Outworld Liberators

Fay, Oswin, Jackson, and Jenkii dropped as the ruin gave way beneath them.

"Everyone, grab on," Oswin roared as he threw out the rope.

All three caught it at once.

Then Oswin used the one advantage his Infinite Metamorphosis Engine Constitution allowed.

Somewhere within his steel frame, an array switched on, and fire burst from his back and feet in sharp jets. The sudden thrust slowed their fall and hauled the four of them upward just enough to keep them from plunging straight into the dark below.

Even so, it was only a trump card.

The thrusters ran on external materials, and he had no more than a minute before the whole thing failed.

Oswin's mind raced. There was no ledge. No platform. No wall close enough to brace against. Nowhere to set them down.

Then he saw it and went momentarily dumb.

Floating beside him was a large bloated frog more than three meters wide, swollen like a bladder and bobbing in the air.

Its lips had been cinched shut with rope, puckered into such a ridiculous shape that under any other circumstance it might have seemed comical.

Jenkii was holding it fast with one arm, her brows wagging as though she had just solved the greatest problem in the world.

Oswin stared.

Then, deciding not to question genius in whatever form it chose to appear, he cut the fire from his thrusters and let himself drop.

The rope caught him at once, and the frog's strange buoyancy helped keep the group from falling too hard.

"Should we go back to where we came from?" Jenkii asked, her eyes fixed on Oswin.

Oswin was already answering the question before she had fully spoken it.

His pendulum had begun jerking wildly toward the path behind them, the sharp cone of it stabbing again and again in that direction.

Danger. Not only danger, but something worse than before.

The warning was more violent now, more urgent, almost desperate.

Jenkii opened her mouth, impatience rising again, but Jackson hushed her before she could press him. So she waited.

Oswin kept his eyes on the pendulum and slowly shook his head. They could not afford the quickest path now. Only the safest one, and more than that, the truest.

He reached into his robes and drew out a steel box, the sort one would use to protect some priceless treasure. Yet when he opened it, both Jenkii and Jackson gawked.

Then they shook their heads as though their eyes were playing tricks on them.

Inside lay a flattened piece of dog shit, complete with the print of a boot heel pressed into it.

It was, quite literally, common canine dung.

And yet it was rare.

For Dog Shit Luck to form, the dung had to be stepped on by an unaware passerby with the left foot. To do it on purpose was useless. That would only be a man trying to deceive fate, and fate was not so easily fooled.

Oswin calmly took out a small stone grain mill.

Jackson kept shaking his head at Jenkii as if to say that this sort of thing was normal, or at least normal for a diviner of Oswin's level.

There were countless methods of divination in the world, yet Oswin was the most monstrous diviner of his age, the sort who could rival even the gifted youths of Astrologia Fategazer Court, a top tier force so far above the cult that the distance between them could hardly be measured.

Jenkii, who knew next to nothing about divination, only felt herself sinking deeper into confusion. She slowly wound the rope around her arm and tugged Fay closer until the two were side by side.

"What is your brother doing over there? I am not saying he is a sham," Jenkii whispered. She really wanted to know.

Fay glanced at Oswin, then lowered her voice and explained the basics of Dog Shit Luck.

Jenkii listened, but the explanation did not comfort her. Her throat bobbed uneasily. From childhood until now, every time she had stepped in dog shit, it had always been with her right foot.

While the two of them spoke in hushed voices about luck and misfortune, Oswin had already finished grinding the dung.

He gathered the powder with great care and poured it into a bamboo tube. The tube was fitted with a divining mechanism much like the turtle shell, and the moment Oswin touched it, it began drawing on his qi.

This time, he did not hold back.

He fed nearly eighty percent of his reserves into it.

Then he lifted the tube and blew the powdered dog shit across the toe box of his shoes.

The powder scattered at once. It did not drift with the air like common dust. It fell straight down, like some enchanted snow. Then, all at once, it shifted and streamed toward one side as though a sudden gust had claimed it.

"Follow the powder," Oswin commanded.

Jenkii, still holding the living frog artifact, began idly playing with its tied lips as they descended.

It was an absurd sight. A giant woman drifting through the dark while fussing with the puckered mouth of a bloated frog.

Under any other circumstance, someone might have laughed.

Oswin did not. He drew out ten spirit stones and pinned them between his fingers. His body was useful, yes, but it was costly.

For the Infinite Metamorphosis Engine Constitution to keep running, it needed constant feeding. He did not truly need food anymore, though he could still eat and still did.

What he needed now was energy. As they continued downward, one spirit stone after another crumbled into ash in his grasp.

Then another. Then another.

By the time the walls below came into view, Oswin had already burned through thirty stones.

Jackson noticed Oswin's abnormal rate of consumption, but he did not ask. He knew better than to pry into the secrets of a man he barely knew.

The darkness slowly gave way to shape. Walls emerged. Beneath them lay a web of crevices, twisting and splitting like a maze cut into the earth.

The golden powder kept falling into those narrow gaps, and Oswin followed without hesitation, pulling the others down after him.

No one spoke. They simply descended in silence, sliding along rough stone and trusting the path shown to them.

At last, Oswin looked down at the dog shit powder still clinging under his shoe.

It had turned black.

Then the last of it smoked and dispersed in a single direction, the final breath of luck spent by his spell.

Jenkii raised both thumbs at once. She had no idea how the method worked, but to her it looked marvelous. Jackson stayed near Oswin's side, just as silent and no less impressed.

Oswin touched the fading trail of smoke where it had left a thin white line across the stone wall.

"It says we go only one way," he said.

Oswin gave Jackson a quick look from head to toe.

"Do you have any scouting skill we can use?" he asked.

Jackson did not find the question strange. The cult had no shortage of arts and odd techniques, so being asked such a thing raised no suspicion at all.

Now that he had refined a part of the Neutral Blood, he shaped it at once into twenty adult mosquitoes.

They shot into the dark with startling speed, black against black, sent ahead to feel out the path.

There was no light here. Only the qi in their eyes gave them enough sight to keep moving.

Jackson then offered to switch places with Oswin and take the lead himself.

Soon, they were running through the maze of narrow paths.

As they ran, Oswin kept his pendulum in motion. Before long, it began jerking again, the pointed cone stabbing toward the darkness behind them.

He clicked his tongue. Whatever was back there had not given up. If they meant to survive, he would have to show more than before.

Without breaking stride, Oswin pulled out a headband fitted with a strap and fixed a small steel frame onto it. Into that frame he locked the turtle shell, setting it before his brow like some strange diviner's visor.

"Jackson, recall your mosquitoes. Let me direct where they should scout," Oswin said. There was almost a pleading edge to his voice.

Jackson nodded at once. He did not question it. One by one, the black mosquitoes returned from the dark and hovered near, waiting for instruction.

"Check left," Oswin said, pointing with his whole arm.

Jackson obeyed and led them that way at once.

To the right, hidden beneath shadow, faint glimmers stirred. Oswin caught them in the edge of his sight and knew what they were.

The Light Goblin Fairies.

They had followed. Inside the turtle shell, the red and green marbles clashed again and again, knocking with such speed that the sound turned shrill.

After Oswin gave his fourth direction, both marbles cracked apart from the strain.

He narrowed his eyes, reached into his robe, and loaded a fresh red and green pair.

"Right. Scout right," Oswin said at once, unwilling to lose even a breath.

From the left passage came a low rumble, then the sound of explosions rolling through stone. None of them turned to look. None of them so much as slowed.

They had no need to know what had met what in the dark behind them.

It was enough to understand that enemy was now crashing against enemy, and the longer that skirmish lasted, the better for them.

They slipped past one threat after another while the chaos swelled in their wake.

Then Oswin raised a hand.

All of them stopped at once, so sharply and so neatly that they might as well have been machines. No one asked a question. No one wasted breath.

Oswin moved first. He pressed himself flat against the wall, letting the rough rock bite into his body. Then he took out an earth stone, poured qi into it, and sprayed a layer of soil over himself until his figure dulled into the color of the passage.

The others copied him at once, and Oswin coated their bodies the same way, helping them blend into the stone as best they could.

Oswin hid the pendulum. It was no longer merely pointing.

It was ringing.

Even through the dirt smeared over their skin, their eyes remained exposed, and through those eyes each of them saw the thing passing before them.

Their pupils trembled.

This was nothing like the wooden monster they had fought before.

This was steel. A whole length of it, alive and moving, like some impossible union of dragon and burrowing worm. It had real arms, each one twenty meters long, ending in five fingered hands as large as houses, human in shape and hideous in their purpose, able to cling to stone or hook into any surface they pleased.

So far, all they had seen was only a portion of its body, and even that stretched for nearly two hundred meters of living metal, the limit of what their eyes could measure.

As it moved, its flanks scraped against the walls.

The sound was like a sword being dragged slowly across stone.

It was an Infant Living Ghost Pagoda, a creature that one day might grow into a true Ghost Pagoda, the sort of horror that could make even immortals tremble.

For now, by the Ghost Realm's standards, it was still only young and innocent.

As it passed, the Light Goblin Fairies quaked. The thing ate them by the hundreds, sweeping them up in dreadful mouthfuls of light and flesh.

Even then, it seemed dissatisfied. The Living Ghost Pagoda only frowned, as though chasing such meager prey hardly felt worth the effort.

Then it stopped.

A wet sniffing sound came from somewhere along its vast steel body, eager and searching, like a beast catching the scent of its favorite meal.

"She was here," it murmured. "Here, beyond all doubt. But where has she fled from my sight?"

The tone stayed sweet and polished, like that of an honorable scholar. Poetic, even tender, as though it were offering praise to a beloved woman.

Then it sighed again, almost dreamily.

"That axe-bearing lady… what noble muscle, what fierce beauty in her gaze. Where art thou concealed?"

Every hair on Jenkii's body stood on end. Her eyes pooled at once with helpless tears.

In that moment, Jenkii wanted nothing so much as to go home. She wanted to wail, to scream, or to rush out and beat the shit out of that strange creature.

The thing did not speak of her like a hunter naming prey. It spoke of her like a lover drunk on admiration, and that somehow made it worse.

It began describing her. Every inch. The beauty mark hidden beneath her arm. It spoke of the flowers she used when she washed. Of how her hair was always combed down with that particular brush of hers.

It even spoke of the feelings she had tried to bury, of the small mean jealousy she sometimes felt toward Fay's beauty, all while insisting that Jenkii herself was the finest woman in the world.

Jenkii had never known terror like this. For the first time in her life, she realized that being admired was not always a pleasant thing.