My surprise was clearly better than theirs. Demons, and I was ninety percent sure they were demons, froze, stunned.

  Even that elven bde in the hands of their lead bitch didn’t look nearly as menacing now. Still, I was one against three. She outcssed me in cultivation, and all of them outmatched me in experience.

  And they might still have their own aces.

  Thousand Sparks of Awareness. Mind Parallelisation. Inject God of War Fist and Cheetah Pulse.

  Before the stimunts hit the bloodstream, I was already in motion.

  To my right was a second-period cadet. On the left, bitch Xianyun, and behind her, another goon, also Second Stage.

  The goons were empty-handed. Only their leader held a weapon, and that was the biggest threat here. But even if I took her out first, I’d be exposed from both sides.

  And I doubted I could take her out quickly, even with my best move.

  So I turned my back to her. The demon in the yellow jumpsuit flinched, took a half-step back. I dipped my head, bull-style.

  "Hey!" she shouted, but my qi had already surged into my legs and skull. I unched.

  One step, two, three!

  The demon snapped out of it just before I hit. He yanked something from his pocket. A shield fred to life, but I crashed through it like it was made of cardboard.

  I felt the impact. I felt the explosive energy burst from my forehead with glee and hunger.

  His ribcage colpsed with a crack. His body smmed into the inter-carriage doors with triple the force I’d used trying to break the window earlier. He crumpled, lifeless, eyes already dimming.

  Recoil hit me. I froze, breath caught, watching his broken body slide down the wall.

  Then the backsh passed.

  I spun just in time to see the demon girl bearing down with her bde raised.

  The games were over. Even with stimunts in my blood, I couldn't outpace a Third Stage attacker.

  She aimed for my thigh. A gust of icy sharpness told me she was already cutting, but my amulet shield fred.

  God bless Novak and his gifts.

  A Third Stage technique met a Fourth Stage artifact. Surprise fshed in her eyes.

  "Surprise, bitch!" I growled, and struck with a Chain Punch.

  Airy Chain Punches should've looked like a volley of silver fist projections, reinforced by wind. But something went wrong.

  From my fist burst vertical silver streaks. Long, thin, not fist projections, but bdes. They stretched out one after another, like the teeth of a chainsaw.

  The demoness swung her sword and the first wave shattered in a series of cssic explosions. The sword howled under the pressure and its trajectory wavered.

  I unfocused my targeting. The barrage spread wide enough that even if she wanted to block it all with one sword, she couldn’t.

  On an arena, she could’ve just dodged. But here, inside a train car, she was like a bug caught in the barrel, right in front of the buckshot bst.

  Still, she was a Third Stage cultivator, with centuries of experience.

  Bde movement techniques are garbage, but she jumped onto the seats and spun mid-air, letting 90% of the barrage fly past.

  The minion behind her wasn’t so lucky. He screamed.

  Silver bdes sliced through his uniform and face like paper. Each projection detonated, not with the full power of standard projections, but even a third was enough.

  Every ssh burst him open deeper. His skin tore, blood spttered the walls. His gut split in two pces, and I froze when the detonation revealed his intestines.

  That hesitation saved Zhou Xiangyun. She nded with minimal damage from her dodge, just a sshed ear, a torn right thigh and left shoulder.

  The cultivator behind her colpsed, screaming the same endless word: "Fack!"

  She didn’t look back. Her eyes locked on mine.

  "Looks like," I said, "it’s just you now."

  She slowly lowered her bde, pointing it at me.

  "I’m still stronger."

  I shifted stances, taking a step back to widen the space between us by half a metre. Then I flipped my fists palm-up and raised my middle fingers.

  "I’m tougher."

  Then I hid my fingers and reset my stance. It was cool, but still dangerous.

  I didn’t charge.

  For the first time in this fight, I let myself stop and think. I’d been wasting effort mirroring the same info across both thought streams. But Mind Parallelisation was working, so I could reroute.

  One thread for the bitch and the fight. The other — analysis.

  No signal. No network. The beacon was active, but the line went dead. Still jammed.

  But the interface was feeding me info on my opponent: cssic sword with Bde at 152 and Point at 121.

  She hadn’t shown any straight-dash movements typical for a Point cultivator yet, though this would’ve been the perfect moment. Still, Novak’s amulet wasn’t something that should be broken through so easily.

  Unless, of course, she had some sort of ultimate technique or another ace up her sleeve. These demons had been oddly short on surprises.

  On the other hand, my Chain Punch had turned out to be a surprise for me!

  This wasn’t a punch anymore. It was a saw. A chainsaw!

  And why the hell hadn’t I seen anything like it in the library? This was a dream technique!

  But what made it that way? Damaged channels? Or the fact that I’d been trying to isote Bde Qi all week without practising Fist at all?

  Then again, Iron Head still worked the same, and Mad Monkey of East was performing just fine.

  I needed to figure out what was going on with my channels. I repyed the moment of the strike in my mind, frame by frame, but most of it was a bnk. I’d been moving on reflex, no awareness, no memory of what I’d actually done.

  I needed to repeat it. Besides, we’d already been gring at each other for a full second.

  My fists unched into another barrage. One thread of my mind was focused on the fight, the other tracking the flow of qi through my channels.

  Shoulder, the double channel down the forearm, and three branches into the fist. Under my direct and conscious attention, the flow didn’t try to divert into that warped trench that cut across the channels from the elbow down.

  As a result, the technique turned out completely conventional. Good old silver projections. A full volley of silver fists.

  Xiangyun had clearly expected a barrage of vertical bdes. Her sword fshed upward on the diagonal, enough to intercept the majority of strikes, only, instead of vertical lines, she was met with stretched silver spheres the size of my fists and part of my forearms.

  She reacted to the shift too te, and switching to full defence didn’t give her the results she wanted.

  To her credit, she was fast and technically excellent. The metal of her bde whined under the pressure, but it sliced through silver fists, and for a second I thought she might actually manage it.

  But I’d deliberately widened the spread of the barrage.

  She blocked almost everything aimed at centre mass, but one of the projections clipped her left foot, crushing her toes and folding the tip of her boot ft.

  She still held her sword. Still on her feet. Impressive discipline. But to ignore that kind of pain, you need to be on some very strong painkillers.

  She stumbled. The sword dipped low to her right, she herself tilted left, bringing her left eye in line with a projection that would’ve otherwise flown harmlessly past her head. The silver fist exploded against her face, ripping through her upper eyelid and popping the eyeball clean out.

  The demoness cursed.

  Her ‘fuck!’ overpped with a much quieter one from her companion still sprawled on the floor behind her, but she managed to stay standing, leaning on her sword.

  For a moment, she was completely blind, and I broke off the barrage. Not because I was feeling merciful, but because this wasn’t the technique I’d intended to use.

  It was something else entirely.

  Still, the part of my mind handling the fight didn’t let me fully stop. Instead of freezing, I Monkey’d towards her and drove my foot into her stomach, detonating qi beneath the sole.

  Xiangyun flew backwards, smming into the far doors between carriages. She tumbled over her half-dead teammate and lost her sword mid-flight.

  Ha! Looked like she wasn’t a threat anymore.

  Was this the time to start taking prisoners?

  This was insane. I’d definitely have something to tell Novak, and more than a few bragging rights to show off to the seniors. I’d bet a hundred credits none of them had ever pulled off anything half this cool.

  But first, I needed to secure the sword, before she somehow got to it again. Because despite her injuries, she was still moving. She was even trying to stand.

  I stepped over the downed demon to retrieve the bde.

  I’d messed him up pretty good. And not just the face, which had lost about half its skin. His yellow jumpsuit was soaked in blood, and a proper puddle had already formed beneath him. Still, the folds of fabric and the wounds in his abdomen had settled just enough to keep his intestines from spilling out.

  I couldn’t help but wonder why the bastard hadn’t finished himself off.

  Could’ve been several reasons. Fear of capture was probably top of the list. The horned bastards had to know by now that one of their own hadn’t made it back for reincarnation. And with the way their twisted minds worked, they’d be picturing all sorts of horrific tortures their missing friend might be enduring right this second.

  In that light, a sliced-up stomach didn’t seem like the worst possible fate. Maybe worth hanging on a bit longer until dying became the safe option.

  There were other possibilities too. No suicide impnt, maybe. Or his hands were too shredded to work anymore and do it manually.

  Either way, the guy didn’t have long, with that kind of blood loss.

  I left him to bleed out and picked up the sword.

  The demoness had actually gotten back to her feet. She gred at me with her one remaining eye.

  Just then, the train screeched to a halt.

  She gnced at the dark ptform outside, cluttered with equipment and dimly lit by cold utility lighting. She had to turn her whole head to see it. Then she smiled with bloody lips and spat a mouthful of red onto the floor.

  "One way or another, you're done!" she said.

  I looked too.

  There was a cultivator in armour waiting on the ptform. Something told me his stage wasn’t any lower than mine.

  Two parallel streams of thought kicked into overdrive, scanning for a way out and shouted in unison: ‘Surprise!’

  The doors were already sliding open.

  I Monkey-leaped at the swordswoman, driving her own bde into her skull with one sharp thrust.

  If she passed even a single word of information to whoever was waiting outside, then this whole fight would lose its edge.

  I left the bde where it was and stepped forward to meet the newcomer, only to nearly trip over a spider-like drone skittering through the door. The damn thing almost ruined the whole moment.

  Luckily, I spotted the brushes on its limbs just in time. Just a cleaning bot. And judging by the state of the carriage, it had plenty of work ahead.

  I gnced past it and called out cheerfully to the demon ahead:

  "Maybe you’ll be smart enough to piss yourself early?"

  The interface tagged him: I. S. Levinson. Third middle.

  Oh, we have a signal here!

  MaksymPachesiuk