Sexy Sect Babes: Chapter Twenty One (Patreon)

Jack opened up with the same move he’d used to roast a small army’s worth of angry wildlife not three months back. A coruscating crackle of blinding light speared forth from his fingertips – guided by a thin targeting laser – straight towards the trio of goat women.

Only for Men to step forward…

…and block it.

With a sword.

The lightning streak splashed against it, throwing up a curtain of sparks, the metal turning a dull red as it started to heat up.

Such bullshit, Jack sighed as he kept up the power.

Sure, he’d heard from Lin that cultivators were apparently capable of simply… ignoring physics when it pleased them – though she’d phrased it with some bullshit about ‘imposing one’s will on the universe’ – but knowing something intellectually wasn’t quite the same as really believing it.

Well, he believed now. And as a result, it seemed he wasn’t going to be able to end this fight the easy way. Which was unfortunate, because the HEV really wasn’t built for combat. It was a piece of industrial equipment first and foremost – and handled as such.

Fortunately for him, he had a few tricks up his sleeve that the suit’s designers had likely never intended.

Because if you weren’t fighting dirty, you just weren’t trying hard enough.

“Ren. An. I’ve got a reward for whichever one of you can bring down one of our guest’s friends faster.” He grunted distractedly as his mind mentally flitted through the menus in his neural interface.

He didn’t bother to see if either woman had acted on his suggestion. His focus was now entirely on Men as the stream of lightning from his hands finally ran dry, safety measures kicking in to keep the projectors in his fingertips from frying themselves.

Once more proving that his ‘quotes’ from the Star Wars remake from months ago were a lie. He definitely did not have ‘unlimited power.’ Fortunately, he had a rather vast repertoire of reconstituted early twenty-first century media to pull upon.

“You dare!?” the woman shrieked as she finally lowered her – now slightly warped looking – blade.

She charged straight at him – at speeds that would put an old school locomotive to shame.

Oh shit, Jack cursed as he mentally thumbed through his suit’s neural interface.

Finding what he was looking for, he let it fly.

A rock the size of carriage appeared as if from nowhere – aimed straight at Men as it flew through the air. Jack’s only regret was that the sudden appearance of the thing blocked his view of Men’s face as she suddenly found herself on a collision course with the massive projectile.

…Of course, she didn’t exactly get to see the look on his either when she did something from the other side – likely just punched it - and said boulder exploded into a hundred pieces of jagged rock.

Shards that flew back towards him.

Fortunately, his suit was tougher than that, so the razor sharp projectiles harmlessly pinged off him.

Still scared the shit out of him though. Though, to be fair, he wasn’t the only one.

By all rights, Men should have used the momentum of her charge to keep blitzing him, but it seemed his sudden summoning had surprised her, as rather than follow on her charge, she instead hesitated.

Jack didn’t. Terror had a way of making him focus. Which was fortunate, because Men’s moment of hesitation accounted for barely a split second, a pause that likely would have been unnoticeable to most mortals.

Fortunately, Jack wasn’t most mortals.

With a twitch of his hand, a half dozen jagged metal rebar poles shot out from invisible portals around him with enough speed that to a local they would have looked like they’d been fired by a ballistae.

Unfortunately, that didn’t amount to much.

Men barely even moved from where she stood, simply bending to the side a little to allow most of the spikes to pass harmlessly by. Men batted the only one on a direct collision course with herself aside with her sword, the blade letting loose a mournful shriek as well as a shower of sparks as it redirected the flying pole into the nearby gate house.

“Impressive,” Men allowed, regarding the new decoration adorning the stone structure. “It seems you have a talent for the summoning arts.”

Jack didn’t like it. She was far too calm for his taste. It seemed that while he’d initially taken her off guard with his lightning, and then the summoning, she wasn’t truly worried.

Stupid magic demigods, the Scandinavian mentally hissed.

“My turn,” she said.

Then Jack was backpedaling as his opponent came at him with a swarm of stabs, strikes and slashes. His suit registered enough hits that Jack suspected that if he weren’t wearing armor, he’d have been reduced to little more than mildly chunky salsa by the barrage of blows.

Fortunately for him, he was armored. With armor that was – hopefully! - unlike anything this world had ever seen.

More to the point, he wasn’t about to let the cultivator woman have things completely her own way. Sure, even with the neural interface, his reactions were slower, and he didn’t even have a hundredth of Men’s training, but the miner was not totally unfamiliar with old fashioned brawling. Or even fighting to the death.

He hadn’t always been a miner after all.

Unfortunately, his attempts to block Men’s attacks with his arms were nearly totally ineffective.

So he decided to change things up.

“Pocket sand!”

The Scandinavian savored the look of surprise on Men’s face as a puff of fine glass powder shot forth from his gauntlet right into her face.

“Guh, cheap tricks!” the woman hissed, rubbing at her eyes.

Jack tried to follow up, but his opponent easily leapt back out of his range, before glaring at him through bloodshot eyes.

Of course, because a little discomfort is all the superhuman has to show for it - when she should be blind, Jack thought irritably.

Glass powder was not something to take lightly. You couldn’t just use an eye wash. No, if a worker got glass powder in their eyes that required a trip to the hospital and a thorough eye scraping by a specialist. At minimum. At least, if you wanted to avoid blindness. And excruciating pain. Though it wasn’t like an ‘the cure’ was a walk in the park either, at least as far as discomfort was concerned. No, an ‘eye scraping’ was exactly as unpleasant as it sounded.

None of that mattered though, because apparently, a cultivator could get away with wiping their face with the back of their hand and calling it a day

Because they were bullshit.

Note to self, next time mix glass powder with some kind of poison or irritant. Maybe an acid.

Chastising himself for not thinking big enough earlier, he activated his next plan.

Setting himself on fire.

The air filled with the rank smell of crude oil as his portals doused him in the thick oily substance. Grinning, Jack clicked his fingers together and the emitters within sparked, igniting the oil and turning his entire body into a giant man-shaped inferno.

“Phoenix form!?” Men’s eyes somehow managed to widen despite the glass in it.

Not that Jack heard her over the sound of hissing and popping coming from the exterior of his suit. Or the warning sirens coming from within as the temperature gauges started to rise.

Fortunately, while the HEV certainly didn’t appreciate being set on fire, it was rated for far hotter. Which was why it was the work of a single thought for Jack to silence the warning klaxons of his suit.

Then he charged toward the stunned cultivator. Or at least, where he hoped she was, because one side effect of ‘operation burning man’ that he hadn’t previously considered was just how much being on fire would affect visibility.

He liked to think he felt the impact of something as he blindly swung his arm out. And he also liked to think he heard a shriek of pain when he did.

He definitely felt it when something hit him in the chest in return, bodily lifting him off his feet and sending him crashing to the ground.

“Contusion in front upper torso detected.”

“Yeah, I detected that too,” he wheezed, trying to pump air back into lungs that did not want to cooperate.

Alright, it seemed operation burning man had failed. Time to switch to operation aqua-man.

Preferably before that bitch gives my chest another superpowered love tap, he thought as he sent a mental command.

He could only hope she’d bent her stupid little sword when she did.

And singed her hands.

Fortunately, ‘operation aqua man’ was much simpler than its fire-based predecessor. In that it dumped roughly a thousand gallons of river water on top of him. From about a meter up. Which was roughly the furthest  his suit could create a sub-space portal from.

It was doubly fortunate that he’d already been knocked on his ass by that point, because he had a feeling that if he hadn’t been, that would have done it. The HEV was sturdy, but a thousand gallons of water just didn’t give a shit.

He actually felt it hit him from within the safety of his suit.

The rush of water washing over him did its job though; clearing his vision of the inferno that had enveloped it. Once that was done, and satisfied that he was no longer effectively blind, Jack carefully clambered to his feet.

A task made more difficult by the fact that the ground beneath and around him was now just so much mud.

Still, the sight that greeted him as he finally levered himself upright was about what he expected. His opponent had clearly been taken off guard by the sudden tsunami of water and was sprawled in a wet soaking mess a few meters away. He’d like to think the sudden bath had taken the fight out of her, but he wasn’t that optimistic.

Glancing further afield, he noticed that some of his militia had also been caught up in his impromptu shower too. Which was good, because it meant they’d just been pushed further away from the ongoing fight. Bad in that Jack was a little worried some of them might drown in the puddles that had now formed all around the North gate.

Oh, maybe not, Jack though as he saw movement from the previously still bodies.

It seemed some weren’t as dead as they looked, and the sudden bath was serving to rouse them once more to consciousness. Hopefully once they made it all the way, they’d been able to limp to safety.

He’d need at least some of them to survive if he was going to find out just what the fuck happened here prior to his arrival.

Looking even further afield, he could see An, Ren and Men’s posse fighting. An and her opponent on the walls, Ren and hers fighting some kind of running duel across the nearby rooftops.

“Three.” A voice hissed. “You can control three elements. Lightning. Fire. Water. Summon both metal and stone to do your will. It seems you really are a hidden master.”

Looking down, he saw Men had stood back up, her once resplendent dress now sodden and covered with mud. Her eyes had also turned red. A deep, virulent red. Looking at them, the Scandinavian didn’t know whether it was a result of bleeding from the glass powder in them… or rage.

To hear her speak, it sounded like rage.

Jack readied another attack as studs flipped out of the soles of his feet. “What can I say? I’m a man of many talents. Which you might have known if you’d just come and talked to me, rather than rocking up like you owned the place.”

“We do own this place.” Men said, though there was significantly more caution in her voice now. “It was our right. You failed to give the Marble Cloud Sect face by acknowledging that. To acknowledge you would have cost us face. Invited other interlopers.”

He shrugged. Or at least, tried to, given his suit.

Men chuckled. "If nothing else, I am impressed. So let's see how long you can keep up with a young mistress of the Marble Cloud Sect, ‘Hidden Master’."

Men dashed forward once more, with a level of speed and grace that was just plain bullshit given just how muddy the ground was.

Jack raised his arms, blocking her sword – which now had more in common with a formless slab of metal than a blade – as best he could with his forearms. Which didn’t amount to much, but was better than just letting her wail on him. Besides, it wasn’t doing much, so he’d let it happen. Better that than her realizing just how ineffective her strikes were on the ‘soft’ parts of his armor and instead winding up for another big hit like she’d landed earlier.

As he did, he allowed his invisible portals to open once more, though to look upon them, nothing was exiting.

Which was why it was all the more bullshit when Men cocked her head midstrike.

"What are you doing now, Hidden Master? Some kind of invisible poison?" She asked casually, her burning gaze narrowed. The barrage of strikes and slashes continued unabated, demonstrating her mastery of it by how little focus she had to dedicate to it. "You’re doing something to the air, but this young mistress cannot tell what."

"It's a surprise," Jack grunted back, unhappy that she had noticed it at all.

So he tried to distract her. By summoning cement. A lot of some industrial strength adhesive. The kind that reacted with air. In an aerosolized format.

It was just unfortunate that the HEV’s safety measures wouldn’t allow him to form a portal inside his opponent – or right next to her skin.

Instead he had to settle for two feet away.

Still, this time the deluge of liquid stickiness managed to hit his opponent. Even with superhuman reflexes, it was difficult to dodge an expanding cloud of vapor.

Should have mixed this shit with my pocket sand, Jack thought as the cloud of liquid cement clung to his opponent’s skin and garments.

“Ice too!?”

Jack cocked his head as the cultivator leapt back, pawing at what he supposed rather did look like a layer of ice forming on her skin. Of course, that just resulted in her hands getting stuck to whatever she touched.

So he kept up the steam of gassy stickiness.

In the normal course of events, the layers of accumulating adhesive would have eventually rendered his opponent unable to move without shedding a lot of skin. And that was before one considered the results of someone getting the stuff in their eyes or lungs.

So he’d like to think he could be forgiven for thinking he’d finally found a counter to the cultivator menace.

Instead he found his eyes widening as water seemed to form out of nothingness, scrubbed away the adhesive from his opponent’s skin, before expanding outwards like a net and snatching up his own incoming stream, expanding in size as the liquid became cloudy and viscous. In moments, what looked like hundreds of tiny icicles had formed within the watery blob.

“Huh,” Min mused. “It acts like ice, yet clearly isn’t? How curious?”

Then she threw the blob at him.

Jack was too slow to react, taken off guard as he was by his opponent’s sudden display of hydrokinesis. The massive blob of water struck him in the chest with the force of a cannon and he stumbled back as droplets and adhesive crystals rained to the ground.

“Ow,” he muttered at the strike to his very bruised chest.

"I must say, I’m impressed, ‘Hidden Master’!" Men grinned at him. "It has been a long time indeed since any have forced me to use my control of water. Far more humble than your own command of multiple elements, but I think more pervasive. Still, for a man it is a most impressive feat. I think I shall look forward to capturing you. I had earlier thought the base uses for you that my comrades opined were beneath me, but now I think it will be a rather singular joy to partake from one such as you. If nothing else, this little spar has increased your value in this mistress’s eyes.”

Impressive talk for a woman who was literally crying blood as she spoke. Her eyes were honestly haunting to look upon. Plus, Jack honestly had no idea if what she was saying was supposed to be a threat or a compliment. Because cultivators were weird like that.

“I wish I could say the sentiment was mutual,” he grunted back, happy to let the conversation drag.

It seemed the general anesthesia he’d been steadily pumping out into the air was finally working. Which was fortunate, because he’d had no clue how effective the stuff would be in the open air.

…He was also slightly worried about gassing part of the town if the wind shifted. Fortunately, for the moment there was barely even a breeze, the invisible and scentless gas remaining more or less localized. Which helped explain why Men’s stance was a shade less firm than before. Her gaze was slightly less focused, her eyes were drooping minutely and her words had taken a split second longer to form.

His knockout gas was doing its job. And fortunately, everything he’d just described could be explained by the effects of a particularly taxing-

Men’s head lolled for just a second, before her eyes sharpened and she grinned. “Ah, I had wondered what the foreign element was. You’ve done something to the air.”

Jack wanted to slam his head into the floor. Cultivation was such bullshit that he wanted to scream.

“Well, I had hoped to do this the easy way.” He sighed, straightening up. “But it seems that you won’t allow that.”

Men grinned. “Of course, this young mistress is a rising dragon of the Marble Cloud Sect. If she were easy to subdue, the elders would not have sent her.”

And she’s back to the third person talk, Jack thought. Though it’s nice to know she’s not just some bog-standard cultivator. It seems she’s one of the Marble Cloud’s stronger players.

Assuming she wasn’t just boasting. That was a definite possibility. Though he doubted that. She was stronger than An. Ren too. And they were of about ‘average’ strength in An’s own words.

So no, Men was the real deal.

Which made him feel a lot better about what he was about to do.

“As a dragon, can I assume you’re immune to fire then?” he asked, then let rip with his lightning. The spark instantly ignited the slowly expanding cloud of incredibly flammable gas around them.

Jack’s suit was about as indestructible as anything this side of mundane physics would allow. The HEV suit had started as a piece of military equipment after all. And the body beneath that was reinforced by as many gene-mods and surgical alterations as one could muster before things started to enter either the grotesque or life-shortening territory.

So when he said the sudden explosion was painful, it can be assumed it was rather… intense.

It was also brief though – and when the auto-tinting on his visor finally died down and he clambered to his feet for a third time in as many minutes, he found the area was pretty well devoid of life.

Including those few members of the militia he’d been hoping to interrogate. They looked to have been flash fried – their armor covered in a thin layer of black soot.

“Well shit,” he muttered.

He knew some part of him should have felt guilty about that… he shook his head, clamping down on the sensation. He couldn't afford it.

Taking a breath, he focused on the most important thing.

Which was that Men was down.

Alive, but down – and not looking to get back up any time soon. Apparently even she couldn’t avoid an expanding fireball while standing in the middle of it. Which was good to know.

Her entire body looked to be an angry mixture of charred and burned. Somehow her dress was still intact – for a given value of the word. Which only served to reinforce for him that it was enchanted in some way.

I’ll need to look into that, he thought.

His suit was tough, but as his aching chest – and many other minor aches across his body - could attest, not invulnerable.

Perhaps he’d been a little quick to completely dismiss the mystic mumbo jumbo side of this world.

“Master,” a voice called from over by the wall.

Looking over he could see that both Ren and An had apparently defeated their own opponents. In a rather more permanent manner than his own – given the fact that An was holding the head of her own downed opponent in one hand, while Ren’s sword was rather liberally covered in someone’s lifeblood.

That was good. He really hadn’t been up to fighting more punch wizards today.

“Is she…?” Ren asked, the rest of her question going unspoken.

“Defeated,” he answered back, the loudspeaker system on his suit making both women jump. “And likely not long for this world without medical help.”

Which she’d get.

He had too many questions for the woman to let her die now.