I spent two seconds on my feet before stumbling to the ground. That probably saved my life.

A wave of angry fighters crashed into me from behind the moment the fighting started. Every one of them streamed toward the boy in a mad frenzy. They didn’t care who they hit in their mad dash. An elbow to the gut, a shoulder knocking me down, footsteps trampling on open fingers. It was chaos and I should not be here.

It was all I could do to curl up into a ball. Any limb left outstretched was crushed underfoot, so I let them break my body instead. They kicked me around like a ball and broke my nose in with pointed feat, but I would stay together until the end. I didn’t free myself until the rumbling of feet died down. Only when I managed to stand up did I realize how beat up I was? Red welts and long nicks of bloody agony strained with every movement. If I had a sword I would drop it. My gauntlets hung limp in front of me like an ape that does not know they’re yet dead.

Too much dust in the ear. I couldn’t breathe. My ears rang with the phantom sounds of the village bell. Was I even standing or hallucinating all these tender sensations? I was a ghost wandering a dying battlefield. The moon above shined down on empty stands. There was not a living soul around.

Where was my brother?

“Sen!” Dust choked my every breath but I had to shout. This was never mentioned by Lady Yu. Blood and sand she yearned for, but not the dust. Not the stinging tears. Not the clumps of dirt forming deep in your throat. I kept my hands up as Lady Yu taught me, ready to strike the shadows in the dust. Too many hominids billowing in and out of existence, demons slinking at my feet, whispering in my ears, too much to pay attention to, and not enough senses left to see what was right in front of me.

Shouting and a withering mass of shadow in front of me. I slunk towards it. Clanging weapons, cursing men, screaming. If Sen was anywhere, he would be there.

Instinct screeched at me and my languid body moved. I ducked low like a coward as a man flew over. Nothing but dust and a diminishing silhouette greeted me when I whirled around. “What the hell–” Instinct was quiet as I was struck again. A bull launched me into the air. Bloody agony returned as I fell to the ground. Someone was on top of me. I clawed at him but my shirt was clumped in his hands. Intertangled we rolled in the dirt, struggling to a stop. My attacker ended on top in the end.

“BaoBao?”

BaoBao’s tight ratlike looked away from me. His breath was heavy, his pupils were tightly focused on something very far away. Blood from his mouth dripped down his cheek onto mine.

My feet were tucked under his chest and kicked. Hard. He disappeared into the sand but I ran, refusing to let him go. Rage muted the pain and BaoBao was its chosen victim. Sen was forgotten in my mind but his words were not.

Pincers exploded from my fists as I ran. I yelled at where his body had gone. “Fight me, you bastard.” Then I saw him.

BaoBao laid on the grounds. He couldn’t stand up. His palms slipped in the sand. Attempting to move his leg made him scream. There was a chunk torn out of his knee. I took a step back but he found me while rolling around in pain. Hatred flared on his face but not at me. At whatever was behind.

“I’m not going to fight you, idiot. Help me get out of here.”

Someone else slammed into me. Heavy and fast it was much too late to dodge, but I had learned my lesson from BaoBao. I did not whirl around and lose my footing. I did not trip underfoot and flop to the ground. I jumped and let his momentum carry me. In the air, I twisted like Lao, and the heavy mass slid away into the distance. I hesitated watching where the body landed. The ground came upon me too quickly. I landed on my ass instead of my feet and tumbled anyway.

“What was that?” I looked around. BaoBao was gone.

The clashing in the distance was dying down. The screaming wasn’t.

Something was very wrong here.

Heavy claws weighed me down. I let them fade. I prayed to the heavens that they were not needed. This was not the island fight of Lady Yu’s day. I wasn’t sure this was a fight at all.

My feet started moving away from the screaming behind me. I wasn’t running away. I was not leaving Sen behind. I was just checking on my latest assailant.

He wasn’t moving. Dust still blanketed the air so I saw nothing but a limp shadow. A tiger waiting to pounce potentially?

The pincers returned. I should not need them. This man was clearly down. I would see nothing on my approach. Be attacked by nothing. I walked with trepidation knowing he would get up. He didn’t. This man who had attacked me didn’t twitch. Didn’t move at all, and he was certainly not lying in wait to pounce. He was limp on the floor. Half of him was pointing in the wrong direction.

I shouted for a healer. Screeching for someone to come. Anyone to come? But there was no one around. The stands were empty. The dust was thinning and no men carrying stretchers were heading my way.

The man on the floor did not hear my screams. He couldn’t hear me at all, couldn’t see the crab claws shivering at my side, couldn’t see me gulp down vomit. He couldn’t see anything because his head was missing.

I fell back, chunks gushing between my fingers as it all hit me at once. This corpse was suddenly too big without the dust. Too real. I scurried back thinking it would come to life in pursuit. Red was still spilling from what had been a neck. A long slab of skin covered in hair and cheek and ear loosely cascaded down his shoulder like some bloody human skin scarf. It was as if some monster had bitten deep into his face and wrenched the skull from his face.

Acid simmered in my throat. My eyes grew too big for their sockets. The dust was clearing.

He was not the only corpse. Bodies like a shipwreck floated on top the sands. My brother’s face was not among them. The twisted faces of three crippled cultivators were. Tong’s mangled torso was. His kids. His family. Too many of us and too many not of us. I started to run

Not in the direction of BaoBao. I should have. I should have scampered home. I couldn’t. My brother was all I could think of. I needed to see. I needed to check.

What would I even do if he was still alive?

A hydra crept into my vision, a black silhouette against the dust more fearful than something real could ever be. Thick long necks whirled around like a nest of vipers. They grabbed human-shaped shadows in their maw, crushing them, tossing carcasses away like refuse. I wiped vomit from my mouth but did not stop running toward it.

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It wasn’t real. I couldn’t believe it was real. I tried to close my eyes but they had to bare witness to this nightmare. Dust stung my eyes as I closed in. The hydra faded in my vision. It wasn’t real. Hydras didn’t fly up to the isle to torment us. Monsters did not come to the Floating Isle.

Cultivators did.

—

I finally saw the hands behind the shadow puppets and I wanted to flee. What we were fighting was much worse than a hydra from the depths of the sea. We were fighting dragons.

The boy, Lao’s mark, was killing us. Light whirled like silken threads around him. At his feet laid a golden circle of concentrated grounds. His eyes were closed, blood streamed out like tears from both, and he stood palms together as his dragons performed their gruesome work.

A dozen golden heads sprouted from his back. Dragon spirits scaly and fearsome tackled the men and women still standing. Those heads should have had no impact. Everything I knew about spirits told me that they would pass over bodies like the wind. They didn’t. Wherever those heads struck, corpses went flying.

And still, everyone fought. It was suicide, but what else could we do but steel ourselves and assail this monster? Run.

I turned my foot but then noticed something incredible. The dragons were missing. Everyone was yelling and the boy’s head kept tilting in all directions launching his dragons at every stray sound. The better fighters, that's all that there were now, knew to take advantage of this. Punctuating their screams and dodging quickly. The spirits would sail past them to the ground and shatter on impact.

And now there were fewer. What had been a den of vipers when I arrived had transformed into just two docile dragons. I saw a hand go up and every voice quieted. The boy spun his head in sudden fear but he didn’t strike. He was blinded.

Lao stepped forward with his fist still raised. On the opposite side of the boy, Sen broke from the crowd, twirling his spear.

The boy struck immediately at the two fighters. While the remaining dragons were occupied, everyone else ran. People streamed past me as I watched my brother kill a dragon.

Men could not kill cultivators. I had always believed that. Lyn's existence had cemented it for me. She and Sen spared daily. She could not summon dragons. She could not hold off a crowd with her eyes blinded. And she still put Sen in the dirt every time. Had Sen been holding back? No. He would never do that. Not to Lyn. He had just always fought fair.

You could kill a cultivator if you fought dirty.

The boy was getting tired and someone had gouged out his eyes. His face was red with frustration and he needed to catch his breath but neither Sen nor Lao would let him. They attacked without end. Twirling, twisting, stabbing, they made the boy back off his concentrated circle and the dragons at his back began to fade without it.

In frustration, the boy opened his eyes but there was nothing there but rage. He released his palms from their prayer and the dragons shattered in shards of light. Then he began to fight.

This was a cultivator. The boy, even with so much anger, performed the forms immaculately. Dragons shot from every strike of the palm, smaller, still as large as a torso but lesser. They had no agency like the ones before. They could not curve in the air. They could not bite you and throw. They were just logs shot from an arrow.

Lao and Sen dodged them easily.

The boy’s forms were too perfect. He thought about each movement before carrying it out in full, falling back on what must have been years of repeated practice, but not for combat. When Lyn had practiced her forms, she had never done them in the same order. She had tried to feel how each one could flow and created a style that was ever-changing.

This boy’s forms were pageantry in comparison. He moved as if every muscle twitch was to be judged. He made his trajectory and force clear for an invisible audience. Even I could predict how he would move. Those who knew the forms were untouchable. Sen and Lao laid into him.

Lao drew first blood.

A sword swung at the neck. The boy was too occupied launching an attack at Sen. I cringed with thoughts of beheading, but the boy flashed away with the first sensation of pain. He was faster than I could see. Lao blinked at his sword not believing he had struck air.

Nobody moved as the boy scrambled upwards to his feet. It seemed that he couldn’t move so fast and recover without the ability to see the ground beneath him. He touched his face in disbelief, too stunned to notice Sen striking at him from above. There were no footsteps to hear from up above.

Sen speared the boy through the heart. The boy coughed blood gripping the shaft poking from his chest. Sen let go, opting not to struggle for it. He skidded to a stop on his feet and then tackled the boy. I thought the Cultivator would be as steady as a tree, but Sen got him to the ground as easily as taking down me. They struggled there, the boy not knowing the forms that could release him from his chokehold, but having the strength to make Sen struggle.

Lao came before Sen lost that contest of strength and stabbed the boy in the shoulder. The cultivator screamed and I cheered too. Sen got to his feet with the boy sealed in his arms. The cultivator’s head was bent so far forward he could not see Lao’s pointed sword. His hate swarmed in the air, that sickening aura pressed down on my skin like water. It was not close to the worse I had ever felt.

I ran to them, but the girl that was once with the boy came first. She had not been amongst the corpses and she was moving towards the boy fast. She would free them. I looked for something to throw but there was no spear among the corpses.

Lao and Sen both flinched as she approached but she didn’t attack. Instead, she removed the medallion from her neck and walked towards the boy with it in hand.

The boy didn’t resist until it touched him. He couldn’t see but a flash of recognition came from the cold metal. He struggled. Kicking the girl back and nearly broke free from Sen’s arms, but Lao kicked the boy’s legs from underneath him. His struggle faltered as he fell to the ground. I ran to help. They were so far away.

The girl got up. She held the boy by his chin with a strength greater than Lao and Sen could apply. Slowly she brought her medallion to the boy’s forehead whispering something under her breath. When the medallion touched him again, the boy exploded.

A green inferno spiraled up to the sky. The girl was flung away. Her medallion clattered to the edge of the arena. I ran after Sen lying on the ground. The sudden burst of fire had thrown him off the boy but not far enough away from the inferno to be safe.

Those green flames were sickness, not fire. Sen started to flatten under its presence. The muscles on his arms shrunk until I could see bones under emaciated skin. His cheeks hollowed. Something like frosted air was fleeing his open throat into the inferno. I had no idea what it was taking from my brother. I just scooped Sen out of there and as far away as I could carry him.

I could carry him. That was wrong. My massive big brother had become so thin that I could carry him. We stumbled to a fall at the edge of the arena. My brother looked up at me. His goatee had turned white and scraggly and his eyes had sunken too far back into his head.

“Lin.” My brother spoke my name like a drowning man. His voice was too hollow and scratchy as if he had been eating ash. “Lin. Where’s Lao?”

“Lao?” I looked around. I didn’t see him anywhere. The inferno had finally cleared away the dust. I saw tones of shrinking bodies, turning flat and hollow like my brother. I saw piles of dust and ash. I could not find Lao.

I shook my head at my brother. He closed his eyes and started to weep. “Laoooo.” A sad muted wail broke left Sen’s throat. He didn’t have the strength to yell so it came out like the meek whimpers of a dying dog.

Sen rolled away from me, trying to stand. I did my best to help him, getting under his shoulder and lifting him up. My brother seemed astonished that I could do that. I wasn’t sure if he had processed what had happened to him. All I knew was that there was a chance to live through this still.

We would go home. We would be safe. We would make Sen whole again.

There was an exit on this side of the arena, not too far from where we were, but far enough from the inferno that Sen wouldn’t be subjected to whatever it was doing. I limped us towards it. The adrenaline that had me carrying him while running was fading and the ghost of older injuries was coming to haunt me. It couldn’t have been far to the door, just a few more paces, we could touch it. We didn’t.

Something shoved me back.

Sen was yelling at me, too far away from me to reach him. His arms were outstretched in desperation but he was not trying to grasp my hand. He had pushed me away.

There he managed to stand like a skeleton that hadn’t yet registered it would collapse with nothing holding it together. The weak hollowed figure before me looked nothing like my brother. My brother was strong. My brother could do anything.

A giant golden dragon slammed into him from the side and splattered him against the door.

Shards of wood and him scrapped my skin. His blood bathed me. I screamed.