Chapter Twenty-Seven: Cataclysm
Crane didn't really know where to start. Too much had happened in so short a time, and he hoped that the unprecedented circumstances might allow the transgressions between himself and the esteemed tiger master to be forgiven. The air was still heavy between the two of them; Po and Mei Ling alike did their best to pretend they weren't watching intently as the two old friends met for the first time since coming to blows.
"That was quite the move back there." Tigress said, breaking the silence.
"Thanks. I thought you guys might have needed some help."
"That's a bit of an understatement."
Crane gave a bashful smile.
"Let's just say I owed you one." the bird said apologetically. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... I hate that I-"
She interrupted his stuttering by placing a paw to his back in reassurance.
"It's alright." she said, looking over to Mei Ling and then back to her fellow Jade Palace master. "I think I understand now."
"I know the rules, Ti... I just don't know what's happening to me, I feel-"
"You don't have to explain." she interrupted again. "I'm happy for you. Believe me - I am."
The bird master was undeniably confused by this about-face in tone from his old friend, who he had been sure would be less than forgiving. It wasn't the physical aspect of their fighting that had worried him so, but what he had said to her - what he had said about Shifu. All of the Furious Five had always known this was a soft spot for Tigress; no one ever dared speak about it in her presence.
"But what I said the other night, I have to apologize for that. It was not my place." Crane insisted.
"Maybe you were right."
The avian shook his head in immediate unconscious disagreement, "I don't think-"
"Maybe you were right."
She was now looking him directly in the eyes with a particularly grim breed of resolute certainty. Faced with this, he gave in and would protest the point no further. She broke off her gaze, and the two battle-worn warriors stood together for a time before she spoke once more.
"Oh, and Crane?"
"Yes?"
She gave him a gentle and friendly embrace, the likes of which he had never received from the tiger master. He was now beginning to question reality somewhat.
"You're not a wimp." she said, softly enough that only he could hear.
Crane didn't know how much he had needed to hear that from her until this very moment. He had so often wondered if Tigress really understood how much an otherwise-passing jest had stuck with him, given the context of the chaos back in Gongmen City. It was validating, on a certain level, to know that she had also considered how it had made him view their relationship.
"Auh… thanks." was all he could manage as they parted.
Po and Mei Ling alike had watched this development with indescribable relief, happy that it would appear there was no hard feelings between the old warrior companions. Tigress now approached the golden cat, and there was little doubt between any of them what she was about to inquire about.
"Do you still have it?"
Mei nodded in confirmation, weary of nearby Mongol soldiers that may have been in earshot.
"Good." the tiger reaffirmed. "About the other night - I apologize for letting my anger impede my better judgement. Perhaps we can all come to some kind of arrangement."
Mei Ling, still cautious up until this point, showed a much friendlier expression as her striped counterpart said this.
"I think that's a good idea." Po added, glad that the conversation was now moving in this direction.
But before any more could be said between the small council of kung fu masters amidst their war-torn surroundings, a great commotion began stirring, shouts and general alarm emitting from outside the ruined camp. The four of them quickly moved further south and out of the former Qi-Dan positions to see what had caused the disposition of the victorious Mongolian forces to change so suddenly.
It became apparent with terrifying haste. There, upon the emergent horizon was a darkened haze that otherwise might be easily confused for the optic distortions of the midday heat. But it was growing in size. There was something coming - and clearly with tremendous speed - towards the recent battlefield where the Khan's army was now outstretched in total disarray.
"Oh come on!" the Dragon Warrior groaned. "What could it possibly be now?"
As the haze drew in, it was now evident to be a large force of some kind - but there was no order, no cohesion to speak of. The nearby crowds of still-bloodsoaked soldiers were bunching up together to get a good look, and before long it became clear this ominous oncoming haze was not an it, but rather a they.
"Tengri protect us…" a nearby member of the Kheshig muttered.
A ravenous horde of mange-covered ferals were breaking towards them at full speed, drawn in from the steppe wastes by the irresistible stench of freshly-spilt blood at so great a scale.
"Flesh eaters!" Gan could be heard shouting, hurriedly trying to reassemble the Mongol battle line.
The mangled state of the Khan's forces after so recently engaging in the previous battle made doing so near-impossible, and the masters knew at once that everyone now outside the walls was now in mortal danger.
"Ugh - I really hate these guys!" Po exclaimed, recalling the brutality of the ambush they had interrupted when first encountering the Mongols. "But we've got no choice, we gotta fight!"
The others needn't voice their agreement, forming up at once with the remaining soldiers in an improvised line of defense. The archers had already begun loosing the first shots, killing many of the monsters from range - but it seemed to somehow have almost no effect at all on the oncoming weight of the charging enemies. They were growing close enough that the ragged defenders of Khanbaliq could hear the howls and shrieks that ought to reside only in nightmares.
Though they were hardly adequately prepared for such a fight, battle was joined with the fiends nonetheless, and once more Po found himself surrounded on all sides by a brutal life-and-death struggle. Trying to keep up his very best efforts, the panda master began blasting the beasts away with chi attacks, the others joining him when they could - the extremely close quarters nature of the fighting meant that more often than not it was a struggle just to keep the enemy teeth at bay.
Minds completely lost to hunger-driven insanity, the ferals made up for what they lacked in complex tactics with their sheer instinctive determination to kill. A good distance behind the fight that had just broken out, Khasar Khan was still trying to get word of what had just come up from the southern wastes and engaged his forces, and Altan was the first to reach him.
"It's the flesh eaters my lord! They have returned in even greater numbers than we feared!" the eagle reported, clearly himself terrified of what he had just witnessed on the front lines.
"Don't waste time here then! Reorganize our forces - drive them back now!"
Altan gave an unsure salute that didn't exactly inspire confidence, before taking off again.
To add the the slew of bad news the ruler was receiving, the Kheshig sergeant Ganzorig had just returned with an alarmed look on his face.
"My Khan! The artifact - it's missing!"
With a roar, the enraged Khasar grabbed the tiger by the shoulders and shook him menacingly.
"What do you mean it's missing?!"
"It is not in the citadel! It is nowhere to be found!"
Unable to believe what he was hearing, Khasar tossed the sergeant to the side roughly, overwhelmed by what was happening.
"How did you let this happen? Why was it not guarded?" he continued to question.
"Because, well-" Ganzorig hesitated, "Because you ordered us to leave the golden cat alone with it!"
"I did?"
The sergeant just looked at him, afraid of what to say back to this.
Oh shit… yeah, I did actually order that.
"You fools must have misheard me! Now that bird-loving chi witch has taken my prize! Find it at once!"
Ganzorig looked past the Khan into the frenzied melee taking place in the distance, where some of his comrades were quite literally being eaten alive.
"Find it in that, my lord?"
"Yes! Do it now!" the Khan barked.
With a mix of shock and unease in his bearing, Ganzorig took off into the fighting without delay; he was already well aware he had just been given a rather pointless task given the circumstances. Coming up to the ruler just as he had left was the princess Yuelen, now less armed than before, having expended her weapons upon the Qi-Dan king.
"Father! I wish to lead a counter-assault against the steppe demons!" the leopardess requested.
"No! You've done quite enough today - interrupting a duel like that was an embarrassment!"
"He was a mercenary, father! He's owed no such honors!"
"A duel is a duel! Now back to the city with you - you're no longer needed here!"
Appearing angered by her father's words, Yuelen turned about and headed back towards Khanbaliq in a huff; while she would never let it show, the shame she felt in this moment of disapproval was enough to make her want to weep.
Back at the foremost clashes of the attack, the lack of organization in the ranks of defenders was giving the feral monsters a decisive advantage - by the second, more and more soldiers were being taken to the ground and torn to pieces by the fiends. The grisly sights of it were also taking a hearty toll on the Mongolian battle morale.
Still lacking any form of substantive armor, Po was relying almost entirely on a combination of his chi attacks and inner peace redirection techniques to avoid lethal clawing strikes from the flesh eaters. The fighting began to reach its apex of intensity, the arriving Mongol reinforcements being matched evenly by even more swarming enemies. The line was on the brink of collapse, and they would soon be overrun and subject to unspeakably violent fates.
In the midst of the chaos, the panda heard Crane call out to him in desperation, "Po, you have to help Mei Ling!"
Indeed, as the Dragon Warrior searched for the golden cat amidst the fighting, he found her to be almost completely overtaken by the crazed remnants of what used to be steppe wolves. Trying to get to her in time, Po belly-gonged the nearest opponent before him, and this cut an effective pathway towards her. Leaping over the deranged group of canines with surprising fluidity for his size, the panda master drove them back temporarily with another burst of gold light. It was the brief reprieve that Mei Ling needed to reach into her tunic and reveal the much-contested Dagger of Deng-Wa.
"Panda, you have to use this now! It's our only chance!" she pleaded, offering him the archaic weapon.
"What? But we don't even know how it works!" Po replied frantically, elbowing an attacker from behind without turning his head. "Shifu said it's supposed to be like, super-mega-dangerous!"
"We have to try! You possess a greater source of chi than any of us here - take it!"
The surrounding cataclysm of battle all around the Dragon Warrior seemed to slow for a time, Po focusing solely on the metallic shard that now lay in the outstretched palm of the golden cat. For once, the infernal thing was completely still, as if having a mind of its own and sensing the gravity of the present moment. Everything in him, every fabric of his being - every shred of his instinct - was telling him not to touch this thing. But after looking up and seeing the desperation in Mei Ling's eyes, he realized all of his friends would surely die if he did not.
So there wasn't really a choice, then.
Taking into his grasp for the very first time the relic which had become the source of more strife than he ever thought imaginable, Po's entire body immediately tensed involuntarily from an unmatched wave of energy running through him like white-hot lightning. Facing towards the oncoming horde of demonic enemies, his eyes became bright golden orbs as he unconsciously raised the mythic weapon skyward - itself having now changed to a gilded shard of blinding yellow light.
For several more moments, the fighting all around him began to stop as everyone looked up at the otherworldly spectacle. Though sanity had long departed from the ferals, many of them also became entranced by the panda and the object in his grasp, both of which were beginning to levitate slightly from the ground as an upswell of air gathered inwards about this critical point. Realizing whatever was coming next was sure to be disastrous, the other masters wisely dove to the ground as quickly as possible.
In the final moment, the Dagger of Deng-Wa transmuted from the blinding triumphant gold into a deep crimson red; the eyes of the Dragon Warrior did the same, and the incomprehensibly powerful charge of energy was released in a mere fraction of a second. There was a mighty and entirely soundless airburst that shot forward and devoured everything before the Dragon Warrior, setting alight the very air itself in a cardinal blaze of hellfire. Anyone and everyone that stood to the south of the critical point of origin - where Po remained floating just above the ground - was instantaneously vaporized; in their wake, there remained naught but a mist of reddened chi energy to be whisked asunder by the steppe winds as if they had never even been there in the first place.
The terrifying horde of ferals, perhaps having previously been thousands strong, was reduced to several dozen in just one stroke; a number of the Khan's forces were also caught in the path of the annihilative seismic wave. The surviving portion of the army behind Po was left speechless and in abject terror of what they had just witnessed. Ganzorig, the sergeant who had finally arrived near the front lines only moments before, backed away at once. Being one of the few who may have had some clue as to what had caused this appalling destruction, he was even more afraid than the rest.
After another few tenuous seconds of levitation, the body of the Dragon Warrior dropped to the ground; the red glow faded from his eyes and the dagger followed suit, returning to the cold silver complexion of before. Waiting several more moments just for good measure, the other kung fu masters at last slowly rose once again. Mei Ling looked about to find that almost none of the enemy - which had been overwhelming them only seconds before - remained, and that Po was now motionless on the ground with the fabled weapon still in his grasp.
Shit...
The golden cat ran over to the fallen warrior straight away, rolling him over to his side as the dagger at last fell from his paw.
"By the gods, I've killed him for sure!" she exclaimed.
Crane and Tigress quickly joined her, the striped feline leaning over the monochrome bear and hastily trying to ascertain any signs of life.
"What the hell happened, Mei?!" the distraught avian master questioned. "Why did you give him the weapon?"
"I thought it was the only way! There were so many of them..." Mei pleaded, now on the verge of tears.
"Quiet! Both of you!" Tigress demanded, lowering an ear to Po's chest and searching for a heartbeat.
Agonizingly slow moments passed as they waited for her to voice her findings.
"He's alive!" she announced, having sensed a feint beating at last. "That explosion, whatever it was, it seems to have drained his life force..."
Though relieved, the other two were now just as concerned over what to do with the situation they now found themselves in. It was apparent to all the masters now that the old legends about the Dagger of Deng-Wa were all true - and then some.
"This thing... we can't let the Mongols have it, Mei." Crane concluded definitively, still in shock from what he had witnessed. "I know you have your oath, but this level of power - it's a threat to the entire world."
The golden cat hesitated, looking back briefly towards the walls of Khanbaliq. She lowered her gaze to the ground before returning it to the bird she loved so dearly.
"You're right, I see that now. I had just hoped that we... That there would be another path for us here."
"I know, but that path no longer exists. We need to leave right now, and get as far from this place as possible."
Tigress had no patience left for the discussion of the other two.
"Crane, come here - you're going to have to carry him!" she instructed.
As the bird master did as he was told, Tigress quickly grabbed the Dagger of Deng-Wa and motioned for the golden cat to follow. The four masters then made for the open steppe with all due haste, the unconscious Po being lifted away by Crane as fast as the bird could possibly manage. In the complete chaos and confusion following the debilitating airburst, almost none of the Khan's faithful soldiers even noticed them taking leave of the battlefield and into the southern wastes - that was, save for Ganzorig, who had managed to observe all that had just transpired in a steadfast attempt to fulfill his duty. He knew however, that reporting the news to his ruler would win him nothing but further scorn.
Some hours had passed since the frightful conclusion of the second battle that day, and Khasar Khan now sat amongst the ruinous remnants of what was once an otherwise-pleasant stretch of land to the south of his capital city. Though Gan, Altan, and several other retainers stood nearby, the Khan was mostly left completely alone as various Mongolian soldiers wandered about the scattered dead to and fro. The jubilant victorious atmosphere from before was now long gone, and it was hard to believe that just that very morning their army had prevailed over the infamous Qi-Dan clan. Khasar's improvised throne at the present moment was nothing more than a minor rock outcropping, and after hearing the bad news from Ganzorig, he had been contemplating there for quite some time.
There seemed to be nothing left to do but to sit and let the highly unprecedented events of the day sink in; while his city and family were safe, he had been robbed of his grand prize just as its full potential had been revealed at last. His crippled forces were in no condition to give chase to the masters who had left with such impressive speed. The ruler barely noticed as Subutai had slowly approached him, the ancient argali walking gingerly with the assistance of his shamanic staff.
"Well now - I bet you find this all thoroughly amusing, you old fool."
Subutai remained expressionless.
"I have never claimed to take great pleasure in my prophecies coming to fruition. That's something your father failed to understand as well."
"Oh really?" Khasar spat back, thoroughly miffed.
"I warned him of the dangers of continuing to invade Goryeo so recklessly. He made his own decisions."
The Khan rolled his eyes.
"Is there going to be a purpose to this conversation arriving at some point?"
"I figured that perhaps now, with you having seen for yourself the forces you are foolishly trying to control, that you might at last see reason and give up this personal quest of yours for the Deng-Wa artifact."
"You must be joking, Subutai. Certainly not now; least of all now!"
Now it was the argali's turn to appear annoyed. The Khan continued, nonetheless.
"I can envision myself already, holding it just as that silly panda did; but instead of some mangey pack of steppe rats, I would be facing down the most esteemed Imperial General of the Left, his hundred-thousand-strong legions helpless to stop me."
"You continue to misunderstand - sometimes I do wonder if you Khans manage to listen to anything at all."
"Funny. We'll see who is proven right in the end, old man." Khasar deflected, not interested in dealing with the shaman's insolence any further.
"Indeed – and thus, I have warned you on this matter for the final time. As you seem to be most keenly aware already, I am powerless to force you to do anything."
"That you are."
"Whether I like it or not is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe, but you will soon have the means to undertake this invasion of yours." Subutai paused, turning his head slightly to look back into a distance the Khan could not yet see. "Much sooner than you think, in fact."
Interest piqued by this final statement, Khasar rose from the outcropping he sat upon and climbed over it a short distance - and there it was. Outstretched into the horizon as far as he could see were riverine columns of marching soldiers, the vast armies of the Mongolian realms having arrived at last. By the heraldry, he could tell that nearly all of the clan hordes were represented in their ranks.
Now this is more like it.
After months upon months of fruitless waiting, the full force of Mongolia had been brought to bear. Khasar smiled, for he was now happier than he had been in such a very long time.
Author's Notes:
- Surprise! This one didn't take nearly as long haha
- Basically, I had originally intended for all of this to also take place in the previous chapter, but it would have been just far too much to cram in all at once
- Until next time!
