"Of all the people," Liangyu hissed under his breath, glaring sideways at Jian. He was already dropping his center of gravity, getting his body thoroughly prepared to fight if, and when, Aunt Hua decided to show her face.
"Of all the people," Jian echoed back, his tone equally showing mutual annoyance.
The dense woods around them began to grow uncharacteristically windy. The sudden rustling of a thousand leaves instantly alerted the both of them.
A heartbeat later, Aunt Hua materialized out of thin air directly behind them, floating silently above their heads, immediately forcing the two boys to pivot into their defensive combat stances.
"Looks like we’re the first," Liangyu said out loud to Jian, trying to project a confidence he likely didn’t feel.
"Please, don’t flatter yourselves," Aunt Hua scoffed. "I’ve already laid waste to the hot-headed one."
Jian’s jaw tightened. "Don’t listen to her," he instructed Liangyu, refusing to take his eyes off the floating menace. "She could be lying just to get into our heads. It’s a basic psychological tactic."
Liangyu seemed noticeably patronized by that unsolicited offer of free advice. "You think I didn’t think of that? Of course I thought of that. I’m not an idiot."
Tired of the talking, Jian slammed his foot into the earth. Instantly, he summoned a massive bundle of thick tree roots from the ground, sending them shooting upward like wooden spears to try and get a hold of her.
She merely smiled. With a graceful twirl, she dodged the incoming roots and effortlessly escaped the trap by splitting her physical form into two identical people. One Aunt Hua for handling each of them.
Liangyu took a staggered step back, his eyes wide in genuine awe. "There’s two of them?!"
One of the Aunt Hua duplicates immediately moved in on Jian, launching strikes in an attempt to overwhelm him as he desperately jumped several heavy steps backward to maintain distance. "It could just be an illusion!" Jian shouted over the sound of breaking wood.
Simultaneously, the other Aunt Hua shot forward to grab Liangyu. He didn’t bother blocking.
He immediately started running in the exact opposite direction, using his earth cultivation to aggressively pull up massive, jagged boulders from the ground to act as heavy obstructions behind each of his sprinting steps.
"But how the hell would we know which one’s the real one?!" Liangyu screamed back, his lungs burning as he ran at full speed through the dense foliage.
Aunt Hua materialized out of nowhere, standing perfectly still right in the middle of his escape track.
"You don’t," she whispered.
Liangyu was running far too fast to stop. As he stumbled into her range, she casually delivered a devastatingly precise kick straight upward into his chin. The sheer force of the blow lifted him off his feet, snapping his head back before he crashed heavily into the ground.
And just like that, her form disappeared into mist.
Jian, on the other hand, was far too busy fighting for his life to check on his friend. He aggressively took advantage of the massive amount of the surrounding forest, using his powers to forcefully bend and twist the towering trees into incredibly dense, maze-like wooden structures.
His goal was twofold. To significantly reduce Aunt Hua’s terrifying movement speed, and to hopefully trap her inside a wooden cage.
It wasn’t until a few frantic moments later that the strategy backfired. She finally got frustrated with all the wood. Raising her arms, she summoned a monstrously strong gust of wind, clearing a circular radius of the forest, completely uprooting all the trees Jian had just manipulated.
Jian instantly summoned a thick boulder from the earth, covering himself completely to withstand the crushing pressure of the blast. When the wind finally died down, he pushed the stone away and walked out into the newly cleared field.
"Wind again?" Jian muttered, cracking his neck. "Two can play that game."
He shifted his feet, locking himself into a grounded stance. He extended his hands and began summoning his own currents of wind from directly below the exact spot where Aunt Hua was currently floating, rapidly spinning the air to slowly create a localized cyclone.
Caught off guard, Aunt Hua’s levitating position faltered. She began struggling, her robes whipping rapidly as she fought to keep up against the immense suction of the wind. Soon enough, she was entirely engulfed within the center of the cyclone.
Liangyu, who was just regaining consciousness on the other side of the clearing, blinked his concussed eyes open. As his vision cleared, horror washed over him.
He noticed the real Aunt Hua casually floating directly behind Jian’s exposed back. She was holding a huge boulder above her head with just one single arm, while Jian remained completely oblivious, pouring all of his focus and energy into maintaining the cyclone.
Liangyu forced air into his bruised lungs and screamed, "JIAN, BEHIND YOU!"
It was too late. Before Jian could even twitch to react, Aunt Hua viciously threw the massive boulder right at him. It struck with the sickening sound of snapping bone and crushing weight, driving Jian face-first into the hard ground beneath tons of solid rock.
"JIAN!!" Liangyu screamed.
Before the echo of his scream could fade, Aunt Hua showed up directly in front of him with her face devoid of any emotion. As a desperate last-ditch effort, Liangyu forcefully pushed his hands forward, trying to summon a sharp tree root to pierce her from the side.
But Aunt Hua was a monster. She didn’t even dodge. She simply reached out and caught the thick, speeding root with her bare hand midair, stopping it dead in its tracks.
Then, somehow overpowering his own magical connection to the earth, she bent the root back to attack Liangyu instead, plunging the wooden spike cleanly through his chest.
Liangyu’s eyes bulged. He coughed up a thick mouthful of dark blood, his knees buckling as his eyes slowly slid shut.
Aunt Hua nonchalantly let out a relaxed breath. She dusted her hands off and slowly scanned the ruined surroundings to decide where she needed to go next.
Far into the distance, standing at the very edge of the newly created clearing, she spotted Mei. She had clearly just arrived, and was currently staring at this entire scene of brutal carnage with wide eyes, frozen and scared to death.