Beyond the Zenith

What was that wave of pressure?! A sonic boom?!

Cries of alarm filled the air as Han Qingyu used the force from being flung to adjust his angle and altitude, narrowly avoiding a direct hit from the pillar sword.

The sheer force of the Sharpie’s swing through the air still slammed into his chest like a physical blow. The surge of source energy inside him was in its weakened ebb after the last wave had crashed and hadn’t recovered in time for him to tank the hit.

As Qi Shantong had said, directing the flow, tempo, and timing of the surge was the same as controlling life and death on the battlefield. However, Han Qingyu had only gotten his armor fewer than twenty days ago and was still green.

Han Qingyu took the hit in midair. Blood spewed from his mouth. His body arced backward before plummeting like a kite with its string cut and slamming hard into the ground.

“Little Qing?!” Mira cried out in a panic.

Sprinting diagonally around the Sharpie, she fired wildly, trying to draw the blinded, frenzied Sharpie toward her. It didn’t work.

The Sharpie had given up on moving altogether after losing its sight. It stood in place, heaving a few ragged breaths, then reversed its grip on its heavy sword, raised it high overhead with both hands, and drove it straight down toward the ground.

This was one of the Sharpies’ signature area attacks. It usually appeared in the opening moments after they launched from their aircraft to meet an engagement, often used to block the first wave of assault and scatter a platoon’s formation.

Every soldier with experience on the front lines of the Witnesses knew this, and platoon combat drills included specific counter-tactics for it.

For the Sharpie to pull this attack out now meant this was probably its last strike.

The arms beneath the black armor swelled, and the piercing crack of fracturing filled the air. It was grating enough to make one’s teeth ache. Then, the pillar-like heavy sword plunged straight toward the ground.

Han Qingyu had only just started to move, propping himself up off the ground with both blades and lifting his head.

The pillar sword was driven into the earth with a resounding boom.

Even Mira, standing relatively close, could clearly feel the ground shudder beneath her feet. A dense cloud of dust erupted around the Sharpie and its pillar sword, sending rocks and soil flying.

The thick, rising dust blanketed everything under the moonlight, making the darkness even less accommodating to the eye. It swallowed both the Sharpie and Han Qingyu.

Only the bodies of the fallen recruits and Mira, frozen in place, remained visible in the valley.

“Little Qing?!” Liu Shiheng and He Tangtang shouted at the same time.

“Han Qingyu? He...”

Cries and murmurs of anguish, frustration, and denial filled the mountain. At the end of the day, Han Qingyu, briefly both a beacon of hope and a miracle worker, was only a recruit.

At that moment, a girl arrived, trailing blue light in her wake. She took in the terrain and the people.

That’s Number 10? Is this where he leaped down and attacked the Sharpie from? she wondered, picturing it in her mind.

All she had seen from a distance was that one glimpse of Number 10’s lonely figure pushing himself up from the ground and lifting his head. Then, the pillar sword struck the earth, and Number 10’s silhouette vanished into the dust cloud.

Don’t jump. Don’t be reckless. Number 10, you’re a recruit. Even Teacher Lu told me again and again to never go airborne in front of a Sharpie unless I’ve entered the ranks of the top-tier.

Xin Yaoqiao stood rooted to the spot, a strange emotion welling up within her. It wasn’t quite grief—after all, they had never even met face to face. Still, she couldn’t help but recall her aunt’s story about falling in love with Huo Qubing after reading a history book when she was young.[1]

A ring of dust hung in the valley. Bodies of fallen recruits littered the clearings. Meanwhile, the survivors watched with bated breath from one of the mountain slopes.

The silence stretched on for nearly ten seconds, broken only by the occasional patter of flung rocks and soil hitting the ground.

At last, the dense dust cloud thinned.

The massive outline of the Sharpie emerged. It was indeed its final strike. Although the Sharpie was still on its feet, it was slowly crumbling apart. Steam rose from inside the black armor. The process was unusually slow, perhaps because it had already spent the last of its energy.

“Ah...” A small group of people raised their hands and pointed, crying out.

The sound caught in their throats as the dust cleared enough to see another, much smaller figure standing next to the Sharpie.

They had a dead iron knife in the Sharpie’s chest at heart level and another lodged in its lower back.

So in that last moment, he charged forward instead of retreating? This was the bewildered thought in everyone’s mind.

Xin Yaoqiao was more knowledgeable in Sharpie combat, and her confusion stemmed from a different place. Closing distance on a Sharpie right before its dust storm... isn’t that a technique they only teach after you’ve reached top-tier combat strength?

Han Qingyu kept his suffering to himself. It didn’t matter that he was coughing up blood. That didn’t scare him. Lao Jian had set an example for that.

The real problem was that every organ in his torso was screaming in agony. His entire back felt as though countless tiny blades had sliced it apart.

In that last instant before the Sharpie’s pillar sword came crashing down, he had moved forward almost on pure instinct.

The partial recovery of his source energy surge was one reason for it. The other was that there simply hadn’t been enough time to retreat. Perhaps some part of his subconscious had guessed that closer was actually safer.

As a precaution, he had even used the last of his strength to drive both blades into the Sharpie, which was blinded and fully committed to its last attack.

The two stabs went in with surprising ease, though he couldn’t be sure whether it was because the Sharpie had poured its remaining source energy into the strike, or because its armor was already fracturing.

***

“Little Qing?!” Liu Shiheng called out, his voice carrying both hope and a question.

He Tangtang simply jumped straight off the cliff.

Han Qingyu’s body swayed, and he collapsed to the ground.

Mira rushed over, wanting to reach out to him but not daring to. “Little Qing... Han Qingyu?”

“Alive... hurts.” Han Qingyu forced out the two words as he turned his head.

Cheers were about to erupt when a vehicle came barreling off the mountain road on the far side of the valley. People jumped from the roof, through the shattered windshield, and out of the open doors of the airborne vehicle.

The force of their leaps arrested the car’s forward momentum in midair, and it crashed heavily to the ground.

Zhang Dao’an and the other fifteen instructors landed, along with the remaining six members of Platoon 1123, all wielding their blades.

“What happened?”

“Little Qing killed it.”

There was a brief moment of bewilderment, confusion, and disbelief, but there was no time to press for details.

“Where’s the other one? Didn’t it come here?” Old Cao from Regiment 491 asked urgently.

Only then did the recruits finally remember the other Sharpie. Two Sharpies had attacked the convoy at the start, but only one ‌remained. Where had the other one gone? And what was it doing?

“That one was carrying the aircraft on its back,” the second lieutenant from Platoon 1123 said.

That one sentence caused the motionless Han Qingyu to stir back to life.

1. Huo Qubing (霍去病) was a renowned military general of the Han Dynasty in ancient China. He was the nephew of Wei Qing, another famous general who played a key role in expanding the Han Empire. Huo Qubing was known for his bravery, military prowess, and his many successful campaigns against the Xiongnu, a nomadic tribe that threatened the security of the Han Empire. ☜