Chapter 10: Scream Of Demon

The creature broke off from Lian and came at her full speed, three long, wrong-jointed strides closing the gap.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t slow down.

A strip of yellowed paper was already between two fingers. She let it fall rather than threw it small, exact, like the final press of a brush leaving the paper. It touched the concrete and flared white and vanished, and her body slid sideways through the air with no push behind it, no step her own legs had taken, robes snapping once with the force of a motion that belonged to nothing standing in the tunnel.

The creature’s claws passed through empty air where her throat had been.

She was still moving when the words began, gravity only catching her as the line ended, settling her onto that same dragging, uneven stride, like the fall had always been part of the form.

"Lord Lao above. Witness this ground. Something here wears meat it was never given. I call it out under your name, not mine."

The one working light guttered, then steadied darker. Grit lifted off the concrete into a thin grey haze around her ankles. The cold thickened near the floor until Lian’s breath fogged in front of his face for the first time all night.

He couldn’t tell whether he should be more afraid of her or of the thing she’d just dodged. She’d complained about her knees over that shop counter just hours ago. She’d called him "brat." None of that squared with what he was watching now.

A second talisman was already burning between her fingers he never saw her hand move to draw it. She pressed it flat to her palm. Gold light bled up through the paper’s grain, a character forming stroke by stroke, pressure shifting inside each line the way a brush thickens and thins. The smell reached him even from where he sat, hot metal and old incense, sharp enough to sting his throat.

"You have no house, no line, no rites said over you. Get back under the earth that spat you out. Swiftly, swiftly, as the statutes command."

She flung her palm forward. The character tore free, unraveling into a thread of gold that struck the creature square in the chest. The grey flesh drew inward around the mark, folding the way a photograph curls before it blackens. Smoke lifted off the wound. A slow drop of something dark slid down its ribs and hissed against the concrete.

Its next step came slower, the whole right side of its body drawn tight around the mark.

It threw its head back and the sound that came out split into two notes at once, one thin and one grinding, like two throats screaming through one mouth. Then it cut off, sudden.

It staggered a full step back.

For one bright second, Lian let himself believe it was over.

It wasn’t. The creature caught itself, hunched low, and dragged something up out of its ruined throat that only half-arrived as words.

"You’ll—" a wet click, something shifting behind its teeth, "—p-pay. For that. B-both of you. Pay."

His own arm throbbed with every pulse. The cut hadn’t closed. The edges had gone a deeper red, the skin around them darkening in a way that didn’t look like ordinary bruising. Blood kept dripping into a pool that had stopped beading and started forming a sheet.

Fuck. That’s a lot of blood.

He clamped his other hand over it, and warmth kept seeping through anyway. He wondered whether an ordinary cut bled like this, or whether something had come into him along with the wound that didn’t intend to stop.

The old woman was already moving again, that same dragging step carrying her low slower now than the first time, her breath audibly shorter, one hand braced briefly against her own knee before she straightened and this time she pressed the next talisman flat against the ground and dragged her fingers away, the motion less steady than before. The character spread outward like ink bleeding into wet paper, racing up the creature’s forward leg before it could react, gold threads wrapping ankle to knee and cinching down all at once with a sound like rope drawn through a knot too small for it.

"That bone still remembers whose it was. Hold. Answer to it. Not to the thing riding it."

The creature tried to step and the bound leg refused it, buckling under its own weight.

"I’ll k-kill—" the words buckled as the binding cinched tighter, a wet gasp swallowing half the sound, "—both. Him. Then... you."

The rest dissolved into a shriek as its own weight betrayed the seized joint. It didn’t break the light. It tore its own leg apart to get past it, the dislocation opening with a grinding crack Lian felt behind his molars, grey-black fluid sheeting down the ruined limb and hissing against the ground. The creature closed the last distance on a leg that no longer bent right, dragging worse with every step.

There was no time for her to steady herself.

Its arm reaching further than the space between them should have allowed drove forward and down, and its hand punched into her stomach just below the ribs.

The arm kept going. It came out the other side.

She made no sound at first, only a small breath, looking down at the limb buried through her own body. Blood ran in thick lines down the creature’s forearm, dripping in heavy drops onto the concrete between them.

"No!" Lian’s voice cracked.

He thought he should do something

Then the rest of the thought caught up with him, worse than the first half. Even if his legs worked, even if he could stand right now, there was nothing he could actually do. No talisman. No mantra. Nothing but two hands and a bleeding arm and a body that never faced an situation like this..

I’m pathetic. A fucking loser. I’m just some ordinary guy , what am I even supposed to do, sit here and watch her die, and then I’m gonna die next

A short, broken laugh scraped out of him, nothing like real laughter. Some hardcore run I never signed up to play. And I’m already about to lose it.

The creature wrenched its arm free with a sound he’d spend a long time trying not to remember. She staggered, one hand pressed to the ruin of her own stomach, blood soaking the edge of her sleeve dark and heavy, dripping steadily off her elbow.

She didn’t fall.

"Your name," she said, her voice gone thin, almost gentle, almost curious. "Before I go. Tell me your name."

The creature went still, all at once,it said Tāotiè

Her jaw went tight. Her eyes fixed on something far past the tunnel walls.

She didn’t stop to feel it. Her lips were already moving into the next working before the name had finished dying in the air, syllables harder-edged than anything he’d heard from her yet, each one landing like a nail driven flush in one strike.

"Nomen tuum teneo. Anima tua mihi obligata est. Cede, umbra nam te nominavi."

The air around her hands began to tighten.The ground split open in thin lines of light around the creature’s feet, and chains tore up out of the cracks, wrapping its ruined leg, its arms, its throat, hauling it down to its knees with a force that rattled the tunnel walls.

She stared at her own hands like they belonged to someone else.

"...That actually worked." A short, disbelieving breath. "My master went abroad, once. Studied their methods and the Church’s rites, all of it. I never thought I’d need any of it."

Then it let out an scream in high pitched tone

"EEEEEKHHHH"

"arriving from behind them , beside them , and they can hear it even from inside their skull,This made her lose control over tāotiè for a second