Send our master out this instant!"

快送吾師出來也 — and the pronoun is worth a glance. Eight Rules says 吾師, the formal literary "my master", not the everyday word he normally uses. Even the idiot reaches for a bookish register when he is shouting at somebody through a wall.

It frightened the little fiends inside the gate into tumbling away to report, "Great King, it has gone badly, gone badly — the front gate is broken down by the monks!"

滾將進去 — rolled their way in — is the same rolling verb the demon kings got when they came off their beds. Small fiends and great kings move identically when frightened, and the novel notices.

The three demon kings were exceedingly annoyed. "These wretches are downright rude," they said.

The comedy is entirely in the size of the reaction. Their gate is in pieces and their response is that the visitors are being rude. 著實 is the adverb thoroughly, downright — and this is the third reading of 著 in as many passages, zhuó, the bookish one. 無禮 is a breach of manners, not of law: the word a host uses about a guest who has behaved badly at dinner.

They called at once for their armour, dressed themselves, took up their weapons each, and led the little fiends out of the gate to meet the enemy.

The arming sequence, done in one breath — the novel usually spends a poem on this. Its brevity here is a signal: the fighting is what matters, and it is about to get its poem instead.

By this time it was about the third watch, and in the middle of the sky the moon was bright as daylight.

Here is the night-watch again, and now it is telling the time properly: 三更, the third of the five watches, so roughly eleven at night to one in the morning. And the moon is full, because this is the fifteenth of the first month — the Lantern Festival, the night the whole thing began. 月明如晝, bright as daylight, is not decoration but stage lighting: it explains how the reader is about to see a battle fought outdoors in the middle of the night.

Out they came, and without another word of talk fell straight to their weapons.

更不打話 has the OTHER reading of that character — gèng, meaning "still" or "even" — sitting three lines after the watch-keeping gēng. Two uses, two readings, one character, and only the sense tells them apart. 打話 is to exchange words before a fight, the formal challenge and counter-challenge that this novel's battles almost always open with. Skipping it is a small, telling discourtesy.

On this side Pilgrim took on the battle-axe, Eight Rules met the great sabre, and Sha Monk faced the great cudgel.

The pairings, set out cleanly so the poem that follows can be read. Three demons, three weapons: axe, sabre, cudgel. The cudgel is the one to watch — the poem is about to call it three different things in ten lines.

It was a splendid fight:

The cue. 這場好殺 announces a set-piece battle description the way 你看他 announced a transformation. 場 is read cháng here — it is counting an event, one bout of fighting, not naming a place, and the two senses take different readings of the same character.