I nodded. “I’m pretty sure the other demons who escaped Hell are hiding somewhere close by, using the smoke as cover.”
“Why would they be doing that?”
“Because I told them to,” Erlang Shen said.
We floundered around looking for him but couldn’t spot him. We needed to look up. He was hovering gently in the air behind us, two stories off the ground.
Quentin lunged deep. I didn’t hold him back. I’d learned my lesson with Tawny Lion to fight first and ask questions later. The Monkey King shot forth like a bullet, his big traveling jump weaponized.
Erlang Shen seemed to have expected this. He banked to the side, Quentin’s wild charge clipping him in the foot. The impact spun him around in the air like a top, but that was it. He came to a halt as purposefully as a figure skater.
Quentin’s arc was much less graceful. He went careening off at an angle, unable to control his motion once he was off the ground. He landed on the hillside, throwing up a puff of dust like a cartoon coyote.
The advantage that Erlang Shen had, being able to truly fly, was embarrassingly obvious. But to drive home the point, he swooped over to Quentin, grabbed him by the ankle, and flew back to me, using his speed to slam Quentin into the boulder. There was an awful cracking sound, a billiards break. It all happened before I could even move.
“Oh don’t look so horrified,” Erlang Shen said. “It takes more than that to put the ape down.”
Quentin staggered to his feet. The wind had been knocked out of him, but hopefully nothing else along with it.
“What are you up to, you hundan?” Quentin spat.
“He wants the Throne of Heaven,” I said. “He’s sick of being under his uncle’s thumb, so he’s going to take it by force. And to do that, he needs the weapon that nearly conquered the gods once before. A full-power Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
“The real version,” Erlang Shen said. He bobbed on the air currents above us as if he were a buoy in a harbor. “The staff, that is. Not this human you’re pretending to be.”
“That’s why you freed the demons from Hell and sent them after us, one by one,” I said. “This was some kind of sick training regimen.”
“Active recall combined with progressive overload,” he replied. “The best way to remember old skills and develop new ones. I even took care to send yaoguai you’d beaten in the past, so that your body would ‘remember.’ Hence why I needed the jailbreak.”
He’d been challenging me, ramping up the difficulty of my opponents bit by bit. I couldn’t have come up with a better study plan myself.
“Granted, I didn’t do a perfect job, since you don’t have all of your abilities back. You seemed particularly determined not to change size or split into copies. But you’ve baked long enough. I’m done waiting.”
“Oh, and speaking of baking,” he said. “Shenyingdawang! Could you spare a moment?”
I didn’t know who he was talking to until a voice rang out. “One sec. I’m almost at a save.”
Quentin’s face took on an expression I’d never seen on him before. Absolute fear. In one swift, fluid motion he threw me over his shoulder and started sprinting away. Fleeing.
Erlang Shen laughed at us instead of giving chase.
“What are you doing?” I shouted at Quentin.
He didn’t even take the time to respond. He zeroed in on a ditch and threw me into it, hard. Then he dove on top of me.
The sky above turned into plasma. It felt as if we were trapped in one of those Tesla globes, blanketed by neon filaments that reached for human contact. Quentin pressed me down, away from the colorful display like my life depended on it.
The heat was so intense that it overloaded my nerves. The scale went all the way around again to cold, a frost-burn numbness that my brain had to take as a joke. There was no fire like this on Earth, ha-ha.
Then it stopped. I could see blue again.
“We have fifty-eight seconds before he can do that again,” Quentin said into my ear. “Fighting a god and Red Boy—we’re not prepared. We should run.”
We should have. We should have fled and come up with a plan. We should have fled to the other side of the world and retired from the demon-fighting business.
But what rooted me in place, of all the random images that had to come to my mind unbidden right now, was that stupid book sitting in my room. The book of Sun Wukong’s tales.
I couldn’t shake the thought of how many unnamed villagers and peasants in those stories had to die just so that Xuanzang’s deeds would look greater for it. Were they like the babbling, happy people in the park, completely oblivious to the end? Or did they see the demons coming for them, their last moments full of terror and pain?
Genie Lo, caring about strangers, bearing the weight of the world? No one was more surprised than me.
“We can’t run,” I said. “Erlang Shen’s willing to blow his cover and start killing anyone he can get his hands on. We have to stop them here and now.”
Quentin smiled at me. “Then we have forty-seven seconds to do it.”
Maybe it was because we were in mortal danger, but he’d never looked more beautiful. I craned my neck upward and gave him a peck on the lips. “Let’s go.”
We sprang out of the ditch and ran straight at the source of the unholy flames. Red Boy greeted our attack with mild interest.
“Forty!” Quentin shouted. “Thirty-five!”
“Zero,” Red Boy said. He inhaled through his nose, opened his mouth, and another vortex of color came out.
I wasn’t fast enough to react. Quentin elbowed me to the side. I fell just in time to see the sun itself wash over him. He was completely engulfed in flame.
The pain from the True Samadhi Fire this close was a crisis of faith. It felt like my organs would never speak to each other again. The blood stopped in my veins.
Red Boy closed his mouth and the storm cleared.
“I’ve been training, too,” he said. “I don’t take as long to recharge now. I got a lot stronger on that island without anyone knowing.”
I tried to crawl back to Quentin, my eyes barely working, the gravel stinging my skin. A rock formation with his shape stood where he should have been. I put my hands on it without worrying about the residual heat searing me to the bone.
He’d been tempered. His body didn’t even feel like tissue anymore. This was a gray stone cast of Quentin, a mineral replacement.
And it had a crack running across the body from shoulder to hip.
“No,” I said, trying to figure out how deep it went with my fingernails. “No!”
Quentin didn’t move or speak. The expression that had been frozen on his face wasn’t shock or anger. It was resignation. His eyes were closed, his mouth calm. It was too much of a goodbye, and I screamed.
36
Erlang Shen swooped in and grabbed me by the back of the neck. He flew up, up, and away, taking me into the sky.