Sunwhisper looked to the school. The fighting had died away, and damage was being assessed. Some of the outer buildings were aflame, and fire artists were coaxing the flames down like animal tamers managing a lion that had escaped its cage. A woman in a golden raiment walked across the road to where Sunwhisper and his companions stood with Ise Ebi. The purple bob of her hair was bound back from her face, which was streaked with soot and dust. Her eyes were red and angry, but that anger was directed somewhere else. She barely seemed to see them.

“Jin?” Hinata said. “Sunwhisper? Have you captured one of the enemy?” She gestured toward the sacred lobster with a long handled ax that had a blade three feet in diameter. It looked weightless in her hand, and being a spirit weapon, it probably was.

“This one is not our enemy,” Sunwhisper said. “He has come for my aid.”

“We have troubles of our own,” Hinata said, instantly dismissing the sacred beast from her attention. “We’re gathering everyone in the atrium. We need to see what remains of the school.” Her mouth twitched. “There have been deaths.”

“Master Makoto?” Janna asked. “I couldn’t see it clearly, was that him?”

Hinata looked past her, focused on the direction that Yuyu had taken in the sky. “Get to the atrium. You’ll know soon enough.” She took in Chitose’s immobile form, and then moved on in search of other stragglers.

Ise Ebi clacked his claws. “I will not be staying. Nor do I trust my safety to your school once they discover who I am.”

“You think I can help Yuyu?” Sunwhisper read no dishonesty in the sacred lobster, no hidden motive. “Why?”

“I have suspicions about her new ally. His origins are similar to your own.”

“Titanus?” Ken dismissed his swords, taking a step forward. “What does the barbarian king have to do with our sage?”

“Not Titanus.” Ise Ebi didn’t have a neck, but he imitated the motion of shaking his head with his whole body. “The one Titanus serves. Those metals he grafts onto his disciples, they are very similar to what I sense inside…” the sacred lobster paused, looking from Sunwhisper to the others present, and edited what he had been about to say, “what I sensed in your original spear. I think you may have a better understanding of the Spiral Dragon than anyone else. Apart from that, your talent for forging spirit links may be of use. You have obviously developed it since last we met.” One of his claws clacked in the direction of Ogumo, who had been circling the lobster, and then Karasu, who was soaring above. Sunwhisper had no idea how skilled the sacred lobster was, but it had always been able to see the connections associated with his techniques. His bonds with the raven and the spider would be as obvious to Ise Ebi as if they were written in plain script.

“The grafts,” Sunwhisper said, “they make it hard for me to form links with their subjects. Yuyu resisted them entirely, and I can already feel the others fraying as the distance between us grows.”

“The dragon corrupts all bonds,” Ise Ebi said. “Some shred of our union remains, but I can barely feel my mistress. I have brought you something, a gift, and I hope it serves you better than it did the one I took it from.” Though the sacred lobster carried no pouches, he reached into a hidden space and produced a chunk of corrugated metal, a shoulder piece like the one Empiti had worn, and held it out for Sunwhisper, who accepted it. “Take this and study it. There may be a way to use their own work against them that I cannot see. The dragon is a poison for this world, and for my mistress, and I will be fighting it as well as I can, but I am only one small creature, wandering between the feet of giants. When you are ready to face her, come find me where the border guardian met his end. The spirals have not spread so far as of yet.” He turned to go.

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“Wait,” Janna said. “How have you changed so much? How powerful is Yuyu now?”

“I have not changed as much as you think.” Ise Ebi’s antennas waved to each side like the fronds of a tree. “My mistress did not trust our own clan, and insisted we hide our advancement to prevent them from asking more of her than she had already given. But I see no sense in hiding now. It is hard to say how strong she is, because the fifth and sixth stars are awarded according to the increasing sophistication of a beast bond, and the spiral path destroys those bonds. But before she became a disciple of the dragon, our bond would have been sufficient to qualify her for a fifth star at least.” The shape of his body, his many limbs, gave him an ungainly appearance, but when he moved away, it was with a kind of alien grace. “Your elder here should have the measure of what she can do, now that they have faced each other.”

Sunwhisper examined the material in his hands. It did appear to be titanosteel, though he didn’t have the equipment that would have been necessary to examine it at a molecular scale to be sure. If the Spiral Dragon was producing more of this material, instead of working off of a limited supply that it had brought from its home universe, then it had to have a manufacturing facility somewhere in Goth. The land of the barbarians was said to be a mana desert, did that mean that the entropic effect of magic was not as strong there? Would technology function normally in that region? If that was the case, it would explain why the Spiral Dragon was working with humans to spread its influence instead of behaving the way it had on earth, expanding in an ever growing tide of nanites. There was a chance it couldn’t survive independently outside of Goth.

Inu’s dog barked once, drawing him out of his reverie. “Uh,” the wild haired girl said, “what was all that about?”

Sunwhisper gave her a quick explanation on their way to the atrium. Neither Inu or Ken knew Yuyu, though they had heard her spoken of as a disgraced servant of the Azai, a woman who had failed to watch the territory entrusted to her. They had not known she was the one who had sponsored both Janna and Sunwhisper as students of the academy, or that the lobster was her bonded beast.

“We should have subdued it,” Ken said. “Master Furui would have wanted an interrogation.”

“He didn’t feel like an enemy to me,” Sunwhisper replied, “and I would not treat a friend that way.”

Many of the cabochons that normally would have lit the atrium at night were broken or stolen, but Furui had brought out a great stone from his own collection. If floated above his head like a little star, putting him at the center of the illumination as well as the attention of the remaining students. Sunwhisper performed a quick survey. There were one hundred and thirteen cultivators and only seventeen sacred beasts present in the atrium, suggesting that nearly half the population of the academy had either died, fled, or defected. Others might be too injured to make an appearance, but it was unlikely that number was high. There were plenty of injuries on display, cuts, bruises, burns, and broken bones. Cultivators could heal quickly when they channeled, and generally treated anything short of a lost limb with a shrug.

Furui had separated from his eagle, who was scouting the air outside, but some of the signs of his recent transformation were still evident. There were more feathers in his hair than there had been the day before, and the surface level of his meridian network was visible to the naked eye. Orange mana flowed beneath his skin like the blood in his veins.

“We have suffered an attack,” he said, “and there is loss and there is pain. But this is the nature of advancement. We will emerge from this trial stronger than we ever were, stripped of the dead weight of the parasites who did not deserve to stand among us. The enemy was overconfident, they saw our strength, and they broke against it. They cannot be allowed to recover, to gather again for a second strike, and worse, to corrupt those they took from our halls as hostages.”

Did the elder know that the enemy preferred to convert rather than to kill? If he did, he might not want to spread the idea to the students, but Sunwhisper couldn’t imagine that at least some of those present hadn’t been given an offer similar to the one Empiti had given him. Those that remained had resisted temptation, or else simply not believed in the promise of the path of spirals.

The crystal above his head burned bright.

“Tomorrow, we will chase them to the edge of the world.”