Chapter 24 — The Beasts Didn't Buy Tickets

CHAPTER 24

The Beasts Didn't Buy Tickets

“Out of the road! Move!” Ge Lu shouted.

His cart hurtled past the inn steps. The basket from yesterday bounced beneath a torn covering, and Deng Chao clung to its rim.

Shi Feng stepped back with his breakfast bowl. The cart hit a rut. An egg rolled beneath its covering, cracked against the rim, and gave off a sharp, foul smell.

The hunter holding the basket went pale. He was at Qi Condensation, but he looked ready to abandon the whole cart.

“Did it break?” Ge Lu shouted.

“No!” Deng Chao shouted back.

A red limb pushed through the covering.

The hunter jumped off the moving cart. Ge Lu finally looked behind him, screamed, and whipped the mule toward the gate.

Something crashed beyond the southern gate.

The road shook. A horse screamed. Then the gate's wooden bar flew across the street and smashed through a noodle stall.

The Split-Maw mother came into Yunze Town.

Its back rose above the roofs. Gray plates covered its body, and the hooked legs tore through walls as it forced its way along the road. Behind it rushed a pack of smaller beasts with pale armor and jaws that split wide.

Shi Feng's expression became serious.

This wasn't an opponent he could casually kill. The mother was far beyond the town's ordinary hunters, and more powerful than the beasts he'd fed on so far.

“Eggs!” somebody screamed. “Those fools stole its eggs!”

Ge Lu lashed the mule harder.

An egg rolled from the basket and broke beneath a wheel. The mother's cry shook the inn's windows.

The smell he'd noticed yesterday came from a nest. Now Shi Feng saw what Ge Lu had taken for the Wei household: a clutch raided from the marsh nest to fill Wei Renshan’s bounty before the mother noticed.

They hadn't thought very far ahead.

The mother struck the cart with a foreleg.

Wood burst apart. The mule bolted with a broken harness dragging behind it. Ge Lu disappeared under the wreckage, and two hunters were caught before they could reach the far side of the street.

The rest ran in different directions.

The smaller beasts followed them into the lanes. Shi Feng put down his bowl and picked up his pack. His sword was already at his waist, with Wei Kuo's knife tucked on the other side.

He wasn't joining a defense of the town. He needed to leave the mother's path and find a way toward the northern road.

“Upstairs guests, pay before you run!” Xu Geng shouted from the inn counter.

The innkeeper held both arms over the coins spilled in front of him. A drinker shoved past and knocked over his stool.

“My room's paid,” Shi Feng said, passing the counter.

“Breakfast isn't!” Xu Geng cried.

Shi Feng put the agreed stones beside his hand and walked out through the kitchen. He kept his word. That didn't mean waiting while Xu Geng tried to charge the fleeing guests twice.

The rear lane led toward the potters' quarter. He took it, keeping the mother's enormous body behind the inn and out of his direct path. A young Split-Maw Spirit Beast dropped from a low wall.

Shi Feng caught its lower jaw before it could close around his face. His fingers tightened. He struck its head against the wall and broke the neck with a short turn.

The beast fell at his feet.

He stepped over it. There were people in both doorways, and no quiet place to devour a carcass. He didn't need the resource badly enough to stop in the middle of the tide.

At the next corner, a fat landlord was trying to force a crying tenant out of a stone storehouse.

“Only paying guests!” Liu De shouted. “Twenty spirit stones per person!”

“You raised it from ten!” Chen Wan cried.

“Then you should've gone in sooner!” Liu De shouted.

Shi Feng moved past them. The storehouse was already packed, and arguing wouldn't make its walls stronger. A crash sounded from the street behind him.

The mother pushed through the inn's roof. People scattered from the front entrance. Xu Geng ran with the cashbox beneath one arm and left the building without looking back.

The eggs were still somewhere ahead of the beast. A surviving hunter had carried the smaller basket off the broken cart and was running east. Shi Feng saw him cross the far end of the lane.

He turned north instead.

At the next crossing, two armed men were trying to lift a fallen beam from a cart. One wore a town watch sash. The other kept shouting that his cargo was valuable, as though the timber might rise faster if it knew the price.

“Leave it!” Meng Tao shouted.

“It's imported cloth!” Pei Jin cried.

A young beast skittered around the corner. Both men abandoned the cart and ran.

Shi Feng cut the creature across the neck as it passed him. It fell beneath the abandoned wheel. He didn't stop to touch it. The narrow lane ahead remained clear, and that was where he needed to go.

Behind him, a door slammed. Someone started hammering on it from outside and begging a relative to open up.

He felt anger at the hunters who'd brought this disaster, but anger wouldn't make him the town's guardian. He couldn't protect every household while a mother beast taller than the roofs tore through the streets.

The potters' square was crowded with people trying to reach the same narrow road. Tang Jiu stood on an empty cart and waved both arms.

“Safe passage! Ten spirit stones for a place!” Tang Jiu shouted.

“Where are the horses?” a man in the crowd demanded.

“On their way!” Tang Jiu shouted back.

The cart didn't move. Paying passengers pushed to board first. Shi Feng glanced at the empty shafts and kept going.

Above the potters’ awning, Lin Shuang braced one boot against the parapet and hauled a child and an old woman up a knotted rope onto the tiles. As a red-plated brood beast scrambled onto the opposite gable, she spotted Shi Feng moving below.

“Shi Feng! Don’t take the east street!” Lin Shuang called down, catching her spear up from the tiles. “That idiot Ge Lu ran the egg basket toward the Wei storehouse, and the mother’s tearing down every wall between here and the market!”

“Which gate is still clear?” Shi Feng called back.

“None of them until the brood passes! Get behind stone—I’m guiding these people over the ridge tiles to the north granary, and once the road opens I’m taking a cloth convoy west toward Shuanghe Ferry!” Lin Shuang struck the climbing beast’s claws from the eaves with her spear butt. “Don’t get eaten before the ferry road!”

“Keep your rope dry,” Shi Feng replied, and turned into the side lane.

He passed a public well where three women were filling every jar they could carry. A frightened boy tried to drag his grandfather toward the northern road. The old man kept insisting that he needed his shoes first.

He entered a side lane behind the northern pottery works. The street beyond it should have led to the road out of town. Instead, a fallen wall blocked the far end.

He could climb it. He took two steps toward the rubble. A brood guardian rose from the other side.

Its red head cleared the bricks, followed by a pair of bladed forelegs. The creature was larger than an ox, and its plates were much thicker than those of the young beasts.

Shi Feng drew his sword.

The guardian struck down. He stepped aside and cut at its leg, leaving a deep mark where the plates joined. The beast shrieked and pulled back.

He could kill this one.

Then a second guardian climbed onto the roof behind him.

The tiles cracked beneath its weight. It was larger, with dark red armor and a body that gave off far more pressure. This creature's strength was at the Foundation Establishment level.

The lane was too narrow to avoid both beasts while climbing the wall.

Shi Feng backed toward the open kiln yard beside him. A rounded firing chamber stood at its center. Its stone walls offered a place to keep the guardians from attacking him from opposite sides.

He entered the yard, then stepped through the kiln doorway. The first guardian followed along the lane. The second crawled over the outer wall and dropped into the yard with a heavy crash.

Inside, Shi Feng put his pack behind the furnace and drew Wei Kuo's knife with his free hand. A human voice squealed from somewhere behind the kiln.

“Don't bring them here!” Zheng Bao cried. “I just repaired that roof!”

Shi Feng looked at the approaching guardians and raised his sword.

“Then stay out of the way,” Shi Feng said.