> …Among the greatest disasters of that bygone era that is sometimes called the ‘Ancient Time’ or ‘The First Era’, the emergence of the ‘Defilers’ stands out as a truly inauspicious moment for those of us determined to catalogue the path from them until now. Our ancient ancestors were quick to point towards the ‘Barbarism’ of the Ur’Khal and the ‘Pride’ of the ancient peoples of Earth, Sea and Sun for emergence of this blight, but like all such things, the reality is never simple. While the truth of those times will likely never be truly known, at least to us, who come so long after – history suggests that we should have stood with them to quash that cancerous thing evoking the darkest nightmares of our devil and demons before it could truly rise.

Excerpt from ‘On the Origins of Darkness’

  By Menoc of Tyre

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~ ARAI, CLOUD ARROWS TRIBE – SHAMAN MEETING ~

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Sat around the large hearth in Shaman Argor’s abode beneath the largest of the close ring of rock pillars that made up the hold of the Cloud Arrows tribe, Arai found herself quietly impressed with how collected and boring the old Ur’Inan was. The others called him the ‘Ancestral Shaman’ but the actual nuance of it seemed to be that he was the shaman that ‘dealt with matters relating to the tribes’ ancestors’. From what she had observed in their three lengthy meetings so far over the past few weeks, prior to this point these responsibilities mostly seemed to involve him sitting in this cavern high in the largest pillar, staring at bits of ruin that others brought him and occasionally yelling at people to leave him alone. In many ways, the Shaman reminded her of Old Oudeng, which was somewhat surprising.

That was not to say that she could feel at ease around the shaman, who was possibly the strongest person in the whole tribe. The one reason he was not the chief, according to Rusula, was that he disliked fighting and believed that old fogies should not squat on top of others for generations. His detachment was in marked contrast to the other two, much younger Shamanesses, who were both… ‘Unique’ characters in their own ways and much more concerned with worldly matters – in various ways.

“The way east is difficult,” Argor said eventually, turning away from the pool of water he had been staring at for a good few minutes now. “Still difficult I should say.”

She nodded, and said nothing, because this meeting was one he had asked for, whereas the last few they had initiated for various reasons.

“I have looked at the dream, such as we may – the times uncreated are thin here, the geometry caged,” the old shaman said methodically as he stared into the middle distance.

“Yet, chaos rises, you come from the west. Perhaps you are its heralds or follow in its path… or perhaps you – two sisters of Ur’Sar – are the chaos...” the old shaman murmured eyeing her searchingly.

The symbol in her Sea of Knowledge shifted subtly at that, not to hide, just to symbol obscurely.

“I will be candid, I have peered into your path, watched the route you took, according to your words.”

She shifted slightly, trying not to look too impassive. Bluffing someone who was basically an Ancient Immortal was not something she wanted to try. They had certainly told no lies about their trip here.

“Your path holds the symbolism of the rites of ascension, and the deeds of the Mothers of Fire, Earth and Blood are echoed in your deeds,” the old shaman said a trifle more dryly. “Which is to say you walked here from the western continent and didn’t die – divination is strange like that – and far too many forget it at times.”

In that, she was pretty sure he was talking about the various members of the Cloud Arrows tribe who had been pushing their sons, daughters and occasionally husbands at them on and off over the weeks.

“Anyway, I did not call you here to ramble away,” the old shaman muttered. “You wish to go east – why, is not my business, although others would like to make it my business. However, the business of what IS out east concerns me greatly, if you follow.”

“You want to know more of where we are going, Ancestral Shaman,” she said politely.

“…”

“You are smarter than your age makes others think,” Argor nodded. “Yes, I am sure Rusula had told you many things. She is very free with conversation when she wants to be.”

“She has spoken somewhat of the Defilers to the north,” she said.

“Yes, they are what concerns me. I have been east, to the White Dragons, and returned twice. The lands you seek are likely before that point.”

She turned his words over in her head a few times before grasping what he was implying. He was concerned about the east, but the Cloud Arrows tribe… was not?

“The tribe is more concerned with local things,” she said eventually.

“Exactly. I have asked for several expeditions east in the last few seasons,” the old shaman nodded. “The seasons have grown more… erratic, unpredictable, especially those that come from the north. Especially the season of thunder.”

“And this season is more erratic than most?” she guessed.

“Yes,” Argor nodded, finally stopping pacing.

“The tribes around us, beyond us, are not affable to us smaller tribes. We hold secure places where we cannot be easily dislodged, but we are always under pressure, from the wetlands, from the mountains – even from the sky on rare occasions,” he stared at her pensively.

“You also want to go east,” she said finally grasping what he was on about.

“Yes, and no…” the old Ur’Inan said with a rasping laugh. “I cannot leave here, I am a shield for this place that keeps others away. Pezvak is my son, he will accompany you, with a team of his best hunters – people who are skilled at moving unseen through dangerous places. Rusula will go with you as well, because otherwise, the Chief will complain.”

“Rusula?” she blinked, surprised at that.

“She never told you?” the old orc barked. “She is the daughter of the old chief – who was killed by the Five Eyes no less. That is why she wanted to stick to you like fish glue.”

She stared at him, surprised, because the very chatty Rusula had indeed said nothing at all about that. “So when we killed…?”

“That Vaklash you killed, whose core you have been refining, was the son of the raid leader from the Five Eyes who killed her father and three brothers in the last war we had with their tribe,” Argor said drily. “She is also the most gifted of the three who stand to become shamaness in the future. She has sharp eyes and good wits, for all that she enjoys leading others about by their little legs – it is why she is apprenticed to Wanava and not I.”

“So Pezvak will guide us eastward, vaguely speaking, and then what?” she asked, curious.

“I cannot say. There are few eastwards who will speak forthrightly,” the old Shaman grumbled. “Something is changing out there – maybe it is something that has crawled out of the pits below the White Dragons. Maybe it is a war between the Ghoblan and the Undren that has spilled westward… but…” he trailed off frowning.

“If it was just that, you would already know?” she guessed, because he seemed to want her input now.

“Yes, that kind of thing travels, one way or another, but this season is too erratic. Too many strange things are moving. The serpents stir to the south. The Undren whisper of a catastrophe in the deeps that the D’varad stir. Sar-Vash, the hold of the Unspeakable enemy, was ruined. You have come from across the ocean.”

She really had to struggle to remain neutral faced at that, because beyond these D’varad, and maybe the serpents she had an inkling that at least two of those were on the two of them. The old orc was looking at her pensively now.

“We may have had some role in the chaos back west,” she conceded eventually.

“Hah.” The old orc chuckled. “Sar-Vash died, this is a good thing, less of the Hydra is also a good thing, and the Undren suffering some setbacks is also good. You damage the Five Eyes, perhaps by a quirk of fate, but it was still done. Had Goglurz been a bit more or less of an idiot and Lashnag not so fast of tongue we might be down two 6th advancement tribe members and my son would be a cripple.”

-Ah, monkeyshit, she grimaced inwardly. Really, this old Ur’Inan is a fast study.

“And yet, you decided to trust us. Destiny is a strange thing, misfortune and fortune have melded in a bizarre way. These things cannot be sought, only found,” Argor added. If the old Ur’Inan noticed her unease, he gave no outward sign at least.

She sat there, in silence thinking it through. On the face of it, she could see that his offer was both a request and not. If they travelled alone they could move quickly, but they would be moving blind, into dangerous lands where both Ur’Inan and others would perhaps be less amenable to their presence, or be more like the Five Eyes, willing to try capturing them before negotiating.

“Why did you ask just me here?” she said eventually.

“…”

“Your sister does not fully trust, Daughter of Fire,” the old orc said softly.

It took her a moment for her to realise he hadn’t spoken in Easten, the language they called La’Taan, but in another language, cruder than their local variant of the Imperial Tongue, but still recognisable.

“And you have the same gift I do, though I cannot see its quality either, which means it is greater than my own.” The old orc stepped forward and she saw symbols shift across his body, focusing on his forehead.

She watched stunned as a symbol formed on his forehead that was remarkably similar to her own, the words ‘Mountain Seizing Earthly Physique’ settled into her mind. The strength of earth that welled up from the old Ur’Inan, reminded her of the Yang Earth symbol, and in fact, as she stared at it she could see similarities between that symbol and his.

“You knew from the moment we used the strength of the mountains to suppress the Five Eyes,” she said softly.

“I did,” the old Ur’Inan nodded.

“How do you know this tongue?” she asked curious.

“How old do you think I am,” Argor asked.

“…”

“You were alive when the calamity happened?” she asked, credulously.

The old Ur’Inan eyed her for a moment then laughed again. “No, I am not that old, but there are some among the tribes in this area who are. Warmaster Demon Axe, of the Thunder Mountain Tribe for one; Ancestral Shamaness Jaga-Yun of the Gloomy Crags, for all that she is weaker than I, was alive then. No, my grandmother was, though. Your tongue is that of her people. She was born in the Southlands and seized in war, then sold to the evil men who built this place. My grandfather freed her from their enslavement and she joined the Cloud Arrows tribe as its Shaman of Ancestor.”

“Are there others of her people here?” she asked curious

“No, the few who remained died in the purges after the calamity, when the great tribes and other forces here realised what had occurred, that this place had become their prison. Those many who were enslaved here, there was no differentiation between those who walked good and bad paths. Those who came later were just as reviled because their promises came to naught. It is ironic really because we would kill any who dared compare us to the Orcnéas, yet the tribes painted all of those forces from above with the same brush and buried them in the very ruins of what they built.”

The old Ur’Inan sighed and smiled wryly. “In any case, I am prattling on now. The reason I called you here, beyond asking you to take some of our tribe onwards with you so that we might know what occurs to the east for ourselves, is to tell you that I tried to divine your onward trip.”

“Oh,” she wasn’t sure what to say to that, “Thank you, Ancestral Shaman.”

“There are two salient points there: first, that you should leave before the next storm wall arrives; and the second is that your journey east will bring many difficulties and not be easy.”

“Sadly, I wish I could be more helpful in that regard,” the Old Ur’Inan sighed drily. “The chicken I killed is probably cursing me in the afterlife for such a worthless outcome.”

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~ ARGOR, ANCESTRAL SHAMAN OF THE CLOUD ARROWS TRIBE~

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Argor watched the young woman leave with a sigh. They had talked some more, but she was distracted which was fair given his divination had not been what she had likely wanted to hear. Nobody liked being told that their path was going to be difficult and cause a lot of problems.

“Is that enough?” he asked eventually, when he was sure that the girl had left the tower to go tell her sister that they were going to have companions on their trip east and that it was going to be difficult.

“…”

The shadow, no bigger than a young girl, stood in the pond, considered him as well, then looked at the pool. With a dainty foot, it scattered the waters, removing the divination as if it had never been.

“It is enough,” her voice whispered, carrying a strength that made his soul quake and the symbol in his core want to prostrate itself.

Shaking, he grasped his arms and stared into the fire.

“Mother of Sky, to reflect our Dreams. Such hope, such sorrow, to break the wheel,”

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the shadowy presence was gone, leaving only haunting laughter and the flickering light of his abode and the haunting memory of what he had seen in the pool. Earth, Fire and Blood – three great encounters drawn to them like moths to a flame, hands seeking to move others only to find themselves the puppets, their designs broken and their dreams but a new cage for themselves, all of it cloaked in Night and with the shadow of the Moon eclipsing all.

It was the clearest divination he had ever made using that ancient method, and the presence of that shadow… He had not asked the other girl here for one simple reason – both of them in the same room made divination impossible. Two Mortal Physiques travelling together, it was no wonder that the poor fools from the Five Eyes Clan had been smashed by them. That the Cloud Arrows had escaped calamity in the same moment was…

He shuddered, thinking what he knew of that dreadful curse. Picking up the old grey slab on the shelf he easily found the line in it.

‘There are no strings on mortal physiques. Those who would tie them will find themselves bound and those who would move them hither, will find the world turning upon them. They are the antithesis of those who fancy themselves movers of men and changers of skies.’

‘The more pressure they suffer the more they will fight back until either their bearer is broken on the wheel of the world – or they rise.’

His own Earthly Physique was excellent, an inheritance from his grandmother, but within it were texts regarding the others… It was one thing to read, but quite another to see it. They had been stranded here by the storm walls, random chance landing them on the Cloud Arrows’ doorstep after they got stuck in the broken maze to the north. Goglurz’s actions had somehow rolled in their favour and it was the Five Eyes who had run smack into the misfortune instead – an event so random you would not credit it, unless you knew what he knew.

While they had been here things just moved about them. The world turned, events swept them up and moved them along as the geometries shifted around them. They even made a mockery of the alignments in this place that his grandmother had placed down to hide their vitality in this mountain. It was a gamble to push Pezvak and Rusula at them, a terrible risk – but for some reason, the tide of fortune that had swept them up was more good than bad. Both Pezvak and Rusula would suffer on this trip, but if they survived they would be able to step beyond their current means, and with them, the Cloud Arrows tribe might survive the shadow that was already turning this way from the south.

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~ ARAI, SANA AND CLOUD ARROWS - TRAVELLING ONWARDS ~

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Looking out over the vast swathe of forested uplands from what was the far extremity of the Ur’Inan territories within this huge massif, Arai found herself one again quietly glad that they had taken the chance and negotiated with the Cloud Arrows tribe. Sana was still a bit mixed on it, but even her sister had to concede that without their help, getting to this point would have been deeply frustrating.

After that somewhat… cryptic meeting with the Shaman Argor they had found the expedition put together in almost an afternoon. It wasn’t quite being kicked out the door, but it certainly made her feel like the shaman was keen to see them away from the hold for some reason. The trip after that had gone… well, it was wrong to say it was smooth but it had been quite rapid. With a small band, they had moved through cavern systems mainly during the storm walls and then above ground when it was possible. There had been some small skirmishes with other tribes on the way, but mostly they were groups of a strength like those they had met elsewhere. A few Nascent Souls or Soul Foundation and mainly Golden cores. Nobody was willing to stick around to bother Pezvak at least, and so they had made it to this point in just under two weeks.

To their south, the wetlands stretched away below them, dotted with massif pillars and a few more upland areas in between large lakes that were visible through the rolling rainclouds that swept across continually. Ahead of them, the forested uplands vanished into misty rain. Every now and then a giant rock pillar split the landscape, while the distant flashes of lightning on the mountains that Ur’Inan called ‘the White Dragons’, illuminated the more distant peaks. The forest was still sub-tropical here, and rivers wound through it falling over the various rent edges of the escarpment as misty, stepped waterfalls. Here and there it was possible to make out the ruins of complexes scattered around and on the distant pillars or on the cliff edges.

To get here without knowing the paths that Pezvak took them on would likely have taken them a month to cover the same distance or seen them forced back to the wetlands to brave the serpents. Otherwise, they would have been forced back by the mazes of broken landscape alignments, ended up fighting half a dozen small tribes or, if they went below ground, rapidly found Undren with all that that promised.

“This is the extremity of our various territories,” Pezvak, who stood nearby, rumbled as they looked out at the misty wet landscape. “Beyond here, it is the land of the Ghoblan and the Undren,”

“And the defilers,” one of the hunters behind them muttered.

Sana stood nearby, arms folded, scanning the landscape just as she was.

“We make explorations into the depths, through the tunnels, but there is nothing like you seek in anything that our tribes have found,” Pezvak added. “Nothing like that has ever been found here. If you seek it, it is likely in that direction.”

She followed where he was pointing, along the vast escarpment to where dozens of ruins dotted the high points of the forest as it started to rise into proper foothills were dimly visible in a break in the weather.

“Even hidden by the forest sprawl, that complex over there must be massive…” shading her eyes, she peered at the distant ruins. They were blocky and angular, similar largely to the ones they encountered in the swamp from what she could make out.

“You must be wary, though. The space of that place is strange, even by the standards of the swamps you have traversed to reach this point,” Pezvak frowned. “That is also very close to the areas where the defilers have made the biggest push in recent seasons.”

“What are those?” Sana pointed off to the south, over the edge of the escarpment.

They all looked in that direction at a break in the cloud that allowed the distant portions of the escarpment to be briefly visible. The vast escarpment stretched down below them. In the distance she could see that something had rent the landscape, dropping one side of it away as it left a weird disconnect between the uplands and the swamp. Lights were dimly visible to their augmented vision in the middle distance from settlements in the lower massif around that point. A few even blinked out in the distant wetlands.

“To be visible at this distance they must be huge fires,” she murmured.

“I had no memory of settlements that large from when we last traded this far towards the mountains,” Pezvak frowned. “It seems Shaman Argor’s concerns that this season of storms is covering something untoward may be well-founded.”

The few other Ur’Inan with them also shook their heads, as did Rusula, who had tagged along.

“Perhaps it is Ghoblan, or one of the southern tribes has made inroads,” one of the others, a hunter named Kazgru, said with a shrug.

“True,” Rusula nodded, adding, “In the seasons of thunder it is hard to keep in contact, and this season has lasted many months already.”

As if to punctuate that point, thunder rumbled off to the north. Another huge storm front was moving in. The thickness of the thunderclouds overhead was actually suppressing the usual storm half-light into proper dusk. The oppressive air that came with it made everything feel charged, was likely also the reason those clusters of light were more obvious, as they were reflected through the mists and rain.

“We will go along the edge of the escarpment, making for the nearest towers,” Pezvak said after a further pause. “We should be wary, though, of trusting ruins for shelter.”

“Hmmmmm – yes. That is the kind of place someone would happily fortify up and occupy in lieu of having any nice safe stone mountains to hide in from these storms…” Sana mused, which got several amused laughs from the Hunters.

She shook her head, and her sister half smiled as well.

Running a hand through her sodden hair, which she had cut short again, she squinted down through the misty rain sweeping across the escarpment closer to them – taking in the nearer wetland and massif.

There were shadows in the forest below those massif pillars, and the two points between several of the pillars looked slightly like they could be huge carved walls or some stepped structure that was overgrown. The horizon point was just a bit too uniform from this altitude, even broken up by gloom and rain as it was.

“It’s hard to tell with the gloom and the dropping visibility from the waves of rain pushing through but there might be another one down in the valleys over to our south-east that’s almost as big. Those two valley rises look awfully straight for the feng shui of the landscape around here.”

Rusula nodded, “There is a large ruin down there as well, mostly lost to the jungle and the wetland, almost as big as Yogo-Shada or Cita-Furiax.”

“It is the westernmost edge of the Gloomy Crags territory,” Pezvak added and chuckled. “They will be about as amenable to you as the Five Eyes were.”

“Big tribes easier to forget roots,” one of the hunters muttered.

“Big tribes get much better at cracking heads though,” another added from up above where they were also keeping watch.

“Anyway, we should move out, if we want to get to the nearest tower before the storm wall arrives,” Pezvak said abruptly, waving to the other half a dozen hunters who all started to make their way down the cliff.

Making their way along the edge of the escarpment and towards the nearest small tower, she found that the distance between things out here was just as warped as the Ur’Inan had suggested it was. As far as hypotheses went, they had a few already, but the most plausible one was the one Sana had formulated. It was based off their discussions about the fixed points in the landscape in the ‘Perilous Realm’ – that basically, the ruins and other notable points in the landscape were ‘normal’ and that the space between them was somehow ‘wrong’. The best that they could come up with, while asking Rusula as they went, was that the distance was somehow folded, akin to ground contraction like her own Sundering Intent allowed her to do. Looking at it from a distance, the disruption would not be visible, but walking through them you would be forced to follow the contours unwittingly.

The longer they walked through the rain, the more this seemed to be borne out. The tower Pezvak led them towards, which looked like it was maybe 200 metres high around four miles away, turned out to be 200 metres high and closer to twenty miles away. Equally curious, walking too high in the sky here was, it turned out, impossible. The qi simply became thin the higher you went up, such that upon rising to maybe half a mile she essentially could not support her own momentum without a vast expenditure of her own qi.

When they finally arrived at the tower though, she found that there was something in that that they hadn’t really bargained for. Arriving there, they looked back at the massif and saw it was about twice the distance away it should have been.

“What the fates… That’s…” she scowled and looked back at the massif now much more clearly visible from the top story of the tower in comparison to the ridgeline.

Pezvak was scowling. “This is a problem. It should not be this bad.”

“It shouldn’t?” Sana looked at him and then back at the massif and frowned. “I feel like we are seeing something quite fundamentally important in the way this landscape is trying to screw with us… But I cannot for the life of me work out what exactly it is.”

“If it’s like this, the storm wall is going to arrive well before we get to Jumaki Chasm. It should be 25 miles from the massif, but we have already come close to 20 and it is just the first tower.”

“It is too fast,” Rusula frowned, staring up at the sky. “The storm wall is already building again. At this rate it is going to hit within a mere 20 hours?”

Pezvak just nodded grimly.

“They did not come this fast before?” she said.

“Here it is different, further out they lag,” Pezvak said by way of explanation. “This season of thunder is already strange and erratic, but this is…?”

“We return to massif for now?” one of the other hunters, whose name she thought was Luz, asked, looking edgy.

“It bad luck to stay in ruins when storm wall come,” another grumbled. “The Maker’s Eyes not reach. People vanish, especially out here.”

Pezvak turned to look at the two of them.

“When you say people vanish,” she asked, “are you talking about the rumours that the Ancestral Shaman talked about?”

“People vanish, never seen again. It happen in depths, but sometimes even whole warband vanish near ruins when caught in the storms. This a thing of the last century or so. The old ancestors of tribes have no luck seeing why, and the few who go to investigate also all vanish, so now people just avoid them.” Rusula explained.

“Ruins always dangerous though, above and below, even after all this time,” Pezvak agreed.

“Can we not just find a cave in the escarpment?” she asked, looking towards the edge.

“Most caves here lead to the depths. We can hide there, but many things will come in with the storm,” Pezvak frowned.

“So why are those caves safe?” Sana asked.

“They have always been holy place. Dark things fear to tread where world roots once ran,” Rusula said.

Arborundum veins, she had worked that one out quickly enough after the shaman Argor had remarked on them having a piece of the world root in their possession during their first meeting. The Cloud Arrows tribe had quite a remarkable collection of it, in several different colours – cups, bowls and even a small bracelet. The former were used by the old shamans in certain rituals while the bracelet was worn by Chief Ogun.

“Then why are the caves in the massifs okay?” she asked. Those had clearly had no Arborundum in them.

“They are high up. The maker’s eye sees. Evil skulks below,” one of the hunters muttered.

She looked around at the other hunters who were all looking up at the storm wall and the black, blocky tower with unease. She was pretty sure that they could just find a cave and seal it up, but on balance it was probably better to do what the hunters said, she supposed. This whole land seemed to make them uneasy in any case.

“I think we should return to the massif and consider what is what,” Arai found herself agreeing as she considered how skittish the Hunters looked.

“Yeah,” Sana nodded pensively. “It is better to not tempt inauspicious things.”

Arriving back at the massif where they had left it, she felt her head hurt a bit, because the return trip had indeed been about 10 miles, as it should have been. The tower behind them was also once again four miles away, looking as it had been. They had passed through exactly the same landscape, at the same speed, but in half the time, covering half the distance, without missing anything they had seen on the way there. Even the hunters were a little unnerved by it, and frequently prayed to their ‘Maker’ in La’taan.

Sat in a cave, overlooking the escarpment, she looked on while the members of the Cloud Arrows tribe sorted out a campfire and some food, and considered again what it was they had just seen about the distance between places here. It was still gnawing at her, even when she was brought some soup, so in the end she drew it out as a map, using her scrip. Looking at that diagram with the recorded measurements and her observations and a visual record of the trip there and back in her mind, she still found that she had nothing.

Meanwhile, Sana just sat there staring at the distance between them and the tower, studying it with her soul sense as if it had actively offended her somehow. It was a sentiment she could appreciate, having walked there and back again and still finding herself none the wiser.

Soon flickers of lightning started to become more visible through the rain clouds in the distance to the north so she sighed and put it out of her mind. The Cloud Arrows tribe had gotten used to them just doing their own thing and refining cores, and just started to talk about various things and gamble with dice as they sat around the fire in the cave.

The core she was working on still had almost half its qi left. It really made her wonder what they had been doing to cores before this point to not get this much out of them. Was it the symbol and shattering the soul foundations? She vowed to experiment on that at some point once they got some decent Nascent Soul cores. Unfortunately, qi beasts of that grade were surprisingly thin on the ground once you suddenly needed some, or so it seemed.

Sinking her mind into her Nascent Soul, she looked at her Qi Sea as qi from the core flooded into her. The upper half was almost filled with mist at this point. As she watched, shifting rings of qi were separated and refined, rolling around like a vast hurricane with her Golden Core at the centre. Dozens of little sky islands made of agglomerating qi types drifted in it. The sea below rolled with great crashing storm waves.

In the heart of her dantian was a placid area – the eye of the tumultuous storm of refinement. Bordered with massif pillars made of core detritus, she… well, her Nascent Soul had carved shrines on each peak which held the qi focusing arrays she had added. Those arrays were now the focus of everything that was going on. The storm surged around them, pulled in by the rotation of the Golden Core which hung in the middle of the place, spinning so fast it looked almost motionless were it not for the rings swirling around it in the eye of the storm. The arrays themselves fed a continuous series of flare-like columns that swirled around the intervening space, being devoured by the core at a steady rate.

The whole scene was quite unreal, given everything was shifting rainbow colours except for the dense grey clouds of qi, which mirrored the storm outside and had miniature bolts of tribulation-looking lightning arcing through them and occasionally earthing in her core.

Her Nascent soul currently sat in the middle of all this. Focusing on that aspect of her dantian made everything go weird because the scale of the whole scene became somewhat off. It was like she was either focusing on her core, and the Nascent Soul was right there, as her, tiny in scale, or she focused on the Nascent Soul, whereupon the core was tiny and the draw remained the same while her Nascent Soul sat on a platform in the eye of the hurricane of refined qi.

The spiritual walnut trees on some of her pillars had started to become actual small trees. They periodically drew down lightning from the rolling hurricane, and the density of unrefined qi around them was definitely higher than elsewhere, which was interesting. She could see a similar, lesser effect around the lotus and the Sun Orchids, as well as several other spirit plants she had added along the way.

The Serpents had all eked out dens for themselves and hunted spirit crabs or fish. The spirit crabs ate rock bits, and the fish ate anything. It was a strange cycle of sorts to watch, but it definitely made her qi refinement that bit quicker, and the crabs and fish were slowly multiplying even as the serpents ate them. It was a strange facsimile of how they behaved in reality. She turned to one of the serpents and frowned at it. They all had the Myriad Transformations symbol where their cores would be… Could she actually bring them out as pseudo Nascent Souls?

She focused on one – it flicked its tongue but did nothing more.

“No…” she sighed softly under her breath, already having worked out her mistake, “Stupid Arai, you’re doing it wrong!”

This time she manifested her Nascent Soul in the cave directly. It appeared, sitting on the head of a rather grumpy-looking, ethereal twin-headed serpent several metres long.

She stared at herself from three different perspectives from 8 pairs of eyes for a moment before having to stop because it was giving her a headache.

That act made everyone else in the cave stop and look at her.

“You… know Auram Manifestation…” one of the hunters muttered, making a holy sign while a few others actually bowed.

“That’s a totemic refinement of a juvenile Hydra?” Rusula whispered with awe.

Sana watched her dully, and the feeling through their connection was tangibly: ‘Well, monkeyshit – Why didn’t we think of that before!’

She prodded the serpent with her Nascent Soul and found that it was indeed like a pseudo Nascent Soul of sorts… it didn’t have a Sea of Knowledge, but it had access to a pseudo soul sense of its own and even some kind of independent agency, although that was rather patchy. It also had an ‘intent’ that seemed to be derived from her own, crossed with its own comprehensions of that devouring power it had had in life.

She tried to get it to use an ability – the air mist blades. Without even doing anything particular, it formed a small three symbol array in its mouth and breathed a cloud of severing mist at the roof of the cave that made everyone else flinch back. It then gave her a ‘that’s how you do it’ expression that made her want to send the serpent back into her dantian and ignore it.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Pensively, she recalled them all and then, focusing through her Nascent Soul she tried to just send out serpents. The one two-headed serpent and two single-headed serpents flitted out and appeared in the cave beside her. Both of them were, she had to be honest, kinda small and only around two metres long with bodies as thick as her leg.

It still managed to impress the Ur’Inan who were now looking at her with even more reverence if that was possible. She summoned out a few more, which were all basically normal snakes and spent a few minutes working out what she could do. If left to their own devices, they had autonomous movement, and would also follow basic instructions. The limit of the two-headed serpent was four symbol arrays, which it could do with a real struggle. The single-headed ones could manage two symbol arrays in the same manner before turning fuzzy. When they overexerted themselves they just returned to her Qi Sea and sulked. Casting arrays in that way also cost her more than just doing it normally, but she could already see the advantages – diversions for starters.

Sana had also started experimenting at this point, and after a bit more investigation she went back to refining qi from the core and waiting for the storm front to pass. By the time it did, she had managed to increase her reserve of refined qi by another 30% over what they had been. Some rough mental math suggested that was about 85,000 ‘units’ now. Her Nascent Soul was also bit more mature looking – but only just.

It was also possible for her to bring out the crabs and fish, as it turned out, but they were not particularly useful in the cavern. They retained their elemental affinities as in life, and as it turned out, as Nascent Soul fish, they could swim in the air and were physically powerful, but they otherwise lacked in stamina.

The crabs, which got a smattering of actual applause from the Cloud Arrows tribe and some impressed ‘Oooohs’ from Rusula, were very stealthy and had good explosive combat power – especially with water-type arrays, but again lacked stamina. Both were situationally useful, but incomparable to the versatility of the serpents who had significantly more autonomy it seemed. A lot of it was likely down to understanding she assumed. It was easier for them to understand the mind-set of a serpent and how it acted compared to a fish or a crab.

The return trip to the first tower was much the same as the previous one. They didn’t linger here and pushed on, heading for the caves that the Cloud Arrows tribe spoke of, which were apparently somewhere beyond the third tower. As they approached within half a mile of second tower though, she pulled back her soul sense and waved for everyone to stop – even as Pezvak was doing the same with a very dark look on his face.

“I take it those are these ‘Defilers’?” she said as they all came to a halt.

Through her soul sense she could see that the tower ahead of them was occupied. A large group of brutish figures maybe 40 strong – demon-like individuals with pig-like heads and muscled, fat bodies were sat around a series of cook fires.

They had about 30 other creatures there with them. Mainly Undren and the smaller greenish-grey demons she now knew were called Ghoblan. Along with them were several female Ur’Inan who were being brutally tormented. It took her a moment to work out where the male Ur’Inan were before she saw one of the demons gnawing on a leg and thought to look at the fires, which held several hacked-up torsos on spits.

She looked on for several more moments as the pig head demons laughed and did lewd things before pulling her sense back – none of those at the tower were above Soul Foundation, so their arrival had passed entirely unnoticed.

“Evil things,” Pezvak hissed, unlimbering his bow.

“What is it?” Rusula asked, bringing the rest of the hunters up.

“A raiding party of Defilers,” Pezvak growled.

“They have come this far south? This soon after the storm?” Rusula whispered, looking… uneasy. The rest of the group behind them also shifted with unease and anger.

“I take it we kill them?” she said to Pezvak. “It seems like eradicating them would be doing the world a big favour.”

“With fire and fury,” Rusula muttered, grinding her teeth.

She was about to suggest that they just attack with a few, but looking by the faces of the Ur’Inan hunters she suspected that there was no ‘honour’ in that.

“We will attack first and let you sweep them all up,” she said to the others.

“If they have banners we must be careful,” Pezvak muttered.

She swept the tower again but saw nothing really like that.

“They don’t seem to have anything like that,” Arai added.

“We will disperse their energy and sunder their strength. You will then move in and help those they have taken prisoner?” she suggested.

Pezvak nodded and the two of them jumped into the air and used their movement arts to blur through the rain towards the tower, hiding their presence. Arriving above it, she swept a second time just to make sure there were no surprises, then they both unleashed as much of their strength as they could.

In the end, the attack took mere moments, as Sana’s Maelstrom Intent was almost tailor-made for dispersing and diffusing qi in localised areas. As the pig head demons screamed and shouted in a guttural language that made her skin crawl, she locked onto as many as she could and sent a chilling pulse of Sundering Intent-infused qi towards their meridians.

Several weaker Golden Cores died simply from the shock of the attack. The rest coughed up blue/purple blood and staggered drunkenly before collapsing. It took about 10 seconds for the other slaves to recognise what had just happened, then with an enraged scream one of the female Ur’Inan pushed off a demon that had been holding her down and, grabbing its axe, brutally stove its head in. That opened the floodgates for a wave of carnage as the Ghoblan, Ur’Inan and Undren swarmed over their persecutors.

At the same moment, the Cloud Arrows group arrived at the edge of the clearing and just stopped to watch the same scene as them.

It was a scene of… justice probably... but mainly it was just horrific. The Undren dragged several of the smaller pig demons over to the fires, breaking their limbs and throwing them in a large cauldron of boiling water. The female Ur’Inan and several… female Ghoblan were busy mutilating helpless pig demons in ways that were quite horrifically inventive.

They dropped down beside Pezvak and the rest, who were still standing there, watching. She didn’t consider herself particularly sheltered when it came to death, having seen quite a bit of it both here and also through body recovery as a Herb Hunter. However, this level of vengeful torment made her feel unclean just watching it. Not for the victims, these ‘defilers’, who made her skin crawl in some strange way just being near them, but for the perpetrators, who didn’t deserve to have been delivered to a point where this kind of violence was cathartic.

“What do we do?” she asked Pezvak, who was standing there with folded arms.

“They have their minds... don’t they?” Rusula muttered, holding her own arms while a few of the other hunters also muttered darkly.

Watching the carnage, she could see that the strongest among the prisoners were two Ur’Inan females who were about Golden Core and suffering some kind of cultivation damage. It had settled down to a somewhat more systematic torment at this point, and the few remaining pig demons who were still alive had been restrained. The Ur’Inan woman who had started the revolt with their unknowing help was going down the line chopping off limbs and the demons’ offending organs. Two of the Undren followed along after, gathering up much of it and throwing it into the fires or into the cauldron.

“When did they gag the small horrors?” her sister asked dully.

“Undren are fast like that, but probably it was the Ghoblan,” Pezvak said grimly.

*Boom*

The raging swell of thunder swept across the sky making it physically darken.

“What do we do about the freed ones?” she asked Pezvak.

“And isn’t that damnably fast for another storm wall?” Sana added.

“It is fast,” Pezvak grumbled. “That’s less than two days.”

The freed prisoners also noticed the weather, and as a result, finally spotted their audience. The reactions were… interesting she had to admit. The Undren, who were mostly what she would have considered the lightly armoured caste, all flinched and stopped what they were doing. The Ghoblan massed together but didn’t look especially afraid while the three of the five Ur’Inan females all scowled and pointed weapons at them. The other two, who had borne the worst of the torment, just looked on dully.

“They don’t seem pleased to see us?” she noted to Pezvak.

“They see we are Cloud Arrows – their tattoos mark them as Gloomy Crags,” Rusula answered.

“Ah, so they are afraid that you… will also bash them over the heads and take them home as ‘brides’?” she said drily.

There were one or two awkward shuffles from the Soul Foundation hunters behind them that suggested that in other circumstances that might not be too far off the mark. She shook her head and walked forward

“We did this,” she pointed to the dead and dying pig-headed demons.

The three females from the Gloomy Crags all flinched while the other two just looked from one to the other.

“Who are the other two from?” she asked.

“Red Feather tribe by the looks of it,” the Hunter called Luz said. “They are not allied to the Gloomy Crags.”

“Or us, for that matter,” Rusula added.

Another huge echo of thunder rolled across the sky, followed by a sizzling wave of purple-white lightning that skittered like an insane flood of locusts across half the sky. With it came a strange distortion in the qi of the world. The after-tones of the bolt echoed oddly, and in the shadows far above she swore she saw a series of shadows drifting through the rain before they vanished.

“Isiqhwithi siyakhala,” one of the ghoblan mumbled, bowing down.

“Iliso lendudumo,” another mumbled. “Uzwilakhe wesibhakabhaka.”

She blinked, because the cadence of the words sounded... familiar?

“Ghoblan and their weirdness,” another hunter, Tantaz, grimaced.

“Somehow I think staying here would be a bad idea,” she said, looking out at the forest.

The rain was starting to fall harder now, forming a curtain of noise on the dense greenery. The temperature was if anything more cloying than it had been in the swamp. It was more than just the fires here… Frowning, she knelt down and touched the ground, sending her soul sense down a little. It didn’t penetrate far, but the rock was definitely warmer below.

“Yes, we should not stay here,” Pezvak agreed. “It is too far to make it to the massif as well. This storm will arrive in a few hours.”

“Going down is not possible is it?” Sana said looking at the cliff edge. “You said that the caverns in Jumaki chasm are beyond the next watchtower?”

“We will not reach them in time with our current speed,” Pezvak said, rejecting that suggestion.

“You can go faster though,” she said, thinking again about the distance, and the fact that they had been walking at what was effectively a scouting pace.

“I can, but they cannot,” Pezvak frowned, gesturing to many of the others.

“If it comes to it we can dig into the ground and hide,” she said decisively.

“You lot,” Pezvak pointed to the five Ur’Inan women and also included the Undren and the Ghoblan in the gesture.

She watched as the Ur’Inan spoke to them in their common tongue, which she was still really not much closer to mastering beyond a few guttural words. It had far too many consonants in it and half the time she was certain they were trying to teach her rude words or how to proposition others. After a few moments of back-and-forth, Pezvak nodded and turned to them.

“They will come with us, these five at least,” he explained.

“We come too,” the Ghoblan female who seemed to lead that group said with a scowl.

They looked at the twenty or so Undren, who scowled and as one started to grab various bits of defiled and make their way towards the escarpment edge.

“They will take their chances, it seems,” Luz grunted.

“We should not linger here, then,” she said.

The trip along the ridgeline, racing against the storm was hard. They kept to the treeline where possible. To her surprise, both Ghoblan and the five Ur'Inan women were able to just about keep pace with their brisk run. The thunder crept ever closer as they skirted river gorges, the occasional small ruin and groves of gnarled and poisonous spirit vegetation. In many places, the forest actually grew all the way up to the edge of the escarpment now – tumbling over it in tangled avalanches of life-catching vines and various unpleasant, death-loving species that especially liked to congregate around the rivers.

They had made it almost four miles when they encountered a second band of the defilers, in similar numbers to the last beside one of the gorges. This group were in the process of butchering a large number of Undren prisoners, shoving a few, who she assumed were females, into a caged wagon. The slaughtered corpses were being piled onto a second one by the child-sized, minion-like Pig Demons who outnumbered the adults maybe three to one.

There was no planning this time. They simply rolled over them without even pausing. Two pulses of intent-infused qi accompanying a hail of arrows from the hunters. The Undren had broken and fled back down the gorge before they had even finished killing all the defilers.

Standing beside one of the corpses of a corpulent Pig Demon, her sister waved her over. “You notice some of these ones have grey leathery skin?” Sana said.

“Huh… now that you mention it,” she checked and glanced at another, and saw that it did as well. That detail had somehow passed notice before.

“Isn’t it remarkably like the bales of skin we saw in the Island City… that the Sar’katush were storing?” she frowned, looking for those memories of long ago.

“The Undren in the depths had some as well,” Sana reminded her.

“Some other races take it, use it, but not us. It is a thing that is unclean,” Rusula said.

“Yes, big war-here Defiled Undren,” one of the Red Feather Ur’Inan women said helpfully in very bad La’taan.

She spoke to Rusula for a moment, gesturing and pointing in various directions in their normal tongue while Rusula nodded along before turning back to her.

“She says that Defilers come with the season of storms, appear from nowhere, make big strike against the Undren, seize their stronghold here, fight against the Ghoblan to the north, now turn here for some reason.”

“That is unusual,” Pezvak frowned, then asked the woman a few questions as well.

“She says that their numbers are unknown. Several tribes just vanished in the storm waves. They go to scout but get captured by Gloomy Crags before they can get far, taken to Gloomy Crags delvings for questions, then defilers attack, they flee, get caught south of here just before storm wave before last. Defilers attack as soon as wave finishes, caught everyone off guard.” Rusula translated.

“We finished killing all that remain,” Luz came over, holding a tattered flayed hide. “This in the possession of the grey-skin.”

They looked at the flayed hide, which was greenish in colour and still bloody with some distaste.

“This belong to a Warleader of the Gloomy Crags,” Pezvak muttered. “They making it into banner.”

“Destroy or?” Luz frowned.

“Destroy, say prayer to Maker for soul to find new home,” Pezvak growled. “We not like Gloomy Crag, have many blood enmity, but Defilers are enemies of all. This is not honourable end for mighty warrior.”

“I’ll do it,” Rusula said, taking the hide and waving to the three woman from Gloomy Crag to come over from where they were hacking viciously at various corpses, making sure they were very dead.

“We should not linger here,” Pezvak said, to which she could only wholeheartedly agree.

As they made their way onward, the storm howled almost overhead now, the rain sleeting down and making a dull roar in the trees all around them. Visibility had dropped to maybe 50 metres, with their qi-enhanced vision and soul sense also starting to suffer both from the qi-rich environment and from the oppression of the storm above.

They soon found two more camps just like the one they had destroyed, on other river gorges leading down the escarpment. Both had signs of a lot of butchery and obvious trails leading off into the forest. At the third one, they again encountered actual defilers, this time with a Nascent Soul pig-headed demon leading them. Even before they could do anything to it, Pezvak executed it with a white and yellow arrow that hit it and exploded with enough force to scatter its physical body across half of the gorge.

Arriving at the edge and sweeping up the remainder, she got a much better view of this camp, which was in a cluster of ruins that was much more substantial than the last ones they had seen. A few of the smaller pig demons fled shrieking for the treeline before being shot down by hunters, while she targeted Soul Foundation demon after demon, abolishing their cultivations with scything blades of her intent. Sana for her part did what she had been doing before and roughly dispersed all the qi in the area as best she could.

When it was done, they were left with a small band of shivering Ghoblan, two more female Ur’Inan and a bunch of Undren who had already made a decisive retreat back down the gorge. Looking around at the corpses, she was again met with that strange sense of… unease. There was something about the pig demons made her skin crawl somehow and evoked a primal… hatred was the wrong word… disgust.

“Why do the Undren all run?” Sana asked Pezvak, watching them flee. “The ones we fought before were nigh unbreakable.”

“Individual Undren are not strong,” Pezvak said, turning to watch them as well, “The Defilers are masters of this kind of damage, and they are not fighting for their ancestors here. They are not really running, but heading for the nearest caverns where they will regroup and then likely go down. Unlike us, who must retreat overland, the Undren need only go deep to find their kind. All of the depths here are the territory of Swarmblood.”

“They fight like devils when it suits them,” one of the Ghoblan woman muttered.

“But always for themselves,” another added with a sour look at the retreating Undren.

That did tally with what she had seen so far, she had to admit.

“What will-” She was cut off as a vast soul sense dropped out of the sky onto the whole camp. The Undren shrieked and blood ran from their eyes and ears as they collapsed. The weaker Ur’Inan and Ghoblan they had saved were also incapacitated.

Her consciousness went slightly fuzzy as it narrowed in on the two of them and… Pezvak who gritted his teeth and made a strange sign before staggering back.

“Ymg' goka l' Neron, gof'n ahf' c' ephaimgah'ehye nafl'fhtagn”

The words echoed in her head, speaking a word she couldn’t understand even as she fought with the surprising intrusion. Mustering as much strength as she could, she pushed the enemy soul strength that came with it out of her body, using her Sundering Intent and her mantra to repel it even as the symbol surged after, not that it was left with much do to.

“What in the Maker’s Eyes,” she hissed, adopting the Ur’Inan means of cursing.

“That was… Spirit Severing strength?” Sana grimaced.

“Powerful 5th Advancement,” Rusula gasped, pushing herself up even as Pezvak helped her rise.

She shuddered, scouring her body with her intent a second time. The lingering sensation from the intent and that horrible voice that had slid all over her body made her want to burn her skin with acid to get clean again.

“No Principle,” she said, “so yes… probably.”

“It is close to 6th advancement; the defiled do not rank the same way.” Pezvak growled. “If we meet one who has found their inner meaning we can only flee and pray that the Maker has eyes in this place. It will be as strong as a warrior like Karoz, and have spells like yours… and probably a refined banner.”

“Four miles away,” her sister said after a moment, “They have patched up the tower and heavily fortified it… however…”

She cast her own soul sense towards the tower. It didn’t get much farther than half the distance, but it was enough to give her spectral eyes in that direction and make out a sprawling camp of primitive, block buildings and a set of formidable stone walls ringing it.

“Undren buildings?”

“They use them for food and disposable labour if necessary, while also treating the Ghoblan the same and some others.” Pezvak grunted, looking around at the group.

She nodded, having recalled being told as much before now. Based on what she had seen they also used the Ur’Inan females for… either pleasure or maybe breeding and the Ghoblan as well, killing and eating any males presumably.

“The storm is only an hour out, if even,” she said, eyeing the sky.

“Ah,” her sister frowned. “There are more coming,”

“So there are,” Pezvak spat.

It took her a moment to find them, hidden by the rain and struggling against the oppression of the clouds above that diffused her soul sense. In the trees about a mile and a half away was a force comprised of a dozen Nascent Soul pig demons, a bunch more Soul Foundation ones and almost 100 Golden Core ones. More than four times that of before, at least in the horrid little child-sized ones that were closer to bipedal pigs than fat humanoids ran around them.

“Those… are the banners you talked about?” she asked as her soul sense wavered and then was forced back.

“Yes,” Pezvak hissed grimly.

Another sweeping wave of soul sense from the tower bore down on them, but this time she was expecting it and beat it back more easily, even managing to shelter Rusula and two others who were nearby.

She stared around at their situation. Most of the Undren who had fled were flopping on the ground, incapacitated. The Ur’Inan women they had liberated were also stunned while many of the Hunters were on their knees holding their heads.

“What do the banners do?” she asked Pezvak.

“Specifically? I don’t know,” he spat, “I have never fought them. Only the old ancestors and Warleader Ullz and Camp Leader Yargash have engaged large formations of these spawn of abomination.”

“Generally though?” she pressed.

“They interfere with shamans’ arts and disturb mana as I understand it, while giving powerful boosts to their swarms,” Rusula gasped.

“We do not fight here,” Pezvak said looking around. “We must find some higher ground, the previous rock formation, and try to get out of range of that one in the tower.”

She nodded, agreeing to that, and quickly sorted through what they could do by way of arrays. “You retreat and we will cover you laying traps as we go.”

“Yep, and try to find out what those flags do explicitly before we get anywhere within potential formation range of that pack of horrors,” Sana added.

They rapidly made their way out of the gorge. It was unfortunate but they had to leave the Undren behind, there were simply too many of them and they had fled too far already, which made her feel… uneasy somehow, but they already had enough issues bringing the injured Ur’Inan and Ghoblan with them. Three had died outright along with two hunters from the soul attacks in any case.

At their backs, Rusula and Pezvak rapidly marshalled the Cloud Arrow group while they both scanned the group who were pursuing them at a more leisurely pace…

“What are they waiting for?” she wondered as they left various hidden two and three symbol arrays scattered in their path.

Sana just shook her head, as confused as she was. At a certain point, she noted that they had stopped and the Nascent Soul demons had some kind of argument. It was difficult to make out with the fuzzy disruption to her soul sense getting ever worse, but she thought…

“Monkeyshit,” she hissed as she saw several small ones running back in the direction of the big camp.

“Reinforcements…” Sana agreed grimly.

They watched the front edge of the first group push inland, clearly intending to circle around. There were no further attacks from the tower either.

Suddenly, another soul sense that was… different swept over them from the distance in the direction of the tower, then another. She hid her presence and it swept on past them, finding the Cloud Arrows tribe with much more ease.

They kept on retreating, crossing another river gorge, keeping a careful eye on their pursuers with their soul sense and leaving a few scattered traps.

“The big ones have rather bad soul sense,” Sana observed after a while.

“They do,” she agreed, sweeping ahead of one of the bands that had now split off and was rapidly trying to push past them about half a mile north. Even at that distance, it was hard for her to focus her own sense now. The thunder rolled overhead again and the rain somehow managed to intensify.

“Ah, found them,” Sana muttered.

“Found what?” she asked, glancing over at her.

“The source of those other two soul senses: look about a mile to the south east of us, towards the escarpment edge,” Sana said.

She swept her sense that way – it was only possible for her to reach that far by sacrificing her peripheral sphere almost entirely and focusing in a very narrow line. Like that, she eventually saw what her sister had spotted, a larger group led by five Nascent Soul defilers. It was largely… Undren and Ghoblan she realised, with maybe a thousand of the child-sized pig demons. The source of the soul sense was two captive female Undren with lots of livid red brands on their flesh being led on leashes by one of the Nascent Soul demons. Both had white lizard skin across their backs and flanks and lizard-like tails. The only reason she was certain they were female though was because both were obviously pregnant.

She shuddered and pulled her sense out quickly as both of them perked up and looked vaguely in their direction. Thinking quickly, she dithered her sense and then feigned a second deliberately hasty sweep that made it look like they were panicking having seen that and also starting to get short on qi. Only when she was satisfied that those two could not get a clear lock on them did she signal Sana who nodded and turned and ran rapidly towards the Cloud Arrows group who were now almost 500 metres ahead of them.

As they went, both of them started dropping ‘proper’ arrays now while occasionally sending out flickers of soul sense to make sure they drew their pursuers onto them. Yin Earth on the ground and in anything vaguely boggy; Yin Life and Wood in the Rivers; Fire on the trees and Water on anything that had a vaguely metal alignment, which was now suffusing the air as a whole. Mostly these were things they had not really bothered with before now because either the battles did not last long enough for this or they lacked the time to prepare. Crossing a muddy bog, she scattered more three and two symbol arrays of Yin Life through it liberally.

“Metal in reserve?” her sister signed.

“Yep, clean out the Nascent Souls in one go,” she signed back. “We get them if they try to clean out the traps.”

“They may just use expendable prisoners” Sana pointed out. “They seem like the type.”

She had to agree there, and a few moments later was proven right as a wave of almost a thousand unarmed Undren with red brands on them came swarming out of the forest towards the first river they had heavily trapped.

The silent shockwave of miasma swirled through the rain, feeding on the water from the sky as much as the water from the river, and swept across the wave, eliminating hundreds of sub-Golden Core Undren while the pig demons watched with amusement behind. Once those traps ran out, they sent a second wave through while still hanging back themselves.

Only when they were satisfied and most of that wave moved across the river did the pig demons start to move up, still screening and using their small demons to sweep and flank around the side, to the north of them.

“There are more coming from behind,” her sister said grimly.

She carefully swept out her own sense in the direction beyond the Cloud Arrows who had arrived at the rocky outcropping, and saw three more Nascent Souls and the same general numbers as the group ahead: they had quite a mix of slaves, mostly female and several carts of males, heavily crippled. Not moving fast, but aiming to cut them off nonetheless.

They pulled back further and she felt a bizarre tug on her qi, as it went a bit chaotic. She tried to sunder the sense of ‘intent’ that came with it and found it did…

“The Nameless Fate really wants to curse our nine generations,” she hissed.

“Those totem banner things have a ‘Principle’ on them,” Sana said, not bothering to hide the anger in her tone.

Examining the effect she found that it was attacking her ability to control qi in some subtle way and also making the control over it sluggish and uncooperative. The effect was like the diametric opposite form of Sana’s Maelstrom Intent. Where her sister did that with harmony and by manipulating the balance of their surroundings, this was domineering, greedy and chaotic.

“If we had just attacked straight up and been surprised by that, things could have been bad,” Sana muttered.

Retreating further back, the effect didn’t lessen, but it didn’t really get any stronger either, so outrunning it was not possible.

“Well I guess they die fast then,” She drew her sword.

“We won’t get close with it like this though,” her sister frowned, “It’s already starting to affect the qi in my flesh and bones a bit.”

She gave her own symbol a nudge, but it sent back something like a vexed shrug that held a lot of displeasure. That was interesting… and concerning. “If the symbol won’t resist it…?”

“What if we make a huge Yang Lightning array?” Sana sister said, looking up at the thunderous sky above them.

“What about the Cloud Arrows tribe…” she pointed out.

“We should be able to guide it a bit, and remember what happened before?” Sana said.

“That… weirdness,” she nodded, she did recall that, but they had not been able to ask any questions about it. Her intuition, which she liked to think was pretty sharp, had told her that was something they absolutely should already know about.

“That’s a big gamble,” she murmured as they made it to the rocky outcropping.

“Many come,” Pezvak said, having stuck dozens of arrows in the ground beside him. “Their banners are already doing evil as well.”

“We are going to use the ‘Runes of the Gods’,” she said, using the term that the Ur’Inan used for the array symbols. “It will be a very big array; you may not be safe.”

“We will take our chances,” Pezvak said simply, “It is better to die like that than to die to them.”

“We will dance for the Maker, he named the storm for his daughters,” Rusula said grimly.

She eyed them, wondering what that meant, but there was no time to ask as her soul sense told her that the surrounding forces were now within half a mile of them. Her qi was also getting more turbulent.

Grasping Sana’s hand, she linked and felt her qi grow more stable. Her soul sense also expanded and grew stronger again, allowing her to see…

“We need to be fast,” Sana agreed as she started to put down nodes.

They put down the nodes using their soul senses which they could just about move in tandem. Once the entire thing, a vast five symbol array, was laid out, they expelled 90% of their total qi into the array and held it in abeyance. Behind them, the Ur’Inan and even the Ghoblan were all… moving in a strange, coordinated dance that was flowing a bit like a murmuration of birds. There was no qi in it, but she could feel the strange connection welling up even as she watched it. Subtle at first, but growing more profound by the moment. At first, she thought of it as some kind of martial intent, but now that she was looking at it like this, it was somehow… more. Bizarrely, it put her in mind of the Dharma chants of the Buddhists in their small temple. In the middle of it, Rusula was muttering something under her breath as she swept her hands to the sky repeatedly.

The small pig demons and waves of branded Undren and Ghoblan surged out of the treeline towards them. She counted down the metres grimly until finally, the Nascent Soul demons appeared on the treeline some 50 metres away. Several of them had the banners made of flayed skin on their backs, while others were carried by groups of smaller demons who giggled and laughed.

The pressure on their qi was almost at the point where it was about to twist out of their hands. Exhaling, they placed the array down.

A wave of chittering, hissing death swept out of the array – so bright that she could only see the damage wrought with her soul sense, such as she was able to muster. The strength of the Ur’Inan dance also flowed into the array, through the two of them, merging with their intents, flooding into the lightning and giving it the form of actual serpents. The world heaved, the clouds above reverberated and death came from above like the lances of some heavenly being.

Trees splintered, rocks melted, Undren slaves from both sides and the misfortunate slaves in the caravan sent forward as screening fodder on that side were all incinerated, leaving only dust and afterimages in a burning world.

The Pig Demons fried, and it smelt horrible. The little ones evaporated like mist, while the Golden Cores and Soul Foundation demons lit up like bonfires and fled screaming and dying in every direction.

She was certain that the lightning from above was proper Yang Lightning, the sound it made as it cut through the air making her soul shake. The thread around her Nascent Soul hummed gently as it resonated with that somehow, but she didn’t have time to worry about that because the world was still disintegrating, with them in the centre.

The rock beneath the lightning strikes melted even as the Nascent Soul demons, screaming and fleeing in horror, died at last. They were fast but still unable to outrun the wave of death that caught up with them, overturning everything as it travelled outwards, drawing death from above as it went. The serpents of lightning caught them, snared them and tore them down – searing their flesh, dispersing their qi and finally burning away their very souls as the lightning surged onwards.

All around them, the spirit forest burned, flames swirling into firestorms that swept outwards. The rivers to their east and west were gone, as was much of the forest within half a mile. By some quirk of fate, the majority of the slave caravan actually survived due to being beyond the western river and in a rocky area. From what she could see though, most of the guards had come up with the slaves in their attempted attack and thus perished with everything else. One of the firestorms did swirl out of the blazing forest and set a cart on fire but the surviving guards managed to extinguish it before it did too much damage sadly.

Gasping, she refocused on their surroundings as the worst of the lightning subsided.

“The diffusion… is… still…” her sister panted, looking drained.

She stared at her own arms, which had glimmering shadows in them, reflecting the torture her meridians had just endured offloading that much qi. Shaking her head, she swept her gaze through the ruins of the battlefield and quickly found the nearest banner lying some 60 metres away. It had miraculously survived the death of the group of small demons who had been carrying it and was standing at an angle in a still cooling puddle of molten rock suffering no other ill effect. For some reason, her vision wouldn’t allow her to actually focus on it though.

Grimacing, she moved over to it with her movement art. Up close she could see the banners had been made of flayed orc skin by the looks of it. The runes on them were horrid and made her mind hurt just looking at them. It took her almost ten seconds and a proper headache to look at the banner properly and see the array formation, which had seven symbols in it. She tried to use a transmutation symbol on it directly to break it and got a weird… bounce back. Shaking her head, she cut at it with the sword and found that it did… nothing to it, the point incapable of so much as scratching the skin. Her intent couldn’t get any purchase on it either.

The symbols weren’t what she recognised, except finally for one which was a weird one from the master list shown at the three stones. Not one she had tried, and not the centre.

“Overcomplicating things…” Sana said, arriving beside her and slicing through the skin with the leaf knife.

As expected, the leaf shredded it without any effort and the sense of dissipation vanished.

“That was…”

“This was the last one,” her sister said, patting her shoulder.

“Ah,” she sighed, feeling a bit awkward for some reason.

Picking up the bits, she carried them over to where Sana had dropped the others. Her sister then spent a few more moments finely dicing the remains of the five before taking them over to the cliff edge of the escarpment and heaving them over, scattering them into the misty rain-drenched gloom below.

“Now I can say I have seen the Great Words of the Maker make the skies fall,” Pezvak muttered, making his way down from the rock.

She turned to look at the others and found them slumped and drained. Many looked… a quick sweep of her soul sense made her grimace… Nobody had died, but many of them were in grievous condition.

“We will go deal with the remnants of the caravan,” she said, drawing in as much qi as her body would take from the surroundings.

The Cloud Arrows Great Hunter nodded and she felt his soul sense sweep out into the forest to the east, presumably checking for other survivors.

Making their way over to the caravan, she saw the remaining pig demon guards flee as soon as they got within 200 metres. It didn’t help them at all, the speed of their movement over the burning conflagration was not something that these Soul Foundation demons could match. It was a matter of mere seconds to pursue and sunder their cultivation bases and Soul Foundations.

The three carts were… not as full of prisoners as she thought they had been, which made her feel… complicated. Standing in front of them, she pointed at them and then at the seven scattered guards and mimed killing them before saying, “You kill them.”

Stepping back she cut the lock on the door of one of the carts while Sana sliced another up with the leaf. Once they were open, they didn’t bother to watch what happened next. The animalistic screams of the abominable things were enough.

“What are the odds that got all of them,” she muttered said, shading her eyes and looking away from the carnage unfolding behind them.

“Not ones I would take,” Sana said, looking back in the direction of the rocky outcropping.

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~ SANA, AFTERMATH OF THE BATTLEFIELD ~

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Leaving the ruin of the caravan behind, the two swept inland in a curve tracking the edge of the worst of the devastation. Sana found her paranoia confirmed when she caught two large brute-like creatures skulking through the trees from the north about half a mile from their current location, skirting the worst of the fire. A few hundred smaller demons followed in their wake along with four Nascent Soul pig demons.

“Those are…” Arai said dully.

She nodded, surprised, because the brutes were familiar – the two hulking grey brutes were the same as the creature they had encountered in the depths and seen around the reservoir when they escaped. These two were heavily branded, their antler horn-like protrusions had been hewn off and most of their armour plates on their skin cut away as well. The scar-like wounds replaced with circles of eye-searing glyphs. The creeping sense of losing control of her qi returned as well as they got closer to them.

“That’s going to be a problem if their go-to solution is to make everyone else’s qi hard to use…” she observed.

“Indeed…” her sister agreed.

She found herself looking at the symbols carved on the creatures again. The feeling of disruption was very weird. The symbol’s inability to work against this was very annoying, and deeply concerning actually. It suggested that the thing responsible for this was on some level a thing of the same realm of existence or origin as the symbol in their Seas of Knowledge.

Thinking through what they could do to counteract it, she pulled out one of the scales they still had left in their pack and wrote a ‘Focus, Isolate and Reinforce’ array within a triangular framework. The different shapes of the connectors were as important as the symbols themselves, she was discovering. Circular ones were energy efficient, triangular ones were interchangeable and self-supported each other depending on the length of the different sides, more complex geometric shapes did other weirder things she hadn’t had time to focus on.

Pushing qi into the charm she got… nothing… which was annoying.

“Those two are dangerous,” her sister said, frowning.

“You don’t say,” she quipped as she drew another one quickly, back to front this time, placing ‘Isolate’ at the top, which still got her nothing.

Behind them, her soul sense told her that Pezvak and Rusula had roused most of those who could be and were relocating towards the slave caravan as the epicentre of the battlefield was consumed by the conflagration.

“What are you…?” her sister asked, glancing over at her as she started to draw a five symbol array.

“Trying to see if we can counteract that drain and chaotic thing they are doing,” she said as she tried to decide what to use as the fifth symbol.

“Try inverting the transmutation symbol with one less reinforce and one more isolate,” her sister suggested.

She did as suggested and thankfully it worked as she had hoped. The drain from it was rather fierce though, especially in her current condition. Beside her, Arai quickly made one as well, then with a frown imprinted a few more besides.

“It’s not ideal,” her sister said critically observing it.

“Better than nothing, and they will be useful to the others,” she noted.

“They will,” Arai agreed, “Now… fight or flee?”

“A third possibility,” she said, “We go back and ask Pezvak or the prisoners what realm these things are.”

“…”

Her sister shook her head and nodded in agreement. It took them only a minute or two to quickly flit back through the conflagration without, she hoped, having been spotted by the new group moving towards the epicentre from the north. Landing back down by the cages, she observed that the prisoners had really done a number on the pig demons. Pezvak, Rusula, Luz and the remaining freed Ur’Inan were with them, looking frazzled from their trip through the fire. There was no sign of the Ghoblan or the others.

“What happened to the others?” she asked, noting that several hunters, one of the Red Feathers and two of the Gloomy Crags Ur’Inan were missing.

“A group have gone down the escarpment and started to head back towards our territory, our tribe and others must know that the defilers are out in this much force,” Pezvak said.

Sweeping her sense out, it took her a surprisingly long time to find them. All 6 of them were daubed in purple, blue and black war paint that was somehow… messing with her ability to perceive them?

“And the Ghoblan?” she asked, not seeing them.

“They went with them,” Rusula said. “They said they knew special paths that would be difficult for the defilers.”

“Do you know of the big grey… demons?, who have antlers like this?” she asked Pezvak, gesturing, appropriately… “What advancement are they, generally?”

Pezvak frowned and shook his head. “They sound familiar, like Troll-kind but…”

Nearby, two of the Undren were having a very rapid chittering, clicking conversation.

“They… are usually seven… or six advancement, weak, caught young,” one of the Ur’Inan women they had freed, who she noted had several tattoos on her arms in Easten, informed them.

Pezvak spoke to the Ur’Inan woman for a few moments in their tongue while she focused on her memory of the creature and tried to project a rough drawing of it with her qi for the others to see. It wasn’t great at first, but after a few moments she had a reasonable representation of the two beasts.

“Cut off plates, cut off horns, a lot of symbols,” Pezvak muttered, eyeing them grimly.

“Yes-ss, force-ss here have-s several-s physical-s strength-sss very-sss…” the Undren who was speaking very halting Easten paused and then continued. “Over-circle, maybe-s one, twos over.”

“Uhuh?” Arai opened her mouth about to ask for clarification when the Ur’Inan woman spoke to the Undren in its language for a moment before speaking to Pezvak.

“She thinks that if you are fourth circle, those grey troll-kind is five; if you are five, it is six; it does not think you are six.” Rusula explained.

She eyed the Undren, whose cultivation was barely Soul Foundation and badly injured, suddenly wondering if she had misjudged the realm of most of the prisoners caught. If the pig demons had those banners, would prolonged exposure to them cause a deviation and make your cultivation realm drop? Was that how they controlled their captives?

“What of the qi… uh, mana disruption banners,” Arai asked.

“They are about a mile out now,” she said then winced as a lightning bolt from the storm above sizzled down into the forest 500 hundred metres away leaving a blue line in her vision.

The Ur’Inan woman started to speak and Rusula translated in real-time this time. “It is a thing of their… god, they sacrifice soul to it, blood of agony, bind the flesh of the unwilling, big torture, big degradation.”

“Big rune… very hard-s to look at… very annoyings… Need old sage or ancestor to take on,” the Undren scowled… “No affects us. No mana left to warp.”

Ah, so that was why they were all ‘injured’, it was as she had suspected. All their cultivations bases were sealed somehow. Only the Undren who was speaking and one other silent Ur’Inan woman were at Soul Foundation. The rest were all Golden Core.

Her soul sense told her that the group who were coming had found a path through the blaze and were now heading in their direction. They hadn’t noticed everyone yet, but…

“They are close,” she said.

“Take these,” Arai said, passing three of the talismans she had made to Pezvak, Rusula and Luz. “They will afford you some protection from the…”

Her sister trailed off as the sense of turbulence appeared almost right on cue.

“…drain,” she finished a bit lamely.

“Can you escort them away from here?” she said to Pezvak.

“Rusula and Luz can,” the Great Hunter said, unlimbering his bow, “That is a lot, and you are both weak from summoning the lightning, I will fight with you.”

The others freed grumbled a bit. “They say that they can also fight,” Rusula frowned… then looked into the distance.

“Oh… that is… a lot.” The young Ur’Inan shamaness muttered.

“Yes, it is, and the weakest of them are as strong as any of you…”

She was gratified to see they were running before she even finished with ‘as strong as any of you’, Rusula and Luz following after them.