The woman Xun Xun spoke of stood there like a willow with a hidden edge, her palms able to extend Blades, a miao dao riding her hip like a crescent moon.
Beside her loomed a man rebuilt into iron and wire, nine feet tall like a temple guardian, his features easy to pick out in the haze.
She swung the miao dao, its spine beaded with cool dew, a misted sheen under the newborn sun like breath on jade.
One slash parted a mud tentacle that probed up from the depths, and the highly corrosive sludge failed to bite through her blade, like waves breaking on rock.
A common knife would’ve melted at first touch, frost under lye, gone in a heartbeat of hiss and smoke.
The mechanical man didn’t idle; two heavy machine guns rode his shoulders like twin thunder drums, and he raked the mire with a storm of lead.
Bullets shoved channels through the muck like oars through black water, but they hardly harmed the sludge’s living core.
Mud King’s escape from the lab was tied to these two and their botched work, a debt like a shadow at noon, so they owed blood and sweat to clean it up and reclaim the lab.
Their center’s records read like a cold chronicle: Mud King was a special Monster, found near an Abyssal Rift by people from the Modification Center, then hauled into white lights and glass.
At first, Mud King was only a single Magic Stone wrapped in sludge, a seed asleep in silt.
Battle staff mistook it for a normal Monster’s stone, a pebble in a bag of pebbles, until that hidden stone devoured the rest like a sinkhole swallowing cobbles and woke.
It was a Magic Stone, yes, but its master hadn’t died; it slept in a strange winter, a chrysalis made of mud.
The sludge drank the Magic Stone’s energy like roots drinking rain and began to stir and thrive, but they found it in time, a blade before wildfire.
A capable fighter “beheaded” Mud King early, forcing it back to square one, a circle closed with one cut.
Even with beheading and other measures, Mud King clung to its Magic Stone like moss to granite; if anyone coveted the stone and touched it, the mud would bloom, then swallow all like a hungry tide.
Word spread through the Modification Center like wind through bamboo: you can’t kill the Mud King.
Research began under white lamps; they found the sludge resisted several hospital anticancer drugs, like oil shedding water.
They also found its core was both resurrection key and fatal seam; sever the core, and Mud King would die like a lantern with its wick cut.
Armed with several weak points, the Modification Center dreamed of raising this “undying” thing, a cold orchard of blades.
Mud King’s sludge was alive; fed enough energy, even cut away from the body, it would breed like mold after rain.
Best hosts were Monsters rich in Mana and Abyssal Aura, then humans like warm soil, then insects or other organics at the bottom of the well.
The experiment went on schedule and eerily smooth, like a boat sliding on black glass.
They grafted part of the sludge to a plant, and with that stalk and certain nutrients, they let Mud King leave its body and keep multiplying, ivy over a wall.
After thousands of feedings of Abyssal Aura and Magic Stones, a newborn Mud King Magic Stone finally formed, a second moon under a veil.
It fell a touch short of the original in structure and show, but its other powers mirrored the first like twin reflections in a pond.
The higher-ups saw Mud King’s edge: erase the corrosiveness, fix the sludge into set shapes, marry it with android craft, and you could birth countless “undying” weapons, a forest of spears that won’t rot.
Mud King needed only to devour organics to refill its energy, like a bonfire fed with brush; its Magic Stone hid like a fish under silt, with no gaudy weak point to grab.
If mass-produced, other districts would choke just fighting a Mud King host, a flood against sandbags.
To speed the work, the Modification Center partnered with another lab, but the moment they sent Mud King No. 2 over, fate flipped the board.
They moved too slow; No. 2 slipped free of the anti-proliferation solution like an eel from a net.
That lab couldn’t handle Mud King, so they watched it multiply like mildew in summer, until catastrophe took root and bloomed.
Besides the woman, three other capable-looking folks stood by like crows on a fence; they didn’t jump in, just watched the pair fight and tossed help now and then, help like a damp match that did nothing.
The woman shot them a vicious look, a spark in frost, then lifted her blade and waded back into the muck.
She’d sworn never to fight sludge or go where sludge fouled the air, but the mud monster showed up right after her oath, like thunder answering a boast.
Her blade could cleave Mud King’s tentacles like reeds, but it couldn’t kill it; as long as organics were near, it would spawn more limbs, a hydra of clay.
The only blessing was the lab’s metal—cold, inorganic, joined seam to seam like armor—held firm against its hunger.
For now, the only short path it had out was the gap near the lakeside pavilion, the section Jiujiu had rammed open like a boar through a fence.
The vents still vented, but someone had plugged them with near-matching material, a cork in a throat, so it couldn’t squeeze out for a while.
Mud King kept birthing tentacles, a forest growing at night; it was getting stronger, and the woman’s work grew thornier.
She chopped them again and again, a metronome of steel, while the others swatted the flying splatters like gnats.
Frustration rose in her chest like heat; speed like this was a drizzle on a wildfire.
She decided to close in, but the moment she stepped, the pent-up sludge erupted like a burst dam, swallowing her boots.
Her Mana barrier got eaten in seconds, sugar in hot tea, and she snapped her will, flared Mana, and blasted the mud off in shreds.
Only then did she keep her legs, two reeds snatched back from a bog.
The mire had waited for her to lean close, a trap with patient breath; if Cantata Two fell into the sludge and Mud King devoured it, the fallout would be unspeakable, a storm over dry tinder.
Laughter rose from both sides like cold rain on tin.
Bitter and unwilling, she tensed to charge again, a tiger against a wall, but the mechanical man blocked her, and the chill in her head returned like night.
If she rushed in without care, she’d die like a moth to a lamp.
Those shameless watchers didn’t feel the knife in the waist when they talked; if they all joined, Mud King might already be ash.
They had decided Mud King wasn’t that strong and tossed the woman and the man forward, just to watch them slip, a bet made with other people’s bones.
The fight dragged on like a drumbeat.
More sludge poured out, which gave the miao dao more area to slice, a scythe in high grass.
The man fired special rounds that punched the muck, then flame whooshed up like a sudden dawn.
It burned for tens of seconds, then barely handled a portion, leaving ashy clumps like dead coral.
To be fair, their teamwork was clean, a pair of swallows weaving; in a dozen minutes they’d processed the fresh surge with special methods, and it still felt like a cup of water on a prairie fire.
Impatience pricked Night Frost like needles; how would they actually finish the Mud King, she wondered under a winter sky.
Would they really burn it bit by bit, like ants moving a mountain?
Fire worked, yes, and it was a fine way to treat sludge, but the pace crawled, a snail in cold rain.
Worse, Mud King could eat the timbers that dammed the lake on both sides, gnawing them like termites.
If it swam free in the water, unless they drained the artificial lake dry as a bowl, they’d never find it in this life.
But why should Night Frost fret for their safety, a sparrow counting a hawk’s feathers?
Her urgency lay elsewhere, a drum under the ribs—she had to infiltrate, or the next act wouldn’t turn.
She couldn’t find a clean angle to slip into the Modification Center’s base; four or five Cantata Two were stationed there, and even with ten million ounces of courage, she wouldn’t lift a finger.
Heaven still leaves a path between thorns.
A pair in sealed protective suits pushed a canister that breathed white mist and cold like a winter jar, rolled it up to the crowd, and started explaining, words like frost on glass.
The mechanical man listened, then barked for a rocket-tube thing, a bamboo of iron.
They slammed the payload into the launcher, had the woman step back, then he pulled the trigger, a thunderclap.
A spherical charge burst in the air like a dandelion, and a spray of mist and rain fell into the sludge, pearls into tar.
Mud King trembled violently, a snake seeing a crane, then shrank inward fast and slipped back to the lab it infested.
Curiosity flickered in Night Frost like a moth: what was Mud King’s natural enemy?
But she had sharper plans; she aimed for the ones wrapped tight, because one had her build, and their layers hid every tell.
After they finished their pitch to the Cantata Two group, they turned down a side path to return to the lab, feet quick as mice.
Night Frost tailed them like a shadow on water, but they moved fast, and chances stayed thin.
She thought a beat, calm as snow.
She’d make a small stir, hook one aside like a fish from a school.
She drew a silver cube, a little moon in her palm, and lifted it toward the target.
The woman felt a pull like a tide, lost her balance, and slipped into the mud with a soft thud.
Night Frost apologized, a breeze through bamboo, and looked around.
No one stood there; maybe, the woman thought, she was too worn out, and visions rose like heat.
The other two bit their tongues; they just told her to change fast, so time wouldn’t leak away like sand.
They had to finish two batches of special reagent before tomorrow night; if Mud King got handled before that, they’d miss their rise and their pay, like boats missing the tide.
The three took the stairs, iris scan opening the door like a blooming eye.
Night Frost timed the swing, pasted the camera with a palmful of water, and slid through, a fish into reeds.
Risky, yes; a few footprints of chance would show.
Leaves wouldn’t work; a 360-degree camera would still snare her shadow, and she wasn’t that fast.
With water, the lens should catch only a few blurred white streaks, ghosts on glass.
She moved light as dust; her hands braced the seam where ceiling met wall, the blind corner in their gaze, a swallow tucked under an eave.
When they took the turn, she flowed after them, a ribbon of rain.
There were cameras inside too, sparse as stars in fog; she repeated the trick, and at last reached the changing room that linked to the lab.
Two of them suited up and went in, white shells on black water, while the third grumbled about her rotten luck and peeled off her suit like a cicada skin.
She was a girl a little older than Night Frost, black hair like ink, no Mana ripple at all, as ordinary as clay.
Sorry, even if you’re ordinary.
