Chapter Text
Wukong had finally got his wish, and yet, he was not sure if this was really what he wanted. Or if he could handle it at all.
The monkey had been there when Mihou next woke up. He had known for a while it was a given, and stayed by his side a lot more just in case it happened.
When it did, he had been elated — but only for a few seconds. There were many ways the reencounter could have gone; Wukong wished it would be a smooth, easy conversation yet knew it simply could not be. Not after their last meeting; not after what he had done to his brother. Yelling was expected, as was a whole other fight, given Mihou’s first instinct had been to destroy everything across his path for about half of the island when he regained the smallest sliver of consciousness. He would take a revenge-fueled beating any day as long as they sorted things out in the end.
Instead, Mihou had woken up confused; disoriented. Wukong had not been there at first, having stepped out for a second to rummage through the tiny kitchen for something to munch on while on his vigil.
The chirp had been muffled enough at first that he thought it had come for one of the little ones outside — and he was familiar enough with their shenanigans that he knew that most of the time, if one of them was calling out for him, it was for mischief. The cries could be ignored for a little while as long as they did not evolve into something more distressed.
And that they did, at such a fast pace that was alarming. Wukong had been ready to bolt out of the cabin until he realized… the noises were coming from within his home. The monkey stopped on his tracks, gulping. He was not sure he could even begin to deal with anything other than righteous anger — it made him freeze up in the hallway leading to the rooms, unsure.
Another, louder chirp compelled him to run to where it had come from, all previous thoughts long forgotten when instincts he had thought buried resurfaced all at once. Mihou’s room looked as it always did, except for the fact that now its sole occupant sat halfway up instead of lying listless. In the darkness, only the luminescent ears were visible, along with his brother’s single remaining golden eye that almost looked like it glowed as it honed in on him and his hasty entrance. It narrowed as they made eye contact and for a moment Wukong thought that Mihou had indeed come to his senses enough to be mad at him, as he deserved.
Chirp.
Wukong scrambled to reach the messy nest, gathering his brother into his arms, one hand — one of the very same that had taken so much from him — coming up to card its way through a mane that was long due a haircut. And Mihou…
He simply leaned into it, another soft sound escaping his mouth. Chirp chirp, Wukong responded incredibly softly, trying his best not to disturb the fragile peace. Half-cradling his brother, he felt it clearly as Mihou settled a triad of ears against his chest, settling with a sigh — and oh, it hurt. The once familiar action left him reeling as if he had been slapped. Thankfully and soon enough, the not quite-so-little mass in his hold relaxed against him, breath evening out as he lost the battle against sleep. Mihou would not wake up again so soon, he was pretty sure.
Then and there, Wukong knew one thing: he could not deal with… whatever this was. He would need at least a little time to– make sense of it all, he guessed. Demons, he could handle no problem. Whatever the Celestials felt like throwing at him? Easy.
This?
It felt like a punishment.
If only he could step away and beat up a few of his problems like in the old days, Wukong was pretty sure his life would drastically improve.
The idea took root in his mind. He could make a quick visit to the Celestial Realm, search for clues on the Bone Demon’s true origin — he’d heard she was a Celestial Maiden, once. Fallen or not, mentions of her were bound to still be scattered about the realm, for those stuffy celestials could be real lazy bastards about the cleanup at times. It sounded like a good idea; responsible even. Wukong would be helping himself and dealing with a bigger threat all at the same time.
The only thing stopping him was the very same he wanted to run from: Mihou. But leaving for a day or two should be fine, shouldn’t it? He could strengthen the wards in the cabin, specialize them more. Make it so they would go off if his brother so much as stepped out of his room — and Wukong would come right back if it ever did while he was away in Heaven. That should be enough to guarantee some peace of mind while he was out. Then when he came back, Wukong would be a little calmer; a little readier to work through those deeply rooted issues.
Nothing could go wrong, right?
“What do you mean vacation?” MK all but yelled, letting his distaste be known. Sure, Monkey King more than had the right to get some time to relax after centuries of… well, saving the world, but did it have to be now?
“Come on, bud! It will be only a few days,” Monkey King answered as he piled random stuff into a comically tiny suitcase. “Besides, I promised myself when I found a successor I’d go see some friends, look for some stuff I’ve always wanted… just cut loose and enjoy retirement, you know?”
Again, fair. The timing was just so terrible, though.
“You can’t just leave! What if Spider Queen comes back? If someone else worse attacks the city?”
MK didn’t say it out loud, but he was pretty worried about that thing with the whispery, skeletal magic that DBK had accidentally set free. Sure, Spider Queen was like, his worst nightmare, but even then he could tell that whoever the thing that possessed the Bull King had been, it was worse. Mk didn’t know if he could deal with it if it came to a fight while his mentor was away.
Also, how could Monkey King even think of leaving when there was a whole ass guy taking a long, long nap in his home? MK still didn’t know who that was; he kept forgetting to look it up. (Maybe he should set a reminder. His phone flashed red, advertising some random game with a stupid name. Nevermind then). Generally, you wouldn’t leave someone in that state to fend for themselves, but who knew with the Monkey King? Not him, that was for sure.
“Ah, you'll figure it out. It's adorable how nervous you are,” his mentor teased, failing to be comforting, “But don’t be! You’ve come a long way! And you know, the next step of your journey you must do alone.”
Did he hear that right?
“Alone??”
At least at that, Monkey King looked a little apologetic. “Don’t worry, bud! I’ll check in, give you some remote lessons… we’ll figure it out. As I said, it’s not even gonna be that long, anyway.”
“Sure…”
“You’re gonna do great! Don’t worry,” Monkey King gave him a thumbs up before taking off with a shout of: “Monkey King, out!”
MK didn’t linger a lot after that. He was annoyed, and pretty lost. Things only got worse when he got back to the city and found everyone dead asleep. That had been an experience, for sure — and he sorta kinda felt the urge to leave the whole hero business to the side for a while. Of course, the conviction didn’t last long: the very next day, Monkey King was contacting him; see-through and golden-tinted as he used something that was probably harmless called astral projection to speak to MK from a long distance (maybe he didn’t know how to use a phone?). He claimed there was a tiny little problem he needed MK to solve.
The gigantic dumpling hurling through the sky was not tiny. At all.
“So yeah, me and the boys got into a bit of a food fight up here in the Celestial Realm.” Monkey King told him, unconcerned, right after the bag of mixed reactions from seeing the dumpling, “Anyway, long story short, I need you to handle the tiny itty-bitty giant dumpling before it falls to Earth and destroys everything!”
Gods, he sounded so cheery too.
“What? How am I supposed to do that?”
“Ah, you’re a smart guy. You’ll figure it out!” Monkey King dismissed his worry with little more than a huff. Then with a few more misleadingly inspiring words, the monkey was gone in the blink of an eye, like he was never there in the first place. More and more, MK wished he could strangle him — never meet you heroes or something, right?
With no clues whatsoever on how to deal with the newly acquired problem, MK did the first thing that came to mind: panic. Then, he had a brilliant idea: raid Monkey King’s home; it most likely had something that he could use, given all his adventures — and Tang, the closest he had to an expert in the subject, seemed to agree. The whole thing sparked a debate with Mei, who really wanted to go with him for whatever reason but lost it on unfair grounds.
He started wishing he took the offer about half an hour later, when Tang managed to spectacularly crash their hoverbike right into the sandy beaches on Flower Fruit Mountain’s shore. That, after he claimed to be able to fly one (but not land it, apparently). From there, it only got worse; MK was forced to carry the man all the way from the very bottom of the steps leading to the waterfall and–
“Shuilian Cave!” Tang gasped. “That’s name of the Monkey King’s cave–“
“YEAH! I KNOW!”
His anger was short lived, however. Before he was done, Tang got ahead and stuck his hand into the waterfall, immediately being launched backwards by the powerful seal in the entrance to the cave; one that very few (non-monkey) beings were allowed through and obviously wouldn’t have given him passage. Tang himself knew that, and he tried anyway. That was one more for the list of people he kinda wanted to strangle. Only after MK did it himself that they were let through the strong water curtain. He knew something was wrong the moment he stepped into the cave itself. He could feel something foreign, yet distantly familiar lurking around. As if there was someone else in the cave with them, besides the usual monkeys — even the little guy that usually hung around him very much out of sight, when he’d usually be the first to climb into his shoulder. It made MK pause, alert, but he let it go after a few moments in which absolutely nothing happened, and Tang started looking at him like he was insane.
He could worry about the weird feeling later, when they were done saving the world from annihilation by giant dumpling.
Inside the cave, Tang ordered they look for a vase — totally anticlimactic, to the point where he once again wondered if he shouldn’t just have brought Mei instead — that could be used to deal with the problem. MK didn’t see how that would help until the other explained how the dumpling in question was most likely filled with soup that could flood and wreak havoc to the whole city, considering its type, and that there should be a vase capable of containing water enough to flood an entire mountain range in the middle of Monkey King’s hoard. It sounded good enough for him, so into the treasure vault they went.
MK had never really given it a good look. Even though it had giant, golden doors that stood out in the middle of all the stone the cave was made out of, they were surprisingly not noteworthy most of the time — except when they were needed. Like right now. But, obviously because mystic monkey business meant there was not a single day in which MK could solve stuff in a straightforward way, the doors were very clearly cracked open. It was not normal, really — because even though the vault was filled with junk, it could still be dangerous junk, and Monkey King didn’t want the little monkeys (or MK) sticking their grubby little hands on it and causing the apocalypse on accident — and it being open couldn’t mean anything good.
…
Sounds like a problem for future MK, he thought, stepping through the threshold with Tang in tow. Once he dealt with the dumpling, there’d be plenty of time for him to come back and check out what (or who) had managed to break into the vault so easily — it should be impossible, because it had the same kind of seal the waterfall had, but here they were anyway. There was no need to warn Tang about it, either. Knowing the man, he’d just freak out the moment MK told him something was amiss.
Stepping inside the vault was… incredibly disappointing. Sure, it had a bunch of fancy mystic artifacts that could get someone like Tang completely floored, but for MK? All he could see was the giant mess it hid, magical items of questionable origin piled from floor to ceiling in precarious positions. He had no doubt that messing with many of the piles would result in nothing but disaster (because even though they’d been there for a long time, they probably would just come crashing down the instant either of them tried to take anything from the piles).
“Oh!” Tang exclaimed from further inside the vault, going through one of the nearest piles, “That’s the legendary Demon Revealing Mirror! And the Fire Tip Spear! And– AHAHHAH, Mokey Cop limited edition 1982 action figure!”
This was a terrible choice. MK was sure that with anyone else here, he would already have found the artifact they were looking for and be halfway back to the city. Not with Tang though. His scholarly obsessions, well, they could…
“This could take a while,” the man said from his place halfway up a pile, clutching a few boxes of limited merchandise with what MK knew was no intention of ever letting them go.
Yeah, that would do it.
“Yeah well, we don’t have ‘a while’, so get digging!”
His own exploration of the vault was not a whole lot more successful, though. It all went sideways when he saw the spider — and sure, he’d been getting better at dealing with them after the whole thing with Spider Queen but that didn’t mean he liked them at all. It was what made MK put down the box he’d been looking under, hoping it would have squished his tiny little enemy. Except he wasn’t tiny, or squished, at all. What he distantly recognized as one of Spider Queen’s minions (Huntsman was his name, he was pretty sure) broke through the pile in front of him, launching many artifacts as he did.
MK screamed, scrambling backwards in an attempt to get out of the way. “He just looked tiny ‘cause he was far away!”
For a second, he thought it was fine; the overgrown spider completely bypassed him to shoot a weird web at something further in the vault. MK was relieved enough that he almost let it slide. That is until he saw the attempt at stealing for what it was, stopping Huntsman from snatching a little octagonal mirror that he was pretty sure he saw Tang gushing about earlier. Of course, that made a fight break out, and MK was slapped around for a while until one powerful strike sent him tumbling into a treasure pile, dislodging all sorts of garbage, which came down on both him and his arachnid adversary. He eventually managed to emerge from the mess, gasping for air as if he’d been drowned — only to be called by Tang:
“Ah, MK! I can’t find the vase anywhere!”
That was the last straw.
“UGH! Do I have to do everything?” He yelled, finally activating his gold vision — which yeah, he did forget he had, sue him — scanning around for anything that could help. “There! That crate is full of ‘em!”
“Why didn’t you do that sooner?” Tang asked, equally pissed.
“Because I forgot I could, okay?”
MK had been telling the truth, too. He constantly forgot about that particular ability of his, to the point it was embarrassing. There were many things he could have figure out way sooner if he remembered to use it, since with the Golden Vision he could have seen things much sooner and avoided a lot of trouble. Like the sudden foreign magic that he saw lingering around the treasury, and definitely wasn’t from the spider demon. No, it was something else entirely, a dark, fluid energy that was somewhat familiar to him. It felt like the exact opposite of his own powers — and in turn, the Monkey King’s, which he had inherited everything from.
In his distraction, MK was knocked over, again. He barely managed to avoid the double attack of swords strung on web directed at him and pushed Tang out of the way in the nick of time, seeing the man fall over amongst the crate of vases — at least that would ensure that the other would actually go through them, finally. MK didn’t see much of the progress, since he was a little busy trying not to die at Huntsman’s hands, knocking away attacks with nothing but a flame-tipped spear that broke in half halfway through the fight, leaving him defenseless. Although MK managed to weave between the quick, long ranged attacks for a while, there was only so much he could do; in the end, the spider demon caught him, pressing him to a junk pile with a hand tight around his neck.
“Tang!” MK shouted. “Hurry!”
He didn’t see what Tang was doing. He was again, busy with a very big, very angry spider trying to kill him. No matter how much he struggled under the weight, the grip on his neck didn’t falter. He was starting to see little black spots in the corner of his vision when Huntsman pulled one of the web-covered swords closer, aiming it right at him.
“Time is running out, little chimp,” the other snarled, the glint of the sword ever closer as he spoke.
Twisting himself a little more, MK managed to force out a wheeze, “You know that if we don’t stop that dumpling you die too– right?”
The spider looked surprised for a second. Only to almost be blasted off by some energy beam Tang had aimed at him — coming from a super cool (and weird) gun-slash-sword that transformed right in front of their eyes. What really caught his attention, though, was the mirror that fell out of Huntsman’s pockets when he jumped away: the same Tang told was some sort of demon-revealing artifact. It rolled on its side for a while, making a loud metallic noise that echoed in the ample room. Just as the name suggested, it showed the spider’s reflection on it, but not Tang’s… his would be probably the same, but he couldn’t catch a glimpse of it during the short moment the mirror was aimed at himself. For a split second, it showed something else, too.
MK squinted to try to make sense of exactly what he was seeing. In the mirror, another reflection blinked up at him momentarily: a monkey that looked an awful lot like his mentor, one single purple-glowing eye narrowing at him when they saw each other via reflection. He recognized that guy–
But they vanished moments later, right as the mirror settled on the ground. Meanwhile, Tang continued taunting the spider demon. “There is more where that came from! Now get outta here and let us save the world!”
Against all odds, Huntsman simply… accepted the deal, getting out of the vault with a flourish of the spider silk he seemed so fond of using. He said something about a truce, his reasoning surprisingly sensible for what amounted to some random minion. It was only when he got away that MK figured out what had been his plan all along. The demon-revealing mirror, once fallen in a heap behind the spider, had completely vanished. MK didn’t doubt the demon had taken it with him.
Well, not like it’d be really useful to him, right?
MK wasted a little more time fanboying over the cool, awesome sword Tang had taken, and really wanted to use it to blast the dumpling, but…
“Oh. Yeah, right. The soup,” he said at Tang’s disappointed face.
Said man was quick to reach for a vase on the ground, exclaiming, “This is it! The legendary vase that will save– No, wait. Hold on.”
Tang bent down to look more. MK really wanted to strangle him. Forget everything he’d ever said, he’d never want to do this team-up again.
“Yeah, that’s it!” Tang held up the right vase this time. “That’s the guy!”
Finally. MK barely paid the state they were leaving the vault in any mind, rushing to get back to the city to deal with the deadly dumpling still steadily approaching — their solution was flimsy at best, and left behind many chunks of exploded dumpling covering the entirety of Megapolis, but it did stop it from destroying the city. It was the best he and Tang could do, really. There was something still bothering him, though. In his haste, MK had failed to consider the consequences of the mess back at Flower Fruit Mountain. Did that mean he wasn’t, dunno, curious about whoever that other monkey had been back there? Well, duh. There just wasn’t any time to look around at the moment.
MK would be coming back to take a look though. That was a promise.