Chapter 154: Alright Stop, Meditate and Listen
Zou Tian stepped out of the light and into Shadow. As he anticipated, the badger began moving as soon as he’d fully entered the alley.
It was decision time. Would it go for his throat or the coins? With the creature’s extreme speed, especially compared to him, he only had time to defend against one, and the wrong call would mean disaster for him and maybe for the rest of the village. For Wan Ai.
Making the right call, on the other hand, didn’t guarantee success. It just gave the defenders a chance.
The badger was hurt, and a hurt animal tended to act according to its instincts. Which meant it would go for the throat, right? That tactic was the fastest way to kill its enemy. A basic swipe with the claws to the neck was simple and reflexive, a move the badger had probably known since soon after being born.
The other logical choice was to go for the coins. It already proved to be focused on them, heading straight for Jin LiJuan earlier. And it had appeared to be ready to attack Senior Brother who held some in his hand.
From what Master had told them about spirit beasts, their existence was brutal. Literally dog eat dog. They had to kill to advance or die to become that path to advancement for others.
Given a creature who’d survived long enough to reach near the peak of the sixth rank, what could drive its motivations more than the desire to get stronger? And Zou Tian was carrying fifty thousand qi in an easy to consume bundle of five coins. The only thing that could possibly be more enticing to the badger would have been if they had been Shadow aspected instead of Earth.
The decision boiled down to what would govern the creature’s next action—a reversion to its time as a simple animal or its want and need to advance?
The badger was about to leap. Zou Tian had to make his decision.
He swung the long pole of the pike horizontally at waist level, the flat of the half-moon blade pointed toward where he expected the beast to be.
If the badger went high for the throat, the pike would miss it by a mile. At worst, he had a fifty-fifty chance of being right. Though, hopefully, his intelligence and analytical reasoning moved the needle to being in his favor.
Those traits seemed small to hang the fate of his life on.