“That was not a very good plan,” Raika tells Maen as they sprint the last stretch towards the cliff.

The first part had gone well enough. Maen had walked in, confident and direct, claiming that she was summoned by a senior to provide supplies and a moment of rest. Considering her bag, and it’s hidden contents, the assumption they wanted (and that most of the guards seem to create for themselves) was that she was bringing liquor to some commander or other, one of the Inner disciples turned guard and either bored or frustrated. They didn’t even have to say one; turns out there’s enough frustrated seniors in here that it’s become some kind of habit to ignore some nightly visitations from a lowly visitor. In this, Maen’s minimal cultivation also worked in her favor.

Ah, the sweet smell of corruption in the post-midnight morning.

From there, it wasn’t actually that hard to find a quiet moment to signal Raika. A slight burst of the citrus of yuzu and sharpened nails wafted through a window, minute enough that most of the guards won’t notice unless they’re looking. In this, the sect’s vigilance works against them; without an actual threat beyond the threat of failing at political posturing, the increased demands for patrols and vigilance have instead dulled the guards with weeks of nothing happening. As soon as she gets the sign, Raika slips out of the woods; there are patrols on the inside of the wall, but far less than its exterior.

Then she’d made it in through the window, and they just had to make it maybe a hundred feet to the first opening on the other side of the wall to slip through.

And then, of course, the corruption came back to bite them in the ass when some dickhead in charge swaggered over to Maen and was looking to see some of this fancy wine she’d brought to reward their commander, make sure it passed “inspection”.

So Raika smashed his head into a wall until he was unconscious so he wouldn’t raise any alarm, and they ran.

This, of course, led to someone raising the alarm, because apparently some smartass had decided to tie the guard’s life force and Qi into their defense systems. Or maybe because someone heard her making a hole in the stone with his skull, hard to tell which might be relevant.

“It all would’ve been fine if you hadn’t killed that guy!” Maen yells as they sprint, voices shouting all around, a dozen cultivators rushing towards the wall near where they jumped out of it.

“He’s not dead!” Raika shoots back. “Probably! He seemed sturdy enough, he’ll be fine, now quit yelling!”

“How are we even getting out of here?” Maen whimpers in audible frustration. “There’s going to be a hundred guards around this spot in a good ten seconds, how in the hells do you plan on getting us down the mountain?”

“Oh, off the side, obviously,” Raika replies. And before Maen can do more than look at her like she’s fucking insane, she’s grabbed her around the waist, hoisted her into a fireman’s carry and slipped off the edge of a cliff.

Maen almost shrieks with alarm, her whole body spasming in panic like… well, like a flailing cat, to be honest, but the immediate jolt of Raika grabbing a nearby stone and forcing her hand to dig against it knocks the wind out of her temporarily. By the time she’s recovered from the impact to her ribs and gotten some air back, she’s panting, eyes wide, arms and legs both absolutely wrapped around Raika in as tight of a hold as she can manage.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she hisses, managing to just barely keep it quiet. “We’re going to die!”

Raika shrugs, shaking a terrified squeak out of the felinid young woman. “If you want, you can climb back up,” she says. “Or I could drop you. Both are viable options, you know, and only the latter seems likely when you keep yelling in my ear.” And then she lets go of the divot she was holding onto and drops them another fifty feet, waiting until she’s about a third of the way to terminal velocity before she grabs hold of something again. It’s a hard job, especially with how much heavier she is with Maen’s weight on her and the added challenge of trying to keep quiet as she moves to avoid detection, but she managed it, bit by bit.

Then the entire east side of the cliff above them is washed in violent purple fire, and something lands there.

Now on the one hand, that’s good. With the arrival of one powerful cultivator, chances are politics and the hope of keeping this from spinning out of their control means that the others won’t be arriving as quickly. Some will leave it to assign blame, while others rush and miss something important. On the other hand, that’s bad news, because that much purple fire (and, of course, the smell of burning honey and someone new, smelling faintly of rusted iron and molten metal) can only mean one thing; Shin Ren and an unknown have arrived, and they both smell like heavy hitters.

“Maen,” Raika whispers, as quietly as she can. “Just to be sure, but if I drop you from here, you’ll die, right?”

Maen nods vigorously.

“Ok,” Raika whispers. “Then I’m going to need you to be as absolutely still and quiet as you can, and make sure you don’t leak a fucking drop of Qi. Because otherwise they’re probably going to burn this whole face of the mountain we’re on and that’s going to be really, really bad.”

Maen nods even harder, somehow.

And then something strange happens.

Raika can’t smell claws anymore.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

The yuzu scent is still there, incredibly faint even with Maen literally on her shoulders and wrapped around her, but the smell of sharpened keratin, of something like razors but grown, isn’t present anymore.

She turns her face to look over at Maen, who has her eyes firmly shut and seems to be using every ounce of concentration to not look down and pretend that she’s anywhere but here.

Fair enough. She’d ask about it later.

She drops again, letting herself fall for longer this time, waiting until just before the wind starts to whistle past her before she grabs onto stone with her hand, feet and knees all at once, maximizing points of contact. It tears through her pants, leaving ragged holes in them, cutting into her feet like it’s been cutting into her hands, but it works, slowing her much, much faster. There’s more noise than she’d like, from the fabric tearing to the scrape of stone on bone, but she’s almost halfway down by this point, and there’s the sound of guards and arguing and yelling and bells even this far down, giving her hope that she won’t be heard.

Then she smells them coming.

A dozen smells, maybe twenty in total, a riot of different scents and concepts and memories assaulting her at the stench of so much potent Qi being waved around. She freezes for a moment, ready to panic and let go entirely, to try and catch herself at the last minute and protect Maen with her body on impact if she has to-

And then she realizes the smells aren’t coming from the sect. They’re coming from the city.

She hasn’t torn the tendons in her core yet, but maybe this is a nice time to try.

She leans her body back away from the cliff, forcing her knees and feet to hold tension and keep her locked, and reaches her hand back to yank Maen off of her. If Maen struggles for a moment too long, if Raika lets herself lean too far back, they’re both well and fucked, there’s no way Raika will be able to hold on… but the blinding, panicked focus the smaller woman has on trying to pretend she isn’t here work against her, and she doesn’t react in time as Raika grabs hold of her and flips her forward, holding her tight between her own body and the cliff wall.

“Don’t. Move.” she whispers, as vehemently as she can afford to in the dark and the quiet. She shifts, encouraging Maen to curl up in a ball, to be pressed until it’s almost painful against the cliff wall as Raika grips at it with all her might and tries, as hard as she can, to obfuscate Maen’s lighter servant’s clothes with her own all-black outfit.

And then the night sky is briefly lit up by a flash of gold, and over a dozen presences flash past where they are up to the sect.

She does not need to see them to know what they are. It takes tremendous skill, determination, energy, and affinity to be able to truly fly, to defy the ground of the earth entirely before you’ve truly reached the heavens that are in the grasp of the Divergent Paths. With that, only a few individuals before the level of Emperor-realm can truly even think of flight on their own, and those that can manage it are carefully guarded secrets or immediately snatched fruit for powerful sects and the Empire alike.

So the solution is to invent flight without a need for cultivation.

The technique remains something that only Imperial authorities have access to, a way for many of their squadrons and more powerful individuals to travel vast distances and deploy quickly. Whether it is a technique or, as many believe, some sort of mass-manufactured artifact capable of granting flight to any attuned to it, is unknown, but the golden light of movement and the presence of so many cultivators with so many easily distinct smells tells her everything she needs to know about who it was she sensed getting closer.

Time’s up. They’re a little over halfway down, but as soon as the Imperials are appraised, the search for them will only multiply, and even if they just leave the sect to its own business, there’s no chance that if she waits for them there won’t already be those down in the city at the mountain’s base looking for them.

Raika finally turns her head from the cliff above them back down to Maen, pressed into a little corner and held there by her weight. “We’re going to have to move fast. Keep up whatever you’re doing with hiding yourself, it’s great, but it’s going to get a bit scarier from here. You ready?”

Maen, inexplicably blushing furiously and almost hyperventilating, just nods once.

“Ok,” Raika whispers. “Wrap your arms around me, and hold tight, ok?”

Maen hesitates a bit, the blush deepening, but does as commanded, pressing her little bag of supplies between them with an awkward shuffling and wrapping both arms and legs as tight around Raika as she can. Using her body weight, Raika pins her head against the cliff and pushes it down a bit, so that Maen’s face and skull are nestled in close against her collarbone. She marvels at how cold the smaller figure is, before remembering that yes, panic, small body, and falling through the air on a cool night incredibly quickly, makes sense.

And then she takes a breath and lets go of the cliff.

They begin to fall.

The stone begins to move past them faster and faster.

The wind begins to whistle all around them, tugging at them, attempting to crawl between them and rip them apart into a chaotic, messy fall.

Raika does not grab the mountain again.

Instead, she grabs her will and her flesh. She makes her heart beat faster, then faster again, then faster still, until she can feel her ribs and chest start to ache from it, until she starts to feel dizzy from the flow of blood running through her. She molds the flesh of her legs, making them more pliable, weaving and even knotting some of the broken strings of muscle she can feel from her earlier escape. She feels her knees, her hips, her bones still far from her ability to control, but the fat and ligaments and stray bits she can use to cushion the inside of those joints far more malleable. She feels things shift and click that her body tells her should not be doing that, and she ignores it, because it’s currently being unhelpful and scared and how good for it, but she plans to survive the fucking fall, and keeps moving things, until her skin feels loose in places and too-tight in others, until her spine feels strange from the flesh she’s braced around it, all of it stretched beyond where it should be and agonizing for it but more useful like this. She feels her whole body straining, already threatening to have something important come apart… but she refuses to allow it.

She is Hers, with all that that weight of self and Truth and ownership entails. And in this case, it entails that when she molds herself like this, at least in this moment of panic and the short-term, she does not break.

Raika does not grab the wall. In the end, there’s another major issue with this particular geographic feature that places it a step below the smooth, impossible precision of the pillar of a mountain that holds up the local Imperial governor’s palace; it slopes.

Not much, not till almost the very base of it, not enough to even really mention unless you’re a real stickler and powerful enough to casually remold a plateau that’s quite well made, thank you much, but there is a slope.

And it is rushing fast, the wind whipping, the burning, horrifying adrenaline burning her alive, the pain all but forgotten in the face of a challenge so great that failing it can only mean death.

And then, the impossible speed of her heartbeat almost matched by the panicked fluttering of Maen’s, Raika hits the ground running.