Museum Core Chapter 36: The Cultivator’s Folly

The human body was weird. In fact, in some respects, it could be downright schizophrenic.

Particularly when it came to taking damage.

Humans had fallen from airplanes and survived, and yet, simply stumbling could lead to someone winding up with an intracranial hemorrhage and that would be that. Dead.

There were people who’d survived being shot in the head and people who’d bled out from a poorly placed bullet to the leg.

Drunk people in particular seemed to have their own personal guardian angel, surviving falls with minimal injury, mostly due to lowered reflexes preventing them from tensing up and thereby getting off less badly hurt than most people in their position.

And then there was the spleen, an oft-forgotten organ that could rupture in a way that wouldn’t necessarily be obvious until it was far too late and almost always required surgery to remedy.

One of her many trainers had once told her of stories of martial masters informing men who’d taken blows liable to damage that organ to get their affairs in order as they were deathbound. All due to an ill-placed blow to the stomach.

The point was, human beings could survive extraordinary impacts or die to piddly little stuff, with the deciding point often sadly being luck.

But Jaclyn was someone who could, now, largely work around that.

One’s stomach cavity might be utterly stuffed with vital organs, but those organs could also move, within reason. And her power made her body tougher where it was needed, and made her flexible where that was required.

So while her organs were reinforced to the nines, the tissues holding them in place were flexible, allowing these organs to shift out of the path of the blade, a blade whose hilt was currently resting against her stomach.

There’s no such thing as abs of steel, right?

But even though this was a strike that could be turned into the beginning of the end for her, it had also given her an opening.

Jaclyn’s left hand shot down to the end of hilt of the sword, holding it fast, preventing it from being withdrawn or moving around to cause more damage, while her right first slammed into the soft flesh between the thumb and index finger of Fields’ right hand, which he was once again holding his sword in.

Well, it was the knuckle of her middle finger that dug in. A normal fist would have just slammed into the fingerbones, but with the half-open leopard fist, all the force of her punch was fed straight into that specific and vulnerable point of the human anatomy, causing Fields’ hand to spasm open, releasing the sword’s hilt.

That freed up her other hand, which hammered into her opponent’s nose with a regular fist, and by the time she was drawing it back, she was already throwing another punch with her right, hammering it into his larynx. That might kill him, but honestly, he’d stabbed her without knowing that she’d survive. They were well past the point where lethal force was authorized.

She closed the distance as he stumbled back, the next hit smashing into a specific point in his jaw, the mental foramen, a nerve cluster that could even cause unconsciousness when hit.

That impact would have shattered her jaw and likely cost her most of her teeth, but Fields just stumbled back further. He tried to get his hands up to defend himself, blinking around the tears that had streamed into his face after his nose had been hit, but she took that as a chance to knee him in the unmentionables.

As it turned out, his ostentatious pants did serve a function beyond making him look like an idiot without a fashion sense, namely, providing an absurd amount of protection against attacks on his junk but, well, that was a very vulnerable spot.

Experienced fighters knew to wear cups, turn and block attacks using one’s upper thighs, or even clamp their legs together to trap the attacker’s leg, but as she’d already realized, Fields was not a very good fighter.

He doubled over, granting her a shot straight at his temple. He stumbled from the impact, clearly dizzy, but still standing.

At this point, she’d have simply cuffed the suspect, but he’d shatter any handcuff she had.

Another punch to the temple, but he was still standing and reaching for a ring, one that spat out … something as his hand closed in.

Jaclyn yanked her Glock from its holster, grabbed it by the barrel, and hammered its grip into his temple with enough force to shatter the weapon.

But Fields dropped like a sack of potatoes. He was still breathing, but she had no way of knowing whether or not she’d just given him a lethal intracranial hemorrhage.

With a pained grunt, she sank to her knees and glanced down at the sword that was still running her through.

Her newly upgraded and evolved Skill had given her plenty of information about how to not dodge and attack but move so far out of the way to mitigate the damage taken as much as possible while putting her in the perfect position to counterattack. But it had also given her a nigh-perfect sense of her body, of the injuries she’d taken.

Despite the golden rule of “never remove the offending object when dealing with a penetrating injury”, she pulled out the sword, gently, carefully, making sure to keep it straight and avoid exasperating the injury. Nothing could be worse than trying to walk around with that thing sticking clean through her.

The wound bled, but it was nowhere near as she expected. It would heal even without magic, and Gula should be back soon.

She glanced over to where the others were standing, and her eye caught on Granger’s body cam. He’d brought it to document the Dungeon and never taken it off.

Oh, that video was going to look gre-eat to the general public. “Police officer pistol whips teenage suspect twenty years her junior”, she could already see the headlines.

Urgh, arresting people was going to be a nightmare now, wasn’t it? Submission holds and every other part of the training would do bugger all now, wouldn’t they?

Hell, if someone managed to get her arm behind her back, and tried to cuff her, she could probably just walk off, dragging them behind her like a stubborn dog. And if someone tried to cuff her while she was on the ground, she’d have been willing to bet real money that she could just use her free hand to push herself back onto her feet and cue stubborn dog drag.

… Wasn’t it a bit asinine to think about this right now?

Woof, maybe she’d taken one too many punches to the head, maybe the blood loss was worse than she’d predicted, but … oh, were those more cars she was hearing? That had been quick.

***

The ride back was quiet. The army medic who’d patched her up had had a conniption when he’d learned she’d pulled out the sword, but gone ahead and bandaged her various injuries, after which Gula had accelerated the healing with her Caladrius projection, and then, they’d just driven back. Some people had secured the village, including that damn Mr. Jones from MI6 who’d shown up for some reason, some had made sure to take the remaining “villagers” back to civilization, and some had secured Fields.

That jackass cultivator had enough pairs of handcuffs on him that he’d likely jingle if he walked, and seven soldiers with the most powerful rifles in their arsenal were sitting around him, aiming at his eyes, temples, throat, chest, and even his unmentionables, just in case.

Jaclyn breathed shallowly as she tried to endure the car’s shaking. The fight had been tough, nay, awful, but she’d gotten quite a bit out of it.

Name: Jaclyn Abrams

Race: Human

Class: Anima Monk

F-Rank, Level 16/20 -> E-Rank, Level 1/20

Class Abilities

Spirit Bond: Honey Badger (F-Rank)

Spirit Projection (E-Rank) (new!)

Statistics (20 points available)

Body: 60 -> 65

Magic: 0 -> 5

Mind: 40 -> 45

Spirit: 39 -> 44

Skills

Pugilism 18 -> 21

Bàoquán 19 -> Fist of Indomitable Badger 25

Athletics 17 -> 19

Situational Awareness 20 -> 22

Bullshit Radar 13

Martial Arts 20 -> 23

…

Four Levels, a full Level-up’s worth of points added to each Stat too, and a new ability for E-Rank.

And her new power, well, it had been the obvious choice.

Transformation worked as a power when your bond was to a creature with venom you could then apply to your body, or a huge form that would allow you to pack on a lot of weight. Neither really worked with her Jack-Russell-sized pocket berserker.

Which Ability would you like to choose as your E-Rank Class Ability:

Spirit Projection (project phantom body parts of your bonded animal)

Transformation Bond (transform into your bonded animal)

So yeah, simple.

Spirit Projection

Your body may remain human, but your spirit is infused with the physical power of the Honey Badger and can now be projected outwards.

You have unlocked the following projection types:

Badger Fist (partially open fist -> badger claws projected from knuckles)

She’d discovered the Badger Fist entirely by accident, she’d formed the standard fist-shape for her previous main martial arts, and suddenly, a spectral badger paw had shimmered into existence around it, nasty claws protruding like some kind of decidedly illegal and supremely dangerous knuckleduster. Who knew what other tricks she could uncover?

Jaclyn had already called ahead to make sure that Eve wasn’t around when the convoy arrived and she transferred to an ambulance to take her to the hospital, then, her daughter could visit her once she was as healed up as she could be in a day, clean, dressed in a hospital gown, rather than looking like hell and wearing clothing that had was colored by more blood than dye.

Optimally, they’d make sure there was somewhere in the hospital for Eve to stay too.

She’d also made sure to get the information on Fields’ powers out there, he’d have to wind up locked in a place with absolutely no greenery and he should never be given access to any kind of cutting implement, lest he use that to project more of that “sword light”, or whatever it was called.

Today had been a mess, but hopefully, there weren’t more of those “inheritances”, as Granger called them, out there.