The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader looked over the situation and judged that the ice-block man — the one who had come out and sat straight down cross-legged to regulate his breathing as though nobody else existed — would be hard to handle. And the polite young gentleman, covered in wounds and still keeping his smile and his bearing, was no simple character either. The twin brothers were too well attuned to each other, and there were two of them, so taking one hostage would probably not be easy; their standing was also plainly on the lower side, guards to that young gentleman by the look of it, and holding one would not be worth much.

The tall, striking woman — there was no telling where she had come from, so no rash moves there.

Which left, in the end.

Two targets.

One was the thin man who had done the beating. The other was the fat man who had taken it.

The two of them looked about equally useless in terms of strength, but the thin one was a great deal better in character, in temper, in fighting spirit, in every respect. The fat one was mud that could not be troweled onto a wall.

“Now.” The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader traded a look with his companions and they settled it together: take the fat man hostage.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. In the instant his companions loosed several dozen fist-blasts as cover, the lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader sprang high like a hawk stooping on prey, swept down, and caught hold — with exactly the right timing — of the fat man just as his head came up out of the sea. He is a big man, but his movements are not merely nimble; his technique is ornamental and practical at the same time. The fat man had no time at all to struggle before he was hoisted bodily up, thrown to the edge of the relay blood-rune formation, and rolled neatly to a stop at the feet of several Heavenly Realm leaders.

“If you would rather not watch him die badly in front of you, then move. Go on and try it.” The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader was privately delighted. One strike and he had it, and he had genuinely shown his face in front of his companions. He had expected some difficulty; he had not expected it to go this smoothly.

“I’ll say this. I have a hundred ways to keep him alive right up until he comes apart.” The tall, stick-thin Heavenly Realm leader added his piece.

“What this city lord likes best is smashing a hostage’s bones one at a time.” The spherical, devil-muscled leader swung the gold-horned spiked hammer in his hand, indicating a rich store of experience in the torture of persons.

“Don’t waste the smashed bones. I happen to keep a Taba hound, and it likes nothing better than gnawing on human bone.” The rhinoceros-nosed, tusked Heavenly Realm leader explained that he was no good man either, and that in this world there was nothing he would not do except a good deed. To lend weight to the argument, he actually summoned a python-tailed Taba hound at Sky-rank level three.

The python-tailed Taba hound is an enormously greedy and enormously vicious giant hound breed of the Heavenly Realm.

A grown beast runs over twenty meters nose to tail, eight meters at the shoulder.

That mouth, with poison drooling from it.

One bite.

Can swallow a wild bull or a grass rhino.

The worst of it is that a python-tailed Taba hound has no pain nerves at all and its body heals itself superbly, so once it begins a fight it will not stop until the enemy is down. Among the Heavenly Realm’s many evil beasts it is one of the more notorious. It cannot compare with the ten great beasts — the Heavenly Realm Dragon, the Purgatory Hydra and the rest — of course, but in the eyes of ordinary Heavenly Realm people the Taba hound counts as a common and terrifying monster all the same.

For a man of his rank, a city lord, to get hold of a specially mutated python-tailed Taba hound.

And at Sky-rank level three, no less. That is not easy.

Without this python-tailed Taba hound to put down his many competitors, the rhinoceros-nosed leader might well never have gotten the post of elite squad leader in the advance corps.

The hound came out and started eating at once, and had swallowed two of the slaves beside it in the time it takes to blink.

Perhaps it found eating like that insufficiently bloody, insufficiently thrilling.

It pinned several more slaves under its forepaws and tore at them one after another with a mouthful of sharp teeth, biting each of them in half, taking a smug satisfaction in the agonized wailing and the fountaining blood… The tail behind it is a python, and it hissed as it took aim at the fat man, seemingly ready to swallow him whole. Powerfully acidic venom dripped from that snake’s mouth and spattered into the mud and sand, where it hissed too and gave off streams of black smoke.

“I surrender!” The fat man raised both hands high, signaling his willingness to be a law-abiding subject, to serve the Heavenly Realm’s righteous punitive army, and to make a qualified and loyal collaborator.

“I haven’t asked you anything yet!” The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader had nowhere to put his temper. Nobody needs you to surrender right now. Your role at present is to be an unyielding hostage, so your companions cannot harden their hearts and watch you die. Who gave you permission to surrender? Who told you to surrender?

“My lord, there’s no need to ask. I decided long ago. The moment the royal army arrives I go over to the royal army, loyal and faithful, unchanged for at least a hundred years.” The fat man’s face was entirely serious.

“Surrender is not permitted. We don’t take trash like you!” The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader was furious inside. If you surrender you’re not a hostage, so how am I supposed to threaten those young men and women over there?

“Eh?” The fat man went blank. There is a principle in this world by which surrender is not permitted?

On an ordinary day, the Heavenly Realm leaders would not have minded that piece of merit in the least. Someone from the Sky Tower surrendering — what a rare thing that would be.

Consider: the yokels here in the Sky Tower may be worthless in terms of strength, but they have a stubborn streak. In all the time since the incursions began, several tens of thousands have been killed, one way and another — kings and marquises, servants and slaves, warriors and commoners — and so far not one has been found willing to bend the knee and surrender. However frightened, however much pain a captured or condemned hostage is in, these yokels would rather die than submit… And the ones who look decrepit, even crippled from head to foot, are the hardest bone of all. Take one prisoner and he detonates on the spot and takes you with him. There is no sense in any of them of abandoning a fight to run, or of standing still and waiting to die.

At the moment, though, the situation was a complete shambles, and no amount of thinking about it — thinking until the brain cramped — would make it clear.

Surrender could not be accepted for now.

Follow the original plan first. Make the fat man a prisoner and a hostage, coerce his companions, and question out the actual truth. There would be time enough to consider accepting a surrender afterward.

The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader stepped forward and coughed. He hoped the young men and women over there had not heard the fat man’s little exchange, or this would become genuinely awkward. He clapped a hand over the fat man’s mouth first, hauled him up the way you lift a chicken, and shouted at the thin man across the way. “Listen. Your fat friend is in my hands. If you do not want us to cut out his heart and lungs, flay him and shave the meat off him, then stand up straight and listen to me.”

“I think that useless fat man had better die early and be reborn early.” The tall, striking woman over there canvassed her companions’ views.

“Agreed.” The twin brothers were sparing with words as with gold.

“He has decided to surrender, so he’s a traitor, and if he’s a traitor then it seems to have nothing to do with us.” The polite young gentleman put it that way, and everyone nodded and agreed. There is no reason for anyone to submit meekly just because the other side is coercing a contemptible traitor.

“With the fat man turned traitor, rescuing him is out of the question. Killing him is what’s called for — and I don’t think an ordinary killing will do, that would let him off far too lightly. His bones must be ground up and his ashes scattered, and the ashes thrown into the sea for the fish and shrimp to eat, so that not a trace of his body is left and he is gone from the world forever, as though he had never been born.” The thin man ground his teeth, and the more he said the angrier he grew. “In fact that isn’t enough to answer the hatred. I want to catch those fish and shrimp as well, burn them black, or fry them in an oil pan, and eat every one of them, and then pass a turd, so that the fat man exists in this world as excrement forever. I want the world to see what comes of turning traitor — what comes of clinging to life and fearing death and going over to the enemy for wealth and honor!”

“You idiot, it doesn’t hurt your back to stand there talking. If somebody had you by the collar with a great snake in front of your face, its tongue flicking in and out and licking your cheek, I think you’d surrender faster than this young master did. What are you showing off for? Aren’t you the same article I am? Do you think you can be a hero by hiding behind somebody else’s backside? Sooner or later they’ll get you too, and then you’ll have to call me boss, or this young master refuses to accept your surrender!” The fat man swore back at him at the top of his voice.

“You’re a traitor and you still dare put on airs?” The thin man heard that, went up in flames and charged in with his fist raised.

“Stop right there!” The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader was overjoyed.

One hand out.

And he had the thin man and the fat man both.

The fat man was good as gold and went perfectly still at once, more deferential and better behaved than the lowest house-slave. The thin man was the harder of the two. He took several heavy punches and went on struggling without a pause, and if his strength had not been so poor there would have been real difficulty holding him.

The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader was quietly pleased with himself when a shout went off at his ear. “Watch out — ambush!”

He turned to find the ice-block man, who had been sitting cross-legged the whole time, coming at him like lightning.

No time to dodge. He put a hand out and shoved the fat man forward.

He was only grazed by the fist-blast.

And a layer of frost condensed over his whole body on the instant — the right arm holding the fat man worst of all, which turned entirely to ice along with the fat man’s body.

A kick landed with a crack, and blood sprayed from the lion-headed leader’s throat. By the time it spattered on the ground it had already become blood-ice. If his companions had not come to his aid in time, the lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader seriously wondered whether he would have died on the spot under that string of attacks. The rhinoceros-nosed leader and the three-headed, six-armed leader staggered back several steps, and the muscle-sphere leader and the stick-thin leader both changed color at once, because at some point their feet had frozen to the ground.

The lion-headed Heavenly Realm leader felt his hand come up empty. The ice-block man had taken the thin man back.

An ice-block man that strong, nobody there could match.

But every one of them could see it.

The boy was an arrow at the end of its flight… He must have taken a serious wound before this, serious enough that he could barely hold himself up, and taking the thin man back had overdrawn him to his limit. Another minute of it and the boy would collapse.

“Hm.” The ice-block man put out a hand and summoned a platinum grimoire, which came near to frightening the Heavenly Realm leaders into wetting themselves. It was lucky the boy was badly hurt, or they would have been wiped out to a man. The ambush on a Vice Hall Master they had mentioned earlier was presumably this boy’s doing; when they said they had knocked over a Vice Hall Master in the spatial passage, it seems it was neither a lie nor a threat. The ice-block man genuinely has that kind of strength.

“We go back and rest, get ourselves in order, and then deal with this pack of dogs.” The tall, striking woman, with a small hippo whose silver-white neck carried an enormous collar, went into the ice-block man’s platinum grimoire along with the thin man, the twin brothers and the young gentleman.

Before he left, the ice-block man flicked out a finger-wind, meaning to kill the fat man — frozen into a human popsicle — outright.

Luckily the python-tailed Taba hound got in front of him first and spat out a ball of dense flame.

Which held the finger-wind off.

And the result, which left everyone on that field gaping, was that the unremarkable-looking finger-wind froze both the ball of dense flame and a Sky-rank level three python-tailed Taba hound solid. If the rhinoceros-nosed leader had not come to the rescue in time, his beloved Sky-rank level three hound would probably have become an ice sculpture.

If that ice-block man were allowed to get himself in order, every soul on that field would die without a grave to be buried in.

Fortunately, they now had the best possible reason to withdraw.

Somebody had finally surrendered to the army of righteousness.

The Heavenly Realm legions finally had somebody to walk in front and show the way… He might be a fat man with no combat value whatsoever, but it was a good start all the same, and better than having nothing at all.

And just as the Heavenly Realm leaders were preparing to take this precious worthless fat man back to their hidden camp and report upward, three enormous forces came down at once and pressed the whole field flat. The leaders, on the point of taking to the air, were driven back to the ground and nailed into the earth, and not one of them could move so much as a hair.

“I know one shouldn’t hold high hopes of garbage. But I truly did not expect that a thing arranged this many times, and simplified to this degree, still could not be brought off. Sometimes I would very much like to know what goes on inside the brains of stupid people. Why are they stupid to that extent? That they have no awareness of their stupidity and no shame about it is one thing — but then they must also outsmart themselves, and take themselves for the cleverest man alive. I truly cannot imagine why the world contains people like this. What value does such a person have in this world, beyond making other people angry?” Of the three who had come, the one in front was a tall and handsome young man. If a person had never seen a god and looked up at this young man, he would find that the young man’s features, his bearing and his manner came very close to what a god looks like in the mind.

“Your Highness!” One look at the man and the lion-headed leader and his companions were stunned.

“No. Please do not call me Your Highness.” The godlike man shook his head and waved a hand, again and again. “I do not have subordinates like you. If I did I would long since have been so ashamed and so guilty that I could not show my face. Suppose I had subordinates ten thousand times stupider than pigs — as you are — how would I ever look anyone in the eye? I might well kill myself. At the very least I would have to disfigure myself, or I could not possibly forgive myself. I sent you here to lay out a relay rune formation. You received the enemy instead, and threw ten kingdom lords into a spacetime whirlpool, and even that I can let go. Did I say anything about receiving back an enemy several hundred times stronger than you, disguised as a useless fat man, so he could work as an inside contact and wreck a temporary camp it took us a great deal of trouble to set up? Did I ask you to do a single thing besides the relay rune formation? I did not. So why must you outsmart yourselves and help me solve problems permanently beyond your capacity? If you did nothing at all, that would already be the greatest help you could give me. Could you let me have a moment of something like peace of mind? You will never know how many guardians this cursed Sky Tower has, or how frightening they are, and with your intelligence you will never work out how a rural place full of bumpkins can produce figures who can stand against the Divine Hall… You understand nothing, and yet you must help me solve work that should not be yours, that does not need to be yours, that is not yours to take up in the first place. Before I lose control of my anger — get out. Get as far away as you can. Preferably never appear in front of me again. And listen: not one of you is to look at me with that idiot’s expression again, and not one of you is to make another single idiot noise, of the kind that makes me want to vomit when I hear it, calling me Your Highness… Get out.”

Before the lion-headed leader and the others could react, the fat man — frozen into a block of ice — moved.

Fast as lightning.

Unfortunately.

Three figures faster than lightning cut off his line of escape.

A hand came up, and a pillar of destroying light fired out. In a roar that shook heaven and earth it reduced most of the island to nothing, vaporized a wide stretch of the swell behind it, and left an enormous trench cut into the sea that would take a long while to close again.

What made the lion-headed leader and the rest bulge their eyes and drop their jaws was that the fat man, who had looked so useless a moment ago.

Was standing at the very center of that pillar of light.

And with nothing but his two hands raised.

Had fanned the pillar into a spray and canceled destructive force on that scale.

Across a wide area behind him the ground was simply gone, leaving a deep, scooped-out fan of beach. The fat man, who had looked a moment ago as though a sneeze would blow him past the ninth heaven, stood there like a war god with everything above the waist burned to ash — upright, immovable as a mountain, with a strength about him that felt as though the massed force of the whole world could not shift him a hair.

This — this is really that dead fat man who was begging for mercy a minute ago, sunk low enough to go over to the enemy at the first opportunity?

Impossible.

Something has to be wrong somewhere.

The lion-headed leader, the rhinoceros-nosed leader, the three-headed and six-armed leader — every one of them felt his brain go to chaos, his thinking stiffen and refuse to turn.

Standing in front of the fat man were the three who had pressed the whole field flat a moment ago, and the young man in the middle, with a faint smile and the bearing and manner of a god, said, “If I have not mistaken you, you are the one they call the Sky Tower’s second genius. The Meat Mountain Demon King, Hai Dafu.”

The fat man heard that and smiled, and the smile begged to be hit. “You say this young master is the Sky Tower’s second genius, and I don’t much object, because as the boss, letting a little brother have first place, encouraging a little brother’s confidence — that is the basic example a boss with an open heart and a broad breast, high moral character and exceptional humility ought to set. That’s nothing. But when you say Meat Mountain Demon King, that is an error of the most thoroughly mistaken kind. For a dashing, elegant, handsome, romantic young man of means such as myself, any title at all other than the barely adequate Jade-Faced Little Flying Dragon comes off pale and shallow. If it weren’t your first time meeting me, and if you weren’t so very polite, I would consider suing you for slander. Don’t do it again. A man should keep his feet on the ground and tell the truth. However jealous you may be of my handsome face, you cannot blacken it deliberately. In fact I am a very low-key person, never one for fame or profit — don’t believe me, go and ask around somewhere with nobody in it. Young Master Hai here may be loved by every person and picked up by every carriage in the Sky Tower, but he has always been a silent, practical, public-spirited, warm-hearted, stick-a-knife-in-both-ribs-for-a-friend good man, a great man, a true hero who stands between heaven and earth. If you don’t believe me, let me stick two knives in you and see — I guarantee you’ll understand my character immediately.”

“…” The three across from him listened, and somewhere in the middle of it were thunderstruck into stone by this shameless fat man.

It was hard to watch the fat man carrying on like a small man who has come up in the world.

To the young man’s left, a refined middle-aged man with the air of a scholar could not help saying, “That sounds like something your Yue Third Young Master would say.”

Anybody else would have been embarrassed. But this was Sea Fatty, the thickest face to be found in ten thousand years, who did not take it as anything at all, and waved a hand grandly. “That boy does have a distinctive way of talking. Makes an impression on people. But he learned all of it from me, his boss.”

Run into a shameless article like that, and what can anybody do about him?

A man low enough is unbeatable.

Which is nothing less than the truth.

(End of Chapter 1220)