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The oasis was steaming, the wyvern was exploding, the wingbats were flapping their wings, and the snakes were approaching.
It all felt like a cosmic joke to Jin.
The world slowed down. He'd channelled qi to his brain. A useful technique to reevaluate a very chaotic situation.
A flicker of his eyes to the side revealed the hammer-wielding Biri hefting his hammer with a resolute face. Xiao was frowning. Hashimi, in the distance, had dropped the two women and was running to rejoin the fight. She'd be too late. The snakes would arrive before that.
The blazing fire disciple was still screaming.
The five disciples who'd been killed by the snakes… Jin narrowed his eyes. Five snakes were busy swallowing the useless idiots. They bulged up after the feet of the disciples disappeared down their throats, before laboriously digging themselves back underground.
A dozen snakes from the front. A dozen snakes from the back. Surrounded.
Someone needed to step up. If not him, then who?
"Xiao, another whirl," he commanded in a cold voice.
The Mad Monks disciple didn't hesitate for even a second; they understood each other, warrior to coward communication. They'd seamlessly danced the dance of death.
The baldie spun his staff, and it extended. Jin held up his lance in a block, blade facing down and let himself get hit by the staff once. It threw him backwards violently, towards the oasis, towards the wyvern, through the bats.
The tip of the lance was in the sand, Jin's feet were balanced on the shaft close to the, while his hands gripped the top.
The blade? Perfectly positioned and rushing towards the bats, who were once again downed by the whirlwind.
Jin whipped his body, wiggled, and the blade cut through the wings of one bat, then another.
He hopped off amidst the explosions and the steam and left his weapon in the ground
Qi enabled his next operation. One hand on the struggling head of each of the bats. The bodies were steaming hot. He ignored it. Double-handed throw of the bats. They flew past their compatriots who were once again rising into the air, past Biri and Xiao and straight down the gullet of a snake each.
The two snakes, immediately entering the digestive period of the hunt, sank into the sand below, satisfied.
The bats and the snakes had a symbiotic relationship, but that didn't mean that a beast could refuse food that literally flew into its mouth.
Next, Jin had to do something that was easier, but less comfortable. A few more steps took him to the side of the oasis where the wyvern was struggling. The place where the captives had been blown towards as it landed.
He picked up one human each. They wiggled weakly in his hands, perhaps feeling what was about to happen. Jin spun and hurled the mostly desiccated bodies towards Biri and Xiao, who were desperately fighting off the bats and the snakes. His two teammates ducked.
Another two snakes filled their stomachs.
A roar from behind.
Jin dodged to the left, desperately rolling on the ground. The wyvern had slammed down its head, aiming for the human it could reach. Landing on his feet, Jin hurled another human body, then the goat.
Understanding his plan, Biri's hammer crushed a bat's head, the cultivator stepping forward to grab at the body and hurling it backwards towards the snakes.
It became a minigame, a dance of death.
Jin had to run around the oasis, dodging the attacks of the wyvern, letting the heat of the continuous infernos wash over his back. He picked up captives, human and animal and threw them towards the snakes.
While his clothes were set ablaze on his body despite all the steam in the air, Xiao and Biri found themselves being freed up more and more.
Unfortunately, just as the last of the snakes from the front disappeared, the ones coming from the back reached Jin, who'd run all around the oasis and thrashing wyvern.
As a snake lunged at Jin, gaping maw wide open, he saw the reflection of what was happening behind him in its sclera.
Biri and Xiao were running, running towards the female captives Hashimi had previously saved.
Jin felt drained. Would he have done the same?
Impossible to know, and he'd likely never find out.
His qi was burned through; he didn't have the energy anymore. He'd been reinforcing his body and mind so much that he felt like his entire existence was on fire.
The fact that his clothes were actually burning didn't help.
"Jin!" a female voice shouted behind him, and in the very next second, the lance that he'd left behind shot over his shoulder and cut straight through the head of the snake that had just been about to take his life.
He extended a hand to catch and felt the back of a person touch his, ignoring the flames he was covered in.
"One for all," he said with a grin.
"All for one," Hashimi replied.
Jin used the kinetic force of the lance throw to spin in a circle, Hashimi following his movement and spinning behind him.
The blade of the lance bisected two snakes as it spun its crescent. Hashimi's sword did the same.
"Hashimi," Jin rasped. "Flow me," he said and threw the last of his qi into his mind.
The world, already moving slower than usual, crawled to a complete stop. The dozen or so snakes in front of him, the three bats approaching from the back, the wyvern rearing back its head to spew its own fire. It all froze.
Hashimi's qi enveloped his body. Templating, a very crude version. The girl let go of the qi and handed it over to him just as they'd done countless times while collaborating on Illusion Rooms.
His body was broken and burnt. His qi was officially depleted.
He was the closest to death that he'd ever been.
A demented grin split his face.
Flow.
Jin threw the lance forward, the bones in his arms creaking dangerously as he twisted his body beyond its means.
The weapon flew through the body of one brown snake. Jin hooked his now free arms into the elbows of the girl behind him and jumped into the air, dragging Hashimi alongside him.
Three meters above ground, light flashed from behind.
"Wyvern!" Hashimi shouted. It seemed the beast had finally released its breath attack.
Jin's foot slammed down like a whip.
Dancing.
His toes crashed into the head of a lunging snake, destroying its head and bruising his own appendage.
He used the force generated from the impact to jump forward.
Another kick, another jump.
He felt the hot breath of the wyvern slam down behind him, saw the explosion of sand bursting past him and covering the snakes still in front of him.
Crack, crack, crack.
The air shattered alongside the heads of the snakes as Jin acrobatically, with movements more flexible than should have been possible for a human, danced his way through the danger.
Snap.
One last snake was pushed to the ground beneath his feet, and alongside it, the patella of his knee decided to exit its usual posting and start resting on its side like a sleeping cow.
Jin fell forward, face towards the sand. Black started intruding on his vision from all sides.
He felt a force from his back, arms hooked in his elbows. Hashimi spun.
Jin suddenly found himself facing the dark sky.
'The stars,' his mind boggled. He'd gotten so used to not seeing them in his last life. He was entering a state of delirium.
He felt Hashimi's legs violently crash against the sand, pushing them both forward, out of danger.
The end result of their escape remained a mystery. His elbows locked painfully with Hashimi's, he lost consciousness.
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Jin woke up in a comfortable position, his head nestled somewhere soft, but his body was ablaze.
Fingers gently ran through his singed scalp, and he felt the body he was resting on hum a pleasant tune.
His eyes flickered open before closing again as the glaring sun painfully stabbed at his retina.
"You're awake," Hashimi muttered and gently squeezed him. It hurt, but he appreciated the gesture.
Jin finally managed to open his eyes after struggling for a few more minutes. He found himself half on Hashimi, who was laying down on the hot sand, his head nestled half on her shoulder and half on her left breast.
There was nothing sexual about the gesture. He sighed in contentment. His body hurt, but they'd failed the test fair and square. Elder Flower couldn't say anything if they dropped out now.
Hashimi continued stroking his scalp. Her nimble fingers went to the side to massage behind his ears.
"I lived, bitch," Jin eventually rasped.
He felt the girl chuckle before he heard her.
She lifted a waterskin to his mouth, and he drank greedily before coughing painfully.
"Fucking tournament," Jin eventually muttered after he'd had his fill.
Reluctantly, but happy that he even had the strength, he disentangled himself from his friend. The first thing he saw was his lance, stabbed into the sand next to him. The second thing was the valley beneath.
Hashimi had taken them up a very large dune where they were resting diagonally on the sand and looking down.
The third thing was the oasis. It was crawling. Literally.
"Fucking hell," Jin muttered as he beheld the absolute mountain of beasts that covered last night's battleground. Scorpions, snakes, geckos, lizards, all pecking away at the corpses that yesterday's battle had left behind.
Two dozen or so dead snakes, wingbats and human captives that Jin hadn't managed to feed away for his team's escape. A pile of corpses being nibbled on by a mountain of beasts. But the hardest thing to overlook was the truck-sized headless wyvern being chewed down to the bone, lying in the middle of the now evaporated hole that had used to be a thriving oasis.
"She actually did it," Jin muttered, impressed.
"Had to burn it for another half an hour after our fight," Hashimi replied. "Then she spent the next hour hacking away at its head."
"Crazy bitch," Jin muttered, before shrugging. "Happy for her, though, at least someone got something through their own merit. Everyone else is just scamming."
"Don't remind me. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Lung Junior had the right idea. No point teaming up with people from other sects, honourless bitches," Hashimi muttered darkly.
"Who knows," Jin replied. "Maybe we would have done the same."
"You didn't, you ran back into the middle of the mess to get rid of the snakes. You saved them, and this is how they repaid you?"
Jin closed his eyes and extended a hand to take Hashimi's. He gently squeezed and looked down at the writhing mass of bodies below.
"We're alive, Shimi, we're alive. It's hard to argue that anything else matters." He paused. "Thank you for running back in for me. I know it wasn't easy."
The dark-skinned girl beside him threw her head back and laughed. "It was the easiest thing I've done in my life," she admitted with a lopsided smile. "I wasn't even thinking. My legs, they just moved on their own, and suddenly I was beside you."
"Thank you anyway," Jin said softly and felt something wet on his face. The hand that wasn't grasping Hashimi's like a life-line went up to his face and came away salty and wet.
Third-degree burns all over his body. Toes shattered, elbow incredibly bruised, knee dislocated he saw the scorching desert sun shine down on the feast of demons occurring below.
Another memory that he could have done without. But… had he remained on Earth, he never would have experienced anything like this. Comrades in arms, surviving impossible odds, crying at the beauty of being able to live one more day in a world that promised nothing.
"As a wise man once said," Hashimi muttered. "We lived, bitch."
"Be a bit more poetic," Jin chastised, rummaging through his memories. "How about… Beautiful souls are shaped by ugly experiences."
Hashimi raised her waterskin. "Hear, hear," she said with a laugh.
Jin raised his own waterskin.
"To beautiful souls, I say."
"To beautiful souls," Jin replied.
They drank.
It didn't matter that they were bruised, broken and burned, drinking the last drops of their water in a scorching desert while watching hundreds of beasts fighting over the scraps of a corpse.
They were alive, and that was all that mattered.
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AN: I poured all the summer sweat collected in my underwear into this chapter. I think it came out very well. Not accepting any critiques for this one. Finish the tournament arc on Patreon if you're impatient!