Perhaps the best word for the Lord Chief of Police's current state was 'twitchy.'
It was difficult to find words that would fully encompass the oddities in the expression and movements of someone with an Aethero-mechanical body.
Spines threatened to erupt from his back, and with his Third Calcification cultivation Nash could barely hear the clicking of gear teeth, the whirring of pumps, and the tiny hisses as nearly microscopic solenoids beneath the pores opened to allow the Lord Chief of Police to breathe through his skin.
The Lord Chief of Police's anxiety was not entirely unfounded. While the Patriarch undoubtedly knew that it was occurring, Nash had not actually requested his express permission, and therefore it had to be kept at least a little hush-hush. To that end, only two guards were with Nash, though they were unfortunately required to stay within the room with him due to the Senator's instructions.
They were in a high-end restaurant, partially to put the Police Chief at ease and partially to give him an excuse to be here. More to put the man across from him at ease than to satisfy his hunger, Nash scooped a dumpling from the simmering pot in the middle of the table into his own bowl.
A friendly smile on his face, he popped it in his mouth, his cultivation making the fact that the dumpling was still scalding hot barely worth even registering.
"How simply wonderful," he said, beaming. "You should have one, Senior. It is as Senior Beryl always says; getting into business on an empty stomach leads to foolish deals..."
The Chief of Police's eyes focused independently, one on Nash and the other guiding his hand to scoop a dumpling from the pot and putting it into his own bowl. Nash ignored the minor breach of etiquette and normal bounds of human ability - the Chief of Police had bigger things on his plate to deal with than remembering to keep all of his mannerisms organic.
Nash grabbed a bottle of hard tea still clinking with ceramic whisky stones, each one carved with runes and injected with lums that kept the bottle barely above freezing. He poured a small cup for each of them and slid one over to the policeman.
"Eat, drink. It serves well to soothe the nerves - I must say I sympathize," he said, picking up his own glass of chilled drink and raising it up for a toast. "I apologize if a cold drink is too uncouth for such an esteemed personage as you but I thought you would enjoy one, especially with your current workload."
Unsure of the purpose of the gesture but participating anyway, the Chief picked his own cup and clinked it against Nash. Doubtlessly, it was only out of habit on the Chief's part, but it seemed to help put the man at ease anyway.
"Good health and better cultivation," they each said, Nash's toast much more enthusiastic than the Chief's. Each of them took a sip from their cup, the Chief setting his down to eat his dumpling. Patiently and with an understanding smile, Nash waited for him to finish.
"I thank you for agreeing to this meeting, especially under such short notice," Nash said, breaking the statement into two parts with a sip from his hard tea in order to make it more casual. "I would like to congratulate you on your handling of my Father's... particular style of negotiation, you could say."
With a sympathetic wince, only half faked, he set down his cup.
"I've been on the wrong side of his words before, and I do not envy your position. However, I'd be lying if I said this wasn't an opportunity for me."
The Lord Chief of Police's body went stiff all at once.
With the same style of motion as a swiveling robotic arm, he craned his high-up neck around and down in two separate movements in order to look at Nash more directly. "And why may that be, Young Master?"
"Well, onto the reason for this meeting, I suppose," Nash said, draining the rest of his hard tea. "The Patriarch gave me a rather secretive information-gathering mission, related to the cultivator battle that occurred recently outside the Majestic Cloud Sect."
The mechanical man leaned in, his alcohol momentarily forgotten. "You have information on that attack?" he asked, his voice manic despite the perfect spacing of the syllables.
In response, Nash's smile dropped slightly; where once it was the very picture of politeness, now it was more of a baring of teeth, somehow animalistic.
Despite his lack of obvious signs of anger, the 'smile' took on a distinctly more hostile tone, only exacerbated by the eerie, perfectly symmetric nature of his face. When an Emerald took on an inhuman expression like this one, it slid directly down into the uncanny valley, chilling the Lord Chief's blood and lubricant both.
The friendly smile returned gradually over several seconds, and Nash took the jug of hard tea and poured himself another cup, holding it out in an offering to do the same for the Police Chief.
"My apologies," he said, putting the jug back down after it became clear the policeman would not be receptive. "I am unable to give you such sensitive information, even with you being a man of such high regard. It is rather secretive, as I'm sure you understand."
"Of course, Young Master," the Lord Chief said, leaning back and chuckling nervously in a hackneyed effort to appear more casual about the situation.
"Do forgive me, it's been a long day and this particular case has been troubling me since it was brought to my attention."
Nash nodded. "Of course, of course."
He took another dumpling from the hotpot and dunked it in an adjacent dish of sauce. "I am afraid I must keep you in the dark here, at least until the investigation is over. We are not quite sure of how far their influence reaches, after all. I trust I have your department's cooperation? I will require all of the information you have gathered so far."
For a moment, the Lord Chief of Police hesitated.
Then the smile threatened to drop from the Young Master's face, so like the Patriarch's, and he acquiesced.
The rest of the meeting was spent in simple enjoyment of the food and drink, though the Lord Chief of Police was much too tense to fully appreciate it.
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Nash, sleepless, pored over the same few minutes of security footage from every angle he had been provided, obsessing over every angle.
From within their own family's estates, the branch family Young Masters did the same, however begrudgingly.
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Beneath the city, Amusement stalked through Imperial-era tunnels, following trails of mycelium.
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Within his office, the Patriarch received his son's first report on the Hidden Mountain Temple and the cultivator hailing from it. He skimmed it momentarily, and then filed it away,
With that quiet loudness that only an interruption of the night's silence could achieve, Beryl stepped into the room, handing the Patriarch his own report on the subject.
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Sitting on a tightly-woven jute mat, Nash focused on his channels, looking inwards as he drank a foul-tasting elixir.
As soon as it hit the inside of his throat, the liquid shifted from the physical to the Aetheric and poured through his channels, clinging to the walls of the tubes as it writhed its way further in almost like a living thing. Nash shuddered as the elixir fully entered his channels, fully quaffed and reaching into every nook and cranny of his body in the Aether.
He swallowed a perfectly spherical white pill, and suppressed the feeling of a maddening itching in his soul as the liquid was activated and began smoothing the layers of calcification lining his channels, washing away any impurities present in his Aetheric body.
To see and sense something so other from him work at his channels was a disconcerting feeling. It was like what Nash imagined it would feel like to look at a surgery done on you through a mirror on the ceiling, the anesthetic blunting the pain but not the twin instinctual feelings of revulsion and fascination, unable to look away from the grisly sight.
Soon, though, it was over.
He found the sudden perfect smoothness of his channels disconcerting, like the feeling of touching your tongue to teeth just after all the plaque is scraped off. He caught himself more than once trickling lums through, feeling the uncanny frictionlessness of the Densified Aether sliding unimpeded through his channels, none adhering to the frictionless walls.
For a few minutes, he simply familiarized himself with the new sensations, testing out his techniques and waiting until the slippery aspect felt, if not entirely natural, then at least not disconcerting.
Immediately as soon as he got a sense for it, he began cultivating again, layering more and more infinitesimal layers of calcification on his channels, more carefully this time.
He would need any speck of power he could grasp, after all.
The more he had, the better his odds of surviving his investigation of Amusement.
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It smelt like flowers and rot in here.
The sickly sweet scent of flowers felt artificial despite the living origin of the smell, facsimiles of flowers made of the same pale-white mycelium growing up out of the cracked concrete.
From each of the false flowers, a haze emanated.
The thick clouds of spores were dense enough that they were actually visible, yellow particulates floating through the air, their heady, soporific properties clouding the mind of whoever walked here. It already had, judging by the corpses laid in a neat line, each in the same position; propped against the wall, not leaning to any side in particular, giving the impression of a group of people doing nothing but resting by the wall.
The corpses were stripped to the bone, and from them sprouted massive shelves of woody, pale pink fungus, still pulsating with stored blood.
In each of their skulls, a neat hole was pierced.
The newest of these macabre planters had barely begun to bloom, just recently killed. Even so, the hyphae had already begun to creep up his cooling veins and a rapidly-growing shelf of fungus had sprouted out of his sternum, sucking up both his blood and the Densified Aether from his still-warm corpse, blood and brain matter dripping from the hole pierced in his head.
In one corner of the subway tunnel, a more mobile type of fungus worked. It was one of the bodies belonging to the creature Amusement called Senior Sister, and bore quite a resemblance to the body Amusement had slain mere days ago.
This one also resembled a head with many arms sprouting from where it's neck should have been, but instead of a single eye coming from where its mouth should have been, it was covered in them.
Eyes were everywhere on this permutation of Senior Sister. Tiny ones, no bigger than the fresh corpse's fingernails, studded it all over like scales on a snake, broken up only by the bare pads of the hands and the bands of larger eyes the size and shape of oranges that bulged outof it in seemingly random places.
At the end of the fingers, fungus had been pinched into a resemblance of claws, yellowed and hardened through the drying process that had produced the appendages able to scratch even martensitic steels.
It was those nails that worked at the ground, carving runic channels into the already-crumbling concrete, sweeping the dust and debris out of the holes produced. Once she was satisfied, Senior Sister hopped towards the oldest corpse on her five arms, reaching one out to break off the shelf of mushroom from her victim's sternum, snapping it off from the bone it grew from, the broken end dripping with blood.
She brought the pinkish mushroom to the carved but still inert runes, squeezing and pouring the resulting slurry of blood, fungus, and Densified Aether made physical through her techniques into the etchings in the concrete, watching with her many eyes as they began to glow a soft red.
Discarding the now-useless mushroom, she reached for another, then another.
All the while, that dull crimson glow grew deeper. Soon, her eyes glowed with that same light.
In the four cardinal directions, small fungal buds with five branches sprouting from one end grew and grew. Soon, those branches began to develop fingers. Then eyes.
Each of the newly-created eyes opened one-by-one, glowing a deep red.
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Mountain surveyors were a hard bunch.
That was because mountains were a dangerous place, and always had been.
Traditionally, the mountains were considered only slightly less dangerous than the seas, where Sea Serpents roamed the wide, deep waters. Both immensely powerful due to their simple sheer size and a maneuverability in their native environment that even a water cultivator could never hope to match, Sea Serpents were known as the most dangerous class of beast to fight.
Their hard, shimmering scales had always been prized for the finest of heavy armor not only for humans, but for the ships that dared the waters as well.
To even hope for a sea crossing, the waters either needed to be guaranteed clear or a truly monstrous cultivator was required to come along, the main limiter of trade until the invention of air travel.
It was telling that mountains were only one rung below that; if you asked some, they were even on par.
For any willing to brave those reaches, it was a steady, lucrative living. Their clients ranged from prestigious smiths, weavers, and bone carvers, who were willing to pay a premium for the highest-quality Spirit Beast shells, bones, and silk, to individual cultivators or families searching for the safest passageways through the mountain ranges.
It was here, where the freezing wind could quite literally cut through the skin of a mortal with nothing but its howling-screeching speed, that the Hidden Mountain Temple called their home.
Their existence alone was a legend.
Every year, isolated villages of some of the most hardy, experienced cultivators in Wolf Nation, many of them unaware of such a polity, attempted the high climb to the steaming gates of the Hidden Mountain Temple.
Most died on the way.
Most of the rest died cut down in front of the gate.
A fraction of a fraction of those who had set out were accepted into the Temple.
A fraction of even them survived the cutthroat politics of the Temple they had gone through so much effort to join.
Every year once the Acceptance Ceremony had finished, the wizened Caretaker of the paths left the temple for weeks at a time.
Slowly, surely, the ancient man cleared the paths.
With his broom, he cleared the twigs and dust from the steep, cobbled path. With a metal bucket, filled with snow boiled over a hand-built fire, he washed the blood away. With his shears, he neatly trimmed the wild growths of mountain bramble away from the edges of the trail. Frozen bodies, picked nearly clean by scavengers of every type, were piled onto his cart.
Nobody knew where those bodies went after the cleaning was finished, nobody except for the Caretaker.
He never talked. Sometimes, when one tried to talk to him, he grunted in response. Other times, he simply stared the nosy person in the eyes and they dropped dead.
A superstition as old as the guilds of mountain surveyors was to never look an old man in the eye, or to ask one questions without them speaking first, for the Caretaker had never spoken.
One day, with nobody around to hear, the Caretaker spoke, looking into the distance, past the shorter mountain peaks. His eyes stared unerringly at a scene thousands of miles away, in the plains where the soft-folk lived.
"The children are fighting again," he said. It was nothing more than an observation, said to nobody except himself and the keening of the wind through the desolate, rocky landscape.
The Caretaker returned to his work.
----------------------------------------
It was time for another meeting.
This time, Nash had not called his team of Emerald clan Young Masters to a restaurant, but instead to a more secure conference room.
This one was inside of the Emerald Estate, and reflected that status to an exacting standard. The decor was minimalistic. A modern, sleek table was the centerpiece of the room, with a projector affixed to the ceiling above it and high-end office chairs surrounding it. Nash sat at the head of the table, rapidly paging through and scanning his notebook (now less ratty outwardly but no more organized within) to remind himself of what he had planned as he waited for the others to filter in.
The first to arrive was the Lacerta, her dress a simple, green affair and wearing solid mutton-jade bracelets carved with runes. She glided across the floor with the silence and grace of an assassin and sat down a polite distance from Nash.
Next came the Morganite and the Beryl, Lycaon and Sorex sitting down in short succession. The stocky Morganite sat across from Lacerta, the much scrawnier Sorex sitting next to him.
Shortly after came the Aquamarine, though he didn't seem to be elated about that fact. Suppressing a scowl, Leo sat down next to Lacerta, on the other side of her from Nash.
"Now we can begin," Nash said, motioning for the array of guards that had arrived with the young nobles to take their leave. All of them did, except for his own and the Beryl's. Confused, Nash's head cocked to one side.
"Junior Brother Sorex," he began, looking curiously at the remaining guard, "Why has your attendant not left?"
The guard answered for his Young Master. "Young Master Emerald, it has been decreed that the living Beryls are too few to be risked in any situation." He grimaced, a pained, guilty look. "It was, in the end, our laxness that led to that tragedy."
"Ah, yes," Nash said, not surprised by that answer. "That incident was truly a terrible shame. However," he said, standing up walking towards the window, staring out across the cityscape. He turned back to the guard. "Young Sorex is surrounded by friends and family here, none of whom have a reason to harm him."
His entire body turned to face the guard. "The secrecy of this mission is paramount." Idly, his fingertips dipped into the Aether, fidgeting with the Emerald Flail, twisting and untwisting the fibers. "What is your cultivation?"
The guard's face furrowed. "I am in the halfway point of the Second Calcification," he said, the words hesitant.
"I am in the Third." Nash turned towards the guard who had stuck close to him ever since he had returned to the estate. "Tell them yours."
The Emerald guard inclined his head deferentially. "Young Master, I am at the peak of the Third, and I am preparing to break into the Fourth."
In the Aether, Nash uncoiled the Emerald Flail, flinging it to the door handle. He flexed the technique, looping the end of the rope, and materialized a minuscule patch of it that wrapped all the way around the knob.
He pulled, and it opened. "If a fight broke out that all of us combined could not stop, you would do little to assist," Nash said. "Thus, you may wait outside in good conscience." Begrudgingly, the guard stepped outside, glancing back for Sorex's approval more than once before he finally closed the door and stayed outside.
Leo piped up. "Young Master," he said, his tone scathing. "When shall your guard leave? Or are branch family staff not to be trusted?"
Nash sighed. "If I could order him out, I would," he said, withdrawing the Emerald Flail and walking towards where the remote for the projector was kept. "Unfortunately, the Patriarch has judged that, after my recent escapades, I am not to be trusted alone near the outer walls of buildings."
Lycaon's face twisted in confusion. "What's that supposed to mean, exactly?" he asked, his fingers tapping on the table. "I thought you were kidnapped."
"It's rather difficult to kidnap yourself, I wouldn't recommend it," Nash said, brushing off the concern. "Now that we may truly begin, I shall summarize the information we have so far, and then we shall discuss the first in-field mission we shall perform."
They all nodded in assent, though Leo did so in a petulant manner. "Good," Nash said, loading a file onto a projector.
"This is the first mention of the Hidden Mountain Temple, which occurs in the second edition of the Beryl family collected historical letters. My thanks, Sorex, especially for your provided translation."
"What little is said matches the information we have on them so far; a powerful sect with unusual techniques, situated somewhere in the Mountains of Howling Wind." He clicked the laptop's mouse, progressing forward a slide. “The next oldest mention is from the Emerald Annals, in a section that describes mythical versions of our founding. According to this text, we were once positioned on the foothills of that very mountain range but were forced to move farther into the plains in response to stricter tithes by an unnamed sect controlling that region, at which point we became involved in Imperial politics."
Lacerta's voice interrupted as Nash reached down to show the next slide. "How can we be sure that this sect is that old?"
"Good question," Nash responded. "We cannot. However, we do know that Amusement's main body remembers a time when the Emeralds were still an integral pillar of the Imperial government, and combined with the mention in the Beryl epistolaries, it is likely that the Hidden Mountain Temple is the same one that forced the Clan into more direct involvement with Wolf Country politics."
The next slide came onto the projector. It was a collage of various snippets, each one from a different source, and each one not more than a sentence or two long.
"After the mention in the Beryl family collected letters, mentions become scarcer and more scattered. This one," Nash said, pointing at one in particular, "Is from the journal of an anonymous Heliodor during the war for independence. It is the only one that mentions the Hidden Mountain Temple in full, and the only account of a direct meeting with a member of that sect."
Another skirmish, subway tunnels, the snippet said, in a nearly illegible, scratchy hand. Fighting the imperials, nearly died to a worthless gearspined bootlicker. Out of nowhere, a Senior came in, killed them all plus a few of us through cutting air issued from his sword. Said he was from the 'Hidden Mountain Temple,' then tore out one of the bootlicker's gears and put it into a bag. Hardtack and gutter tea for dinner again today.
"As is plain to see, this fits the same MO as Amusement." Nash turned to another slide, this one filled with grainy photos and police report transcripts. "A member of the Hidden Mountain Temple appears as an incredibly powerful cultivator, uncaring of Wolf Country political ties, and interferes violently to some goal unrelated to the status quo."
Lycaon tapped on the table, requesting permission to speak. Nash nodded to him, and he nodded back. "What information does this give us? Does it tell us Amusement's next move, somehow?"
Lacerta looked towards Nash, and he nodded to her also. "It does not reveal anything immediately useful," she said, turning towards Lycaon, "But it does establish this as a norm for Hidden Mountain Temple, which helps to confirm that Amusement is indeed a member."
Sorex, having acquired his own permission to speak, gestured at one of the photographs taken of Amusement kicking his way into the entrance of a subway tunnel, one arm down.
"He was injured from that altercation," he said, his voice so quiet it was nearly a whisper. If his audience were not cultivators, they would have struggled to hear him. "He is likely trying to find somewhere to lie down and lick his wounds. It is now that he is most vulnerable."
"Exactly," Nash responded. "That is why our next move is to find him."
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Stakeouts sucked.
Even with the Beryl using his powers over distance to safely place small, wireless cameras at every entrance to the subway system in the city as they drove by, you still had to have someone monitor them. That duty, as Nash had decided against foisting it onto some operation-security violation of an underappreciated servant, fell on alternatively him or one of the other Emeralds.
Currently, it was Leo who sat in the back of the squad car, with all the grimacing and grumbling that entailed.
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Despite his obvious displeasure, he was actually performing his task; his eyes, furrowed in frustration, scanned on the panoply of screens for any movement around the tunnel entrances and quickly classified it into not-Amusement and possibly-Amusement.
On his lap his sword was laid beside its scabbard, him absentmindedly tracing the decorations that covered the hilt.
This was a war-sword, not a court-sword; despite the delicate filigree of the gold, shaped into images of flowering vines climbing up the hilt, the blade was broad and long and thin, tapering down into an infinitesimally wide edge that could cut through a hair lengthwise.
His normal sword, the triangular-bladed smallsword, had been left behind.
The other members of the team sat in the other seats of the hastily-procured van, which was currently converted into something between a surveillance vehicle and a tour bus.
In the driver's seat was Nash's guard, the only attendant in the van itself and the only one let fully onto the details of this operation. All the other guards were stationed in another, considerably less luxurious van, which was instructed to follow the first one closely. They had only been told that they were pursuing a dangerous cultivator that was involved in the recent Majestic Cloud Sect incident, and that the cultivator usually wore a smith's apron.
Nash himself was seated in the passenger's seat, while the other Young Masters of the Emerald clan were scattered through the many seats of the windowless van.
Lacerta sat alone, the closest to Nash, apparently not bored despite simply sitting in silence.
Sorex and Lycaon were positioned on opposite sides of the aisle, and were the only ones actually talking. Lycaon was leaned forward, one of his legs crossing into the aisle itself as he chattered away at Sorex, trying to drag a friendly conversation out of the diminutive Beryl and getting nothing but single-word and single-phrase responses. For his part, Sorex looked mostly confused rather than annoyed, simply unsure of how to react to the overly exuberant Morganite.
All of them had their weapons close by.
Leo had his aforementioned sword, while Nash fidgeted with his forearm-length knife, tapping his fingers on the images of carp.
Sorex also wielded knives, but his were a pair of shorter ones strapped to his thighs. Lycaon rested a short, beaked warhammer against his shoulder, and Lacerta had a leather case filled with vials that slotted into an odd knife, also held in the case.
The guard's weapon was an ax and buckler, both hanging from his formal belt. The axe showed signs of being rehafted, and the metal was not steel, but rather a piece of bronze already chipped on the edge, though it was sharpened and polished to perfection.
In the Aether, it had a haze to it as it slightly Densified the Aether around it, for a purpose Nash did not know.
All at once, everyone's eyes snapped to the back of the van. Leo had reflexively stood up, his sword in his hand.
The scabbard had dropped from his lap and clattered against the ground. "I see him," he said. "The third entrance."
"Sit down," Nash said with a calm he did not feel. He turned towards the guard. "Drive! Everyone else, prepare your weapons."
"Senior?" Leo said, getting Nash's attention.
"Yeah?" Nash snapped at him.
"This sounds insane even to me," he said, sitting down with subtly shaking legs, "But he looked directly at the camera. I swear he could see me. I think he knows we're here."
Nash grimaced, but did not respond. He pushed a button on the dashboard and began barking orders to the guards in the other car.
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They found Amusement waiting for them.
He was leaning casually against the railing of the entrance, which sectioned a small area outside of the subway entrance. That section rose out of the ground and had a door of its own, one of the later additions to cover up the blight of the Imperial-era tunnels.
Behind him, the many chains and the padlocks that had kept the door locked were laid out in neat piles on the ground, every single link forced open. One pile was the links of chain, while another held still-locked padlocks of various sizes.
His elbows on the low railing as he looked up at the vans pulling up, Amusement fiddled with one of the padlocks. It unlocked with a click and he tossed it aside, where it landed perfectly in another pile behind him filled with picked locks.
Reaching out his hand, another padlock scraped along the ground and jumped into his fingers. This one he unlocked quicker than the last, and another came to replace it.
"Ah, it's the little Emerald," he said, his expression fitting his namesake. "Well, don't be shy, Junior. Come out and speak."
Nash obliged.
He had called ahead to the police, so this area had already been cordoned off. In this area of the city, gangs ran rampant and the police rarely bothered to interfere except for suspicions of truly momentous cultivator battles, so most listened.
The lack of people here led to an eerie silence that blanketed the city block like a thick fog. The only ambient sounds still present here were the distant roars and rumbles of cars screeching down the roads not far from here, and every slow, measured footstep Nash took felt like the crack of an explosive cutting through ears stuffed with cotton.
"Hello, Amusement," he said, giving a respectful salute. He did not bother to conceal the long knife that he held in one hand.
Nash turned his head and looked into the van, giving a curt nod before looking back at Amusement.
Silently, the rest of the Emeralds filtered out, fanning out behind Nash, their weapons drawn.
Then came the guards; the Third Calcification one stood the closest to him, his hands already gripping his axe and buckler. The other guards stood next to their respective Young Master, two of them for each Emerald other than Nash.
In total, it was fourteen against one. Amusement seemed undaunted.
"All this for me?" he asked, tossing another padlock behind him. It bounced and skidded across the ground, making noises that sent Nash's teeth on edge. "What exactly is all this about?" he asked, his smile widening.
"I must shamefully admit, Senior, that I did not come here with completely pure intentions." Nash gave another respectful martial salute, a strained smile on his face.
I need to make him underestimate me - he shouldn't be able to stop the ambush if I make it too interesting for him to play along.
All of his training worked to suppress the trembling that threatened to sneak into my voice. "Senior, I was recently recaptured by my father's men, and he saw fit to make me useful by putting me to work investigating you. A rather unfortunate coincidence, is it not?"
Amusement's smile stayed in place. He dropped the padlock in his hands, letting it dangle from one finger, swinging back and forth. He showed no signs of preparing to speak.
Nash took a deep breath. "We have already discovered a few things involving your relation to the Hidden Mountain Temple," he said, his eyes cast at the ground rather than Amusement's face. "If you can simply confirm that your activities will not interfere with the Emerald Clan's interests, we shall take our leave."
"Otherwise..." His face twisted in resignation. "Otherwise we shall be forced to destroy you."
In response, Amusement laughed.
It was no delicate laugh. His body swinged back and forth as his cackles grew louder and louder, the lock dropping from his hand. After a tense period that was probably less than a minute but felt like hours, the laughter stopped, trailing off into nothingness as the chuckles became farther apart and quieter. Amusement looked at Nash once again.
"How, exactly, will you enforce that?" Amusement asked, wiping a tear away from his eye. "My business, no matter how boring I find it, is mine and my sect's alone. A little country like yours isn't worthy of interfering in it."
He stood up straighter and stepped through the railing, the metal structure of which parted before him and reformed behind him.
Ah. I seem to have miscalculated, Nash thought to himself, watching the superb control of mundane metal.
Now, the fear had passed from Nash; he was simply too focused on how to survive the situation to bother with something as mundane as fear. That was how he gave the impression of fearlessness as Amusement walked up to him, his hands in the pockets of his apron.
"Interesting," Amusement said. "How interesting. You are lucky I find this so intriguing, or else you would no longer be alive." He reached out with a pair of pliers. The axe-wielding guard moved to intercept, but Nash shot him a sharp look.
The pliers dragged against the knife, skipping against the surface and leaving a series of scratches with a clink clink clink.
"Interesting knife you got there," Amusement said. "I don't believe I've seen it before, but I did sense it when we met last. I didn't take much notice of it then, but now..."
Amusement let his words trailing off, his chin gripped between his thumb and the side of his pointer finger. He let that hand fall, the pliers still near the knife's crossguard. "I guess your little Emerald family isn't completely terrible, at least when it comes to hiring craftsmen. A knife like that wouldn't be too out of place for one of my Juniors, though not after their First Calcification."
Amusement's smile stayed on his face. No malice was obvious in his expression, but the simple motionlessness quality of it still served to chill Nash's blood.
"Perhaps I should bring it back, give it to one of my Juniors as a gift. I could even reforge it, with your blood - think of it! A part of you living on throughout the centuries at my side until I reached the Ninth Calcification, and then you could go on and on throughout the ages, perhaps even become an heirloom.”
Nash's heartbeat sped and sped. He did his best to keep his eyes focused on Amusement even as the others stepped, as quietly as they could, to flank Amusement.
The pliers were pushed past the knife, the jaws opened wide and resting open around Nash's thumb.
Nash thrusted forward in an attempt to stab.
Amusement simply stiffened his arm. The channel locks closed, gripping tightly onto Nash's wrist, his thrust halted.
"Tsk, tsk," Amusement clicked. "That's naughty of you."
There was a terrible sound of groaning metal.
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Nash found himself on the ground, staring up at Amusement.
Around his wrists, his knife had been warped, the metal bent into nigh-unrecognizability, much farther than steel should have been able to stretch without tearing. Sticking out from one side was the hilt, the delicate gilt images of swimming carp still visible.
He tried to sit up, to scramble away from Amusement, but found himself locked into place.
Around his legs, an amorphous mass of metal had engulfed him. Nash's hair felt wet, and not with sweat; the throbbing pain on the back of his skull told him that the warm liquid wicked up by his hair was his blood.
His eyes struggled to focus on Amusement. Why is it all so bright right now?
His thoughts turned ponderously in his brain. "Oh. Concussion," he said, out loud.
That brought a chuckle out of Amusement. "That reaction is new, at least." He sat down on the ground next to Nash, staring into his eyes. "Though I don't tend to leave them alive long enough to get back up."
"And what makes me different?" Fruitlessly, Nash wiggled in his restraints.
"You're much too interesting," Amusement said. "Bit jumpy, but I can work with that. You played along, but weren't too much of a pushover. Been a pleasure. Unfortunately..."
The smile dropped from Amusement's face. "You interfered with - "
Whatever Amusement was going to say next, Nash would never know; he had dipped into the Aether, throwing off all but the thinnest layers of his restraints. Bringing the bare minimum of his body into reality, he balanced his entire body on one physical finger, pushing up. He maneuvered himself around Amusement's liquid metal channels, positioning himself behind the stronger cultivator.
Bringing the Emerald Flail down in a hard swing, he returned a minuscule portion of it and his feet to reality, planted securely on the ground as the flail-like rope headed straight for Amusement's skull.
Even in the Aether, Nash could see how Amusement blocked it without even looking, watching the movement of his liquid metal channels.
And even in the Aether, he could still feel Amusement sweeping his physical feet out from under him and pulling on the still-physical portion of the Emerald Flail. Nash spun uncontrollably in the Aether - falling wasn't exactly an applicable concept here, now that his entire body was pulled safely within.
When his rotation brought him back around, he could swear that he saw Amusement's eye-channels tracking him.
He kicked off his shoes and threw them with all the force he could muster, pushing him up and away from Amusement.
I need to return soon - keep him distracted. Or entertained, rather; otherwise, he'll start killing them. If he hasn't already.
Still disoriented and concussed, he dropped back into reality. He landed on his feet, just barely, and still off balance, one hand reached out to stabilize him. The other one held the Emerald Flail, and he immediately began winding up for another swing.
Then the pliers shot out like an arrow and hit his arm.
Nash screamed in pain, the Emerald Flail returning to the Aether as the hand holding it broke into pieces. The projectile melted, shedding the plastic handles as it wrapped around the shattered, bloody remains of his hand.
Amusement walked towards him casually, spinning a padlock around one finger. The grin had returned to his face. "How intoxicating! I actually enjoyed that!"
While Amusement took his time, Nash took the opportunity to glance around. Not good. All of the Emeralds were alive, at least, but the guards couldn't say the same; three of them were still alive and squirming, Nash's guard among them, but the other six had been pierced through the head by spears of metal.
He turned to face Amusement once more. "I'm glad," Nash said dryly and with a false flippancy. "I went through so much effort to make it entertaining."
He attempted to shake the glob of metal off his ruined hand, but all that brought was another spike of pain; he brought it into the Aether, letting the majority of it fall to the ground, though a thin shell still encased his hand as he brought it back into physical reality, a shell his hand was too damaged to break.
Amusement's smile grew. "Your effort is showing," he said. He threw the padlock at Nash in a casual, underhand toss. Nash dodged out of the way as it turned into a shifting ball of growing and shrinking spikes.
"It's a shame you need to die after this," Amusement said, another padlock jumping into his palm and clinking against the artificial arm. "If it was up to me, I would let such an entertaining obstacle live, but your family is involved with the Majestic Cloud Sect."
Through his peripheral vision, Nash saw the Third Calcification guard finally worm his arm free from the cocoon of metal; he struggled to not flick his eyes to the sight, instead keeping them focused on Amusement.
"I agree, it's quite a shame," he said, using pulses of Greater Luminiferous Vision to align the Emerald Flail in the Aether. "I would rather you let us keep living, no matter how inconvenient it is."
"Inconvenient?" Amusement gave a short exhale from the nose in amusement. The smile dropped from his face. "You are nothing but a diversion to a diversion I am forced to take by my duty."
Nash dodged out of the way preemptively; even with that measure, the supersonic padlock clipped him in the side, the throw having been so forceful that it made a terrible CRACK as it sped through the air, curving impossibly to unerringly seek the Young Master.
He fell to the ground, feeling that entire side of his body erupt in terrible, wet pains. An unknown amount of his ribs had been shattered, even with his armor-like high-end cultivator clothing, and a bloody trough had been cut through his side.
Nash rolled along the ground, sending himself into the Aether for a split second to avoid another padlock, this one seeking his skull and carving a noticeable trough-crater into the concrete before exploding into shrapnel. When he returned, he did so already in a lunge, forcing his injured and strained body to cooperate; his feet returned first, shooting him up and through Amusement as his body dematerialized once more.
His shoes returned to reality already kicking at the back of Amusement's head, his body twisting in order to swing the Emerald Flail at the monstrously powerful cultivator.
Once again, Amusement didn't need to break a sweat to block the attack.
But this time, he turned around. And that gave time for the Third Calcification attendant, nearing the Fourth, to grip his bronze axe in both hands and swing it into Amusement's leg.
It bit in slightly before it deformed, turning into an amorphous mass of bronze.
A small line of blood dripped from Amusement's thigh. He smiled, his face the face of a man who just discovered a pleasant surprise. "I wasn't expecting anything of that level," he said, apparently genuinely excited by that development.
The piece of bronze, still thick with Densified Aether, formed into a perfect sphere. It floated in midair as the guard lashed out with a flurry of blows that splashed uselessly against Amusement's casual single-arm blocks.
"Where'd you get this?" He asked, putting a finger on the sphere of bronze and spinning it, still held in the air with his cultivation. Amusement scratched it with the end of his fingernail and observed something in how it deformed. "This is actually pretty decent! This is, what, aether bronze 23A-something? Do you know if this is a casting or forging alloy?"
Amusement caught the guard's blow and pulled down, tearing the arm out of its socket and off of the other cultivator's body. Despite that, the attendant didn't scream, instead throwing a kick at Amusement's knee. Amusement checked the kick as he swept a finger inside of the open wound of the severed limb, smearing the blood on the orb of floating metal.
"Ah, that's no fun. It's keyed to your bloodline, even after I changed it into this form."
Even with the apparent disappointment of his words, Amusement's tone was light, if chastising, and his smile was still present. "Y'know, that isn't a terrible alloy there, especially for this backwater. "
Good. He's distracted. Nash risked a glance at the watch he had bought specifically for this purpose, and found it broken and useless. That's suboptimal, to say the least. I have no idea when the rest are coming - hopefully he's in a good enough mood to not take the backup seriously.
The closest of the restrained to Nash was Sorex, and he flopped down next to his distant cousin, holding him close and bringing him into the Aether minus most of the metal cruft built up around him.
"You should be able to break it now. Get the others and get out of here," Nash said, the sound only carried to the Beryl by the rapidly-dissipating atmosphere his technique had brought with them. "Be silent," he said, returning them both back to the physical world.
They went off in their separate directions; Sorex, to free Lacerta, and Nash, to keep Amusement entertained long enough that the backup could come. Nash bent down and picked up a chunk of concrete, broken loose from the rest of the pavement by one of Amusement's projectiles gone wide. He moved straight towards Amusement, hiding it behind his back with his good hand.
Amusement was still manipulating the sphere, though currently he was pinching and pulling it into some sort of complex, three-dimensional rune that Nash did not comprehend. He looked up from his work, still holding the severed arm of the continuously-attacking attendant, and appeared delighted to see Nash once more. "Ah, come to join us once again? I almost thought you had run away."
"You would've killed me if I had."
"True, true," he said, gesturing with the arm. "Still, being that cognizant of your situation is a good skill to have," Amusement said. "You will live longer that way, though admittedly not by much at this point in our relationship."
Nash heard the sounds of metal tearing as it was pried off of a cultivator's body, muffled by the artificial distance Sorex created between him and everyone else. He walked slowly to the side, circling to take Sorex out of Amusement's peripheral vision.
"I suppose it's too late to simply agree to go our separate ways?"
"Unfortunately, that is the case."
Amusement dropped the severed arm and made a small gesture with his arm, moving the floating mass of bronze to float behind him instead of in front of him. "Do you have any more tricks up your sleeves, little Emerald?"
"I do, in fact. Could you look behind you for a second?"
"No."
Nash threw the rock at him. It bounced off his face without even leaving a mark.
"Was that it?" Amusement asked, a bewildered smile on his face. "I was expecting something more..."
"Elegant? Befitting a noble family?"
"Yeah, that."
"Sorry, we're out of clever strategies. Rock time again." Nash reached into a pocket like he was going for another chunk of concrete, stashed away in his jacket. Instead, he drew out a firecracker, flinging it as quickly as his early Third Calcification cultivation could allow.
It hit Amusement's face once more, just to the side of one of his eyes, and exploded into light and heat. For a mortal, that could have been debilitating and likely blinding; for a cultivator of Nash's level, it would still throw him off, his enhanced senses taking in every nuance of sight and touch and hearing, overwhelming his brain with sheer volume of information.
Amusement barely flinched, taking fractions of a second to refocus his eyes on Nash, no worse for wear.
Nash was already taking advantage of that minuscule delay, as was the guard.
The guard was closer and higher in cultivation, his attack landing before Nash had even started his. With his remaining hand, he drew a small knife and rocketed it forward, straight for Amusement's belly. It lashed out like a snakebite and pierced straight in, the point of the small weapon sinking in up to the guard's curled knuckle.
Meanwhile, Nash had already brought the Emerald flail to bear, coming down in an overhead strike. It was barely too slow, and Amusement slipped slightly out of the way, blinking the light out of his eyes; the attack still hit his shoulder, though it did nothing but glance off.
Amusement's face went blank.
Nash dipped into the Aether.
He came back to a spray of blood, the guard decapitated and head rolling on the slight slant of the ground.
Nash jumped, flinging himself out of the way of the lazy but incredibly fast sword-hand chop. He landed, and immediately he was forced into another series of desperate dodges, often needing to dip out of the way of a particularly fast attack.
By now, Sorex's task was half-done, and Leo was the first to lend his aid. He lunged, his sword flicking out with all the speed his First Calcification could muster.
"Run!" Nash barked. "You're not strong enough!" he said, sending a flurry of punches at Amusement in an attempt to distract him, but with one hand down and Amusement's higher cultivation it was a fruitless attempt.
Leo grimaced, his teeth bared in concentration. A trickle of lums left him and an array of runes began to glow on the sword, and the distance between that edge and Amusement's neck seemed to simply shorten.
His swipes, despite their perfect form, were still not even close to biting into Amusement's flesh, but they were closer, and that gave Nash another opportunity.
"Run, you idiot!" he implored, palming another firecracker and thrusting his arm towards Amusement's face. When his arm was inevitably blocked, he tipped his hand and dipped it, surprising Amusement enough that the palm heel strike, firecracker in hand, collided with its target.
Once more, Amusement flinched back.
From farther than it should have been able to, the sword stabbed forward, getting caught between Amusement's reacting fingers.
From even farther, two shorter weapons shot out, Sorex's knives seeking the stronger cultivator's jugular and leaving nothing but minute scratches, barely weeping blood. That, too, Amusement tried to block, the arm previously meant to stop Nash's assault redirected to the Beryl's approach, but Sorex was too far.
Instead, padlocks stood on their shackles, pointing towards Sorex and launching at him in volleys, forcing him to bat them away with his twin knives or dodge with his distance.
While the Morganite used his massive build to wrench the restraining metal from the remaining living guards, Lacerta slipped in to attack as well. Her odd knife sought the wounds already created, slipping in and out of vulnerable points as she stuck close to Amusement. Whenever her knife met the scratches already open and bleeding, she stuck it into those further and squeezed the handle, releasing something into the bloodstream.
Nash's heart was calm. They would either succeed, or they would die.
There was no point in agonizing over the particulars.
For his part, he swung wildly with the Emerald Flail, dipping both it and him in and out of the Aether to attack from impossible angles, trying to occupy at least one of Amusement's blocking hands. Whenever he thought he could get away with it, he reached for another firecracker, or feinted doing so.
It was that cooperation that was currently keeping them alive.
Even with their poor cultivations relative to Amusement, their sheer numbers and high-quality techniques kept him occupied; he only had two arms, of course. and to use one of them to attack would leave him open for a potentially damaging blow.
That status quo continued for a bit longer - Nash wasn't sure whether it was twenty seconds or twenty-five, but what he knew for sure was that it hadn't crossed that mark.
That time, however, was more than enough for Lycaon to free the remaining two living guards.They, too, joined the fray.
One of the guards drew a bow out of seemingly nowhere and began loosing arrow after arrow at Amusement as Lycaon and the other one ran to support the other Emeralds in melee.
By now, Amusement was actually dodging, weaving between the many attacks directed at him, ducking around and under the flurry of arrows, thrown firecrackers, knives, sword strikes, poisoned blades, and Nash's Aetheric flail.
His evasion was not effortless by any means, but neither was it strained, despite all of the effort the Emerald cultivators expended to merely keep him occupied.
From a distance, dozens of thunderclaps could be heard, slowly getting closer.
Just a bit longer. Not much more until backup is here.
----------------------------------------
Amusement was currently entertained by the swarm of cultivators attempting to kill him - it had a kind of honesty to it.
Unlike the other affiliates of the Majestic Cloud Sect, the Emeralds had some pep to them. Sure, they still had that unbecoming, upjumped attitude that the rulers of backwater places always had, but they seemed to be able to back it up.
At least among their peers; Amusement was not one of those.
He cast out his perception, feeling the metal all around them - the broken, tortured remains of the cars that had brought the Emeralds here, the piles of chain links and padlocks, the rebar of the concrete buildings around them, to the very weapons the Emeralds assaulted him with. With a word, with a thought, he could send that metal screeching out in a dozen spikes, each one coiling into a twisted collection of metal terminating in a microscopic edge, ready to pierce through the seven remaining Emeralds opposing him.
But for now, he decided not to. Every attack that managed to somehow sneak through his guard only delighted him further, a drop of water onto his parched, empty soul.
More tactically, it would be the perfect deception; the Amusement part of him justified this indulgence, for that was what it was, on the basis that it would mislead whatever cultivator was the source of that thunder. Begrudgingly, the directives implanted by his creators stepped to the side, allowing his fun.
He felt the microscopic creaking of his artificial (or rather, mechanical; nothing about him was particularly natural) arm, and made a mental note to tighten the tolerances of the piece.
Perhaps, he mused, deflecting a poisoned knife with a flick of his fingers, I could use that bronze to help get it up to speed. It would be a waste of good cultivation to manually tie it in once more.
To Amusement, this altercation was more of an exciting dance than a dangerous battle. To him, it was also a logic puzzle, where to win he had to solve the problem of getting hit the least amount possible while still not killing too many of his opponents or allowing any to escape.
With that in mind... It was no fun to keep dodging or catching all of those arrows that weak little guard fired at him as if they would hurt any worse than a mosquito bite. Ooh. Metal arrowheads. As soon as the next arrow was drawn back, the guard adjusting their aim for Amusement, that arrow exploded.
So did all of the ones in the quiver.
The thousands of arrowhead shards swam through the air like a swarm of piranha, coalescing into the sinuous figure of a massive snake. Each one of the little shards became a scale, and the body was bulked out with the bent, tortured remains of the vans. The headlights, or what remained of them, were packed into the thing's face, and a long uninsulated wire ran from it to the car battery that dragged behind it.
Their face lit up in the flickering light of the metal snake's eye, the guard (already injured by the shrapnel) attempted to run, dropping their bow.
The snake was much faster than it looked. It wrapped around the guard and squeezed.
Amusement laughed at the grisly scene, of the life-draining quantities of lost blood splattering onto the backs of the horrified Emeralds. Specifically, the little distance-managing one and the big, hairy one, both of whom he didn't have a name for and didn't care to learn.
His laugh intensified more and more as the body dropped in three, lifeless pieces, each one dangling with a different section of intestines.
He raised his hand up and twisted it. The scales spun around on the body as the snake did so too, a constant roar of clinking metal against itself and the high-pitched keen of it scraping against the concrete.
He directed it to lunge with a delighted smile on his face.
It was all so amusing, seeing how the little Emeralds were forced to jump out of the way, desperately throwing themselves out of the path of a golem without even basic autonomy, crudely made by someone with only peripheral knowledge of that art.
It was like throwing an infant crocodile into a small box of still-blind baby rats, and Amusement would know. The incoherent flailing, the desperation in every movement, the clumsy attacks and defenses of creatures unsuited to true combat.
Then, the next clap of thunder sounded, and Amusement's smile dropped. In an instant, the trickle of water dripping onto the parched emptiness in the center of his soul stopped, every bit of it absorbed.
Here, there was a possible threat. He doubted that a family as weak as the Emeralds would have a Body Destruction cultivator, even as their Ancestor, but Amusement was still rather weak, and these indulgences had drained his Densified Aether, no matter how insignificantly.
He stomped.
The metal around him locked in place, then shot out, the weapons clattering from the hands of the cultivators around him; the little swordsman kept his grip on his, to his credit, but was instead simply carried away with the weapon, slamming into the ground. He grunted, the breath forced out of his lungs. Amusement paid him little mind.
He thrust his hand forward, the fingers of his metal hand pinching into sharp claws.
The Emerald tried to dodge the attack, but failed; apparently as a back-up, his entire head winked away, dipped into the Aether. Amusement's hand cut downwards, managing a perfectly straight line of carved flesh across the collarbone and pectoral before Nash corrected his carelessness, dipping entirely into the Aether.
Amusement cocked his head to one side. The bolt of lightning barely missed him, attracted to the metallic serpent.
A flash of greenish arc-light commenced, the 'golem' seizing up as it was welded into a single, burnt mass.
Amusement brushed aside the lesser cultivators surrounding him, jumping in front of the newcomer. "And who might you be?" he asked, the scattered metal of the ground already coiling into a massive wave behind him, ready to crash upon his opponent.