Ba Serpents, and there were dozens of them. The bulk were demigods. A few huge ones, charging at the front, exuded the auras of Gods.

It was said that there was no creature a full-grown Ba Serpent could not swallow. Glancing left, seeing three giant heads burst into the clearing, Dorian could believe it. Two crescent fangs dangled from an otherwise toothless mouth—all the better for swallowing things whole. A bright pink tongue speared out like a trident.

He watched as the first Serpent among them extended. Its head snapped forth, mouth blowing out wide like a net, then snapped shut just as fast. Only preternatural reflexes saved Sun from a sudden and painful demise. She yelped. Just how mad had Sun gotten them? She might’ve been too successful.

Dorian met her eyes—red-veined and wide as dinner plates—and hoped dearly that she remembered the last thing he’d said to her. Then his Javelin was ripped from the ground. The last of his dragonsbreath sputtered out. It hardly mattered; the Taotie spun to face the new threat, empty eye sockets crinkling. It seemed baffled. So too did its handlers, the two Jiangshi. They stood there gaping. They seemed like they could hardly believe their eyes.

Then Sun put on one last burst of speed. She blurred brown and Dorian, limbs screaming, spent from his fight and running off trickles of qi, couldn’t muster the energy to move. There were two collisions, then. Sun and he went tumbling down the coal grounds; Dorian spat a mouthful out.

“CLOAK!” he roared.

Thank Heavens Sun did so instantly.

Their qi signatures went to nothing. Their images took the hues of their surroundings. They were both now caked in soot—her qi blanketed them in it. They could’ve been rocks.

An imperfect cloaking, to be sure. Any higher order descendent of the Stone Monkey lineage would’ve taken one look at it and scoffed. Sun Waking himself could’ve transformed himself into a speck of dust. He could’ve hijacked the eyes and ears and noses of everyone present—made them think they were underwater or underground. This was the best Sun, shivering at his side, could manage.

But Dorian had taken that into account. For he was a Speedrunner, and he knew the nature of the Ba Serpent, and he knew the nature of the Taotie, and now it was his turn to grin.

Ba Serpents spent most of their time underground, stalking their prey through Hell’s magma tunnels. They tracked their prey by Qi signatures. Those things were blind to smell and their sense of sight was meager at best. Which meant that Sun and Dorian might as well be on a separate plane to them.

The Taotie, meanwhile, only saw a horde of vultures threatening to snatch its prey. And nothing made a Taotie more angry than being denied its meal.

Bellowing, rearing on its hindlegs, it visibly bloated with Hunger Laws. Its belly distended. The air about it was tinged a sickly green.

Then it unleashed.

It was the Ba Serpents’ turn to be baffled. Their quarry had vanished—but who was this oaf intruding on their sacred lands? And how dare it aim a strike at them? They were a most physical species. They resolved their disputes through force of fang and coil. And so they lunged for the Taotie’s head.

The Gods nimbly wound around the Taotie’s suction. A few Demigods were sucked screeching in. Then in a flash fangs slick with venom sunk like harpoons into rotting skin; the Taotie roared, bucking fiercely, and clamped its own hefty jaws down on a Serpent’s body. CRACK-CRACK-CRACK went its spine. The Serpent’s eyes bulged. The whole lower half of its body went limp. Still it staunchly refused to let go, and its mouth started to shine an eerie purple light.

It bought time for the other Serpents to sink brutal bites into the Taotie’s flank. Their mouths glowed purple as they did; their whole bodies lit up, for an instant transparent, as torrents of qi and Poison Laws surged up from their bellies, up through the fangs, and deep into the Taotie’s body.

The skin around the bites went necrous black. The blackness drove deeper still, sinking bleak hooks into the organs. Again the Taotie roared, this time in equal parts pain and fury. The ground beneath it trembled. Wisps of green qi rose up from the ground around it as a Hunger Domain burst into being.

“Yes!” whispered Dorian. Sun shot him a confused look. “It’s a legendary Beast’s trump card,” he whispered. “It can only be used once. It means it’s desperate.”

The Taotie wheeled around, blasting Hunger Laws recklessly, mindlessly. They surged with power and Law as they left its mouth—the Hunger Domain’s grim work. The Serpents’ strikes dimmed. The Taotie’s grew blazing.

Dorian watched, delighted, as they tore into each other again and again. Ichor gushed. Skin tore. Bones crunched and were crushed to dust. Godly might tore at one another; there was a storm of fangs and teeth, wrestling, constricting, smashing, tar blood mixing with crimson and splattering every which way. Soon all four Gods were so torn up, so tangled up and mangled and splattered, Dorian could hardly make them out out from one another. Still they raged on. Godly vitality was something else.

Sun, meanwhile, had only now caught her breath beside him. “Err—I’ve got a question.” she gasped.

“What is it?”

“Why exactly are we still sitting here? Shouldn’t we be running?”

“Ah.” Dorian’s eyes glinted. “This is the difference between you and me. It’s why I am—well, was—a Godking, and you are not.”

“Dumb luck?”

“No—well, yes—but more than that. Dumb luck, plus a secret ingredient.”

“Which is?”

“Here’s a speedrunner’s lesson. Where others see only danger, you must see opportunity. I’m sat here because of two things. First—I have a healthy disrespect for death. I don’t seek it, mind you—I’d certainly very much prefer not to die. But the older you get the more you tend to fear death. The most risk averse creatures tend to be those very old Godkings. They won’t even play dice. They don’t take chances. They don’t snag opportunities either.”

Sun squinted at the bloody mass.

“Err. What’s the opportunity, precisely?” she said. “I only see death. Unless the opportunity is to die. In which case I do see quite a bit of that.”

“Here’s a second lesson, then. Know your enemy. I’ve fought Taotie, and I’ve fought Ba Serpents! I know them all. Which means I can do some rough mathematics. Three Ba Serpents just about equals one Taotie.”

“Ah,” said Sun, blinking. “Ah."

The battle before them was slowly winding down. The Jiangshi lay flat in the coals, groaning and fatally wounded—fanged through the stomachs. To their sides were the corpses of demigod Ba Serpents. The Gods, meanwhile, grew sluggish. Their strikes were drained of ferocity. They seemed suddenly very old, saggy, creaky. The Taotie bled from dozens of places; its skin was more blackened than green. It was held upright only by its sheer girth. One of the Godly Ba Serpents was dead and discarded. The two others clung onto the Taotie like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to a sinking raft. Their fangs still pulsed purple. Driving in venom all the way to the end.

“The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind,” whispered Dorian. “Five breaths. Then uncloak.”

Five breaths. Enough for the Taotie to bat down a Serpent at its side before toppling over, two legs deadened from venom. Enough for the last Serpent to flop over, spine pulverized and eye crushed. Only one of its fangs was left. The other was jammed firmly into the Taotie’s flank.

Then Dorian shot out a Javelin. It was sleek, and tiny, and deadly fast. By the time the wounded God saw it it hardly had time to react. It made a jerk of the head, a lunge, but its body, deadened and limp underneath, was its anchor. Dorian gently guided the Javelin into its last remaining eye.

The Serpent shuddered once. Then lay still.

Sputtering, gasping, the Jiangshi turned towards them. It seemed that in the chaos—the blur of smells—even they had forgotten about Sun and Dorian. Shock colored their pale thin faces. One of them coughed, spewing black phlegm.

“You…!” it croaked. Then it laughed, hacking out more phlegm all the while. “You should’ve run, fool!”

With a massive heave it propped itself up to the elbows. The effort seemed to shave years off its life. “G-go!” It screeched. It eyed the Taotie’s fallen form. “You dumb brute—move! Have at them!”

Dorian saw the realization dawn on its face. The slow uncurling of the sneer. The slow widening of the eyes. Only now did it appreciate its true position. Its head snapped to look at its partner. The other Jiangshi lay motionless. Trembling, it stared at the Taotie. The beast’s great chest rose and fell, but it did not stir.

“It’s not dead,” said Dorian. “Yet.”

Then his Javelin rose up behind him, still tipped with the Laws of Destruction. It jammed into the Taotie—right at that most withered, torn-up part of skin. Next to where the Serpent’s fang had already sunk. It was lucky the other Gods had done the bulk of the dirty work. All Dorian needed to do was sink in the final blow. Deeper and deeper his Javelin burrowed, sawing past muscle, piercing through arteries, cleaving through every vital organ he met.

He was nearing the heart then. He could feel its gasps through the Javelin. The thing must’ve been the size of a barn. He could’ve stabbed it through, then, and ended it for good—but what a waste! The end was coming soon regardless. He’d seen to that.

One heartbeat. Two. Three.

Then it stopped.

“Three Godly beast cores, one legendary Godly core and a host of demigod cores,” said Dorian, surveying the field. He nodded, satisfied. He could turn these into elixirs that’d do wonders for his cultivation. Or trade them for treasures once they got somewhere halfway civilized. Then there were the bits that could boost him right now—the meats. Under a good chef, a meal made from choice ingredients of a Godly corpse could be a potent cultivation boost indeed. As good as a top end elixir, even…

And he could use all the qi he could get. His Star System cultivation could already store an order of magnitude more qi than a standard Sky Realm cultivator. He could outdo demigods in this form, and he was only getting started! Who knew what his true ceiling was?

He turned to Sun. “The Taotie’s most potent parts are its heart and its tongue. I left them both untouched. Why don’t you—“

She was already sprinting toward the beast with a cheer, carving knives held aloft. Dorian snorted. He was still astounded she actually came back for him. It was by any standard a very silly decision. Good-heartedness, that was. But perhaps she couldn’t help it, like being born with a terminal illness. He supposed that was forgivable. At least it helped him, which he could hardly complain about; he was even a little grateful for it. Fancy that.

Then, with the leisurely air of a hunter whose prey dead to rights, Dorian picked his way across the smoking battlefield. Across the corpses of dead and dying Gods, until he stood towering over the Jiangshi.

“Hello, Jez,” said Dorian with a smile. “We could’ve coexisted, you know. I would’ve been perfectly happy speedrunning alone while you did your Multiversal antics. Then you killed my brother. And cut off my bodies. And fucked up my run. And now you’re after me here, too! You just can’t give it a rest, can you?”

The Jiangshi gave a scared little gurgle.

“Fine. Have it your way.” He sighed. “You’ve done something very rare. I don’t keep enemies, you see. I hate no-one. It’s too much work, and I can’t be bothered to get worked up on behalf of someone else. But since you insist, for you—just you—I’ve made an exception. Congratulations.”

Then he drove his tail through the Jiangshi’s open mouth.