Twenty-Four Poison Branches 7
With a raid this absurdly hard, what else was I supposed to do?
As raid leader, I had to manage the party's aggro ping-pong with surgical precision. But my martial arts were still too rough for me to dish out damage and call the fight at the same time, so I stepped out of the DPS rotation, watched the field, and gave the signal on the right beats. One tiny slip and it was a wipe—straight into the dirt.
Damn. In my past life I thought raid leaders just coasted. Turns out it's the hardest job on the team.
Nerves stretched tight, I kept calling the aggro order and grinding the thing's stamina down. Then it was Sister Seol's turn again.
"Sister Seol! Pull out!"
She had gone in right after Hwa-eun. The moment she was supposed to peel off and one of the Beast Palace's hall-master-level fighters was supposed to step in, she slipped.
"Ugh!"
The Flying Divine Snake's thrashing had kicked the gravel into weird little ridges. Sister Seol planted a foot on one of them, her body wavering as she tried to fling herself clear—and her exit timing lagged by a fraction of a second.
Oh, come on! Rule one of every raid: watch the damn floor!
A high-level martial artist like her recovered her balance almost instantly, but that single mistake was fatal.
With a hissing roar, the Flying Divine Snake flipped its body and coiled around her at once. Her slender waist vanished into its trunk, cinched tight as if someone had yanked a cable tie shut. Then the beast spun, wrapping her from head to toe, and a cry of pure pain tore out of her throat.
"Kyaah!"
"Sister Seol!"
"Elder!"
"Sister Seol!"
Shouts erupted from every side. The snake reared its head high over hers, jaws beginning to gape. One bad bite and she could be crippled—or dead. Thick ropes of drool spilled from its open maw and spattered across her hair.
"This won't do! Fall back!"
Grandfather slammed both palms forward, a twin strike loaded with enough force to kill the thing if it had to. The impact cracked like thunder. When the dust cleared, though, the snake was still there—barely staggered, jaws still open over Sister Seol. Its scales were harder than we'd hoped; stopping it for a heartbeat was the best even he could manage.
It shot Grandfather one venomous glance, then slowly swung those jaws back toward Sister Seol's head, ready to swallow her whole.
"Sister Seol!"
I yanked the sack Yo-hwa had woven for me out of my robe and launched myself off the rock straight at its skull. The bag was supposed to be untearable—if I could just get it over the head, maybe it would keep those fangs off her.
I fell with the sack billowing open like a parachute. The yawning maw flashed past my eyes, and in the last sliver of an instant before it could bite down, I jammed the bag over its head.
"Got it!"
The snake went berserk the second the fabric sealed around its skull, thrashing so hard I couldn't hold on. I was flung free and slammed into the ground.
"Guh—!"
And then something strange happened. Yo-hwa's sack was thin enough to be half-transparent; you could see right through it. Yet the moment it was on, the beast poured out warning hisses in every direction and whipped its bagged head around like a mad thing—as if it had completely lost its bearings. A heartbeat later it flung Sister Seol aside and shot into the air.
"Are you all right, Sister Seol?"
"Sister!"
While we checked on her, the snake thrashed in the sky until the sack finally tore free, then bolted for the far side of the gorge without looking back.
"My body aches, but I'm fine. What about you, Yong? That was a hard landing."
"I'm… all right."
My shoulder throbbed where I'd hit, but nothing was broken. The discarded sack fluttered down and settled neatly over my own head.
Attempt twenty-one: another failure.
"That was a close call earlier. Are you unharmed, Elder Seol?"
"I'm fine, honored elder. Yong saved me. Thank you, Yong."
"Don't mention it. We're family."
"Oh my—our Yong has managed to move this sister to tears how many times today? He even saved my life… Yes. We really are family."
"S-Sister, I appreciate the thanks, but family doesn't need to glue themselves to me like that."
"But we are family."
I peeled her off—she'd latched onto my arm in pure gratitude—and headed back to camp. Attempt twenty-one had failed, yet the mood wasn't bad. Failures were how comradeship grew, after all.
"So-ryong saved Elder Seol when she nearly got badly hurt today."
"So-ryong did?"
"She slipped on a stone and he pulled her out of the Flying Divine Snake's jaws."
"Ohh. As expected of So-ryong."
Rescuing Sister Seol had only deepened the Beast Palace warriors' goodwill toward me. We sat around the campfire roasting the wild boar they'd brought down and, as always after a wipe, started picking apart why attempt twenty-one had failed. Post-raid failure review was sacred law.
"Today we redirected its attention without much trouble."
"From now on we'll have to watch the ground as well."
"She's right, Hwa-eun. Those stones it kicks up make footwork a nightmare."
While the talk rolled on, my mind was somewhere else. In one hand I held a strip of boar meat; in the other, Yo-hwa's sack. Why had the snake panicked so hard the moment that bag went over its head? The question kept circling.
I set the pork back on the hot stone and pulled the sack over my own face. The view was a little hazy, but perfectly usable.
So what was it?
A creature that cocky shouldn't have lost its mind over something this thin. I started breaking down the oddities in its behavior.
It really did look like it couldn't see.
Snakes perceive the world in roughly three ways.
First, sound. People say snakes are deaf because their hearing organs have atrophied—that's half true. They can't hear the way we do, but they can feel sound. They pick up airborne vibrations, sound waves, with their whole bodies and use them as a secondary sense. Most snakes are skittish; a noise usually sends them the other way. The big ones are the exceptions.
Second, scent. That forked tongue constantly tasting the air isn't for show. It snags odor particles and delivers them to the Jacobson's organ so the snake can map the source. The fork itself is an evolutionary trick for reading direction.
And third, vision. Snakes don't see especially well—just enough to tell what's close. Which is why they come with a special upgrade: pit organs under the eyes packed with cells that detect infrared. Like those alien horror movies, they feel the heat pouring off a living body.
Wait. Hold on. Could it be—?
The memory of the bag going over its head, the blind panic, and a scene from an old movie all slammed together at once.
"So-ryong? What do you think? So-ryong?"
"Yong, what are you doing?"
Sister Seol and Hwa-eun both shook me when they realized I'd vanished into my own head. I ignored them and sprinted for the big tree where Yo-hwa was perched.
"Yo-hwa! Come down!"
She descended on a thread of silk, hanging upside down, and tilted Hwa-eun's borrowed face in a silent question.
Kishit?
I grabbed her by the shoulders.
"Can you wrap Oppa up tight in spider silk?"
Ki… kishishi?
"Yong, wrap you?"
"So-ryong, you want to be wrapped? Why all of a sudden?"
Yo-hwa, Sister Seol, and Hwa-eun all stared at me like I'd lost my mind.
"You really think this will work?"
"That's what we're going to find out."
"In all my years as Myriad Poison Divine Lord, I have never worn a look this ridiculous."
In the dead of night, Grandfather and I flew up the gorge on light-body arts, hunting the Flying Divine Snake. He kept glancing down at himself and shaking his head. The reason was obvious: from crown to toe, both of us were mummified in dense layers of Yo-hwa's pure-white silk, looking like a pair of anatomical mannequins.
I'd asked her to wrap me for the test, but one person wasn't enough. The strongest among us had to be the second guinea pig—so Grandfather got the same treatment. He grumbled the whole way as we raced up the canyon.
Then, far ahead on a jutting cliff rock at the gorge's crown, we spotted the Flying Divine Snake stretched out at rest.
[There it is!]
[I see it. Let's go.]
We closed in fast. The instant we hit the edge of its maximum detection range, its head lifted and turned our way.
[So it noticed us after all?]
Twenty-one raids had taught us its identification range topped out around a hundred meters—thirty-odd jang. This was the critical line. Grandfather's whisper over sound transmission was tight with nerves. But the snake only tilted its head, then buried it back into its coils.
Every few steps as we edged closer it raised its head again—yet even when we stood a mere dozen meters away, it never registered us. We locked eyes with it more than once. Nothing.
[It's real!]
Grandfather's transmission was pure astonishment. I waved him back a little, picked up a stone, and flung it. I had mastered the Tang Clan's basic hidden-weapon arts; at this distance, a target that size was a guaranteed hit.
The rock smacked dead center into its skull. The snake jolted upright, hissing in every direction—
—and found nothing. A blind creature with its eyes wide open. After a long, baffled search of the empty night, it shrugged its head back down to the stone.
Grandfather, apparently still holding a grudge for all the earlier suffering, scooped up another rock and drilled the skull a second time. The gorge rang with the crack of stone and the snake's furious roar. After two or three more volleys it finally lost patience and winged away to somewhere quieter.
The moment it vanished, the laughter Grandfather had been bottling up burst free.
"Hahahaha! Satisfying! You wretched thing!"
Needling the Flying Divine Snake had clearly been good for his health. Once he'd laughed himself out, he turned to me.
"All right. Explain again how this works."
"Snakes like the Flying Divine Snake don't have good eyes to begin with. They make up for it by sensing the heat that comes off beasts and people. Yo-hwa's silk seems to block that."
"And how did you figure that out?"
"When Sister Seol was in danger and I pulled the sack over its head, it bolted in a blind panic. That was the clue."
In those alien movies the hero always smears himself in mud to escape infrared vision. I'd wondered if Yo-hwa's silk might do the same—and it did. Asbestos can foil infrared gear; this was probably in the same family.
"So. How do we catch it now?"
I answered with a smile.
"We put silk on every warrior, then we follow it. No food, no water, no sleep. Let's see how long a thing like that can last."
Big brother is going to stalk you until you're mine. Consider it payback for all the grief.
Grandfather's answering grin was downright dangerous.
"That…"
"That?"
"…is a truly excellent plan. Hahaha."
With a heavy thud, the staggering beast finally collapsed beside the gorge.
We'd coated every fighter in spider silk and shadowed it for six straight days. What chance did it have? The moment it went for a fire weasel, stones drove the prey off. The moment it tried to drink, stones kept it from the water. The moment it tried to sleep, stones woke it again. No matter how strong a creature is, every living thing has to eat, drink, and rest.
In the end it managed a few gulps under a hail of rocks, then simply lay down on the riverbank. It looked dead to the world. We poked it carefully; nothing. Not a twitch.
I walked up, rapped its skull with my knuckles, and laughed.
"Hahahahaha!"
The Flying Divine Snake—head of the Twenty-Four Poison Branches—was mine.