“All right. So what do we see?”

  Ahead of me, there was a stream of spirit beasts leaving from a singular point. Before, I thought that the entire wall was down. But now it looked like it was only a few places.

  Crystal cracks raced up and down the bottom of the clear dome, reaching approximately three or four stories tall.

  The formation was down.

  We could try to patch up the wall or we could try to stem the tide, but as Moon Lee landed next to me, we had to decide as a group. Seeing her again was a relief.

  “Most of the spirit beasts are coming from that direction. If we can get there, then we can stop it. But I don’t know how we can close up the hole. That’s a formations thing.” She followed my gaze, getting close enough for our nascent souls to briefly touch, and it felt so intimate and out of place. She was a wall of iron that my senses couldn’t see behind.

  Another spirit beast dared to come within slapping distance. It was a shame that it had one of the more humanoid faces. I knocked it down with a backhand.

  “Good shot,” she said.

  “Thank God we have the kingdom’s formation experts here and on call,” I said. “We’re going to have to break up the Kang family reunion.”

  My backhanded foe slammed into the three story tall spirit beast. My attack interrupted its dream of defeating me.

  It was coming together. I could feel my core filling. Each punch would be just a sliver of energy, but I would get back so much more. I could see why people got addicted to fighting in this world. If you set up the right situation, you would advance.

  Not that I wanted to beat people to a pulp and all, but when it threatened my calm, it was on. I could only be so calm as these nightmare beasts fed me with their own hopes and dreams.

  Xueyie flitted into view.

  The spirit beast struggled against the hit, attempting to cause as much property damage as possible on the way up.

  “May I?” she asked, politely.

  It must have tapped into a speed enhancing technique because it was back up and trying to close in on us.

  Xueyie extended her own energy, matching and then overturning its super speed.

  All at once it was trying to hit me and move, but Xueyie kept it down.

  Mon was getting close. Her disappointment was palpable, enough that I could sense it from a half a city away. I’ll remind you now that Western Jewel was about the size of New York City. This meant that she was probably several miles away. I hadn’t gotten emotions this dense from so far away recently.

  It felt fresh and new. Lee’s nascent soul reacted to an attack, and I launched myself at the titan sized beast.

  I hit it again, one leg punching several inches into where its neck equivalent was. My leg sank in. This had to be the worst day of its life.

  “Ugh,” I said, extracting half of my right calf from it. “Stinky peasant beasts, getting their funk on my freshly laundered clothes.”

  I got what felt like a raw data feed from what passed for its consciousness.

  It felt like I was opening the door into a rough, independent film set.

  Literally sitting at a door for a moment, I could see how it saw humans as expendable little birds. It didn’t want to eat us, it just wanted to see what happened when it squi-

  I nearly threw up, coming back to my senses.

  All I had to do was not go through the large open door into the place where all the little targets were. I could see how it saw us. We were little ants. It wanted to play with the ants.

  The urge to be somewhere, anywhere else, gnawed at me.

  I don’t think that it had a mean bone in its body, but how it went around was destructive. And so it had to go.

  Min screeched to a stop a block away. She had to have been flying. I had lost track of time. I just continually pounded the titan into the ground. I didn’t even know if it was dead or not.

  “Joe! Joe! Stop!” Xueyie yelled. “It’s already dead!”

  I held my hands out. Both were bloody. My knuckles felt raw. In time during this, I had broken my nun chucks into two. The pressure I exerted had to have snapped it. I felt doomed to never find a weapon I could handle.

  Maybe after this I’ll calm down. I could find something that I could hit them with that wouldn’t break. It was feeling more and more like I was going to be the Tai Chi guy who flew around and stole your dreams and nightmares. Fuck, it would be nice to be some kind of bogeyman to the Red Fang Sect. Maybe they would leave me alone.

  My core thrummed with power. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I veiled myself again.

  “Point me toward an enemy,” I said. My hair might glow yellow by the end of this as I got closer to true ultimate power.

  “Joe, let us have a brief conference. We’ve beaten down the larger beasts that have made it here, but there’s still a lot coming,” Lee said.

  I thought we were doing really well and I’m wondering what we should do next to make a success. I had several outstanding ideas, but I listened to the strong women that I surrounded myself with.

  ---

  Never let it be said that Joseph Pidge doesn’t listen to women. Especially in matters of war and emergency situations, I was all ears.

  “We need to get to the Kangs,” Moon Lee said.

  “Agreed,” Min said. “They are the first priority. Without them, this whole city will fall.”

  I was glad that she was done just being my sidekick and spare piece and now thinking about the strategic plan and how to best use the assets that we had at our disposal. Not that I thought that the Kang family was part of our disposal, but that’ll be great if, for once, my spirit beast thought about things that weren’t trying to make my life difficult.

  I might like her a lot and she might be one of the best things that had ever happened to me in this new world, but sure as heck did she give me a lot of shit for no reason?

  “So what you’re saying is true.... It doesn’t matter how many people they save if we don’t get to the Kang family and get them to fix the outer walls,” Xueyie said.

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  Min puffed herself up, looking less like an ocelot and more like a Pomeranian, fresh from a haircut.

  At that moment, I realized she was going to give no quarter to me no matter what happened and I kind of appreciated that about her. I could take what she was saying at value because she was not human. Her primary drive in this world, me, at least regarding me, was to piss me off and get a lot of laughs about how she got me all twisted in knots.

  “Mom, do you mind if I?”

  She relented for the most scratchy scratches of her life, petting her as if she was my evil sidekick, which she was. She was a good girl. Mostly when she wanted to be, but that was almost never. At least, she wanted to get into the middle of the fights so she would definitely have my back in most of these.

  It’s important to have buddies that will have you back in the event of a demonic cult outbreak and the collapse of the wall of containment that kept your city in a safe and wholesome place.

  “Are you going to lead us to the Kang family?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone got any other ideas? We stop the flow of spirit beasts, then we can take care of the ones that are already here?” I said.

  “Let’s go,” Lee said, scooping up my adorable spirit beast.

  She didn’t even wait to see if anybody was joining her. The collapse just began jumping, bounding from rooftop to rooftop towards the central district where the cultivator’s ink pot was located. My phone was a step behind her and I realized she was holding back so that Xueyie could keep up.

  We passed within striking distance of the former compound of the red Fang and I saw that my friends there were staving off attacks from Spirit bases that see equal size and rank as they were. I didn’t know how long they could hold out, but we needed to make sure they did so.

  All we could do was give them an opportunity to live and have good lives. After this. I couldn’t save them personally. It was up to the team that I had put together to do that. There were several close calls, but we finally jumped the last canal to get to that central district I had spent so much time in and the Kangs were just sitting next to a pile of Spirit beasts.

  There were so many piled up that I was wondering if they might have missed a few in their haste to dispatch them and put them away. Kang, the father, would finish a humanoid-shaped beast and then toss it to his daughter and she would fling it up into the pile, which was almost two stories tall. By this point in time. It was in the Central Square, the one that was commonly used for recreation and socializing.

  He looked up and waved to us before punching clean through another spear beast’s neck and tossing the remains to his daughter. Then he looked around and, finding nothing, waved for us to approach.

  “The Western bridge is down and this other one, so these are only going to be so many. What brings you all here?” he said.

  Moon Lee landed next to him, as graceful as a trained gymnast. “We need your help to close up the crack in the outer dome.”

  I had to do my landing after that, which felt rough. Why did all these amazing women always outdo me?

  “Can you stem the tide while we have a brief discussion here with the elder kang?” Lee said.

  “If you’re going to handle logistics of us moving across town to transport a high value target to do a job that I’m going to allow you to take care of that. Any day of the week.”

  “Thanks babe,” she said. “Nope, that does not sound natural at all.”

  A one-story tall beast with impressive speed came rounding from the East and I jogged off to deal with it. It was definitely a first realm cultivator equivalent. Meaning that while I might look fast, to me, the beast felt slow.

  It was the first time that I’d seen a spirit beast actually look like it was moving in slow motion, and I relished the chance to give it exactly what it deserved. With a swift kick in the chest followed by one on its neck equivalent, the spirit beast slammed into the ground, rocking the cobblestones.

  It was at this time that I thought about collateral damage and how I could effectively destroy the insurance industry here by making them pay out all the unique claims that were going to be issued, cursing my name. Technically, I would have no problem pushing this spirit beast through a wall, spirit beasts they were, but all I needed to do was to disable it and toss it onto the pile of dead ones. I had no remorse in doing this. I would have no reason to bond with them unless they were bonded to a human or friendly. In fact, something had amazed all these spirit beasts they were drawn in.

  “Min, do we know why these beasts just came over with a blood lust? It can’t have been like this for the entirety of human history or the race wouldn’t have survived.”

  “There is something going on here,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “Is there a disturbance in the force?”

  She gave me a flat look. “Thousands of Western Jewels people called out asking if you could skip the dated references for films that haven’t even been shown on this planet.”

  “Star wars is a treasure!”

  She gave me a flat stare. “I’ll take cultural cues from someone without such a long history of attendance at improv shows-”

  I held up a finger.

  “-whether or not their attendance was compulsory.”

  “That’s unfortunately fair.”

  Another spirit beast, this one closer to a pokemon than a man, came up into my boundary space.

  “Thanks for choosing us for your best down services,” I said, easily sidestepping its fiery mane. “Please don’t forget to leave a review when you’re checking out!”

  It wasn’t like the fire based beast was trying to be smart about attacking. I drew out of its dream about setting something significant on fire. That was disturbing, but only the dispassionate hulk of a titan that just wanted to smash up as many people as it could out of boredom or curiosity.

  One of my half chucks found its way to the creature’s eye equivalent.