Chapter 19
*Po's perspective — somewhere on the path to Tao-Tai's workshop.*
"Damn!" I swore under my breath and sprinted after Shifu.
But I was hopelessly behind. Air whistled in my ears, bamboo trunks flickered past like a palisade. Legs accustomed to pressing heavy weight now felt oddly soft and uncooperative in this particular kind of desperate sprint.
Then, without warning, a shadow burst silently from the dense wall of green to my right — like a ghost. Small, hunched, moving fast on an intercept course, aimed directly at me. I caught only a flash of some weapon and a pair of cold, gleaming eyes before the shadow slammed into my side.
The blow landed squarely in the ribs. With a thunderous crash that sounded like a sack of rocks hitting the ground, I went flying into a stand of young bamboo, my massive body flattening the slender trunks as I plowed through them.
The thought even passed through me that the force was comparable to a hit from Viper or Tigress. But there was no pain, as usual — only the familiar, dull numbness in my side.
And then, as though in answer to the sudden attack, a sharp, scalding wave of adrenaline hammered through my veins. My heart, which had skipped a beat, now hammered twice as hard, driving heated blood through every vessel and flooding my muscles with a steely energy.
I snapped to my feet, shaking splinters and fragments of bamboo from my shoulders and back. The wood cracked under my paws as I found a stable stance. My gaze immediately picked from the greenish half-light of the undergrowth the figure of whoever had just sent me on that brief flight.
A short distance away, settled into a low, relaxed fighting stance, a Wolverine stood watching me. Short, stocky, dressed in something resembling ninja attire. Every muscle beneath his glossy dark-brown hide was drawn taut, like a bowstring. His face, laced with old, whitened scars, wore an expression of detached, predatory confidence.
But what drew the eye most was his weapon. On his right paw he wore a steel knuckleduster from which three short, crescent-shaped blades extended. They weren't quite like daggers — more like enlarged, mirror-polished claws of some beast, refined into a tool.
*What manner of costumed individual is this?* The thought moved through me quickly. *The claws are dramatic, certainly — but for a fast kill you'd need to aim for the throat or the arteries. And why does he even need them, when his species ought to come equipped with perfectly adequate natural claws? What an aesthete.*
I crossed my arms over my chest and let my expression settle into exaggerated curiosity.
"What does a humble creature like myself owe to what appears to be some kind of assass-in?" I deliberately mangled the word and spread my paws in a theatrical gesture. "Do you truly have nothing better to do than attack peaceful travelers? Or have you simply run out of worthy opponents everywhere else?"
"Worthy?" The Wolverine lazily drew his claws along a bamboo trunk, leaving deep furrows. "Business can wait. But before I leave this valley, it would be a shame not to have a little fun."
His gaze slid over me with easy contempt, and he continued: "So I decided to see for myself what the one they call the Dragon Warrior is actually worth."
He paused, letting me appreciate the full weight of his dismissive inspection.
"All across China there are rumors that the senile old Oogway has found a warrior the likes of which the world has never seen. That the very embodiment of the dragon has arrived at the Jade Palace to claim his title by right of strength."
"But what do I find, when I meet him face to face?" He snorted, looking me over again. "I see before me nothing but a fat panda. An ordinary bag of lard."
The Wolverine slowly, demonstratively raised the clawed paw, turning it so the light played along the blades.
"I've had occasion to meet one of your kind before," he said, running a blade tip along the scars on his face, "and it was that one who left me these… souvenirs. At least he looked like a warrior. Unlike you, you lump."
His words resonated in me strangely — not with offense, but with a burning interest. Where exactly had he managed to find relatives of mine? In my entire life I had never once seen another giant panda. Father had said our kind simply didn't exist in the Valley of Peace, and the locals had never made any secret of their low opinion of my species. The mention of a panda warrior was intensely intriguing.
*Maybe I can buy some time and get something out of him. Shifu will be smart enough to come back when he realizes I'm not there. Being carved into ribbons in this bamboo grove is nowhere in my plans.*
"And where exactly did you meet this panda?" I asked, trying to sound casual.
"The dead have no use for stories," the Wolverine said with a smirk. "You think such a cheap trick will distract me?"
"And are you certain you can manage?" A sudden wave of confidence rose into my voice. "Maybe I don't look like much of a threat from where you're standing — but consider this: one hit from me and your bones and teeth become powder. You're talking far too much for someone your size, genius."
"Let's see what you're actually capable of, piece of lard," the Wolverine said with contemptuous ease.
"I don't know, I don't know—" I shrugged with deliberate slowness, examining my claws with exaggerated boredom. "Your mother, though, when I paid her a visit — she had only nice things to say about my physique. Said there was a certain charm to a man of substance."
*Jokes about mothers — universally applicable across all worlds. The main thing right now is keeping my tongue in my head after saying it.*
The Wolverine's response was movement. He dissolved from his position and materialized directly in front of me in the same instant. No windup, no preparation — only a sudden, whipping sweep of his arm.
My instincts screamed and I lurched back reflexively, but it was too late. A sharp whistle of air cut across my chest, and I felt warm streams beginning to trace their way slowly, inexorably through the fur along my ribcage.
I drew a paw across my chest and saw blood on the pads. The sight of my own blood hit me harder than any physical blow. This time there was no numbness — only sharp, burning pain and the humiliating sensation of vulnerability.
*Well, you absolute comedian, you've outdone yourself. YES, YOU ARE IN SERIOUS TROUBLE.* The thought moved through my mind with growing, almost hysterical clarity.
"First blood, fatty!" the Wolverine hissed. He had put several meters between us in an instant. He ran his tongue slowly along the blades of his claws, his entire bearing expressing something close to sensual pleasure. "Did you think jokes would save you?"
"You do realize you look ridiculous doing that, right?" I snorted, actively suppressing internal panic. "If it were someone female with large… eyes and something form-fitting, it would come across as normal, even somewhat erotic. As it stands, it's just disturbing. And aren't you afraid of picking something up? I sincerely advise against licking your own blades. You could catch hepatitis. Or already have."
The contemptuous smirk slid from his face, replaced by cold fury. He had evidently expected panicked screaming and begging for his life — not another idiotic joke.
What followed came in a low, guttural voice saturated with hatred:
"I'm going to cut you until you start squealing. Until there's nothing left of you but a wet patch on the ground. And you know what the best part is?" He paused, letting the words do their work. "I'm going to take my time. You're so… substantial."
*Now it's perfectly clear why he chose that particular weapon. He's a genuine sadist and a psychopath. But he has made a fatal error — trying to intimidate with pain the person who has chosen the path of masochism and survived the nipple training.*
Without waiting for my response, he surged forward. I answered with a thunderous roar and charged to meet him, putting all my mass into the collision. Every muscle in my body tensed to its limit, hardening like stone. The ridges of muscle beneath my hide rose and flexed, fat yielding to steely force. My reaction speed increased, my movements sharpened — and it still wasn't enough.
My paw cut through the air with a whistle and found only emptiness. The Wolverine had silently bounced off a bamboo trunk with a speed the eye could barely track. My strike connected with the tree, which exploded into splinters with a deafening crack.
"Slow," he remarked, already standing three steps to my left.
And the nightmare began.
My tensed muscles, ready to tear anything in their path, were useless against this whirlwind. He never stopped moving. Bouncing from trunk to trunk, tumbling through the air, circling around me. His blades whistled, leaving fresh marks across my body. First came thin burning lines on the shoulder. An instant later came deep scratches along the side. Then sharp stings bit into my back, and fresh cuts opened along my legs.
Every new wound drove into my flesh with the icy cold of steel, then erupted an instant later into a wave of fire. Drops of blood — hot and sticky — seeped through the fur, spreading in red stains. I lunged to one side, my paws closing on nothing — he was already gone, dissolved into the air.
"Too slow!" came his voice from the right.
"A tree moves faster than you!" it answered from the left.
Helplessness tightened around my throat, mixed with boiling irritation. I was trying to swat a nimble mosquito that was openly drinking my blood. I understood he was just playing with me, but I could do nothing about it — only watch uselessly as my strikes went wide.
*Any other transmigrator in my position would have already slipped into that blasted Flow state and laid the opponent out with one elegant movement. But where is that perfect hero right now? Probably soaking in some harem fantasy.*
And again — the familiar whistle, three lines of fire across my back. *God, I hate this bastard.*
Dark, blind fury flooded my mind. I stopped trying to aim and began destroying everything around me. My fists came down on bamboo trunks, blows against the earth left deep craters, stones shattered to gravel. Chaos became my answer to his rapid movement. *If I can't hit him, I'll wreck everything around him. Maybe at least I'll take away his footing.*
*Wait, am I falling into the clichéd berserker mode?* The sardonic thought flickered through.
I stopped suddenly, breathing hard. My chest was burning, my muscles were on fire, but I could see the result of my madness — the clearing around me had been transformed into a wreckage of craters and debris.
"I'll admit — you're not quite as weak as I assumed," his voice came as he stepped lightly over the rubble. "Are you using some technique? A moment ago you looked like a tub of lard. But how long can you keep this up? How many minutes does your body have left? Five? Three?"
The Wolverine stopped, his blades catching the light filtering through the canopy. "You understand you're completely in my power? I could resolve this with a single movement."
He paused, letting the words sink in, then slowly raised the clawed paw as though demonstrating how effortlessly he could deliver the final strike.
But contrary to his words, I felt no fatigue. Quite the opposite — I could feel my muscles convulsing in wave after wave of new spasms, swelling with mounting force.
Every sense and instinct had suddenly sharpened to an extreme edge. The world around me seemed to brighten into new detail, and right now I could see every particle of dust in the air, hear the faint beating of his heart somewhere in the distance.
*Right. Full berserker mode. Can't say I'm surprised. Transmigrator or not, what else was it going to be?*
*In novels it always looks considerably more romantic — the hero loses his love and enters the berserker state to win her back. And what do I have? No tragic love story, just a psychopath with claws who decided to use me as a sharpening stone.*
*At least it's not over taxes,* came an absurd passing thought. For some reason an image followed immediately of imperial tax collectors arriving at Father's noodle shop and demanding payment, and Father seizing his ladle and— *Stop! I'm being turned into mincemeat out here and I'm thinking about nonsense!*
*Need to find a way to get this one, but how? Wait. What if—?*
My paw reflexively grabbed a chunk of rock and I hurled it toward a glimpsed shadow. A miss. But the idea — wild and simple — had already taken root.
"Think you're fast? Excellent. Now try dodging this!" I snarled.
I bent down, grabbed a decent-sized boulder — and crushed it in my paws like ripe fruit, the stone fragmenting with a crunch. What remained in my fists were handfuls of stone shrapnel which I hurled with full force in a wide arc ahead of me. The Wolverine had been circling at this point, preparing to open more cuts, but with the sharpened senses from earlier I was already reading the direction of his movement.
The stone shrapnel whistled toward its target. Most of the fragments missed, shredding distant bamboo. But I heard a short, venomous snarl and noticed the opponent lose speed abruptly. One of the fragments had apparently found its mark, grazing his leg.
He didn't allow me a second throw. The moment I began to bend for a new projectile, a blade already grazed my neck — uncomfortably close to the artery — leaving behind another burning line.
The message was clear and unambiguous. Any attempt to play outside his rules would end with a severed throat. Which enraged me only further.
I finally caught his next attack in full detail — not as a blur of shadow, but as a sequence of precise movements: a slight crouch before the jump, the elastic compression of the rear leg muscles, the short upswing of the arm. My mind, operating at extraordinary speed, analyzed the trajectory, calculated the line of evasion, sent the signal to the muscles. But my body let me down again. It responded far faster than before, but still — too late.
Sharp, burning pain pierced my shoulder, and the familiar warmth of flowing blood spread across the skin.
"Is that all you've got, you mangy runt?" I snarled, and in that moment the desperate but only workable plan finally crystallized in my head.
My opponent didn't dignify me with a response. He came forward again, his weapon aimed directly at my chest — at that same measured cut he had practiced again and again.
But this time I didn't dodge.
I made the opposite movement — a forward step, literally impaling myself on his knuckleduster. Contracting my chest muscles with every ounce of force I had, I felt the steel blades drive into flesh with a dull crunch — and stop there, lodged in the muscle layer. My tensed muscles closed around the weapon like a vice, holding it fast inside my body.
He had no time to react, no time to free his weapon. In the same instant my paw snapped shut around his wrist — the one still gripping the handle of the knuckleduster protruding from my chest. The grip was iron.
The Wolverine wrenched frantically, and his free hand swept upward with a whistle, driving a strike directly into my nose. A faint crunch, a flash of dull, distant pain — as though through layers of cotton — warm blood flooding my face. But I simply laid my other paw on his shoulder and squeezed. A crack sounded, and the arm with which he had just struck me hung limp as a rope.
"Got you now, you biting little rat!" The words tore through my clenched teeth, through the blood dripping from my nose.
I could feel his thin but solid bones cracking under my grip. He made no attempt to break free. His eyes had gone wide with shock, pain, and a raw, animal terror.
*Now, according to the laws of the genre, I'm supposed to lose all self-control, kill him, and then spend some time weeping and dripping, waiting for someone to come and comfort me,* I thought inwardly, feeling my lips stretch into a wild grin.
"Let go!" he hissed, and his voice now carried not mockery but hysterical panic.
"What makes you think I'm going to do what you want?" My words came out with a surprising calmness, almost conversational. "Right now I'm the only one making any decisions here."
I pulled him closer and leaned down, feeling him trembling throughout.
"You and I are going to have a long and thorough conversation… but first—" My fingers tightened further. "Answer me one question." I pronounced it with quiet menace.
I leaned down to his ear and whispered:
"Have you ever been on a helicopter?"
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