Chapter 39
The plaza became a blade swung at the sky. Two hundred thousand heavenly troops moved as one, a disciplined tide of spears and banners that drowned the square in practiced precision. They answered the judge's call with the steady certainty of law, a living ordinance meant to bind even reckless kings. Wukong perched on his cloud like a coin flipped against a ledger, the grin already forming.
"Come then," he sang, voice bright as flint. "Let us make an argument."
The troops advanced, boots striking the stone in metronomes. Ranks parted and closed with the ease of a machine. Spears leveled, formations coiled; the air tasted of polished iron and oath. For a breath the heavens held its breath, as if the world were listening for the verdict.
Zokraks and Xorath stood behind Wukong, silhouettes of recent resurrection. Fear threaded their posture, a thin, honest wire. They had seen divinity cleave nations. They had felt its ledger. Zokraks' remaining limb trembled. Xorath flexed the fingers of his right hand like a man testing a new key.
"This is madness," Xorath muttered under his breath.
"Madness is better than boredom," Wukong replied, grinning. "And the heavens are a dull mistress."
At his word the cloud uncoiled beneath him like a living thing answering a name. He rose, lightweight and sovereign, and the army's banners fluttered like a field of waiting teeth.
Then the missing name arrived on the wind: a rumor given weight. The crowd's murmur broke on it and scattered. "Erlang Shen," someone breathed, and the syllables fell like a stone into the pond of the square.
He did not arrive with the pomp of heralds. He arrived as a problem. From the folds of the high gates he stepped, gaze cold and unhurried. In his hand he held his staff: an instrument that knew the geometry of endings. He did not speak; he only looked, and the world checked its balance.
Wukong's grin sharpened into something like appetite. "At last," he called. "You are late for the fun."
Erlang Shen's eyes, twin knives of ordered distance, rested on the army and then on Wukong. He breathed and the air accepted the suggestion of duty. In a movement both casual and final, he extended his arm and the staff shrank and lengthened at his will until it matched the scale of the task—now as long as a mountain shaft, now a sliver of metal bent into a promise. He held it like a conductor holding a baton at the moment before a storm.
Wukong did not hesitate. He matched the motion with the single-minded hunger of one who prefers direct answers. He sprung from his cloud and met the staff's movement with his own: nimble, a blur of bronze and thunder. He resized his own staff until it spoke the same language of threat and then—boom—he swung.
The impact was not local. The arc of the staff wrote a sentence across the sky and then slammed it down into the court. Stone cracked in half like a snapped rib. Banners shredded into fragments of ordinance. The judge's dais folded inward like a book closed on a scandal. Shockwaves rolled outward, and where the shock cut the ranks, men fell like trimmed grass.
A hundred thousand troops died in the first true argument. Armor and law separated. Spears and commandments scattered. The plaza turned into a scatter of bodies and falling vows. The sound was not merely carnage; it was the punctuation of the unjust.
Zokraks' face, usually a geography of scorn, drained. Xorath's jaw tightened until the knuckle showed through skin. They had not wanted this ledger written. Wukong laughed, a bright cold laugh that tasted of triumph and something darker: the private joy of a gambler who had placed his stake and won.
"Is that all?" he shouted, reveling in the ruin. "Come now, heavens! You have better temperaments than this."
The army, diminished and ragged, did not answer with a charge. Only a few leaders staggered forward, eyes flaring with shame and fury, trying in ritual to restore the order their formations had lost. Their commands were drowned in the thunder of falling statutes and the echo of minds broken by force.
Zokraks pressed himself back against a column, palms slick. "This is dangerous," he hissed. "You know what this means. The Heavenly God will mark us."
"Let him mark," Wukong said, still smiling. "Marking is paperwork. We prefer the content."
Xorath's hand curled into a fist that hurt; he could feel the echo of severed things in the bones of his wrist. "You enjoy it too much," he said, voice a blade disguised as reproach.
"Of course," Wukong replied, flamboyant as a blade. "Why else do it?"
Behind them, behind ruined banners and spattered law, someone moved into the square's filthy light. The figure came without fanfare, stepping through the scattered bodies and the smoke like a line drawn through the mess. He wore simple robes: no heraldry, no armor, only a posture of something that had never learned to be polite to chaos.
No face showed in the moment the crowd noticed him. Even as the dying called out their last formalities, the stranger's shadow somehow kept its silence. He raised a hand as if to cut the applause of wind.
"Enough, Wukong!" he said—simple, precise, a blade unsheathed quietly. "I think you think yourself mighty."
The phrase landed like a stopping plank across the plaza. For a breath, Wukong's grin faltered, not from fear but from the novelty of being interrupted by authority that did not require spectacle. Zokraks and Xorath turned, reflexive and raw, eyes sharpening on the intruder's silhouette.
The chapter closed on that suspended clause: the square littered with the aftermath of glory, the three who had brought it standing amid ruin, and a single unadorned voice insisting a halt.