Being smashed through a table hadn't stunned Kai much, but the hand around his neck felt like steel. How the hell could such a thin woman wield so much strength? She kept him pinned there, apparently determined to suffocate him.
Whatever strange power she possessed, it flowed in her far more powerfully now. He had no idea what abilities she might have or how they worked, but he was sure that she hadn't been faking her illness. That ant that the dicine she had swallowed must have been responsible for her improvent, so before he did anything else...
Kai sloppily swung at her face with his off-hand and the foreign woman tilted her head out of the way contemptuously. An instant later he ramd his other fist into her stomach with his true speed. She gagged, and her grip weakened enough for him to throw her off.
As soon as he was up, he didn't take any chances: Kai kicked her in the stomach hard enough to send her sliding across the room. When she stopped against so boxes, she began to vomit black bile again. He remained alert for a trap, but he didn't think she was faking the trembling in her limbs. It seed that his blows had effectively interrupted her absorption of the pill.
"I save you and this is how you thank ?" Kai put his hands on his hips and stared at her, but she glared back darkly.
"I know all about the 'thanks' you want. You disgust ."
"Whoa, wait!" The venom in her voice took him completely off guard and Kai found himself on the defensive even though she was the one who had attacked him. "You think I'm going to try to extort sothing out of you?"
"Of course you are."
"Is it so hard to believe that soone might help you because it's the right thing to do?"
"Yes." She stared at him with a baleful gaze that held not the slightest shred of doubt.
"Fine, I can see I'm not going to convince you." Kai faked a sheepish smile as he shifted his weight, then lunged to grab her box of dicine. Her eyes widened and she froze. "I want to give you these and let you go on your way, but I need so kind of reassurance that you won't imdiately take another pill and try to murder ."
"I swear on my honor that I will not raise a hand against you."
"Is that how your people swear oaths?"
"No, I was imitating you." The woman's eyes narrowed as she examined him. "I still think I hate you, but I can see we'll have to cooperate. What do you propose?"
"Let's start things off on a better note." Kai gave her a real smile. "My na is Kai Granfian. May I have your na?"
"You may not."
He stared at her, trying to determine if it was a joke, then sighed and moved on. "Even at your full strength, I don't think you can just leave here. I also need to get out of here before the rest of the smuggling gang shows up." When he'd started talking, Kai hadn't known where he was going, but as he looked over the boxes a plan ca together. "There was a wagon out back, I think. I'll take it out and you can hide in the back until we leave town. Nobody touches anybody, nobody murders anybody. Does that sound acceptable?"
After another pause, the woman nodded. While Kai retrieved his arrows and pulled together so fake supplies, she sank down into her chair and shuddered through a series of racking coughs. Many of the wounds crossing her face had broken open again and her ragged clothes were further stained as if her entire body was bleeding. If that black bile really was blood.
After staring over all the bodies of the smugglers, Kai threw them all into a pile in front of the cage. It would have been better to interrogate them or drag them all back to the city for judgnt, but maybe this would scare the rest of the gang off enslaving any more people. The world was probably better off without them, he just wished that he could have made more of a difference.
Once he attempted his plan, the woman cooperated without further complaint. With her covered by a tarp in the back, the wagon looked ordinary enough, so Kai began to pull it away. It was unusual for a warrior to pull a wagon themselves, but his strength was more than up to it. Hopefully by the ti anyone thought it odd, he would be long gone.
Every step of the way, Kai was sure that sothing would go wrong. Smugglers would pour out of nearby buildings, or a leader with a powerful Class would appear, or the heavens would strike him with lightning because they just hated him that much. But he only got a few odd glances. With every step further away from the town, Kai began to accept that it might work, and once the buildings were tiny on the horizon he could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
"That worked better than I expected." He turned back to see what insult the woman would throw at him next, but there was no response.
When he checked underneath the tarp, he found her lying unconscious. She groaned in pain, yet didn't wake up, even as more blood dribbled from her mouth. Without her power or her hatred, she was a miserably bedraggled thing. Kai felt sorry for her, even though he was certain that she would have hated it.
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Since she didn't seem likely to wake up, Kai didn't abandon the wagon after all and kept putting distance between them and the town. Once he needed to stop to ward off a minor monster, but otherwise it was a smooth trip. He noticed that her coughs seed to be getting worse and she was delirious, babbling in the language she had used previously.
Since she seed to be getting worse, Kai stopped and tried to help her drink so water. She drank a little but struggled if he ever touched her, so he backed away. After so thought, Kai pulled out her thin box and removed one of the pills.
She was too delirious to take the pill, but he managed to feed it to her with so more water. It wasn't long before her eyes shot open and her entire body tensed. Kai braced himself in case she charged at him again, but this ti she remained calm.
"Do you think I'll be grateful for this?" she asked.
"Given your behavior," Kai said, "I'll be glad if you choose not to spit in my face."
To his surprise, she gave a slight laugh. She seed almost as surprised and returned to her scowl. "You have done the bare minimum, nothing worthy of any great honor, but I have done worse. I apologize for my behavior."
"If you don't choke again, don't worry about it." Kai finally let himself relax a little and set down her bundle of things on one of the boxes. "You don't have to tell anything if you don't want to. You can run off if you insist. But you'll leave wondering what the hell was going on here for the rest of my life. Would you really do that to ?"
For a long ti she didn't answer him, dark eyes staring into his. Eventually she nodded, almost to herself, and spoke in a low voice. "My na is Zae Zin Nim."
"Well, that's... not a na I've heard before."
"I ca to your continent for reasons I prefer not to divulge. My condition is manageable, but I underestimated how much it would weaken , and I fell into... unfortunate circumstances." Zae... or Zin? Or Nim? lowered her head and frowned. "I doubt they would have been able to extract my qi, but I'm glad they didn't get the chance to try."
Not sure what exactly she ant, Kai focused on the concrete: "I don't know how things work where you co from, but we try to be fair here. What is it you're trying to do? Is there any way we can help each other?"
"And now the question of compensation." The foreign woman was on her feet in an instant, glaring down at him. "As expected."
"I don't an anything like that! You use a power completely different than anything I've seen. Can't you at least teach the basics?"
"It's likely not worth it. To judge your potential as a cultivator, I would need to analyze your dantian. Are you willing to take a strike from without resisting?"
"A non-lethal one?" Kai squared his shoulders. "Do it."
She flitted forward, her palm striking him in the stomach. The force alone was enough to make him stumble back, but it didn't really hurt. Much more concerning was the fact that he could feel so alien power inside him, like spinning water... he tried to grasp it, force it to move like mana, and it slipped between his fingers.
The woman frowned and made a gesture, pulling the power back out of him. She seed to consider it for a mont, then shook her head.
"How odd. I didn't expect any barbarians here to even grasp qi, but you tried to adapt to it." She slid her hands into her sleeves and regarded him somberly. "You could think of cultivators as having many different characteristics. Inborn talents that hard work can barely change. Your dantian is unusually large, and you're more perceptive than I expected. Strong ability to retain qi as well. But there is no point in trying to train you."
"Why not?" Kai asked. "Those sounded like good things."
"There is another capacity that you could think of as 'growth,' aning the ability to use qi to move toward the next stage of cultivation. Obviously, this factor is far more important than all the others combined, since high growth will outstrip all other factors given a little ti. I'm afraid your growth rate is slower than any I've ever seen... why are you laughing?"
Kai couldn't help himself and laughed until he had to wipe tears from the corner of his eyes. "A skill from a different continent... an entirely different form of power... and fate still has it out for ." He got himself under control and focused on her. "So you won't help ?"
"You may not be a repulsive man, but I can feel your hunger for power. I want no part in it. I will rember you with respect if I never lay eyes on you again."
She leapt away from the wagon and disappeared into the wilderness with startling speed. Kai hadn't been able to get a good look, but he didn't think her feet had been touching the ground as much as they should have. Clearly it was so sort of foreign technique.
If she had been in good health and tried to fight him, Kai doubted that he could have won. Her strength had been intimidating, her speed seed even greater, and he had no idea what strange powers they might manifest on her ho continent. That word stuck in his mind... it was literally the first ti he'd t soone from another continent. Usually the other continents were abstract myths, so far from ho as to be irrelevant.
Since she'd been so clear about her intentions, Kai decided that he had no choice. He packed a crate of the valuable goods from the wagon and began heading back to the city.
Along the way, he couldn't help but think about Zae Zin Nim. Given her power, he hoped that she would be okay on her own, but that clearly hadn't been true in the past. Whatever illness she carried, it was more than enough to overco her. For hunters, they usually beca resistant to disease as they grew stronger, but he had no idea what kinds of exotic conditions might exist elsewhere.
He found himself wondering if his actions with the smugglers would have serious consequences. They seed to have stumbled on the foreign woman and had no idea what they were doing, and they didn't have an easy way of retaliating against him. There didn't seem to be a good way to track down or investigate their operations, if they had any. Could the entire matter really just end? A brief incident in his life that he would think back on as an old man in confusion?
That assud that he would make it to old age. Kai shook his head and focused on the here and now.
The remaining days of the journey dwindled, and miraculously he wasn't attacked by any monsters he couldn't handle. Kai even resud so of his exercises, both to keep himself alert and to press against his limits. He was going to have so much to do once he got back.
By the ti he saw the city gates, he had an entire list in his head. Take a bath, get the flask from Juray, eat a proper al, report at the Hunters Guild, check if Inafay had returned, see if the jeweled dagger had any value...
Kai hadn't even gotten ho when all those plans were thrown from his mind because Gunjin Granfian appeared in front of him with a scowl on his face.
"You're finally back, Kai. We need to talk."
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