"Hey! I told you to go first — so what are your legs shaking for?" Xia Ya barked, glaring at him with not an ounce of conscience.
The pitiful Mr. Consort's eyeballs rolled every which way, fixed on the pheasant already burned to charcoal out on the marsh, and he thought: If I really do what you say and walk out there, that chicken's fate is my fate.
But with the big man glaring murder at him, how would Oakes dare shake his head and breathe a single word of no?
Driven to the very last of his rope, Oakes was suddenly visited by a flash of inspiration. He grunted twice, rolled his eyes hard, went into convulsions all over, and flopped straight down on his back with a thud — eyes shut, teeth clenched — and, wonder of wonders, he actually fainted dead away.
Xia Ya walked over and kicked Oakes a couple of times in disgust. Oakes didn't dare wake for anything now; he gritted his teeth and took two hard ones, and when Xia Ya's boot landed square on his injured foot, the goblin still clenched his teeth and bore it without so much as a grunt.
What the hell — a couple of kicks, so what? It hurts, and then it's over. But if I really have to walk point out there... I won't get the chance to hurt ever again!
Seeing the goblin wouldn't come to, Xia Ya gave up. He muttered, "Damn it. The one moment I need him, he's out cold."
The bumpkin hitched up his pants and cinched his belt tighter, then glared at the death passage ahead. A burnt smell still hung in the air, and threads of black smoke seeped up out of the ground. Xia Ya narrowed his eyes and thought it over, then raised a hand toward the wretch: "Hey. If we want through here, there's likely only one way: run flat out, all in one breath. Whether you dodge the fire that comes shooting up out of the ground — that's down to luck. But your legs are hurt. You can't run fast, I'm afraid..."
The wretch felt a small swell of feeling: So the bumpkin does care about me after all.
Xia Ya went on: "...so I'll throw you across first. The forest on the other side is safe. It's about two hundred meters. If I put my whole back into it, I should be able to throw you over."
The wretch shrieked at once, "No!"
She stared at Xia Ya in fury. "Are you an idiot? Even if you're strong enough to throw me across, with that much force behind it I'd fly two hundred meters and be dead the second I landed!"
Xia Ya frowned and thought about it, decided the wretch had a point, and changed his mind. "Then... let me first see if I can charge across. If I get over, I'll twist a rope out of tree bark in the forest and try to throw it back to pull you two across."
With that, Xia Ya backed up a dozen paces, then did a few squats in place to loosen up his legs. He drew a deep breath, then abruptly bellowed, eyes bulging, and drove his feet hard into the ground!
Bang! The earth under his feet burst open, clods of dirt flying, and through the cloud of dust Xia Ya shot forward like an arrow. His body was like lightning; he hit full speed in an instant and reached the edge of the marsh, and the moment one foot touched the hard crust he leaped!
He jumped incredibly high — one mighty spring took him seven or eight meters up. Watching from behind, the wretch was secretly shaken: This savage bumpkin really is ridiculously strong!
Xia Ya's body hurtled forward through the air, tumbling seven or eight somersaults in mid-flight, farther and farther... his whole figure traced an arc through the sky and sailed off into the distance.
In that instant, when his body topped out its arc, he was already more than ten meters deep into the marsh; only then did he begin to drop.
Bang!!
Human strength has its limits, after all. Terrifying as Xia Ya's brute force was, his momentum eventually ran out; his body fell, and he slammed into the ground. The hard crust beneath him burst apart with a roar, and where he landed he was already about thirty meters into the marsh.
Behind him the wretch was just about to scream when she saw that the instant Xia Ya came down, the crust caved in where he'd landed with a boom, and a ball of flame came blasting up from below. The bumpkin gave a miserable howl, scrambling and crawling and tumbling forward — over and over he rolled, seventeen or eighteen times, and everywhere he rolled new pillars of fire kept bursting up out of the ground.
Fast as he rolled, Xia Ya was already all flame, blackened from head to toe, like a coal ball just pulled out of a furnace.
Howling without pause, Xia Ya forgot all about being on fire and charged forward like a madman. The speed he hit was genuinely frightening — dust and flame merged into one mass, a smoky human shape shooting straight ahead, a full thirty percent faster than a galloping horse, except with an obvious long string of fire trailing out behind his ass...
Luckily the marsh was only two hundred meters across. Xia Ya's leap had covered thirty-odd meters, and the hundred-plus meters after that he covered at a dead run in no time at all. At the very end he made one final leap, and when he came down and flattened himself against the ground he had reached the edge of the forest on the far side. Xia Ya howled and howled, rolling desperately in the dirt; it took him several rolls before he finally smothered the fire on his body.
But looking at him now, Xia Ya was burned past recognition: his face was a sheet of black, the fur robe on his body had burned down to scraps of charred fluff, and the filthy underclothes beneath were just as ruined, burned through in many places to show scorched, stinking flesh.
Probably only a monster with inhuman muscle could have used that method. An ordinary man wouldn't have his speed; run even a little slower and the flames would have swallowed him.
The wretch stared, dumbstruck, caught between amusement and shock — amused because she had finally watched the bumpkin get a taste of his own medicine, shocked because the bumpkin's strength and speed really were monstrous.
Dar, by contrast, stood there without changing expression, rubbed his nose, and watched Xia Ya charge across the fire field; a strange light flashed once through his eyes. He likely hadn't expected this coarse fellow to bull his way through with such a crude method.
Just as Xia Ya was climbing to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain and waving and shouting to the others on the far side, Dar turned around, let his gaze travel over the wretch and the goblin, and sighed. "All right. Our turn to cross."
He walked up to the wretch. "The goblins don't speak the human tongue, so I can only take you across."
A flicker of mockery passed through Dar's eyes. "I can tell you're different from that vulgar fellow. You must be of noble birth. So... you can dance, surely? Let's hope your steps are well practiced."
With that he stepped up, one hand pressing down on the wretch's shoulder, the other catching one of her hands, and said coldly, "Waltz Nocturne, movement four, section six... go!"
Before the wretch could react, she felt a great force pulling at her from Dar's arm, and she spun out helplessly along with his steps.
This Dar was strong, too. Dragged along by him, the wretch felt like a puppet on strings. As panic rose in her heart, Dar's cold voice sounded at her ear: "Concentrate. If you don't want to die, dance with me!"
"Left three! Right two! Turn, left foot, half a step! Stop! Turn again, right back one. Good! Don't move — I turn! With me, back! Back again! Stop! Two steps forward..."
The two of them were like a couple dancing, their figures whirling over the fire marsh, now left, now right, and somehow they forced their way right in!
In one breath they danced a hundred-odd steps, and all around them flames kept bursting out — yet every burst of flame came two or three steps from where they were, and never once touched them!
There amid the fire, the two of them threaded their way through the gaps in the flames like ghosts, their pace neither hurried nor slow. Dar's face was calm; the wretch had long since gone white as paper, the roar of the flames filling her ears without pause, and only one thought in her head:
I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die right here! Oh God, I've never even tasted love...
Amid the wretch's tangled prayers and curses, the ground under her feet suddenly went hard — she was on solid earth at last. Dar let go at once and shoved her to one side, saying coldly, "You can open your eyes."
The wretch opened her eyes and looked, and the world spun around her; a joy like surviving a disaster flooded through her. That two-hundred-meter death marsh of fire behind her — she had actually walked right across it!
Then she looked herself over — not a single hair had been burned!
"You?!" The wretch stared at Dar, eyes wide.
Dar said coldly, "I came here for this dragon. I worked out this fire marsh long ago. There are one hundred and sixty-four fire vents here; the position of every vent, and how long the gap between each eruption lasts — I have all of it memorized. I could walk it in my sleep and never put a foot wrong."
Hearing this, Xia Ya let out a furious roar and rushed over, seizing Dar by the neck. "You bastard! Why didn't you tell me earlier?!"
"You never asked. You just went running off on your own." Throttled as he was, Dar didn't change expression in the slightest; he answered as though he had right on his side.
Xia Ya's face was streaked with soot and smoke now, like a professional boiler stoker's, and he badly wanted to strangle this bastard Dar. But then he remembered that the man was unfathomable and knew this place so well that they might still need him later... In the end he let go, shot him a vicious glare, and said, "Any road we come to from now on, you walk at the very front!"
Of the whole party, only Mr. Goblin Consort was left on the far side of the marsh. Xia Ya raised his voice and shouted, "Oakes! Hold on, I'll fix a rope and throw it across — catch it, tie it to a tree, and climb over..."
If only he hadn't shouted. His shout jolted awake the goblin who had been lying there playing dead.
Oakes leaped up from the ground, looked eagerly toward Xia Ya a couple of times, then at the stretch of fire marsh between them. The goblin's little eyes rolled a few times, and suddenly he laughed out loud twice.
"Okay! Okay! Freedom! Freedom!"
That shouted, the goblin, face alight with excitement, turned and ran.
Xia Ya's face collapsed at once. Watching the goblin wriggle his ass and bolt, he stamped and raged, "You bastard — my Soso! He eats my food, drinks my drink, and now he wants to run!"
A berserk savage was a terrifying thing. He suddenly bent, picked up a stone from the ground, tossed it once in his hand, then took aim at the distant figure and threw...
The goblin had already gotten a dozen-odd steps away when the stone came flying after him and struck him with a bang on the back of the head. The poor goblin consort's joy peaked and turned to grief; he toppled straight backward — and this time... he really was out cold.
"Hmph!" Xia Ya clapped his hands and said smugly, "We keep moving. That traitor won't wake up for two or three hours. We'll settle accounts with him when we come back — assuming nothing like a jackal has carried him off in the meantime."