Sunwhisper paused beneath the tree where the border guardian died. He could not wait for Ise Ebi there, and he doubted Yuyu’s sacred beast would be welcomed by the mobile academy. The pauldron was in a pack slung over his shoulder, and there was an amulet hanging from his neck. Before leaving lake Hylia behind, Sunwhisper had spent all of his remaining ranks to raise his statistics in a way that he felt would best suit his new strategy for dealing with the disciples of the Spiral Dragon.
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Strength: ****2
Dexterity: ****6
Constitution: ****5
IQ: ****9
EQ: *****1
Ego: *****1
Dao Rating: 42,256
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While he’d been unable to afford advancing his IQ to the fifth star class, it was still essentially in line with his other mental statistics, which he no longer allowed to drift more than one or two ratings apart. He had already learned that any imbalance in his mind led to an imbalance in his decision making, and he would need to be operating at an optimal capacity in order for his plan to succeed.
An army of nearly one hundred and fifty cultivators and sacred beasts followed the yellow brick road, every one of them freshly fuelled by mana, supported with the resources of the academy. The vault had been opened, its treasures dispensed among the faculty or sent to other safehouses of the Azai so that the school treasury would not be a waiting target for pillage the moment its guardians had gone.
Raibu had loaned Sunwhisper the amulet, which held a Dreamstone, a rare and difficult to produce cabochon that would extend the range and power of the spirit links he channeled through its facets. Famous weapons, swords and spears and axes, could be seen among the crowd. Other rings and amulets, pendants and arrays, were charged with mana and ready to be called upon when the battle began.
Ken, Janna, and Inu stayed close to Sunwhisper, who was himself mere paces behind Furui. The master of the academy led the charge with his eagle, easily maintaining a pace exactly as fast as a three-star initiate could run. He had said little since the journey began, and the yellow bricks passed beneath their feet in a blur until they came to its end.
Fringe Town was surrounded by a forest of wooden spines like screws that had been driven up through the ground. Only the most sensitive among them, as well as the ultraviolet artists, could feel the play of energy between the spires. Faint, but real, the invisible thoughts of a vast and inhuman mind. Above the town, dark clouds gathered in a spinning nexus, heavy with rain.
“Destroy them,” Furui said.
“Wait!” Sunwhisper stepped beside the master. “I will need the spires.”
Furui had raised his hand, ready to cast it down, and with it the entire forest. His huge, dark eyes focused on Sunwhisper for a long moment.
“Very well.”
They could already see the spiral disciples approaching swiftly through the wood. There were even more than had attacked the school. Sunwhisper scanned the local geography, discerning the nature of the patterns in a few seconds of analysis.
“The town center would be best to begin.”
Furui signaled for the column to proceed, and the academy students fanned out to either side as they moved into the forest at a jog. The spiral disciples moved in jagged bursts of speed so intense it was almost like instant transmission, and the two groups met seconds after they entered the region of the spires.
The first disciple to reach Furui was dispensed with a single kick that shattered one of his shins. He tried to continue fighting, but Sunwhisper summoned his spear and used it to knock him into one of the wooden pillars. There were dozens of duels breaking out along the line of the charge. The spiral disciples were stronger on their own, but the academy students outnumbered them, and fought together. Even so, in the time it took to cross the forest of spires, nearly half of their number had been embroiled in fighting, so the column that rushed into Fringe Town proper was far reduced from its original size.
Yuyu was waiting for them with a coterie of fighters of her own, Empiti and the other students who had forsaken the academy for the Path of Infinite Spirals. She was covered in the fluted armor plating, with only her face revealed. Her water dance concluded as they crossed onto the main street, and before they could reach her, the sky opened. A vast wave of ice and snow poured down from the heavens, thick enough to obscure vision, coating the world in an instant.
Furui responded by calling on his eagle, blending their forms so that his arms became great wings, ochre and orange. With a sweep of feathers, he opened a tunnel of wind through the blizzard, and flew forward to meet Yuyu head on. Hinata, her golden ax at the ready, went to face her former classmates, while Raibu paused to set a veil over Sunwhisper and his companions. With a flourish of white mana and blinking crystals, he distorted the light and air around them so that they were entirely hidden by the flurry of snow, but could see through it clearly themselves.
“Do what you must,” he said, and joined the battle.
Screams and shouts were all around them, the crack of broken wood and sundered earth, the roaring of flames and the rush of water and wind; the ringing of metal like chimes cutting through it all. Sunwhisper led his small group around the flashes of orange and silver that were all they could make out of the duel between the two most advanced cultivators. Karasu was having trouble navigating in the wind, so she landed on Sunwhisper’s back.
“Town center,” she crowed. “More disciples.”
It was Wen Lambo who was waiting for them, along with a little girl and a young man both wearing matching steel pauldrons and gauntlets. The snowstorm was less dense around them, and as soon as they stepped onto the spiral etched into the stone of the town square the veil around Sunwhisper and his companions flickered and died. His spear remained tangible, but he felt his bond to it weaken, as well as his connections to Ogumo and Karasu. The disruptive effect of the Spiral Path was affecting everything here.
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“You?” Wen Lambo’s face split in a grin. “How fortunate that we should meet again. I thought that I was going to have to hunt you down.”
“Jammu!” Janna called. “Suna!”
The young man and the girl looked at Janna as if they barely recognized her, but Sunwhisper knew both their faces well enough from the time he had spent with the Jin family. They both seemed to have aged a great deal for only two years of absence, but it was certainly them.
“You have bargained with a serpent,” Sunwhisper said. “If you reject it now, you may yet still be able to be saved.”
“A dragon,” Wen Lambo said, “and a sage. I have already killed one of those, so I am not too concerned with the other.”
Jammu took a water stance, but he blinked heavily as his eyes settled on Janna again and he seemed to focus. “Is that you, sister? We thought you were dead. Why don’t you join us here, and be a part of the new world.”
“There will be no new world,” Janna said. “You have made a friend of death, and I do not envy you.”
“Better to have death as a friend than an enemy, I would say.” Jammu laughed. “Those elders had it wrong all along, or else they wanted to keep the truth from us. I would bring death with me at my right hand, and let all who oppose me suffer his wrath.”
“He is not at your hand,” Janna shook her head, “he is over your shoulder, and he will take you as surely as he will your enemies. They have not made you stronger, Jammu, they have made you weaker. I have seen it.”
“We will see who is weaker,” Jammu sneered, all sense of familiarity leaving his face. “You are the same girl who betrayed the honor of our family for a little fruit. You followed a fool then, and you follow one now. What did it get you?”
Janna raised her arm in the traditional salute of a cultivator, making the tattoos there plain to see. Even among the debt markers for the school, the three stars of her rank stood out starkly against her pale skin. Jammu’s eyes widened when he saw them, and Suna was looking between her arguing siblings in confusion, but Wen Lambo interrupted the reunion.
“Enough talk. I still don’t know what you are, but it doesn’t matter anymore. You will be dead soon.”
He swept up his great blade and leapt into the air, coming down at Sunwhisper in a corkscrew of raw mana and steel. Sunwhisper dodged to one side, calling upon his shield. In the Hylian mountains, he had imbued the ritual chamber where he gave his spear its name once more to make a spirit armor of his own. He had never liked standing in one place to fight, and even with Eight Mines Clutch to enhance the density and durability of his body, he could hardly trust it to resist the blows of rare weapons or more advanced cultivators. Heavy armor would be both redundant and awkward. The short amount of time he had spent training with Svallin, a tower shield, had been enough to convince him of that.
Besides, he needed both hands to wield Vel properly more often than not. A golden sash swept out from his wrist, alive with mana, and whipped Wen Lambo’s eyes like a striking snake. It was the Blinding Scarf, now as much a part of him as his spear. Wen Lambo bent away from the sash, and slashed it in half with his blade. The piece that was separated burst into a wash of golden light so bright he had to shield his eyes, and then Sunwhisper was behind him, jabbing the point of his spear into his spine.
Wen Lambo twisted in time to avoid being paralyzed, spinning fast enough in response that Sunwhisper had to duck beneath his blade. Their disciples were locked in combat as well. Ken had called his swords, and Inu her Bagh Nakh, weapons fashioned after the form of a beast’s claws. Janna had wrapped stones around her hands and gone straight for her brother. Though they fought three to two, Jammu and Suna had no trouble keeping up with them. They each carried steel clubs inscribed with scripts to harden them, and used them to parry the blades of their opponents.
Suna was the smallest one on the field by far, but the Spiral Path had imbued her with a strength almost equal to her brother’s, and she struck one of Ken’s swords from his grip with a single blow, forcing him to go on the defensive.
Ogumo rushed in from behind Wen Lambo, slashing the backs of his legs with his claws. The cultivator flipped his massive sword around with expert control, and prepared to drive it backward into the spider, but Sunwhisper used Impurities Attraction to drag the blade off course, followed by Impurities Rejection to knock his opponent off entirely off-balance to open him to another jab from the spear. Wen Lambo had covered almost forty percent of his body in metal, and though Sunwhisper couldn’t use his techniques to rip the plating off of his skin, he could certainly use its presence to his advantage.
Wen Lambo snarled, either uncaring or unfeeling of the pain of this second wound, and he landed a kick to Sunwhisper’s stomach. Increased density was not enough to resist the full strength of the Spiral Path, and Sunwhisper felt something inside of him crumple from the force of the kick as he staggered backward.
His Impurities techniques were not powerful enough to repel a direct strike from the great sword, but he used them to deflect Wen Lambo’s next attack to one side. Karasu dove in, cutting the cultivator’s cheek with a mana hardened feathers, and narrowly avoiding being cut in two by a backswing. Ogumo still harried Wen Lambo from behind, and Sunwhisper’s sash had regrown enough to distract him further. It could be hard enough to catch his fist, or soft and flexible as living silk, slipping under his defenses.
The massive sword was no better than a spear for close combat, so Sunwhisper dismissed Vel and pressed in close as soon as he had recovered, doing everything he could to prevent Wen Lambo from using his weapon effectively. The older cultivator uttered a wordless shout in his frustration, resorting to strikes with his elbows and knees, and Sunwhisper bent all of the talents of his improved body and martial skills to protect himself while his bonded beasts waged a war of a thousand cuts. Sunwhisper had not had a lifetime to train his body for the fighting arts, but had absorbed manuals from each of the eight elements, hoping to find inspiration within them to develop a fighting style unique to the Path of the Kingdom of Wild Hearts. While he had not achieved a synthesis yet, he had programmed numerous response patterns into his neural matrix to make up for his lack of muscle memory.
At the highest levels, fighters moved much faster than they could think, faster even than Sunwhisper could think, though his mind moved more quickly than most. Duels between opponents who were otherwise equal were generally decided by a kind of rock-paper-scissors, as some styles, though not objectively superior, would have advantages against others when compared unilaterally.
Wen Lambo was using a wood stance, which was best countered by a crystal stance like the one that Raibu used. Sunwhisper adapted to this information by changing the bank of response patterns he was drawing upon, and along with the help of the Blinding Scarf and the damage his beasts were doing, was able to slowly gain a position of advantage over his opponent.
Wen Lambo realized what was happening, but could do nothing to stop it. His allies were fighting for their lives, and in any case, he was not the sort of person to stoop to asking for help from his inferiors, especially when faced with an opponent he had sworn to defeat himself. Sunwhisper did not need the techniques of his path to read his opponent, whose feelings were as obvious to him as if he spoke them aloud. He was caught in a trap of his own making, a limited style, and a limited world view. Unable to adapt, he was simply running what he saw as his best program over and over again in the hopes of breaking out of the pattern, but Sunwhisper would not allow it. Whenever Wen Lambo was about to break free, Sunwhisper was already there, prepared to stop him.
The battle did not conclude with a dramatic embellishment. No secret technique was revealed. There was no time for such things when two artists vied against each other at top speed and in close quarters. Their bodies moved as if of their own accord, and Sunwhisper’s perceptions dimmed to the small space that his world had become, a shifting triangle with himself, Ogumo, and Karasu at each of its points, and Wen Lambo in the center.
Wen Lambo did not respond to pain, but his body still had limits. Karasu could see the flow of mana in his limbs, as well as the activity of the artifacts that were fused onto his skin. Because she could see these things, so could Sunwhisper, and that knowledge was shared with Ogumo as well. Fang and feather, fist and claw, acted in concert, fighting as one being in three bodies, and slowly cut away at the strength of Wen Lambo until there was nothing left.
When he finally stopped fighting, it was because he was already dead.