[”Crash Course…”]
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Warning!
Critical damage sustained
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Enemy Neutralized
Combat Essence Increased
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Enemy Neutralized
Combat Essence Increased
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Warning!
Damage Threshold Exceeded
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Enemy Neutralized
Combat Essence Increased
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Enemy Neutralized
Combat Essence Increased...
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Warning!
Tutorial Assistance Disabled...
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The last glowing notifications faded into nothingness as I hit the river’s surface like a stone. The cold bit into me, a sharp counterpoint to the fire that still clawed at my skin, and the echoes of the explosion in my ears turned the world into a distant, high-pitched whine. It was disorienting, a cacophony reduced to a single piercing note, underscored by the dull throb of a brain rattled too hard against the inside of my skull.
Pain. Crushing, searing, excruciating pain.
It was everywhere, sharp and raw where my skin had been flayed by heat and shrapnel, dull and throbbing where bruises had taken root in the deep parts of me. My chest heaved as I tried to instinctively draw breath, but the river answered with icy water that clawed into my lungs, making me gag and spasm in its grip. I coughed, choked, tried again. The river cared little for my struggles. It churned and dragged at me, indifferent to up or down, to life or death.
The night’s chaos seeped into my mind, unraveling the last threads of clarity. My arms flailed, hands clawing through the water as though I could climb it like a ladder. I tried to rise, to break through a surface I couldn’t see, but it was hopeless. Darkness pressed in, broken only by the ghostly afterimage of the explosion, its flickering light etched onto the backs of my eyelids.
There was no up, no down, no frame of reference at all—only the crushing weight of the river.
My chest burned, and my body betrayed me, forcing another desperate attempt to breathe. Water rushed into my lungs, cold and merciless, sending shockwaves of panic through my already fraying mind, clawing at my thoughts with sharp, jagged edges. This was it. Death, certain and inescapable, coming for me yet again. I could feel the river pull me deeper, the current wrapping itself around my chest like iron bands.
My vision blurred, my lungs screamed, and my thoughts unraveled like threads caught in a gale.
Then, amidst the chaos, I felt it—soft as a sigh, sharp as a blade.
The notion of someone clicking their tongue, deep in the recesses of my mind.
“Moron,” said a voice, dry and faintly amused, creeping into my mind like a lazy breeze.
Liang Feng.
His voice, smooth and unimpressed, crept through the tangled delirium of my thoughts.
"I didn’t give you this body to die with," he said, the words curling lazily, like smoke. "I merely needed to get out of a sticky situation..."
I could almost see him there in the abyss ahead of me. His lips curved in an exasperated sneer, his eyes rolling upward in theatrical disdain.
“You leave me no choice,” he said, the sound weighted with all the drama of a man profoundly inconvenienced.
Then came the glow.
Dim and faint, but enough to cut through the dark waters. A screen flickered into existence before my eyes, alien and familiar all at once.
//
Soul-merge initiated.
Accept/Decline
//
“Accept,” Liang said, his tone so unbearably smug that it almost made me want to refuse out of spite. “Unless you really want to die. Even like this, they’ll remember me more fondly than you, Victor Moore.”
The mocking lilt of his voice twisted through my mind, so smugly certain of my choice. So hauntingly irritating it made me want to twist his neck. But pride has its limits, and mine wasn’t worth dying for. Not compared to everything else I still had to lose. Not compared to the abyss pressing in all around me.
[Soul-merge Accepted]
It felt like being struck by something vast and heavy, not against my body, but against the very idea of me. I was shoved backward, not in flesh but in spirit, torn from the seat of myself. From Liang Feng’s body.
I was a bystander. A ghost. An observer floating helplessly above as he surged into action, his movements sharp and deliberate in ways I’d never managed. His legs kicked, strong and sure, cutting through the water with a power that felt utterly foreign—mine, but not mine.
The world hit me all at once, clearer now without the haze of pain and panic clouding my senses. The skies burned with a ferocity that seemed almost unreal, as though the heavens themselves had been set ablaze. Flames clawed upward from the shattered warehouse, their greedy light illuminating the river in furious reds and oranges.
Liang broke the surface with a gasp, and no more than a handful of seconds could have passed since I fell into the water. The warehouse continued to erupt in violent bursts of oil-fed fire, each explosion punching the night sky with fresh plumes of smoke and heat. The air reeked of burning chemicals and charred wood, thick and acrid on the tongue, a taste that felt like it might cling to me forever.
The noise was relentless—a thunderous cacophony of fire and shattering debris, overlaid with the tumultuous roar of the river. Waves slapped against Liang’s body, rocking him with the force of the merchant ships struggling against the explosion’s shockwaves.
“Damn it,” Liang hissed, his voice taut with irritation as he coughed up the water I’d so graciously inhaled for him. “You really made a mess of my body.”
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It was strange to hear his words without feeling his breath, to see his grimace without wearing it. Detached as I was, the sarcasm still stung. But even more than that, it grated. Because he wasn’t wrong.
Not that Liang had much time to dwell on it. Another explosion reverberated through the air, followed by the groan of tortured wood and metal. A sharp, resounding crack echoed across the water as the crane gave way, its heavy beams snapping under the strain. The whole thing tilted riverward, its dangling crate pulling it down like an executioner’s blade.
Liang barely had a moment to draw a sharp breath before he was forced to dive beneath the surface. The crane came down like a hammer, splitting the nearest merchant ship clean in two. Even underwater, the chaos was undeniable. Barrels and shattered crates plunged past, streaking through the murky depths, the fragmented remains of the ship tumbling and scattering like leaves in a storm.
Some debris sizzled violently as it sank, leaving ghostly trails of bubbles and steam that hissed just inches from Liang’s face. Yet, with an instinct I couldn’t claim as my own, he twisted and surged through the current, evading the deadly rain with a grace that bordered on miraculous.
When he finally broke the surface, coughing and sputtering, his hands latched onto a floating crate. It bobbed under his weight, offering a tenuous reprieve.
“I’ll give it to you, though,” Liang said between wheezing breaths, his lips curling into a faint, maddening grin. “You’re good at the destruction part. You even managed to buy us a few moments away from those pesky observers.”
His eyes swept the docks, and the grin spread wider, laughter bubbling up as he took in the scene. Burning Jiangshi stumbled over one another, some shrieking as they toppled into the river, others collapsing into smoldering piles on the dock. Flames licked the night, painting the chaos in hues of flickering gold and crimson.
“So this is the potential of Liang Feng they all feared?” he said, almost to himself, his voice threaded with delight. “I like it.”
His laughter rang out, sharp and wild, but I wasn’t paying him any mind. My attention was fixed on the second merchant ship, which had been knocked loose in the mayhem. Its hulking form careened toward us, carried on the river’s current and the force of the explosions.
In my mind, I screamed a warning, every ounce of urgency I had. But Liang? He just rolled his eyes.
“Oh, please,” he said, as if the looming shadow of the ship bearing down on us was nothing more than an inconvenience. “Do you think I’d let that be what kills us?”
The vessel barreled closer, a wall of wood and iron threatening to crush us, and yet Liang hardly moved. Just as the ship surged past, its bulk nearly skimming us, he reached out with a languid confidence, fingers closing around a rope dangling from a splintered mast. He caught it as if he’d known its path before the rope itself did.
A moment later, we were yanked into motion, the river’s current pulling us along in the ship’s chaotic wake. Waves slapped against us, threatening to drag us under, but Liang was already climbing.
For someone who didn’t know a single martial art, he moved with startling strength and ease. His muscles tensed and shifted as he hauled himself up the rope, hand over hand, with a focus that left no room for hesitation. In no time, he vaulted over the railing of the ship, landing deftly on the deck of the low-riding vessel.
I’d expected some triumphant display or a moment of composed dignity. Instead, Liang rose stark naked, his hair a damp mess that he brushed back with a lazy hand, his chest glinting faintly with the golden chain that had somehow survived the chaos.
He stood there, silhouetted against the burning remains of the town, looking for all the world like a man surveying his kingdom. The smirk tugging at his lips was maddening. “You still have a lot to learn about what it means to be Liang Feng,” he said, his voice full of insufferable smugness.
Then, as his gaze swept over the devastation, his expression soured. There was a near inaudible wince, and the smirk twisted into a grimace of annoyance. “I’ll leave the rest of this mess for you to figure out, though. The state you’ve left my body in is starting to piss me off…”
There was no warning, no transition. It was like a hook threaded through my very being, yanking me violently back into the skin of Liang Feng.
The pain hit me all at once, no longer dulled by his defiance or sheer force of will. It wasn’t just pain—it was a tidal wave of agony that crushed every thought under its weight.
Oh, it was all still there, alright. The absolute lunatic that was Liang had just been ignoring it. Now it surged through me, forcing me to double over, coughing and wheezing against the rocking deck of the merchant ship. Tears burned in my eyes, and the world swayed—not just from the river’s restless currents but from the fractured state of my mind. Thoughts that had been sharp seconds ago now tumbled uselessly, like broken glass rattling in my skull.
Everything had become too visceral once more. The searing ache in my ribs, an arm that still smoked and sizzled, and the exhaustion that settled into every fiber of this borrowed body, made that abundantly clear. Tears stung my eyes, blurring the fiery glow of the town ahead of us. The ship swayed beneath me, but the world seemed to tilt even more, as though my mind couldn’t decide what was real and what wasn’t.
And through it all, Liang’s voice drifted through the fog, maddeningly casual. “I wouldn’t lie around like a wuss for too long.” I could practically feel the stretch of his yawn behind the words. “Annoying as it is to admit, the wager you placed in the brat paid off.”
Blinking back tears, I raised my gaze just enough to see the new chaos unfurling across the ruined town. Mei. She must’ve reached one of the hooded, lantern-swinging sorcerers while I was busy drowning. Now, any Jiangshi that hadn’t been obliterated by the explosions was running rampant.
Without the unifying force of a single controlling mind, they’d devolved into a ravenous swarm, turning on the nearest targets. And those targets? Their own masters. Armored soldiers, once so commanding, were now barely holding against the tide of undead fury. The Jiangshi overwhelmed them, teeth and claws against steel and discipline, and the latter was losing.
It was as if the entire town had risen in death to drag its killers down with it. But it wasn’t as satisfying as it should’ve been to watch.
My breath hitched as I saw her—Nao, pinned amidst the chaos. Her brother tore into her with feral abandon, his undead strength far beyond what she could fend off. The armored soldiers were too busy fending for their own lives to even notice.
Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was all real. If this was all just a grand illusion I was watching.
There was no notification. No warning that the objective had failed. Even the timer was gone.
Through the racing pulse of my heartbeat—refusing to accept that I’d failed a quest so easily—Liang’s voice returned, an irritating hum in the back of my mind. “You should be glad those things disappeared before they made you actually kill yourself,” he said, sounding almost bored. “But they will return, eventually—telling you how horribly you failed in due time—but if I were you, I’d be more worried about your ‘distraction’ working a little too well.”
His words barely registered as I stared at the scene ahead. The carnage. The fire. Nao’s last defiant cry drowned out by the chaos.
I… I failed…
Liang sighed, a theatrical thing that made me grit my teeth. “You did intend to ram this merchant ship straight into the black vessel, did you not?”
The sheer urgency of the words snapped me back to the present. My head whipped around just in time to see it—looming, far closer than I’d realized. The black ship, a hulking shadow against the firelit night. A sturdy wall for the merchant ship to crash into. For one eternal moment, I could see it all too clearly.
I’d let Nao die, but right now, I had far more pressing matters to worry about. My own damned survival being on top of the list.
I had barely a second to brace. The force was catastrophic, the merchant ship crumpling with a hull-breaking groan. Wood splintered. Metal shrieked. The entire deck buckled beneath me, throwing me forward, onto my feet—stumbling into a desperate run before I even realized what was happening.
