Intense Battle
To beat the Thunder Crown Wolf at all, the clan has to strike before it reaches the village. Clan leader Gu Yue Bo leads his elders out to meet it, cutting into the wolf tide like a warship splitting water. He fells wolves with a golden moonblade that splits into three in flight. One elder swells into a huge fat man and knocks a charging wolf away with his own stomach; others fight behind needle-thin hair or bodies sheathed in light armor. The wolf rises to meet them and roars, and every wolf in earshot answers by charging the elders and slowing their advance. A healing elder spreads Therapy Light Gu across the group, closing light wounds and halving the heavy ones, before Gu Yue Bo presses the attack again. ch. 164
An ape-formed elder launches Gu Yue Bo into the air, where his Moon-invite Gu draws in five elders’ moonblades at once and fires them back as a single giant purple blade. It slams into the wolf just as a thunder light armor forms over its body, and the collision throws ordinary lightning wolves flying in the blast. The wolf’s right foreleg is torn open and will not stop bleeding, but a healing Gu on its body turns the fight into a war of attrition the elders cannot easily win, since the wolf draws freely on natural essence while they are limited to their own apertures. ch. 164
Fifteen minutes in, lightning floods the wolf’s body and its speed suddenly surges, too fast for the ape-formed elder to dodge. It bites him and tears his skull apart, then rips a hole through the battle line with sweeping strikes of its tail while purple-blue current drives the elders back. Gu Yue Bo, a rank four fighter, stands out as the group’s anchor while the fight only worsens: the wolf’s own wounds deepen to the bone, six clan elders are already dead, and only the village’s urgent reinforcements keep the front from collapsing. Gu Yue Bo rallies them to hold anyway. ch. 164
The wolf then goes berserk under a rank four Berserk Gu, its strength, speed, and agility all doubling at once. One swipe of its claw turns a different clan elder to pulp, and a strike of its tail destroys a field of grass and wood puppets, burning them to charcoal and leaving their handler defenseless. ch. 164
Gu Yue Bo orders the Iron Chain Snake: a Wind Snare Gu and a Swamp Gu slow the wolf’s legs, then snake Gu pour out and lock together into a metal net around it, though the net will tear itself apart within five to six minutes. He leaves two elders, Chi Guang and Suo Ping, to hold the wolf pack back from the chains and pulls the rest home. In the village square, up to a hundred badly wounded Gu Masters and mobilized mortals sit ready to be a human wall against the wolf tide while the able-bodied keep fighting. Gu Yue Bo and his elders kneel before the ancestral tablets and beg the clan’s first generation founder for help, invoking his old promise that Gu worms would come down from the sky if the village ever faced destruction. ch. 164
