> However you do it, I want that Brood Pit of Clan Swarmblood sent to the Final Shore as an offering before sundown. How it escaped the attention of that avaricious moron Jerome Meltras, given they have Abzu water and an Elder Pond down there, I will likely never understand.

>

> If the opportunity presents, try to recover the Abzu water, but waste no lives on it. In any case, burn it with fire, bury it, gas it or if all else fails drown it. Thanks to that ignoramus Tyrus Belthorne we have no shortage of water in this horrid place now.

>

> You have carte blanche in this matter.

Marcella Junia, Senior Administrator of Undergrove on behalf of St. Roberta’s Academy.

  To: Lady Raleen Belmont, Commander in charge of Zone 7: Undrenmarsh, Undergrove.

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~ ARAI – OUTSKIRTS OF UNDREN TOWN ~

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She moved out first, with Sana following behind, skulking as fast as she dared between cover as they made their way across a series of back alleys and storage pits at the edge of the hall. Climbing rapidly up a building, she made her way through its shadow and dropped down onto an unsuspecting Undren, knifing it and flitting over the wall. Sana followed moments after with the Undren, dumping it in the darkest corner she could find.

Skirting the edge of the next building, she paused to check that nothing was going to come out of the excavated entrance after it, and then with Sana still hot on her heels, made her way down an alley that was basically a tunnel under a small collection of buildings. There they had to kill two more Undren that happened to walk out of a doorway right in front of them, looking suspicious. Sana killed a third one, dumping it behind an awning. A moment before they passed from view she paused, not quite sure why, and caught the frozen skitter of tiny claws nearby. Several rats ducked back into the shadows of a doorway hiding from her just a fraction too slow.

“They are using rats to spot, I think,” she sighed to Sana, adding a few choice curse signs.

“Great,” Sana signed back with a scowl. “It’s also possible they are particularly attuned to the death of their own kind…”

“Also possible,” she agreed, moving across the next narrow alley.

They made it two more alleys and a square before three large armoured Undren and a thirty smaller ones poured out of the main thoroughfare right at them.

-Well, we made it a quarter of the way, she thought with a sigh.

It was certainly less she had hoped, but it beat just having to fight from the start.

Using her stone sword, she cut down four minions in rapid succession, with Sana following behind her and miring all of them up with her movement art and the Maelstrom Intent.

One of the large ones, which was somewhere around Core Formation qi-perception told her, with mutated lizard claws on its hands and feet, pounced directly at her, snarling. She struck at it, impaling it in the wall and then slicing sideways to free the sword-

The spear arriving right at her back made her spin away and deflect behind her just in time to catch a second one by sheer good fortune. An explosive rock hit the wall by her head and made her ears ring as the explosion washed over her but otherwise failed to breach her qi defences, which was a nice change from the norm.

She cut down another three small ones and a drummer then and darted through another alley between two buildings and over a low wall. Sana followed after her with the leaf blade, which she was currently wielding, also red with rat blood.

“Movement art?” she signed as they darted through the next courtyard even as a drum started to pound behind them.

Another started up ahead of them and then another… and another.

“Saving it to try and get the jump on a Nascent Soul spider,” Sana signed back.

She signed her agreement and punched a minion that had scrambled out of a doorway trying to tackle her. Sana eviscerated another that threw itself off a roof.

They turned the corner and smashed right into the line of waiting Undren.

She slid low and swung the sword in an arc, sundering limbs off of a dozen of the closely packed attackers who were charging at her before they could swat down at her with their spears and clubs-

There was a crack and the smell of burning fur around her as a lightning bolt arced from somewhere down the street at her. It punched through her qi defences and sent her sprawling into the side of a building before the Intent within her body sundered it apart and the Myriad Elements Qi overwhelmed what remained.

Rolling up, she kept rolling as a giant Undren almost three metres tall, wielding a two handed club crashed down where she had just been, demolishing the wall entirely.

She was about to attack it herself when Sana slipped past her. The club shifted weirdly as it slammed down, missing her, even as Sana opened up its stomach with the leaf and stabbed it straight through the heart a moment later, ruining its core. Without bothering to fight the rest, they hurtled into the next alley.

Undren came over the walls above them, like a furry, scaly wave. A dozen explosive rocks arced down ahead of them as well, for all the good they did.

She had just smashed a large, blade-wielding Undren through a wall, poisoning it with her qi when another spear appeared out of nowhere, piercing her shoulder from some odd angle even her qi-perception didn’t catch, and sent her sprawling.

Staggering up, she caught the faintest flicker of something with eight legs crossing the alley above her, just on the blurred edge of her qi-perception. Hissing with anger, she grabbed the spear and pulled herself off it, grimacing at the nasty feeling it made as it scraped against her bones. She had barely succeeded in this, when a second spear appeared a finger’s width in front of her face. Throwing herself forward, under it, the spear proved her intuition right as it dragged downwards, almost impossibly, trying to hit her even as she tried to grab-

It vanished the instant her hand touched it, as if it was just a mirage of shadows. Snarling, she pushed her perception range out to its utmost, catching three spider-riding rats on the surrounding rooftops.

As soon as they realised she had detected them, the spiders screamed and directed soul attacks at her, their combined strength making her vision blur faintly. She sighed inwardly, all of them were weaker than the one they had fought in the island city. If anything they might be weaker than the first one they ever encountered, which probably put them at Soul Foundation.

The nearest one smashed down into the alley ahead of her and she staggered a bit, overplaying her confusion to try to bait it in. Now that she had a Golden Core and the thread’s Martial Intent in her body, she barely even needed the symbol to shake off those combined shouts; her mantra and the Intent had already done most of the work.

It charged at her, which was a mistake on its part, because Sana immediately shot past her, aiming for it. The spider mother danced forward, intending to avoid Sana, only to get snared in the Maelstrom Intent, losing a back leg and gaining a gaping wound in its abdomen for its pains. It shook, emitting another soul attack, and somehow jumped vertically, spitting a cone of miasma at the both of them.

She used her own movement art and leapt towards it, focusing her Martial Intent into her sword, aiming to strike its thorax.

It waved its legs at her mockingly and dodged, right up until she sank the sword, infused with her qi up to the hilt in its now falling form, and used her own momentum and the spider’s to almost cut it clean in two. They crashed down on a rooftop and she grasped for its nascent core, which resisted crazily as she tried to drag it straight into her dantian. The spider’s rather fuzzy spiritual form materialized, even as its rider vacated the corpse. The impact of the strike levelled most of the building they were in and cratered the hall floor. Using the symbol to invade the core she successfully cancelled its consciousness even as she felt her bones creaking from-

A spear appeared from nowhere and smashed into her heart, casting her almost fifty metres, through two buildings, before she came to a stop, impaled on a sturdy rock wall.

-Fate-thrashed virgin-molesting, she gasped in her own head.

The Intent there had been clear, to cripple her cultivation.

A second spear ‘appeared’ a metre away from her, travelling so fast she could barely see more than a blurred line. Instinctively, she focused her qi on her body and tried to infuse as much of the Martial Intent into it as she could. The two collided and the spear tore through her shoulder sending a wicked pulse of Yin Fire Qi with it.

She tried to tear the first spear out and Lightning Qi boiled out of it, trying to stun her.

-Nameless, accursed… nine generations, she snarled charging forwards off it instead, the wound healing even as she-

-Third spear, heavenly virgin!

She barely deflected the spear with her arm gauntlet, sending it glancing right by her head, yet the impact still spun her around like a top. Yelling inarticulately, she lashed out in the general direction it had arrived from almost instinctively. Her mind’s eye shifted and the Martial Intent rippled across the intervening space at one of the spider-riding Undren. She watched, detached, as it grasped into thin air and its spear appeared once again, piercing out at her Martial Intent even as it arrived. It swatted the intent, grinned evilly and then threw its spear again in the moment that her consciousness snapped back to her body. The spear hit her between the breasts and catapulted her through two more buildings and into the wall of a pen where they were raising spiders.

In a way she was ready for it this time, using her movement art to pull herself off the spear, expecting the two other spears that blurred at her legs and head.

She pulled the spear out and aimed it back in that general direction, hurling it with all her strength plus a decent amount of Intent. The dull boom of the shockwave it generated rattled buildings as it passed. She charged after it, snagging a bone spear that had fallen from an Undren and launching it after the first. A second later the spear returned at her from mere centimetres away this time, smashing into her head and flipping her almost 20 metres into the air.

She found herself screaming half in surprise and half in rage, reaching out towards the Nascent Soul attacker with an absolute determination to strike him with her Intent.

To her shock, and also a heathy dose of satisfaction, the Intent smashed into the spider which lost three legs and careered off the side of the roof. The Undren somehow deflected the rest with a clawed fist and screamed something at her in its weird chittering language. The spear appeared in its clawed hand once again and it threw it with even more venom-

-Nameless-mother-lov-!

It came from above, targeting the exact moment her consciousness snapped back to her body, and planted her in a crater in the ground. The Sundering Intent of her qi defences still managed to damage it in such a way that she saw cracks forming on the shaft of the spear as it buried itself half in the ground. The Undren minions who had been swarming towards her point of impact were turned into furry meat paste from the shockwave of her impact.

The third spider screamed and flailed as Sana took all the legs on its left side-

A great echo of Intent rippled up from below, making her limbs grow cold briefly and interrupting her attempt to pull herself off the spear.

Two long black limbs appeared over the edge of the pit and a small Spider Queen hauled itself up over the lower edge some forty metres away from her current position.

Sana was suddenly standing over her, tearing the spear out of the ground, only for it to vanish from her hand with a flicker. It then immediately reappeared striking at Sana’s chest, just as it had her, only to be spun away bizarrely by a focused surge of what she was sure was her sister’s Maelstrom Intent.

Sana grabbed her and used her movement art to drag them both at full speed towards the two towers and the distant exit. Behind them the Spider Queen reared up and spat a coruscating orb of corrosive qi in a lobbed arc over them to block their escape.

Hundreds of Undren died even as thousands more scattered like a boiling tide in every direction. There were far more than she had actually credited, she realised dully as they crashed down on a rooftop.

“You okay?” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

“I’ve been better, not dead yet,” she thought and spat in the direction of the Spider Queen who had already turned to track them.

Without further comment she directed her mantra to redouble its efforts in feeding all her pain and apprehension back into beneficial things, like healing her body faster, and fled towards the exit, exerting her movement art to its extreme. Sana flitted after her even as the corrosive miasma cascaded down around them both. The very annoying spear wielder, whose skull was prime hat material at this point, cast his spear again. This time she got the Sundering aspect of the Martial Intent right and it barely clipped her. The momentum still spun her around, sending her sprawling across a rooftop, but it was on her terms for once. It appeared behind her, aiming between her shoulder blades and she barely connected with it in time. It went one way and she smashed into the next rooftop even as Sana appeared beside her, panting slightly.

There was a flicker and the two Nascent Soul spiders appeared about 100 metres away. Two different ones. These riders both carried bows, which was very bad. Their arrows arrived in front of them without her qi perception even flickering.

-Nameless fates, if you can hear me, smite these malignant evils and their fate-thrashed art! She swore in her head as she slashed in the general direction of the arrows even as they charged towards the exit.

Thankfully the arrows were nothing like the spear and disintegrated upon contact with her briefly expanded qi armour and the pulse of Intent that radiated out from it.

Gauging the distance, she groaned in her mind, as they were only halfway through the hall.

The spear returned with vengeance seconds later, glancing her side as she dodged-

The spider leg had swatted her into the void in the centre of the room before she was even aware of its presence.

-You nameless thrashed!

It was actually able to teleport to the spear?

She crashed down onto the lower story and was instantly swarmed by minion Undren who battered at her with clubs made of bone and spider limbs.

Letting loose what remained of her qi reserves, which had taken something of a dent protecting her from that last attack, she visualised the ‘Yang Lightning’ array sigil and added ‘Chain’ and ‘Isolate’. The ‘Isolate’ symbol had been something she finally figured out while meditating on the intent. Simply put, it separated the offensive aspect of the spell from the caster by including them within the core function of the array somehow. Because the arrays themselves weren’t damaged by the damage they dealt at all, she was also fully protected from the effects of her point blank Yang Lightning pool.

The wave of Undren that had swarmed her disintegrated, as did most of the building she had dropped onto. Her qi reserves also dropped by a concerning amount, but it was worth it for the several hundred smoking, twitching corpses that were scattered within a hundred metres.

The Spider Queen on the layer above turned in her direction, giving her a clear look at it for the first time. It was much like the ones she had seen in the depths, but a bit smaller and black with red and purple markings on its abdomen. It also had a platform on its thorax, upon which sat a bank of drums and above that, a throne. The current focal occupant of said throne was an old, grey-furred, Nascent Soul Undren carrying a staff with a lizard’s skull on it, who was currently gesturing rather imperiously, and quite ominously in her general direction.

The Undren manning the drums screamed and hammered on them, sending a bizarre ripple through the whole hall, disrupting qi in a way that was remarkably like her sister’s Maelstrom Intent. Unlike that Intent though, which held the feeling of a natural phenomenon, the drums’ dispersal was horrific and injurious like whips and clubs striking the air which screamed in pain.

It washed over her and the symbol diffused the inherent soul attack almost before it could make her body grow cold. Exploiting the opportunity that came with it, she charged as fast as she could back up the layer.

-I really need a better movement art, she complained in her head as a spectral claw grasped for her, trying to lock her down.

The grasping phantasm wavered for a second as it battled with her Martial Intent and then she was drowning in acidic vomit spat directly from the spider mother. Even as it ate into her body and tried to deliver a further soul attack, the Martial Intent swirling in her body shredded and sundered it and her core devoured it, replenishing much of what she had just lost in the past few minutes.

The thread shifted in her mind even as a heavily armoured Undren fearlessly leapt with breath-taking speed and momentum, from a nearby building, focusing on her with its own intent. Doing as it suggested, she visualised the Martial Intent as a sword blade in its own right while trying to evade it as best she could. It hit the Undren, sundering its carapace armour even as it still managed to collide with her, and they both went crashing down onto a rooftop.

A colossal detonation from above her scattered masonry into the void like an avalanche onto her current level, demolishing buildings in every direction. Sana was still fighting with the other Nascent Soul spiders and their riders it seemed. At least the riders themselves seemed to be mostly Core Foundation, like the two of them.

Pivoting, she stabbed her assailant and in return it screamed at her, sending some kind of pressure into her… mind? A sound-based soul attack?

Grimacing, she repeated the visualisation with her Martial Intent, severing its head. Grabbing its weapon, a sword-club thing made by embedding wickedly sharp shards of some black stone into cut notches in bone, she impaled it through the chest in one fluid motion and grasped its core, refining it. The weapon was also more than capable of holding her qi without instantly ruining itself, or so it seemed, which was a nice surprise amid all this insanity.

There was a crash and the building quaked before it was then swept away as the Spider Mother above turned in her direction properly and swept every building within one hundred metres with its forelegs.

She fled, diagonally though the avalanche, towards the exit, the spear’s warnings about high rank spider mothers-

Eight eyes appeared in her mind freezing her in the spot.

A shadowy form blurred out, a limb maybe? It collided with her and every bone in her body shattered, her organs turned to jelly and her meridians deformed as she hit the wall at the far end of the hall. Her core somehow remained undamaged and her dantian whole, but the rest of her was a physical wreck that her mantra and symbol were barely holding together, buried in an avalanche of rubble-

The spider mother and its rider appeared right on top of her, its maw metres from her body, fangs as long as her legs. The Old Undren stood on its head, a broad grin splitting its rodent face. Stretching out a hand, it exerted its own Intent to oppress her, pinning her to the ground.

["S-such a Unique Core, s-so rare."]

The words arrived in her mind directly, with a faint blur in tone that made them oddly unaccented.

["It is-s a…s-shame that s-she wants it."]

-You want to eat my core?

“No… fate…thrashed way”, she snarled back at it.

Fortunately, it seemed unaware of the lack of limitations on her actually using arrays. She guessed the spider was peak Nascent Soul…

Visualising the array in her mind’s eye, she imprinted it directly into the ground around her.

-Eat this you horrible thing, I hope you become the nameless’s little bitch in your next life.

{Yin Fire, Yang Earth, Isolate, Cage: Transform.}

Her qi evaporated.

The array cost her almost all of her remaining qi. The pressure that fell from above collapsed the spider mother like the fist from some primordial god. She had been wary of using Yang Earth down here because the entire environment should be its ‘bestest’ ever buddy, to the point where she didn’t want to just entomb them both. It was only thanks to the extra perspective she gained from the spear’s array and the grasping of the Isolate symbol that she dared to even touch Yang Earth. As for Yin Fire? That had a hunger for life-force beyond any other elemental aspect, and the Spider Mother was innately predisposed towards Yin Wood and Life qi. It was an added bonus that Yin Fire fed Yang Earth.

The spider desperately fought the oppression weighing down on the surroundings, its legs trembling as it was slowly flattened against the very devastation it had caused.

Pushing herself up, she forced her body to burn extra qi to heal itself with her mantra. Her wounds were already recovering, her meridians stabilising and her inner organs returned to their rightful, whole state. The array itself would likely last for… thirty more seconds she guessed. That gave them both time to get out of here, as if the nameless fate itself was staring down at them, which given the way things seemed to keep panning out right now, she wasn’t willing to bet against anyway.

Fortunately, the platform, drums and Undren drummers were thoroughly destroyed, so there was no danger there of anything disrupting her qi in that fashion in the short term. The Nascent Soul Undren was oppressed on the head of the spider, muscles cording as it struggled, still barely standing under the weight of all the rock in this place pressing down on the hundred or so metres around her current location, the epicentre of the effect. Its full range seemed to dither three quarters of the way up the cavern, which was far bigger an area than she had expected really.

She fled up the slope as fast as she could also giving thanks that, as far as she was aware, distance appeared to play no role in being tethered to the array centre. Without the leaf she was sure she had no chance of damaging either Undren or Spider in any meaningful fashion. It was also resisting the five symbol array with pure strength from what she could see. The five symbol array should be a Soul Foundation grade array which meant that this rat was maybe even stronger than it… probably Nascent Soul?

-Are you Spirit Severing? She thought, burying that properly terrifying thought with her mantra even as it rose.

The thought that this might be a Quasi-Dao Seeking old rat, which would be utterly disastrous to their chances of survival, spurred her to even greater speed as her mantra added the fuel of her fear to the rest of its continual support. Reaching the top of the new scree slope that had once been a third of the buildings in the hall she found two Core Formation Undren slowly being crushed into the rooftop, spider riders with bows. She wielded the image of the sword with her Martial Intent and killed them both, grasping their cores on the way past. There was no reason to leave any of those fate-trashed bastards alive at this point; their antics with the spears was enough to seal all their death scrolls in her book at this point.

She made it to the top of the slope to find Sana, crushed to her knees, blood dripping from her mouth, eyes and nose. Grimacing, she grabbed her and dragged her towards the outer edge of the oppressions epicentre, still counting down as she did so.

Dragging her out of it, into the area of lower oppression, she was met with a ruined sea of Undren struggling to resist the immense weight from above. Sana gritted her teeth and grabbed her arm.

“That was… unpleasant,” she thought accusingly.

“Sorry, it was that or become spider soup,” she grimaced.

“Movement Art?” she asked a little more pointedly than she might have intended.

Sana sighed and shot her a rather blue look, then the space around them flowed bizarrely as her sister executed the Maelstrom Shifting Steps to the best of her ability, carrying them both almost a quarter of the length of the hall before she had to stop.

Landing on a roof her sister deployed a Yang Fire Qi array with three symbols that incinerated every Undren within 50 metres. Even as the Yang Fire Qi tugged at her, her symbol shifted faintly in her mind’s eye and her Martial Intent shifted faintly, helping her adapt to it somehow. The effect was still there, but outside the epicentre it was much, much lessened, likely explaining why Sana had been able to move at all in the epicentre.

They charged forward again, this time with her sister taking the lead. Ahead of them, within the outer fringes of her array’s swathe of oppression she could see spider riders struggling to organise, attempting presumably to stop them breaching through the tunnel and escaping. Reaching the edge she planted down a three symbol Blade Mist array, watching as it rolled out in every direction. Really, she should have used one of those earlier on.

Even as she was dismissing the curse of hindsight, Sana grabbed her arm and used Maelstrom Shifting Steps again. The space all around them roiled subtly as they sped forward. Sana seemed to have adapted to the oppression of her array at this point, so she pushed out her own qi, infused with Intent, around them and watched as it got drawn into the swirling currents around them. Two spider riders died, twisted into broken shapes while dozens of Undren minions were bisected and torn apart in a small cyclone of sundering limbs, scattering stone and surging qi.

The suppression ended and there was a horrifying roar of rage behind them. Sana gasped and used her art a third time, even more forcefully, casting them blindly down the tunnel for hundreds of metres.

A wall of intent tore down the tunnel behind them, trying to grasp at them. The soul strike that came with it struck straight for her mind and vanished into the symbol without leaving so much as a ripple. A moment later, a huge spectral paw grasped out of the darkness behind them, trying to drag them both back.

“Again?” she gasped to Sana as the twisting chaos of the qi around them barely kept it at bay.

Sana just screamed curses, both out loud and in her head, then everything around them blurred again and they crashed down, tumbling. The grasping Intent arrived seconds later. She slapped an array down, cycling her qi as best she could and recovered a dozen Units even as she cast the array: just Yang Earth, Cage and Isolate this time.

The attack from the Nascent Soul old rat dissipated.

She staggered up and grasped Sana, who was barely able to stand now and lifted her over a shoulder and started to run with her own movement art.

She had made it barely fifty metres when a spear blurred out of nowhere right beside her. It would have smashed into her head had she not been fortunate enough to see the merest flicker of movement. Even with that warning, the collision with her defensive qi made her stumble, even as she cursed its thrower to the nameless for the umpteenth time.

-How?

The bewilderment echoed in her mind even as a spider mother appeared a few metres in front of her, struggling against the oppression, its rider apparently unhindered thanks to its efforts and already grasping for the deflected spear.

She charged it down without caring now, grabbing the Arborundum leaf from Sana’s clenched fist as she closed on it.

The spider lazily swatted her out of the air and she grasped at its leg activating another array even as she linked to her sister through the symbol.

{Yang Thunder, Cage – Isolate}

She was pleased to see it lose four limbs and get a hefty burn for its pains as both of them were thrown into the far tunnel wall. Its rider wasn’t so lucky getting blasted off its back and hitting the wall, impaled by a bolt of lightning that lingered for a surprising length of time.

Behind them there was another enraged roar, the grey-furred Undren she suspected, as she felt her connection to the blocking array she had just set tremble.

Collecting the still semi-comatose Sana she drew in more qi and hurtled off down the tunnel as fast as she was able. Behind her she could hear drums thundering away now, their frenzied rhythms tearing into both her barrier and them.

Ten heartbeats later the array was broken. In the same instant she pushed down another, wincing as her meridians complained and the Qi Lake in her dantian decreased slightly in size. She was rewarded for the cost by it instantly blocking another grasping paw from the void, the manifestation recoiling and growing sluggish under whatever oppression the Yang Earth had was actually doing.

-Fates damn you, if only we could have stayed on the island until we broke through to Soul Foundation!, she swore in her head, cursing events pushing them on like they were.

She was sure as well that they were nowhere near far enough, based on the spear’s warnings, from the Island to be truly safe from whatever it was that was turning its eyes towards it.

It’s easy to complain about hindsight, no matter how out of reach it was at the time, she thought grimly as she dragged up Sana and ran on, as fast as she could.

She started to think a bit more on what they could do to waylay pursuit a bit more constructively. Running and shoving down barriers at intervals was not going to work forever. Her expenditure was simply too high and even with the extra qi coming from the crushed cores she was losing qi with every barrier she deployed.

-Please fates don’t let IT be able to teleport, she added by way of a fairly hopeless prayer.

Whatever the spear was doing seemed to be tied to that technique as she had seen a Qi Refinement Undren doing the same, albeit much lesser, trick with blades. Proper distance teleportation, should be a thing only quasi-Immortals or powerful Dao Seeking experts could, at a bare minimum, achieve.

-Then again, she thought, drawing more of her Qi Lake directly to plant another array down. It would be just our luck to encounter a Spirit Severing old rat capable of bucking that trend.

If it couldn’t teleport, then the answer was to make an area so fundamentally hostile that Undren wouldn’t be able to power through it…

The only viable candidate she had really was the qi-gathering formations they had used before. The issue, though, was the complexity and the time involved in drawing out almost a dozen four link….

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Sis?” Sana winced, stirring on her shoulder and refocusing on their surroundings as they flashed by another side tunnel…

“Don’t worry, I’m just trying to allay pursuit in a more constructive manner,” she thought to her as they passed another side…

She skidded to a stop and rapidly started carving arrays in the wall, feeling foolish for overthinking things. She didn’t need to use a qi-gathering one, not yet. A five link version of the barrier, linked to a small qi-gathering array as a subsidiary, like the spear had done, should be enough to buy them time to recover at the very least.

There was a roar in the distance again and she felt one of her barriers crumble away. That left four still between them.

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~ SANA – NOW ALSO MINORING IN TUNNEL WARFARE STRATEGIES ~

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Sana sat, letting her injuries finish healing while Arai started to carve out array formations to transform the earth qi of the rock into Yang Earth and Yin Fire. Almost thirty percent of her meridians had been damaged overdrawing Shifting Maelstrom steps the second time. At the current rate it would be hours more before she could even think about using it again, so all she could do was focus on using the Qi that remained in her body to gently rejuvenate the damaged areas.

“Right, that’s this done,” her sister said abruptly, getting up from where she had been carving the framework into the wall.

“Will it hold long enough?” she asked, eyeing the 4 symbol Yang Earth array.

“Long enough to get us to the next stairwell,” Arai grimaced, helping her up. “I take it you won’t be using the fancy art again for a while.”

“No… I rather think I will not,” she said as archly as possible, mimicking a fancy noble.

Gritting her teeth, she took a few steps and cycled her qi, determining that she could indeed use her old movement art without too much difficulty.

Arriving at the next set of side tunnels, they turned into it and rapidly ascended the stairwell to the hall that crossed the canal. There she sat down again and continued to recuperate while Arai rapidly put down a few disguised trigger symbols and then drew out several Yang Lightning arrays and connected them up to the triggers. To finish off she put down a Yang Lightning Qi and Yin Water qi-gathering array that linked directly to the other arrays.

“You got all this from the Spear’s supplementary array?” she asked, observing Arai’s work as she continued the laborious recovery of her own meridians.

“Yeah, it was somewhat obvious when you think about it,” Arai answered as she put the finishing touches to the arrays.

As a final gift to their pursuers they replaced the stone panels that had been levered out, disguising the location of the qi-gathering arrays somewhat. They then started down the hall towards the other large tunnel, the one that the spear had originally suggested they make their way up.

Arai winced just as they entered the other stairwell. “The other barriers are all down, that just leaves the carved one and the traps.”

“My meridians are dented but usable,” she remarked, looking over the edge.

“The recovery time with this cultivation art from the pagoda is a bit…” she felt bad suddenly because she had watched Arai duke it out with the spider queen, -well, get smashed about in a sustained fashion before finally gambling…

She was poked in the side by her sister as she peered over as well. “Stop feeling bad about it. I survived. In any case the Intent from the thread is ridiculous… Still, I’d love a better movement art.”

The shaft was the same depth as the other one, so after a moment she just jumped off the edge, dropping the fifty metres to land on the floor with a thud. There was a mild shock from the impact through her body, but even that was only because she was injured already. A moment later Arai landed beside her quite a bit more lightly and doing something with her Intent just before she landed which softened the landing.

Peering out into the corridor she abruptly snapped her head back, because the tunnel in both directions was crawling with Undren fortifying the cross channels. They hadn’t quite made it this far, but if they hung about for a few more minutes they would be fight fighting again.

“We should go. As fast as we can.” She hissed.

Arai glanced out and nodded, slipping out.

They both shifted their old movement arts and blurred down the tunnel, heading east once again as fast as could, hiding their qi with their mantras, not that it made much difference.

Within ten heartbeats there were roars behind them and drums pounding frenetically.

“By the nameless fate how are they actually detecting us?” Arai snarled under her breath.

She shook her head, agreeing silently. Her main regret now was that her spear was lost somewhere back in the settlement hall behind them. Ahead of them dozens of armoured Undren in spider armour poured out of a side tunnel and mobbed at them. Arai wielded two daggers made of qi-repelling stone now, the only weapons other than the leaf, which was now in her own possession, that they still possessed. While the daggers didn’t let them push qi through them, fortunately that didn’t seem to extend to Martial Intent. Shrouding your weapons in pure intent, without any medium for qi was a lot harder, but it was what it was.

They both avoided the lead Undren who had charged shield first at them, splitting either side of it and ploughing into the rapidly fanning wedge behind. These ones had real coordination, she noted with a grimace as she twisted between two thrusting spears, splitting one and half eviscerating its owner. Exhaling, she tried to let a bit of the Maelstrom Intent passively creep out around her. Even though it was less than it had been, thanks to her earlier exertions, it still snared up a lot of rats as she dodged among them. Its effect put her in mind of an erratic and vicious current flowing beneath smooth placid waters, tearing at legs and unbalancing actions at random as it went.

The unarmed forms from the ‘Way of the Harmonious Maelstrom’ were a surprisingly good fit for wielding the leaf in her front hand. It’s defensive, deflecting movements and spiralling footwork carrying her like a small cyclone of tearing death through their ranks while her sister skipped and stabbed opposite her. It also had another rather useful trait she was discovering: taking qi away from her attackers. If she gave the process a nudge every now and then, usually with a palm strike or deflection of a spear haft, the impact and effect just kept ramping up. It wasn’t as much as in the hall, where it had almost been as effective as cycling her qi before she got the teachings from the pagoda, but it was still helping to replenish her dwindling reserves.

They broke through the front line and were met with rapidly forming ranks of minions with spears, nets and a lot of shields. Drums were pounding ahead of them now as well…

This time she remembered to put down a three symbol blade mist array as they had taken to considering them. She had intended to use it before, but circumstances had been… frenetic since they entered the tunnel.

She pushed thinking about extraneous things to the back of her mind and focused on tearing through the oncoming hoard as fast as she could, keeping pace and proximity to Arai. Behind her, the waves that were rushing on fell in the mist for a few moments and then stopped pursuing.

Her sister’s earlier comment about the ‘Intent’ she had gotten from the thread being ‘ridiculous’ was, she had to reflect, starting to look like a bit of an understatement really. The ‘Sundering Intent’, which was all she could really think of it as at this point, was drifting like sharp blades in the turbulent currents her own qi cycle was promoting around them. Undren unfortunate enough to get caught on it, usually minions, lost legs and then a lot more, and it was spreading serious disorder through the attacking ranks just by the two of them simply being in proximity to each other.

An armoured Undren surged through the attackers and cut at her with some shout she assumed was a challenge. She cut its spear with her leaf blade and kicked it away, sending it crashing through other Undren like a cast rock. Two more came after, one cutting at her head the other stabbing for her heart. In return she stabbed the weaker one that was aiming for her head, cutting the weapon in two while-

The other one, who she had just tried to dodge, screamed right in her face, making her limbs chill and the symbol shift in her mind’s eye.

-Soul attack!? She was so shocked that she actually broke her rhythm for a moment.

Without thinking further, she executed the thunderclap art, clearing half the tunnel in the blink of an eye and making her attacker stagger slightly. Tackling it, she stabbed it twice in the chest, turning its leering grin into a collapsing visage of horror as the leaf blade ruined its core in a single stab. Plucking it out of its chest as she scrambled up. Looking around at the scene of disorganised frenzy she howled again, sending a second sonic shockwave rippling through the disorganised mass. The Maelstrom Intent shadowing within it ruptured bodies and twisted weaker Undren into bizarre shapes as it passed over them. Shaking her head and vowing to do that the next time she started attacking, she followed Arai through the gap in the melee her action had just opened up and charged onwards.

Behind them, she heard the drums coming closer and then saw something flicker across the wall of the tunnel opposite her. Pushing her QI sense out fully she saw… distorting shadows running along the walls and ceilings.

“They use Nascent Soul spiders as fate-thrashed cavalry!” she yelled.

Really, she thought, she shouldn't be surprised at that. It was long past the point where she could rationalise these Undren as ‘qi beasts’ or monsters. Demonic Beast Kin seemed the most apt descriptor really. A legion of Demonic Beast Kin, with force organisation, elites, cavalry and siege weapons.

The massed formation split the shimmering blade mist, scattering it and exhausting the qi she had put in it, overtaking them in moments. The lead spider accelerated and rolled right over her even as she was registering its burst of speed. She went down under it, barely avoiding stabbing legs and managed to put a nasty wound in its thorax with the leaf. It smashed its own manifestation down on her trying to flatten her into the floor, and in response she used her own Intent to disrupt its legs for a second and roll free, severing two legs in the process.

Arai did something and the air rippled around her like it was a rug being shaken. The spiders ducked… or jumped, but everything twisted and then a ferocious wave of pure, Intent-infused qi swept out down the hall behind them. It hit the wall of charging Undren behind them and she watched as the first ranks vanished in a messy haze of gore under sundering waves of her sister’s Martial Intent.

The spiders themselves were all now focused on her sister. She could feel the echoes of their Intent focusing on that area rather than her… an opportunity. She winced and used the Maelstrom Shifting Steps. Her meridians creaked but held, although much of her recovery from the last few minutes was set back as a result of her action. Arriving beside one of the spiders, who had ducked the wave, she crashed straight into the rider who had half turned and was stabbing at her with his spear.

It opened up her side even as she stabbed it straight through the heart with the leaf blade, shattering its heart core with the first strike. The spider itself rolled, blurring away and manifesting its soul form as fuzzy legs to strike at her. She ate the damage, using her mantra, the absorption and the symbol to resist it as she struck directly for the spiders own core, slicing open its thorax. The Intent within it and the spider’s soul lashed out for a half second trying to invade her body and kill her. The symbol cancelled it with contemptuous ease and with a soundless wail the core was smashed up and dragged into her Spiritual Sea.

A spider dropped on her, trying to freeze her movements with a soul attack.

She played along until it actually arrived in front of her and then stabbed it in the face, vaulting to dodge the attack from its rider, who wielded some kind of flail made of male spider fangs. Several grazed her and actually drew blood before she crashed into it knees first and killed it, tearing its core out with a well-practiced motion. The spider beneath her blurred away, trying to shake her off and then used its manifestation to swat her into the far wall.

As she flew away, she saw its body become silhouetted by a corona of varicoloured flames as Arai finally used the Qi Blast art. To her surprise it physically corroded the creature’s carapace, easily overwhelming its qi defences as her sister rapidly closed on it. The spider, caught between swatting her and this new attack, desperately withdrew its soul form to strike at this unexpected attack. However, Arai was already beside it gouging for its core with one of the qi-repelling daggers and refining it away.

She landed feet first on the wall and launched herself straight back into the middle of the hall, catching two of the riders off guard in the midst of evading another sweeping beam from her sister. The left one she narrowly missed, bisecting the head of the right hand one before crashing knees first into it, pinning it to its spider.

The spider rolled, spinning impossibly fast on its own thorax to try to throw her off. Gritting her teeth, she exerted Maelstrom Shifting Steps fully, twisting the surroundings with its Intent just long enough to disrupt the spider for a split second and stab its core. Absorbing it, the spider thrashed madly and its momentum spun both of them down the hall, the spider’s legs leaving a wide swathe of devastation before both hit a collapsed section of roof in an explosion of masonry.

Minions recoiled and then swarmed at her, screaming in fury even as she caught a flickering sense of more spider riders approaching along the ceiling and walls with breath-taking speed from behind them.

-What in the fates did we do to make them so pissed off that they are sending a small army after us? She hissed in her head as he sister charged into the next wave.

She dashed after her recovering qi as best as she could, as she ploughed through the formation of shield and spear wielding Undren… It was surprising actually how well they resisted… and the qi flowing through this bunch was…

-Banners, her mind supplied helpfully, reminding her that they had banner rats and drummers…

Two and two slotted together and she tore straight at the banner rat. In a way, it made sense that she hadn’t thought of that before. Undren fighting like mortal soldiers in a battle was one thing, but they were using formations in some way? That was a terrifying thought.

The drummer rats, painted in their bloody runes screamed and pounded on the drums as the eyes of the spider head on the banner with its bloody runes that made her not want to look at it glowed. A spectral form rose out of the middle of the tunnel, striking down at her. A ghostly spider almost as large as the one in the depths below.

Hundreds of Undren in the formation howled in unison and the soul attack rolled over her, chilling her limbs briefly before the symbol alleviated it. The banner-bearing Undren stared blankly at her, disbelief briefly replacing frenzied fanaticism before she cut the banner pole with the leaf and sank her palm into its chest, sending as much of her Intent-infused qi as she dared into its body, which disintegrated in front of her, leaving scattered bloody bones and scraps of flesh. The shockwave took out one of the drummers and several more Undren behind her. Absorbing the core, she stabbed the spider he-

She picked herself up out of the ruin of the hall, her vision still swimming and her skin healing where it had been flayed off by the explosion. Arai was pulling herself up near the far wall, shaking her head. For a hundred metres in both directions there was nothing but dead Undren and burning patches of Yin Life Qi flickering away.

“I won’t do that again in a hurry,” she mumbled as she swallowed back down a mouthful of blood with a grimace.

Her mantra went into overdrive with the symbol’s Intent pulling her damaged body back together again as fast as she could supply qi. She was definitely healing faster now she had a moment to consider things, but if this counted as some kind of body cultivation… it was functionally masochism.

Taking advantage of the lull, she rapidly grasped the cores of a dozen or so armoured Undren who had succumbed on this side of the tunnel as she made her way onward. On the far side Arai was doing the same, signing that she was okay in the process. Her recovery was still ramping up as she gained more and more fragments of cores in her dantian that were being slowly absorbed. It was easily double what it was before everything came unstuck in the hall settlement, although she was still spending more than she recovered, especially with the three symbol arrays.

Behind them there was another strange dissonant howl that resonated disturbingly. The Undren advancing behind them screamed in an even more frenzied manner, hammering spears and clubs on shields as they ran after them.

Catching up to Arai, she pointed behind and made a few very obscene signs.

“Yeah!” her sister hissed. “That fate-thrashed Nascent Rat and its Spider Queen really want our cores, it seems!”

“Oh…” she grimaced.

That made sense.

-Not the scenario we thought of when we were talking about plans, flickered through her head as a stray thought.

She wasn’t sure what grade their cores were, and annoyingly the Maelstrom Scripture said nothing about core quality in any way that made sense to her. That they were effortlessly crushing most Core Formation Undren they were fighting while just about able to catch the spiders which were likely Soul Foundation she was starting to think, was just about conceivable if they had Grade One cores or Special Cores. Hopping realms to kill Qi Beasts was something usually associated with elite disciples of sects in her eyes, or Elites of the Military and Hunter Bureau. The only force in Flower Picking Town who did that regularly were the Beast Hunter Cadre, who were as irregular a bunch of old freaks and lunatics as you could ever hope to find. The very least of them were Peak of Mantra Seed and they all used special laws provided by the Hunter Bureau while their leaders like Lady Xiao Hai were quasi-Immortals with Soul Meridians.

They hit the next wave like two small meteors, using the Qi Blast and the Thunderclap arts this time to rip open the heart of the formation. This group had no banners and nothing capable of even slowing their path as they rolled into the group surging out of a side passage behind it. She launched herself forward with her old movement art, aiming for an armoured rat on a squat grey spider with thicker legs that seemed to be the organiser of this wave. It snarled at her and leapt straight at her, clearly intending to use its ‘superior’ realm to break her charge. Exuding her intent, she mired up the space around her just as it arrived, buying her a precious moment to carve the armoured Undren in two and leave the spider missing three legs on its left side. It was very useful that they struggled to regenerate whole limbs, at least at Soul Foundation.

The spiders from behind caught up as they crashed into the next group who were still mustering. Two blurred to either side of her as she used the thunderclap art again. Arai sniped one of the riders with the Qi Blast.

-Really we should have been doing that before, she sighed, crashing into the mob of minions and armoured Undren like a meteorite.

Rather than use the thunderclap art a second time, she used up half of her recovered qi and imprinted a three symbol Yang Earth, Isolate and Cage array down. Everything within 20 metres of her disintegrated as Undren were flattened into two dimensional shadows of gore on the tunnel floor, their cores shattering in puffs of glittering dust. A spider mother that was unlucky enough to be close by was crippled instantaneously, its rider a swathe of fur, shattered bone and twisted armour on its thorax.

She claimed the spider’s core and refined it, using the moment to take stock of their current situation and absorb as much of the orphaned qi in the area as she could, pushing the qi cycle within her body as fast as it would efficiently go.

While a single cycle was enough to provide her with a truly immense amount of unrefined qi at this point, drawing it in from a radius of almost fifty metres, she was burning Intent-infused qi at an alarming rate that still wasn’t sustainable it seemed. For all that though, the more she used it and replaced it, the easier it was certainly becoming to use it.

“We should have done that before,” she signed to Arai.

“You barely had qi to run, get your hindsight in check,” Arai shot back drily, from where she was searing through corpses for cores.

“True,” she signed, and then immediately grimaced as a spider rider charged straight at the edge of the rippling field of oppression, making it shake and diminishing the qi she had put in it by almost a tenth. A heartbeat later a second one crashed into it, this time a spirit form, depleting it even faster than purely physical attacks.

-Smart things, horrible, creepy but definitely-!

Something blurred out of the dark and crashed through the oppressive barrier of Yang Qi, tearing apart the array, cancelling the field and catapulting her backwards almost a hundred metres further down the tunnel scattering a group of Undren who were advancing on them from that side.

She slammed down the leaf blade into the ground to stop her skid, thanking the fates she hadn’t lost her arm to that long slender limb. If she hadn’t had her mantra she would be a cripple right now.

A three symbol Yang Lightning array appeared underneath her, fuelled by all her unrefined qi, incinerating every-!

Within the same heartbeat a long blurring black limb shifted out of the nothing, cancelling the array somehow even as its lighting tore at the limb. The recoil made her stagger.

-Such a thing!? She had never even considered that there were things that could cancel arrays and give her backlash, she realised.

Two more limbs stabbed at her head and heart, the moment seeming to stand still as they slid towards her with a gut wrenching sense of inevitability. She pushed every shred of Intent-infused qi she still had in her body into defending her core and her head, leveraging every bit of her comprehension with the Maelstrom Intent to try to deflect the one aiming for her forehead.

It missed her by a hair, the twisting distortions disrupting it barely enough. Even then, it tried to snap sideways and decapitate her while the other ripped out a huge gash in her side aiming to pin her to the floor.

She sacrificed a bone of her qi reserves for the first time in a very long while and used Shifting Maelstrom steps to try to escape. Limbs slammed after her so fast it felt like she was almost standing still. Cutting at one with the leaf it waved around her motion with contemptuous ease, aiming to sever her arm and separate her from the blade.

She skipped backwards, barely keeping her arm and the leaf-!

The spear hit her a glancing blow in the side of the head, making the world turn a very disturbing shade of lilac and gold for a moment, spinning her around and sending her into the tunnel wall so hard she bounced.

Almost instinctively she grasped after the spear, which had curved after her and embedded itself in the wall half an arm’s length away from her. It tried to teleport away, but her Maelstrom Intent was able to stop it, just, juddering ominously in her grip.

With a ripple, a clawed, armoured hand appeared out of the air, followed by the rest of a heavily armoured Undren with a totem on its back, grasping the other end of the spear. The spider it rode had long spindly legs and was twice the size of the other Spider Mothers they had been fighting. Its thick carapace blackish-purple rather than green-brown and marked with weird sickly yellow and green patterns that had an inner glow and made her eyes itch. Memories of the corpses behind the great Spider Queen in the depths surfaced in her mind, not a spider mother, a male spider.

The Undren riding it screamed at her, possibly in some kind of challenge and tried to rip the spear out of the wall and from her grasp while the spider moved backwards, presumably trying to aid its rider in dragging the weapon out of her grip.

In the same instant, her sister finally caught up, using the Qi Blast to target the rider. The male spider split it effortlessly, a leg becoming a vague blur that barely missed Arai as it tried to impale her. With a hiss that came as much from the movement of the plates on its body as from its maw, it swept its other foreleg at her, clearly intending to make her either relinquish the spear or loose an arm in the process.

Unfortunately, there was a third option that it wasn’t counting on.

-Split the spear from the Undren and use it herself.

She had been sending qi into it for a few moments already in any case. Now, her symbol followed, bringing Maelstrom Intent with it. The spear rippled in her grasp and the fate-thrashed Undren grasping the other end spat blood and flinched, its grip weakening momentarily as its own Qi within the spear was subsumed.

She sighed, ripping the orphaned spear from the wall with as much vigour as she could, blocking the incoming leg of the spider somewhat in the process. It was really as Old Fang and Old Ouyeng liked to say: sometimes, what you needed to overcome a challenge was ‘just a little bit of luck.’ Right now, the Undren’s spear not being ruined by the purity of her qi was that bit of luck. At long last she could actually use the first form of the ‘Heavenly Maelstrom Spear Art’. Practicing it had been one thing, but it cost a vast amount of her qi when the spears shattered, which they had done pretty uniformly up until this point.

Letting the newly released qi that was upwelling in her body flow, she marshalled the Maelstrom intent and spun the spear, guiding the swirling limb that was trying to impale her away, barely evading its grasp and collecting as much momentum from its strike as she was capable.

{Dreaming of Abzu}

The mnemonic shifted in her head as she sought the balance between the impossible, overpowering momentum of the male spider – what she needed was a…

-Yang Earth, the thought emerged almost unbidden.

The ambient qi swirled around her and her intent flowed in the prescribed pattern through her body. She completed the circuit and extended the Intent with her qi through the claimed spear towards the male spider and its rider.

The entire tunnel stilled.

Maelstrom Intent flowed out of her like a riptide, snaring everything. The captured momentum from the spider swept both her attackers away and crushed them into the far wall. The spiralling Martial Intent from the strike drilled through the spider, fracturing its carapace in places as it flailed its legs randomly, trying to get control of its body. The rider, who had borne the brunt of the strike, was crushed hopelessly against the wall and killed outright.

They stared dully at the attack she had just performed. That was way outside of any expectations she had had for it based on her practice up to that point.

The Undren in the tunnel stared at it.

The two arriving spider mothers and their riders stared at it.

The unnatural stillness of shock, that totally disrupted all expectations of the combat, dragged on for a short eternity. Really it could only be summed up by one word. Tyrannical. The bone spear hadn’t shattered into tiny bits either, which was a plus.

She had also realised something in that moment. She had really been doing the unarmed combat all wrong. The idea was right, but the Intent behind it was totally out and she had totally misjudged how much that mattered. That was kind of galling really, having studied the thing for weeks, but better to find out now.

The moment passed and with a surge everything just rolled at them with a singular, shifting howl of returning noise and chaos.

The injured male spider was still trying to pull itself back together, she could see it healing.

-Nope! No you fate-thrashed don’t, she hissed in her head.

She passed the leaf blade to Arai for now and did a forward thrust with the spear. The attack felt strange because she felt like she was stepping between whirlpools, letting them propel her onwards as she punched through the rapidly reforming line of minions and arrived at the male spider. It smashed down at her but she swept to the side with the spear and was shocked that her attempted parry actually succeeded, barely.

It still sent her careering sideways, skidding through puddles of gore and scattering the dead, but the disturbance around her ate up all the damage it dealt, turning it into further momentum which in turn agitated her Maelstrom Intent and made the circulation of her qi surge. Before it could dissipate or run out of control she spun the spear in her hand and thrust back towards the spider with the basic strike from the Spear Form.

The attempt was pretty poor in her estimation, but she still managed to get an increase in strength of about one tenth just from that. The spider staggered up and stabbed out with two strikes. She dodged to the side tipping the spear to block both as best she could by closing the angle down. It helped that it was clearly stunned still, so she got the timing a bit better and collected the strikes even as she thrust again.

The spider parried the strike and a spider mother blurred behind her, using the opportunity to try to sneak attack her. She swept low and in a circle, then jumped forward at her, but she had managed to collect enough of the Intent around her and projected it upwards with another twisting thrust. The spider mother hit the ceiling in an almost comedic shape, spewing ichor from smashed joints. The spider mother’s strike appeared to have been massively disturbed by her strike, as its spirit form flailed and petered out without even making it half the distance even as it twitched weakly.

The other spider mothers all charged at once, trying to buy time for the Spider King...

-Did spiders have kings? She wondered before deciding probably not.

Whatever it was though, it seemed able to recover.

The ones down below had been twice the size of this and grade eight monsters, however she had assumed those were some special exception and that most male spiders died at Golden Core. Male spiders had short nasty lives like that.

The amount of qi she was recovering now was a small magnitude above what it had been before as well. Her momentary epiphany about how she was meant to use the Intent made her want to cancel all the previous memories of her trying to use it. Embarrassingly wrong-headed didn’t even cover the half of it.

She used Maelstrom Shifting Steps to extricate herself, watching their movements destabilise. Even here she had been putting too much effort into it, not letting it just do what it did.

-Really mother, you were right, as soon as we got spiritual cultivations we starting doing things like spiritual cultivators, she reproached herself on her mother’s behalf.

Her spear twisted towards the large male, which struck at her with as much force as it could muster, endeavouring to deflect the strike this time rather than block it. This time, her timing was a bit worse, but it was still enough to collect the force and return it with interest. The male spider flailed and the spear shook in her hand as the spider was sent flying back into the wall where it twitched stunned.

Arai blurred towards it, deflecting a desperate attack from a spider mother before carving out the core of the spider with the leaf. They both stared at the grade three core with a perplexed expressions for a split second, wondering what the fates was going on. The only thing of note about it was the weird lines that swirled over it, similar in design to those on its carapace. She recovered and waved for her sister to refine it and turned back to the other spiders.

-Was it some kind of mutate? A specially raised beast? Unfortunately there was no time to think about it. She grimaced as she parried another spider mother and countered by sending its rider into the far tunnel wall with a scream.

Behind them an ominous wave rippled down the tunnel, making her skin crawl. Breaking free from the melee, she saw that Arai was already breaking for it, running down the tunnel once more. She cast down another ‘Yang Earth’ array and then a ‘Blade Mist’ array to delay things and sped after her. Catching up, she noted that her sister’s movements with ‘Flickering Steps’ was most definitely faster than should have been the case for the very basic, if robust, art. There was something about her… strides? It took her a second to realise she was seeing the space between her flickering faintly, gaining her maybe half a step for every one she was already taking.

They hit the next wave and she dropped another Blade Mist Array, taking care not to catch Arai in it. Undren died in their droves as she ran through their formation. Now she didn’t even have to bother with sub-Core Formation Undren, the ‘Maelstrom Shifting Steps’ and the synergy with her symbol was growing with every moment she kept using it. The movement art was tearing Qi Condensation and below apart like they were paper dolls, the momentum of the cultivation cycle devouring the qi that was orphaned in their deaths without her doing any more. Even some of the weaker Qi Refinement rats succumbed in the same way, while the stronger ones were crippled.

Unfortunately, the Undren, while fanatical and utterly fearless, also seemed to be fast studies. Within a few minutes they were skirmishing with them rather than trying to overwhelm them: throwing spears, javelins and rocks that were either explosive or corrosive.

They broke through the lines a moment later, whereupon the spider cavalry finally caught up once again, having extricated themselves from the arrays she dropped. Arai placed another on a wall panel and she did the same on the opposite side of the tunnel. It ate into her qi reserves once more but it bought those minutes to open up distance between them and their pursuers. They moved for almost 3 more miles, the ominous intent behind them still building while drums thudded frenetically, spreading in every direction through the tunnels around them, before the next wave found them, from ahead.

-What the nameless fates! She swore in her head as solid waves of rats burst out of side passages on their landward side.

She pushed down a single symbol mist array which blended a vast swathe of them as they barged straight into the oncoming wave. Both of them bulldozed through thousands upon thousands within the first few seconds, her ‘Maelstrom Intent’, her sister’s ‘Sundering Intent’ and the mists dispersing the waves of rats…

“That is not good,” Arai snarled as golden dust swirled all around them.

She just snarled inarticulately, having no words regarding the curtains of golden-green qi-denying dust that was shifting through the air, expelled somehow by the shattered remains of the rats they had just blended.

“Turns out you can also use it like this,” she signed with a few very obscene ones to punctuate matters.

She watched as the dust shifted and flowed through the qi disruption around her as if it was in some other plane of reality even as her sister sent out another wave of intent and qi that tore apart the swirling avalanche that was now massing from behind as well.

“Even if we clear it out totally, this stuff is beyond combustible, not to mention…” her sister signed rapidly as the kept battering their way through the oncoming horde of maddened cat sized rats.

-The qi-dispersing effect of the dust when combusted goes up by an order of magnitude, went unspoken.

-No lightning, no fire, no yang earth would ever last under this sustained onslaught…

“Yin Life-Wood?” she signed then spun the spear in a blur, using the movement art to propel herself forwards.

“Can only try it. It should kill them without dispersing the bodies ridiculously and spreading the dust…” Arai signed.

She pierced a dozen with a sliding thrust, watching puffs of dust come from their broken bodies, just to be sure. It seemed to be their flesh and blood reacting with the air somehow that made the change. As a weapon of tunnel warfare it was without compare. They were already deeply mired as it was. Her qi cycle was slowing as the dust caught at her with its evil barbs, interfering with her ability to draw qi through her skin. Qi defence meant next to nothing to it either, only her Intent was delaying it and even that wasn’t doing more than slow it. Truly a weapon tailored to wear down higher realm solitary victims.

“Yin Wood it is!” she muttered.

Grabbing Arai’s hand, they linked their symbols and put down a four symbol array. Her qi evaporated away as she linked symbols for Yin Wood, Isolate, Transform and Chain, focusing particularly on that last one as she imbued the core of the formation with Intent.

The impact was disturbing, she could only admit. Rats twitched and warped visibly, contorting and spasming for a few seconds as a rippling wave of vitality-stripping, life-force overgrowth roiled out around them. The sound of the swarm dying in every direction was like some vast sigh. The death qi that welled up made her skin crawl as within moments they were the sole living things within a hundred metres in either direction. Unfortunately though, the flooding wave of rats didn’t lose any momentum despite being dead. Thinking quickly, she put down a second array, just a two symbol one that was Yin Fire and Chain, delayed in its activation by a thread of her Intent and then they both fled as fast as they could through the collapsing tides of rats. The wave of Yin Wood qi that pulsed out had already rolled well ahead of them, outstripping their fastest pace as it self-propagated through the myriad swarm of rats beyond her wildest expectation.

“This place would be paradise if you cultivated some evil blood art…” Arai flitted over a particularly high drift of the rats.

“All these corpses and innate qi, just going to waste…” she mimed melodramatically.

It was a stupid thought really, but they were both at the point where you had to seek humour in these events; otherwise, the unrelenting pressure and slaughter of the last hours would properly start affecting them. There was also a niggling sense of annoyance that they should have done this from the get go, but likely it would have been nowhere near as effective. This was only working this well because all these rats were mortal she was pretty sure.

She pushed down another delayed Yin Fire array and another Yin Wood array on two of the central dividers that were barely visible amid the drifts of dead rats and death qi.

“There is literally no end to this tide of rats… There must be millions here.” she muttered.

After another three hundred metres they both put down a final Yin Wood and Yin Fire array apiece and then they ran flat out across the drifts, taking as much care as they could not to exacerbate the damage done already by the golden dust.

The horde petered out after another half mile of tunnel, not that either of them stopped running.

Behind them there was a sensation of ominous potentia as the death qi twisted. They had made it a few hundred more metres when a hot wind swept over both of them.

*Ffft-fthump*

The noise was less sound and more a transmission of emergent upheaval. She grabbed her sister by the arm and pushed all her remaining qi into Maelstrom Shifting Steps. Even then, her instincts were screaming at her that this was already too late for the scale of what was about to arrive. She exerted it to the fullest she was able for the first time since re-evaluating how she used the Intent. Her view of the tunnel actually warped slightly, the lines bending unnaturally as they moved so fast that she started to feel spatial crush on her inner organs.

Even then, it was slow compared to the pressure wave that rolled outwards, covering the distance between its epicentre a mile behind and their current location in less than a second. Picking her line, she dragged them both into a side tunnel stairwell as the shockwave put the floor of the tunnel on the ceiling, plastering the walls with a layer of rat gore and golden dust as it passed. Her whole body felt like it was being pummelled by evil men with hammers as they were thrown-

She hit the ceiling of the stairwell hard enough to crack bedrock, and certainly hard enough to crack half the bones in her body and jar her inner organs. The world swam in weird colours for a second and all the qi that wasn’t directly interacting with the cycle in her dantian or locked away in her bones, organs and blood was directly dispersed. That was becoming thematic of this place it seemed.

Verticality reasserted itself and she crashed into the floor, hard. Bits of her gear rained down around them and Arai hit the ground a moment later with a nasty thwack that was followed by the sound of someone hitting rock with their palm in a lot of anger.

The spear, which had already been showing signs of strain, clattered down and broke as it bounced off the lowest landing.

-How annoying, she thought dully.

The faint miasma of qi-dispersing dust that fused to her skin was painful. It took her a moment to realise in her disorientated state that that was because she was out of qi and the mantra was having to work hard to free up that which was locked in her flesh as the barbed dust interfered with her qi cycle. Fortunately, she hadn’t breathed too much of it in, but even so it was going to slow things down enormously.

She pushed herself up and swallowed back down the blood that was in her mouth.

Arai, who wasn’t much better, pulled herself up and slumped against the edge of the staircase, staring around them. Half a rat fell from somewhere up high with a dull splat. Blood and golden dust covered every surface and the world smelled somewhat coppery and sickly, and tasted of wet iron. The dust itself just hung unnaturally in the air while death qi made the shadows and lines of the stairwell's geometry waver in a nauseating manner.

“We are alive,” she signed derisively.

“No thanks to that trick,” Arai said with a sign that was equally humorous and insulting.

“On the plus side, that probably killed anything below Golden Core for a dozen miles of tunnel in every direction,” she signed back. “What do we do about this though?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who exploded it all!” her sister signed and mimed with a fake scowl before letting it lapse into a mocking grin and signing obscenities in the general direction of the tunnel they had fled from.

Qi was clearly out, so she focused on her Maelstrom Intent to see what that would do. To her shock, it actually shifted the dust closest to her ever so slightly. That was remarkably encouraging, but also going to be utterly headache-inducing. Normally you used Intent through another medium, qi generally. Using it on its own was generally compared to lifting rocks with your mind until you opened your Sea of Knowledge… unless you had a Martial Form that specialised in it.

She focused on the Maelstrom Intent as if it were an attack, visualising… a spear wasn’t going to work… a fan?

Nothing happened for the first few tries, but eventually she made the dust move away from her in a definitive manner.

“Intent will do it,” she signed to Arai, who just signed another series of crude obscenities back at her before pushing out her hand and wincing as some of the dust in the stairwell swirled away from them.

“Well I guess we aren’t using any qi for quite some time… then again, probably neither is anything else…” she signed, which got a silent laugh from her sister.

Pushing herself up, she spent a few more moments practicing before finally feeling happy with her ability to shift the dust away from herself with enough control to walk slowly in it without becoming a golden statue.

Arai followed suit, signing: “Shall we check out the collateral damage?”