3 bar menu

Last embryo Volume 6 Chapter 3 Part 1

Chapter 3

As soon as she stated her name, Shen Gongbao raised her spear which burned with roaring flames and assumed her attack-ready stance. Then, she licked her lips as she glared at Ayato, and began to swing her spear around in an elaborate spear-dance meant to psyche herself up and intimidate her enemies. It was clear from just a single glance at them that these flames of her were definitely not normal. If people like Ayato or Asuka get hit by them directly, they were more than sure that there would be nothing left of them, not even the charred bones. Every part of their beings would simply turn to dust on the spot and dissipate right the and there.

「These bothersome rules state that we are forbidden from killing other Players, but other than that, everything else should still be a fair game as long as you are not going to die from it, right? And if that is the case, then I hope you will not hold it against me if I turn one or two of your limbs to dust as revenge for what you did to me before, Miss Beheading Knight?」

「Well now, what should I do about that? I have never lost any of my limbs before, so a part of me would like to take you up on your generous offer just so that I could see how long I would be able to survive without one or two of them, but on the other hand, my reason is telling me that any offer from crazy people like yourself should be turned town immediately without a second thought. So how about that? Anything else you want to say that would make me change my mind?」

As Ayato and Shen Gongbao exchanged these ironic words, they measured the exact distance between them.

Shen Gongbao, on of the Immortal Sages . . . . . . . . she is one of the villains who have appeared in Investiture of the Gods, one of the most famous Chinese novels of the sixteenth century depicting the decline of the Shang dynasty and the rise of the Zhou dynasty with various mythological elements placed in between.

Originally she was a disciple of The Primitive God of Heaven along with Jiang Ziya, but when she found out that their mentor would task Jiang Ziya to help establishing the Zhou Dynasty instead of her, she was overcome with jealousy and went about undermining her collegue’s efforts in every way possible, sometimes by spreading falsehoods disguised as the words of wisdom and sometimes by openly spreading the seeds of war and even sending evil deities to kill Jiang Ziya, until she was finally caught in the act by The Primitive God of Heaven, who sentenced her to a punishment of pluging the North Sea with her own body, and that is where she was supposed to be repenting for her transgressions: at the bottom of the sea, so deep that she would never again be able to see the light of the sun. And as an additional punishment for her arrogance, she was supposed to be going so with her head separated from the rest of her body, since one of the legends states that she once told Jiang Ziya as such in anger:

「Jiang Ziya, you want to protect the Zhou people? What abilities do you have? You have studied for merely 40 years. How can you match me? I can chop off my head, throw it into the air, and it falls right back on my neck as before. How dare you oppose me?」.

When it came to looks she was definitely pretty, but her good looks should not distract anyone from the fact that she was one of the most viscious and jealous individuals in the entirety of the Chinese Mythology. So when she was saying that she was going to be satisfied with turning just one of Ayato’s limbs to dust, then you could be sure that this was nothing but a bluff on her part and that she was definitely going to try and kill her, most likely claiming that it was just an unfortunate accident afterwards.

「You have done me good back on the Giant Spirit Train, so this time I am going to do the same thing to you! We got rudely interrupted before, but now, there is nothing and no one that could possibly stop us from setting our little score!」
「Hmpf! If it is a fight that you want, then a fight you shall get! I am on a very tight schedule here, but if fighting you here means that I will be able to get rid of an annoying immortal opponent who would stir no end of trouble for us, then I am gladly going to make an exception and take you on! I am going to one up your punishment from the legend and bury that rotten head of yours so deep into the Labyrinth’s ground that it is going to serve as a fertilizer for its ground forever!」

「Ha! Be my guest you blonde bitch! You can try, but we shall see if you are still going to act so conceited once I am done with you!」

With that said, Shen Gongbao ran back to Byakko and jumped onto its back. In her book, now that she has officially stated her name, there should be no complaints about fairness and rules and all that other bullshit. They are just who Players who are going to fight each other, and no one is going to stop her from decimating Ayato this time, but only after she takes her sweet time tormenting her for the humiliation that she suffered at her behest during their previous encounter.

As an opening act to the battle, Shen Gongbao slashed the wall to her right with her flaming spear, causing to silently melt down in an instant. That straight line horizontal slash was meant to take Ayato’s head cleanly off her shoulders, but she managed to avoid it by rolling onto the side just in the nick of time. Shen Gongbao tried to immediately turn around to perform a follow-up attack. . . . .  but when she did that, she felt the blade of a sword slashing at her neck.

「Khh. . . . what the fuck?! When did you. . . . . . . . .? ! ! !」

She was unable to finish, because in the next moment, the edge of Ayato’s Serpens Scorpius passed by the edge of her field of vision once more.

Ayato cut through Shen Gongbao’s neck at almost exactly the same time as she dodged her fiery spear, and she could do nothing to react to it in time because that was an attack performed from a complete blind spot that she could not have seen even if she tried to. Uesugi intended to rush right in to help her, but then she gently released her hand from the handle of her sword when she realized something.

(That attack of hers just now. . . . it was not a simple slash targeted at the opponent’s blind spot. It was a deadly technique where she predicted the range of her opponent’s motion and the time she would need for her attack to reach her and then executed it with such an impeccable timing that left Shen Gongbao no time to react at all.)

It was a manuever that would not have been possible to see through and execute by an amateur, but Ayato managed to perform every step of it with absolute perfection. She predicted the movements of Shen Gongbao’s spear in advance from nothing more but her initial movements and the shifts in her weight and then avoided her oncoming attack and performed her own counterattack at the best moment possible. It might not have been the same, but something like that definitely could be said to be close to predicting the future. When Asuka realized that something like that might have been impossible to do even for someone like Uesugi Kenshin, one of the most famous swordsman and warlords of the Japan’s Warrying States period, she instinctively covered her mouth with her hand and made a shocked gasp.

(. . .  Yes, just now, I definitely saw it. She really was just like Faceless just now.)

As a matter of fact, even after Ayato explained the truth of her origin to her, she was still pretty skeptical about her real identity. After all, even though she and Faceless were supposed to be twin sisters, they have only seen each other face to face once.