Chapter 126
Bruce frowned. "No idea, but he pulled that woman’s Spirit dantian out and fused his own energy into it, looks like he’s going for Master’s formation."
Thud.
Bruce’s great hammer came out, his eyes went round and he set himself for a fight.
Arcturus curled his lip and slapped Bruce on the shoulder with a chuckle. "Brother Bruce, why so tense? That’s a Demon Ancestor’s formation, you think an Upper-Tier Spirit Emperor can break it?"
Bruce hesitated, then eased out of his stance. "Heh, let him try, he’ll end up flat on his face, we’ll watch."
Arcturus sneered, insulting the Spirit Emperor and polishing Soren’s boots in the same breath. "Ptui! Does he not know his own weight? What gives him the right to touch the Demon Ancestor’s formation?"
While they were talking, the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor hurled the rice-grain Spirit dantian at one wall of the formation.
Arcturus’s mouth opened to laugh at the failure.
Then demonic pressure rippled through the air.
A needle sheathed in demonic energy tore across the sky toward the same point, too fast, the target too small, nobody had time to move.
Arcturus went cold to the bones, his back was soaked in the space of a single glance.
"Son of a bitch! That’s the aura of an Upper-Tier Demon Emperor!"
"How is there a Demon Emperor’s aura in a Spirit Domain?"
"That bastard has been sitting out there hiding this whole time!"
Bruce didn’t answer, he triggered partial beastification, his arm swelling and shooting forward.
Arcturus threw out a violent burst of fist-wind, both went for the needle.
They were half a second short.
The needle hit the formation wall, it wasn’t turned aside, it drove deep into the heart of the formation.
Cecilia’s control of force, speed, and precision was flawless, there was no other word for it.
The hidden weapon and the Spirit dantian landed as one.
With a sick crack, a fracture opened across the array wall.
The next second.
The wall blew apart.
Demonic fragments drifted across the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor’s face and opened thin red lines in his skin, he was past caring.
He lunged forward, charging straight toward wherever that needle had come from.
"Demon Emperor, assist me!"
More needles screamed past the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor’s flanks.
Every one buried itself in Bruce’s swollen fist.
Each needle discharged a strange arc of lightning, driving corrosive demonic energy deeper into his flesh.
Bruce was half human, half beast.
What sat in his dantian was spiritual energy.
Not demonic energy.
As demonic energy at the level of an Upper-Tier Demon Emperor tore through him, his partial beastification shut down and locked.
Even the flow of spiritual energy through his meridians seized.
Then he went down stiff.
"Hey, hey, hey! Brother Bruce, are you all right?"
Cold went straight down Arcturus’s spine.
For a second he couldn’t sense a single spiritual fluctuation off the man.
If that broad chest hadn’t still been rising and falling, he’d have assumed Bruce was already dead.
"Son of a bitch!"
"If those two get away from under my nose..."
"...the Demon Ancestor will skin me alive the moment he steps out!"
Once sure Bruce wasn’t dying, Arcturus poured spiritual energy into his legs and shot off after the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor.
He was a beast, and an Upper-Tier Beast Emperor besides.
Deep battlefield experience, serious combat strength.
Breaking that formation wall had cost the Spirit Emperor nearly every drop of Spirit energy he had, poured into Mira’s compressed dantian, his reserves were scraping bottom.
One on one, even with the Spirit Emperor in his true beast form, there’d be no contest.
But there was an Upper-Tier Demon Emperor working from the shadows.
Using a stealth technique Arcturus couldn’t make sense of.
Her demonic pressure only flashed into existence at the instant she attacked.
The instant the attack ended, her fluctuations were gone.
Tracking her the ordinary way wasn’t possible.
Arcturus swept the ground with torch-bright eyes, raking crowds and rooftops.
He couldn’t even fix the general direction the fluctuations had come from.
Dragging her into the open was out of the question.
"Son of a bitch!"
"To hell with it!"
"If I keep flinching from sneak attacks, I won’t find this Demon Emperor and I’ll lose the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor on top of it!"
"Compared to what an angry Demon Ancestor does to me, I’ll take a few needles!"
Racing after the Spirit Emperor, Arcturus bit out the name of his skill.
"Blizzard Sparrow Feather Slaughter!"
Spiritual energy gathered across his back, and a pair of condensed wings unfurled with a whoosh.
They were something to see.
Each one spanned a dozen meters.
He corrected his line, locked on, and beat both wings.
A storm of energy feathers ripped forward like razored snow cutting sideways across the sky.
Thick enough to smother.
They blotted out a whole corner of heaven.
Every beat threw another wave.
As the clouds of feathers streaked toward the fleeing Spirit Emperor, they let out thousands of thin shrieks, like flocks of sparrows crying at once.
If they landed on that unguarded back, the man would come apart like wet paper.
Then a volley of hidden needles drifted out of the deep void.
Just as thick.
No fewer than his feathers.
What put ice in Arcturus’s gut was the rest of it.
The Blizzard Sparrow Feather Slaughter was saturation fire, area denial, designed to be impossible to intercept.
It was intercepted.
Every needle took an individual feather out of the air, dead on, efficient, and direct.
Not one error in the whole exchange.
Cast a net that wide and a few fish always slipped the mesh, not one feather got through.
This was a Beast technique built on his own racial advantages.
It had never failed him.
Having it stopped cold was bad, having the enemy meter out the exact number of needles required, to the unit, was worse.
This Upper-Tier Demon Emperor was not ordinary.
His scalp went numb.
"That Demon Emperor is stronger than me!"
"And she still won’t show herself, she’s spending everything on buying the Spirit Emperor time."
"Is she scared the Demon Ancestor might walk out of the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea?"
He couldn’t work it out.
So he put his head down and pushed.
What else was there?
If he didn’t bring the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor back, he was dead anyway.
Arcturus roared and accelerated.