Almost in the very next instant after the disaster arrived.
"Mr. Ke Jie, look out!!!"
Bai Wuxie reacted first and called out.
"You too, Xiao Bai!!!"
Ke Jie threw himself to one side, remembering to warn her as he went.
The next second.
"CRUNCH!"
A claw studded with several grey-iron pudao smashed table thirteen to splinters.
The claw tips sliced through the floor tiles with ease and sank into the ground. Anyone who had not dodged would have died on the spot.
But.
Ke Jie had barely got to his feet, with no time yet to catch his breath.
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!"
Three more bursts came down through the ceiling.
The whole barbecue joint gave out the sound of something loaded past bearing.
Ke Jie's eyes met Bai Wuxie's across the aisle, and in that instant the two of them finished a conversation with a look alone.
Trading blows with an enemy head-on inside a cramped shop was absolutely not the sensible move. What mattered right now was getting out to the open ground beyond the door and working out what to do.
The moment that brief exchange of glances ended.
Ke Jie and Bai Wuxie moved at once.
"Sword Maiden of the Dongdu Judgment Hall, on scene! Everyone, evacuate to the street immediately!"
Bai Wuxie turned on a coin, calm and focused as she cleared the crowd out.
Having her delicious late supper ruined had made her angry enough to want to cut that damned Blade Demon down where it stood, but in her heart she still chose to put the evacuation first.
"Thank God! It's a Sword Maiden from the Judgment Hall!"
"What are you standing around for? This is a Blade Demon attack!"
"I never thought my shop would end up like this..."
People's reactions varied a good deal.
Out of trust in what a Sword Maiden was and fear of a Blade Demon's arrival, everyone who had not died in the first wave got out of the shop smoothly.
At the same moment.
"Whish! Whish! Whish!"
Ke Jie, driving for the door, dodged one falling claw strike after another from the ceiling.
In those black eyes there was not a trace of the terror or panic of a man walking the line of death, only the cold of calm and reason.
"Careful!"
He even had enough left in him to haul aside a man nearby who was evacuating and had nearly been caught by a blow.
He understood perfectly well that the enemy's target was him, not indiscriminate slaughter.
Before long.
"CRACK!"
The barbecue joint behind him was close to collapse.
Ke Jie got out in time, went into a roll, came up turning, and fixed his eyes straight on the Blade Demon crouched on the shop's roof.
By its look alone it stood nearly two storeys high, its trunk condensed out of a dark red shadow so thick it seemed solid.
Chains congealed out of Blade Qi bound a great many jet-black iron pudao to the four limbs it planted on the ground.
Apart from a single vast crimson eye in its head that leaked a very human venom, there was not one human thing about it.
A monster of nearly truck size: this was the enemy Ke Jie now had no choice but to meet.
"RAAAH!!!"
Roaring like a beast, the Blade Demon met Ke Jie's eyes across the air.
That huge scarlet eye gave off a spite and a hatred cold enough to freeze the blood.
"Whoa! What the hell is that thing?!"
A passer-by nearby could not help crying out.
"Get well back if you don't want to die!"
Ke Jie's voice was ice as he drove them off.
At that.
The crowd that had just cleared the shop and the pedestrians on the street scattered in every direction, and the whole street slid toward chaos.
At which the Blade Demon on the barbecue joint's roof made to pull its limbs free of the building.
"SHNG!"
A brilliant flash of golden sword-light went past.
"Thud."
The Blade Demon's neck snapped at the sound and its head dropped to the ground.
Hard on that, a figure came flying out of the shop and stopped in front of Ke Jie.
"Thank goodness... you're all right, Mr. Ke Jie."
Bai Wuxie let out a long breath of relief.
At some point the glacier-blue dress on her had turned into an armoured battle skirt, the white-and-gold skirt plates gleaming with the texture of fish scales.
Her cerulean eyes had likewise become the golden slit pupils of a dragon, like flowing magma, carrying a deterrence and a wildness that were not human.
Most arresting of all was... the double-edged longsword she gripped in her hand, black-bodied and gold-veined, a golden dragon coiling the hilt, the flat of the blade engraved with the pattern of seven stars in a row: a Spring-and-Autumn-style blade — the Seven-Star Dragon Abyss Sword.
"So this is your Sword Maiden form, Xiao Bai."
Struck by the sight, Ke Jie's mouth curved faintly upward.
"Sir! On duty you address the post. Please call me by my Sword Maiden code name, 'Longquan'."
Bai Wuxie corrected him with a rare seriousness.
Which amounted to admitting who she was by another route.
"Oh? Does Miss Longquan mean she looks down on an ordinary friend like me?" Ke Jie could not resist keeping a straight face and needling her.
"S-sir... don't be like that!"
Bai Wuxie flushed red, at a total loss.
"You didn't deny it, so I'll take that as a yes, Xiao......"
Ke Jie, unable to hold back the urge to bicker with his new friend, got halfway through before his face changed.
"GET DOWN!!!"
The words were barely out.
He grabbed hold of Bai Wuxie and hauled her down behind him, throwing his own weight back so that he toppled to the ground.
"RIP!"
A razor claw tip screamed past, grazing his belly and leaving a cut neither deep nor shallow.
The headless body of the Blade Demon that had just struck stood over the two of them where they had fallen.
"Why...? A First-Fall Tier Blade Demon should have been dead for good!" Bai Wuxie was stunned blank for a moment.
"Nngh..." Ke Jie clenched his teeth and swallowed down the pain from his belly.
He got up fast and pulled Bai Wuxie, who had not caught up yet, back with him.
Perhaps because its head's line of sight was blocked, the headless body of the Blade Demon stood frozen where it was and did not take the chance to pursue.
It only turned slowly, reached out a forelimb to take hold of the head on the ground, and fitted it back onto the neck bit by bit.
That bought Ke Jie and Bai Wuxie close to half a minute of precious breathing room.
"Damn it... it isn't a First-Fall Tier Blade Demon. It should be the Quasi-Demon Tier, the kind you have to shatter the core to kill." Leaning against the concrete wall on the far side of the street, Ke Jie forced the pain down and analysed it calmly.
Those black eyes were mixed through with self-reproach and regret.
If he had realised sooner, several passers-by would not already have been dragged in and died horribly.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Ke Jie... I was careless." Bai Wuxie's expression darkened, and she bowed her head in deep self-blame.
It was the first time she had faced an enemy of this class in a real fight. Most of what she had met before were First-Fall Tier Blade Demons and Sword Fiends, and more often the demon-beasts and fiend-beasts derived from them.
That her own inexperience had got a new friend hurt and innocent bystanders killed left her hard-pressed not to feel ashamed.
"Now is not the time to be low, Xiao Bai. Don't worry about me, I'll keep myself hidden. All you have to do is carry out your duty as a Sword Maiden to the fullest." Ke Jie's eyes were level and his voice gentle as he steadied her.
"Right! I carry the same duty as countless seniors before me, to guard human civilisation, and at the very least, I want to guard you, sir!" Bai Wuxie threw off the slump and turned to look at the distant Blade Demon, her gaze firm.
A pair of brilliant golden dragon slit pupils burned bright.
The right hand gripping the Seven-Star Dragon Abyss Sword had stopped shaking.
In this moment the ordinary girl named Bai Wuxie had faded away, and the Judgment Hall Sword Maiden code-named "Longquan" had woken and taken the stage.
"Sir... leave the rest to me."
"Xiao Bai... then I'll be watching. Its core is somewhere about three centimetres below the neck. I saw it just now, while it was fitting its head back on."
"Mm! Thank you, sir~ I'll keep it in mind."
The moment that rare breathing space ended.
It was time for the fight to the death with that Blade Demon.
"So you mean to stand in the way of my revenge too? Sword Maiden of the Judgment Hall!"
The Blade Demon crawled down from the roof, snarling.
"Slaughtering innocent people is something I will never forgive!"
Bai Wuxie's face was cold as she answered.
"RAAAH!!!"
The Blade Demon pounced in an instant.
It raised a foreclaw and drove it down with force.
"CLANG!"
Only for Bai Wuxie to catch and hold it on a two-handed guard.
Without a sound, a phantom dark-gold sword sheath, condensed out of pure Sword Qi, sleeved itself over the Seven-Star Dragon Abyss Sword.
In that instant.
"Longquan Sword... drawn."
Bai Wuxie twisted with the force and shed it, letting the Blade Demon's foreclaw skid into the ground.
At the same time her left hand closed loosely on the sheath while her right hauled hard on the hilt and drew the blade.
"SHNG!"
The gold-inlaid pattern of seven stars in a row on the blade flared with light in answer.
Seven cerulean stars the size of fists appeared, moving irregularly around the Blade Demon.
Then.
"Tk-tk-tk!"
Bai Wuxie broke into a fast, practised run, her footfalls ringing off the ground.
She went first for the star nearest her and cut it down without hesitation.
The star she struck stalled at once, then drifted slowly up to hang above Bai Wuxie's head.
"First one. Tianshu."
Then.
At a speed visibly twice what it had been, she dodged the Blade Demon's late attack while running for the remaining six stars, counting as she went.
In the space of a few short minutes.
With every star she cut, the Big Dipper above her head came one part closer to complete.
And Bai Wuxie's physical attributes rose across the board by a further measure of her original baseline.
More than that, each star carried its own particular added effect.
Tianshu — slows the movement of the other irregularly moving stars.
Tianxuan — draws the other irregularly moving stars closer.
Tianji — accelerates thought, to the point of a brief "time stop"......
Once all seven stars stood in a row, Bai Wuxie could deliver a blow that carried an "instant death" effect.
This was the Sword Art belonging to her Sword Soul "Longquan" alone — "Seven-Star Dragon Slaying".
An art whose ceiling and whose floor were both terrifyingly high.
As a teammate, an ability like Bai Wuxie's was deeply reassuring.
As an enemy, the Blade Demon fighting her right now was thoroughly out of luck.
It watched helplessly as Bai Wuxie shifted from her opening hit-and-run into a head-on fight aimed straight at its weak point.
By the fourth star in particular, she could kick its full-strength claw strike away with one foot.
That woke in it a fear it had not felt in a long time — the fear of overwhelming power, of the kind Ke Jie's father had possessed.
And so.
The Blade Demon, which had meant to hold its hand and force out whatever Ke Jie was hiding, stopped holding back.
"BOOM!"
It sprang up onto the shattered roof of the barbecue joint.
The two claws studded with grey-iron pudao lit with a pale white blade-glare, and it hauled them out hard to the left and right.
"This is bad!"
Bai Wuxie, about to give chase, went pale.
Almost in the instant after the Blade Demon swung.
"WHOOM!"
A short, sharp tearing of air.
Two lattices of grey-white Blade Qi, layered thick over each other and still spreading, shot suddenly outward toward the two ends of the street.
They moved so fast that even Bai Wuxie, with four stars stacked, could barely keep up with one of them.
Which meant she had to choose one direction, left or right, to intercept.
Choose the left, and she could shield Ke Jie, the subject of her assignment.
Choose the right, and she could protect the greater number of people who had not yet got clear.
Whichever she did not choose would very likely be a slaughter.
This was the Blade Demon's open stratagem, a scheme built on the weakness of character it had felt out in the fighting before.
"......"
Bai Wuxie's face was pained, and she said nothing.
Those pale golden eyes flickered faintly toward where Ke Jie was, then quietly straightened again.
What she did next was her answer......
At the same moment.
Ke Jie was weaving and tangling with the Blade Demon among the rubble.
Using its size, its relative clumsiness and the blind spots in its vision, and adding agile footwork of his own, he managed to tie it up for a short while.
But he was, in the end, no Blade Wielder and no Sword Maiden, and eventually he took a careless hit to the belly from the Blade Demon's foreclaw and was sent flying into the base of a broken concrete wall.
"Cough, cough-cough!"
Propped against the wall, Ke Jie coughed up several mouthfuls of dark red blood that stained his palm.
With no time to check his own injuries, he immediately put his head out to watch what the Blade Demon was doing.
The first thing he caught was the Blade Demon, which appeared to be gathering Blade Qi to cut this way but in fact had something else in mind, its eye full of amusement.
Could it be... that he was only ever bait?
That the whole arrangement, the whole calculation, had been for......
"Xiao Bai! Don't come over here!"
His pupils contracted sharply, and Ke Jie shouted the warning.
"Too late."
The mockery in the Blade Demon's eye all but spilled over.
Its right claw lifted, dropped, then abruptly changed line into a thrust.
Straight into the path she had to take to get around it to Ke Jie.
"Shk."
At precisely the right moment it ran Bai Wuxie through the side of the abdomen, then flung its right claw and threw her onto the open ground beside Ke Jie.
It intended to torment this Sword Maiden thoroughly in front of Ke Jie before it finished its revenge.
"Xiao Bai, you really are an idiot. If you'd just abandoned me, you could have covered everyone else getting out......"
Ke Jie's face was bloodless as he murmured it.
His left hand was clamped hard over his midsection, and a scalding red was seeping faintly between his fingers.
That was blood running from a long narrow cut, through the thin fabric of his black shirt.
In this moment.
Time in the whole world seemed to slow.
"So, I'm going to die......"
He understood in his heart. An ordinary person with his belly opened by a Blade Demon's claw tip was certain to die.
"Is even Xiao Bai nearly gone? If only I were stronger... if I'd become a Blade Wielder, how good that would have been."
Ke Jie's face was ashen as he stared and stared at his own reflection in the pool of blood on the ground.
Thinking that far, a thousand thoughts churned through him.
"Am I giving up just like that? Am I going to accept an ending like this so obediently?"
"Never getting my revenge is one thing, but I couldn't even protect a friend I'd only just made. Is someone like me really worth Xiao Bai's love, or anyone's?"
"I'm sorry, Father. I'm afraid I can't avenge you. Goodbye, Xiao Bai. Goodbye, world......"
Ke Jie closed his eyes slowly.
His vision was swallowed up by darkness bit by bit.
"Drip. Drip."
Tears sliding from the corners of his eyes fell without a sound onto the pool of blood.
In his daze he half heard a voice by his ear, strange and familiar at once:
"Open your eyes, Ke Jie. If nothing else, I never taught you to weep in front of an enemy!"
At that.
Hearing a call nearly identical to his father's, Ke Jie slowly opened his eyes.
What met them was a sacred place he had only ever heard of and never once witnessed for himself.
"Don't tell me this is the Blade-and-Sword Soul Barrow, where Blade Wielders and Sword Maidens awaken?"