Chương 34: Chapter 33 — Kidnapped (2)

The drive to the location provided by Elder Mao was spent mostly in silence. Hu Baolin suggested turning on the radio for a singalong to lighten the mood, but Shen Yue just stared him down in response. Once parked within a reasonably undetectable distance away from the warehouse, Shen Yue opened the glove box to grab a ski mask for herself and two talismans.

She held one talisman out to Hu Baolin, who immediately whispered something under his breath and tucked it in his pocket without instruction, and she did the same. She pulled the ski mask down and Hu Baolin set the wooden fox mask against his face. They moved towards the warehouse.

The side door was unlatched, as the mechanism itself had mostly rusted over, and, thankfully, the crates of storage did not block entry. Before opening the door, Shen Yue placed a hand on it, emitting short bursts of Qi to detect any potential traps blocking entry. There were none, which suggested either carelessness or confidence. She went through first and Hu Baolin followed.

The four kidnappers were arranged around Lin Che with their backs towards the door, which felt like a gift given by the universe helping them enter undetected. Jiang Pei was speaking about compounds and Lin Che was staring at the vials on the table with his mind elsewhere. Through the glass, his eyes found them — two masked figures of unknown origin, but he showed no signs of noticing them. Shen Yue and Hu Baolin nodded. Hu Baolin reached into his bag, retrieving a black and narrow incense stick wrapped in oilskin.

He clicked his fingers, producing a slight spark, and a noise which, thanks to the effects of the talisman, did not escape and echo throughout the warehouse. He had already placed a pill on his tongue before they'd come through the door, and now he produced a second one, which he held out to Shen Yue. She took it and swallowed, face grimacing only slightly at the taste of the compound. The smoke from the incense dispersed almost immediately in the warehouse air, but the smell itself was absent.

It was a faint, grey wisp that made its way through the atmosphere, but the darkness and translucency of the smoke itself helped it remain undetected. All they needed was thirty seconds. The driver's posture changed first, with his spine incrementally moving from an upright position to something more angular, before his knees gave way and his brain went offline. He went down without drama, catching himself and folding in sideways against the wall.

Chen Wei followed, but was midway through a sentence as the effects kicked in. His speech slurred and the last thing he said remained incomplete as he too ended up on the floor. Jiang Pei turned. The elder woman had already moved. But, by then, the two figures had already separated and hidden themselves behind storage crates and in shadows.

The woman's name was Liang Su, and she was in her late fifties, having reached a cultivation stage that most people do not reach by the time she hit 35. Since then, her progress had plateaued and remained stagnant, and she had consequently gone from being a bigshot at the Shen Clan to becoming an agent in charge of information affairs, having previously been privy to information at the sect elder level in the previous decades. That is to say, she was once strong enough to be considered a sect elder.

She felt the incense the moment it began to disperse, but held off on acting hastily. After all, if she started moving, so would her opponents, thus ridding her of her element of surprise. By the time the first man hit the floor, she had already traced the location of one of the intruders in the building, and was fairly confident that there were at most two people involved.

She jumped on top of a crate and peered over the edge, and caught a glimpse of a fox-masked individual leaning against the crate and fumbling through a bag. She leaned in closer, hoping to get a better glimpse of the mask, when suddenly— Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. She deflected a needle using the fan she kept in her grasp. The man threw three more in the deflection's wake, reading where the deflection would take her hand.

The third needle found the inside of her forearm. She looked at it, and then she looked back at the fox mask. The man had moved positions, and the faint light reflected off the lacquered wood of the mask. She hesitated for a second, her face adjusting from surprise to recognition.

"You," she said. Hu Baolin said nothing. She came at him.

Jiang Pei threw the first technique at Shen Yue before she had fully entered his line of sight, which told her his peripheral Qi awareness was good and that she was not going to have an easy time in this fight. The technique he used was of stone, holding the form of Qi compressed into something dense and directional. It was like a rocky shield bash. She herself had brought ice to this rock fight. The Piercing Frost Lance left her fingertip as a single compressed spike of crystallised Qi cold enough to crack iron.

It met Jiang Pei's stone technique mid-air, and the collision produced a sound like a gunshot and a spray of ice-dust and stone-fragment that scattered across the warehouse floor, leaving a white streak across the concrete Jiang Pei planted his rear foot and drove his Bedrock Palm forwards, the Qi compressing downward from his shoulder through his arm and releasing at the heel of his hand in a shockwave that hit the floor between them. It rippled outwards like a stone dropped in still water.

The concrete cracked in a jagged pattern, but Shen Yue was already in the air, avoiding the impact. She put her two hands together for a Twin Glacier Formation, with Qi cycling from palm to palm in a closed loop that dropped the temperature between her hands enough to condense the air around her. She released it as a forward sheet rather than a sharp point, and it hit the warehouse floor in front of Jiang Pei and kept going, sliding across the concrete and crystallising it as it travelled.

Jiang Pei drove both feet into the ice sheet, anchoring himself to the ground and refusing to slip. He skidded approximately six inches before stopping completely, anchored like a post driven into earth. She sent bolts of Splitting Current — a narrow channel of electric Qi following the conducting path she'd made with ice, which moved faster than Jiang Pei's eyes could track. He yanked his feet upwards, breaking his own anchor in a sacrifice of his own stability in exchange for a dodge.

The electricity jumped up to his shoes, but dispersed afterwards, whilst the remaining current passed through behind him and blew out the wall socket behind in a shower of sparks. Whoosh! A stray needle from Hu Baolin's fight disrupted the dodge, hitting Jiang Pei in the inner thigh. His leg started to convulse almost immediately, ramping up in intensity until ultimately resolving into spasticity; Jiang Pei was down a leg in this fight. Still, he pursued, and pulled out the needle from his thigh.

In his fingers, the needle grew larger and larger, now wide enough to be indistinguishable from a rocky bullet. He shot it forwards. Shen Yue opted to dodge, preserving her Qi for offence rather than defence, but Jiang Pei had foreseen this. The bullet clawed past Shen Yue by a hair, but continued on on its trajectory towards the other end of the warehouse, where a switch was waiting to be flicked. The impact led to an electrical whirl overhead, causing both Hu Baolin and Shen Yue to look up.

The extractor fans began to spin, and, very soon, the smoke from the incense left the warehouse. The two collapsed men slowly rose, still groggy from the incense. Chen Wei looked around, assessing the situation: his two bosses engaged in combat with masked individuals, one of whom was throwing needles everywhere, as though he had an infinite supply, and the other who was surrounded by a mist of cool air with electricity running through her hair.

After a couple of seconds of further analysis, Chen Wei decided he would rather not get drugged or infected by a needle, and instead ran towards Jiang Pei for support, focussing his Qi inside his mouth, ready to attack. Shen Yue still had the upper hand, as Jiang Pei's left leg was out of commission, but it was difficult to break through his defences. Jiang Pei switched to the wood element, with his stone density being replaced by something more pliable.

Roots extended from his feet in thin lines along the floor, seeking like hungry snakes. They found her ankle before she felt it coming, wrapping around it and splintering. She sent lightning through it immediately, using her Severing Arc — a short-range discharge. The wood burnt through and her ankle released, but the numbing in that region remained. She pushed for the advantage, and jumped up directly towards Jiang Pei—"DOWN" came a voice a few metres away from Shen Yue.

She suddenly felt like an anvil and fell flat to the ground, losing all sideways momentum. The sudden loud noise caused a jerk in the room as the crates themselves reverberated in an echo. Chen Wei popped a cough drop in his mouth to cool down his internals and for smoother use of his sound arts. At the same time, Jiang Pei and Liang Su put on their emergency earplugs.