply take a celebratory stretch after being bound for so long. But instead his first action as a free man was to take a stance and clench his teeth like a Viking coming to terms with Ragnarok.
“She’s Red Boy’s mother,” he said.
22
The woman opened her eyes. At first the cold, solid gray color filling her sockets made me think she had them rolled back into her head, or that maybe she lacked irises entirely, but tiny wisps and tendrils of fog began to bleed from her face like weightless tears. The shape of her eyeballs was made up of two spherical vortexes, spinning in place to keep their cloudy vapor contained.
Her eyes weren’t living tissue. They were miniature roiling storms, thunderheads inside her skull. If this was Red Boy’s mother, then she was part yaoguai and part weather system.
Princess Iron Fan inhaled through her nose. The clouds in her eyes unfurled and shot forward.
The ground between her and us unzipped, ripped open, disemboweled itself, the flying guts of the earth marking the progress of a wind unlike any I’d ever seen. To call it a straight-line hurricane that threatened to blow us off our feet was selling it laughably short. It was a solid mass—a writhing, angry wyrm that promised to tear us apart where we stood.
I used the split-second we had left to throw my hands over my face. The Great White Planet was right; my reflexes were terrible, and I had to pray that the invulnerability of the Ruyi Jingu Bang would save me.
The impact didn’t come. I looked up to see the wind parting around an invisible sphere surrounding all of us. Guanyin. The goddess was really leaning into her just-completed barrier spell with every ounce of her might, her center of gravity far beyond her toes.
“I’m gonna need you big strong fighter types to think of something quick!” she shouted at us. “I can’t hold this forever!”
The gale outside peaked, sending giant cracks into the protective magic that spiderwebbed all around us, turning the shield opaque with damage. “Genie, get down!” Quentin yelled. He threw his arm over me and plowed his other hand into the ground.
“But what about—”
The barrier shattered. Guanyin, who had held the spell to the very end to buy us time instead of protecting herself, went flying into the air along with the shards of her magic.
“No!” I screamed. I tried to break free of Quentin’s grip and go after her, but even with the wind dying down, catching a face full of it was nearly enough to snap my neck. Quentin had to catch me again by the wrist like I’d fallen off a sheer cliff face.