Hei Bai reached the skeleton and the ring. The ghostly red skull seemed to bob with excitement. At the same time, Sage stood in front of the giant scorpion and kept his gaze focused on that ghost. He called out behind him, “Xiezi, get Uncle Zhuo out of here!”

He was on edge as this was the most dangerous moment. While they’d done a sort of hostage trade and he was standing between Hei Bai and Uncle Zhuo, the problem was that he wasn’t confident in being able to hold her back. In their previous clashes he was fast enough to keep distance from her and his power was enough to grind her down, but that didn’t mean he could hold her back. They had to escape before Hei Bai finished collecting those items. Since she’d turned into a ghostly form like that, Sage wasn’t sure if she had any way to easily store physical items, and so he was hoping that would buy him the time they needed.

In the future, he saw Hei Bai not moving. That red skull floated in place above the skeleton and ring. Was she so happy she was frozen in shock? At that instant he realized something was wrong. Then he felt a sharp pain from behind.

The giant scorpion that hadn’t moved since they returned sprung into action. Its huge stinger suddenly shot forward and stabbed into the giant cobra. While the cobra was absolutely monstrous in size compared to a normal human, it was quite small in comparison to the scorpion. The cobra was over a hundred feet long, with a three foot wide body, but the scorpion was like a moving building. Each of its pincers was the size of a large shed and its tail was like a crane reaching high into the sky. The stinger stabbed into the back of the cobra and then the scorpion’s body moved into action, one of those huge pincers fell down upon the snake’s body, pinning it to the ground.

Sage had no time to contemplate the why, and could only fight back with desperate ferocity. Upon feeling the stab into his back he started to slither away, dislodging the stinger in the process, but the giant pincer pinned him down. The movement of a serpent required the undulation of its body, without limbs to push with, it took far less strength to restrict its movement. Without being able to escape, he had to switch tactics, suddenly curling backwards and wrapping around the scorpion’s other pincer. The scorpion had moved quickly to pin him down, but if he let it catch him between those massive claws there would be no hope of any escape.

Pinned by one pincer and wrapping around the other, his serpentine body was like a pair of handcuffs on the scorpion. Unfortunately, that left the tail free and that huge stinger came down again and again, poking large holes into his scaled hide. Each time the stinger pulled out, a layer of bluish ice formed, sealing up the hole.

Only at that moment did the red skull finally turn around and Hei Bai’s vicious cackling was heard. She laughed raucously while Sage continued to get stabbed by the giant scorpion. Then, there was a red flash of light and Hei Bai was knocked back. The ghostly skull spun around, floating through the air and dodging a flashing red light that was flitting back and forth around the skull like a bee. A burning beam shot out from the skull’s eyes and tracked the fast moving red flash. Two red lights danced through the air, one of them burning lines in the ground and slicing through the nearby trees and stones, while the other darted around like an agile comet.

“Aieee!”

A blood curdling shriek was emitted from the red skull and the darting red light was interrupted. Losing control for a moment, that blurry form was slowed down enough that it became recognizable. The tiny red scorpion with dragonfly wings was struck in mid-air by the burning eye beams and one of its wings was melted clean off. The stun effect of the scream wore off in time for it to keep from smashing into a large stone, but the little scorpion disappeared into the underbrush, carried far off into the distance by its immense speed.

Xiezi released a scream of her own, rushing towards Hei Bai while brandishing a thorn studded whip. She slashed it violently at the red skull, while also expertly flipping and rolling to the sides to avoid the eye beams that were now turned upon her. She put up a valiant effort, cracking that cruel looking whip against the skull a dozen times before the beams caught up with her. They seared a burning line across her thigh and across one of her arms before she could escape and she rolled into the bushes to escape the deadly ray.

Hei Bai didn’t bother to chase after her, instead taking the moment to gloat at the giant cobra getting punched full of holes. The giant scorpion had now stung Sage over a dozen times, each time piercing a hole into his body and delivering a huge dose of poison. She was so busy laughing that it wasn’t until quite some time later that she realized that something seemed off. The cobra wasn’t fighting back. It had seemed to freeze in place, pinned by one pincer and tying up the other while the scorpion continually stabbed it. If she didn’t know any better she might think that the snake was already dead, but she wasn’t going to be tricked like last time! This damned snake was like a cockroach.

Just as she was about to rush into action, the cobra unwound from the pincher and struck the scorpion on the ‘forehead’. It bit just above the eyes of the scorpion and Hei Bai thought it was a move made out of desperation. That scorpion’s carapace was too thick for the snake’s feeble fangs to pierce, right?

Then there was a sudden flash and the giant scorpion disappeared. Just in time too, as its newly freed pincer was about to snap down upon the body of the cobra. Hei Bai was astounded. What just happened? Where did the scorpion go? The giant cobra suddenly coiled itself up, hiding the parts of its body that were the most damaged behind the coils of its unpunctured hide. The cobra’s eyes peeked out over the top of its coiled body and stared at her. She felt there was something different about them.

“You can’t still be moving! That was the Blue Hex Fruit poison!”

The two of them conversed with vibrations of their Spirit Sense, “Poison, you say? Didn’t you notice already? Poison is the thing I fear the least.”

Hei Bai was speechless. She’d been plotting this betrayal from the start. That giant scorpion had been dead long before they ever arrived. She’d filled it with the juice from the Blue Hex Fruit that she’d purchased at great expense during that same auction when she’d recovered her necklace. How was it possible that this stupid snake was completely unaffected by such an extremely rare and powerful poison like that?

“But… that’s not possible!”

“Anything is possible.”

The giant cobra slowly uncoiled, the huge head zooming slowly towards her. It moved with perfect stillness, the eyes focused on hers. The head didn’t twist or tilt in the least, the serpentine body carrying it like it was on a gimbal directly towards her. The cobra’s face slowly grew larger and larger from the perspective of that little ghostly skull. Its mouth slowly opened and two huge fangs hung down. A viscous green liquid spilled from the fangs and hit the ground with an acidic sizzle.

“Hahaha, you think you’re the only one immune to poison? You think poison can hurt a spirit?”

She was snapped from her amazement in order to laugh at the snake’s foolish attempt to bite her, a spirit form. Her eyes brightened, getting ready to fire her eye beams directly into the snake’s mouth, wanting to make his soft insides burn.

The beams shot forth from the skulls eyes and scalded the inside of the cobra’s mouth, but only for an instant as the mouth was already snapping shut far before it reached her. The giant cobra struck like lightning and rather than biting the little ghost, it twisted and merely tapped its nose against the skull’s forehead.

Boop!

Hei Bai thought she heard a strange sound and then felt pain. The wind was knocked out of her lungs and she felt rocks dig into her back. Her hands pressed on the ground and she bounced back onto her feet instinctually. Righting herself and facing down the giant snake. She took a few steps backward to get some distance while assessing the damage from the… At that moment she felt like a bomb had gone off in her head. She looked down at saw hands. Her hands. Feet. Her feet.

“Ahhhhh!”