When they arrived at the school, the fighting had already begun. Flashes of color filled the night as spirit weapons flared and auras burned or were extinguished. There was a rumble of rolling stone as a section of wall collapsed, and the bellowing of a bull rose above it all like an alarm. Sunwhisper chose to circle around to the front of the school. The gate was open, but the wards were not triggered, and a woman with a shaved head lay unbreathing on the path.
Sunwhisper stopped long enough to check on her. It was Chitose, the older student who had first welcomed him to the application process more than a year ago. He touched her, attempting to form a link, but there was no spirit there for him to commune with. A man suffused with a red aura stood further on, observing the chaos at the entrance to the school.
Sunwhisper crept closer to get a better look at the man, who was alone, and saw that his right shoulder was covered by a densely articulated steel pauldron. The patterns forged into the metal gave him pause. He had never seen them before, but he recognized them as a form of script, and they matched the descriptions of the strange armor that cultivators were said to wear in Fringe Town.
Sunwhisper leapt far into the air, and Vel’s golden length appeared in his hand as he fell from the sky. He intended to disable the stranger if he could, but the cultivator vanished just before the shaft of his spear could crack into the side of his skull. His opponent had moved so quickly that it would have been too fast for a human brain to register it as movement at all. But Sunwhisper could process visual data much faster than a normal human, and he could also play back what he saw, the man had dropped into a crouch and then launched himself to one side, spinning into a pose of contrived ease and superiority.
A short young man with ritual scars above both his eyes. It was Empiti.
“A foolish plan. I, Hako Empiti of the great Daigo clan, felt your presence long before…” His jaw dropped when he recognized Sunwhisper, interrupting his own speech. “You? How are you alive?”
“That’s a bit of a story,” Sunwhisper replied. “Am I justified in deducing that you have joined Titanus, seduced by the promise of power at any cost?”
“I would have been a fool to refuse him,” Empiti shrugged. “I’m actually glad you’re alive. You obviously had a problem with authority, and you were the strongest in our class. We are here to collect disciples for the Dragon, and I would be proud to have you return at my side.”
“That armor,” Sunwhisper gestured with his spear. “What does it do?”
“This?” Empiti patted his pauldron with obvious pleasure. “It makes me more than I could have ever been here. Titanus is a sage, you know, and those who come early to his teachings will be rewarded.”
“What about the dragon?”
“I have never seen it myself, but I believe my master’s account. It would take the wisdom of a dragon to do what he had done. There has been nothing like the Path of Infinite Spirals in the history of the Blessed Lands. You wouldn’t have lost to Makoto if you had been blessed with a treasure like this.”
There was an explosion, and an entire spire collapsed. A quick glance confirmed that it was Elder Raibu’s tower. There was no one in the air around that part of the academy, which meant the fighting was as heated within as without. Trails of silver mana were suspended above where his classroom had been a moment before, slow to dissipate.
“There must be a cost,” Sunwhisper said. “What does the dragon ask of you in return?”
“That is the beauty of it,” Empiti spread his arms, “we are only asked to share the good news. I’ve always had an eye for potential. I knew what this was the moment I stepped foot in Fringe Town and saw what Titanus could do, and I wanted to be a part of it.”
Sunwhisper sensed Empiti was not being entirely truthful about what the armor had cost him, but he didn’t expect to get the answer freely. “What about the others? And Yuyu, what happened to her?”
“Lady Makoto is here with us,” Empiti grinned at him. “She helped convince me of the virtues of this path.” His hands balled into fists, and he flexed his arms as he turned them inward, taking a water stance. “Now will you agree to come with me, or will I have to give you a demonstration first?”
“I’m afraid that a demonstration is required.” Sunwhisper didn’t wait for Empiti to act. He poured the entirety of his will into Impurities Attraction, attempting to pull the armor off of his opponent’s shoulder with a magnetic pulse. The technique surprised Empiti, who was tugged off balance, involuntarily coming a step closer, but the pauldron remained in place.
“Not so easy,” he growled, once again moving in a flash. It was similar to the way Ogumo jumped to attack. He was incredibly quick, but still subject to inertia, essentially limiting him to strike in straight lines . Rather than trying to react to the accelerated movement, Sunwhisper predicted where Empiti would go from the tension in his stance, and simply stepped out of the way.
Empiti reappeared, and turned his landing into another jump. He tried to crash through Sunwhisper in a series of flashes, cutting in at him from different angles, but each time, he was outmaneuvered. Calculating such simplistic trajectories was a trivial exercise for Sunwhisper, who after several more attempts responded to another lunge by cracking the shaft of his spear against Empiti’s shins as he went by. He couldn’t actually follow his movements with his eyes in real time, but he knew where he would be, and that was good enough.
Empiti flipped end over end, and rose to his feet with his face distorted by rage.
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“This is no game!” He shouted. “I will make you pay for that!”
“Where is your spirit weapon?” Sunwhisper asked calmly. “I know you absorbed the yosei essence before you were sent to Fringe Town. Why don’t you summon it now, and we can have a more even duel?”
“I don’t need the weapons of the dead.” Empiti spat. “My strength is greater without them.”
There was water skin hanging at his belt, and he squeezed it with enough force to pop its seal and cause the liquid to spurt free. With a deft motion, he caused the water to spin in the air around him, and then struck it, transforming it into a thick mist that surged toward Sunwhisper like a living thing. He recognized this as an elemental technique intended to blind and disorient a fighter, and he launched his spear at Empiti in an effort to disrupt his concentration.
Empiti’s aura flared, and he managed to catch the spear in one hand. He had gotten stronger, that was certain, but how strong? Sunwhisper’s physical statistics were now in the fourth star class, and he decided to test his development against this spiral armor.
He pressed forward on the heels of his thrown spear, dismissing Vel from existence before Empiti had a chance to turn its point on him. The mist allowed for visibility out to about a foot, plenty of room for a hand to hand contest, and Empiti seemed eager to meet him.
Sunwhisper’s martial skills had improved, and after a few short exchanges, he felt he had enough of a measure of Empiti to say that they were nearly evenly matched. Taking into account his own rapid advancement over the last year, that spoke highly of the gifts inherent in the Path of Infinite Spirals, but such strength clearly came at a price.
The only possible reason for Empiti not to use an ascendancy technique to summon a spirit weapon was because he couldn’t. The armor had to interfere with spiritual development in some way. What else did it do? He took advantage of their proximity to use Hand of the Gentle Sage, binding them with an invisible strand of mana. But what he felt from Empiti didn’t make any sense.
The cultivator was severely injured, but it was not Sunwhisper who had injured him, and he felt no pain. Empiti was completely numb. The armor was a part of him, blended into his skin by what must have been a horrific transformation ritual. Its scripts were not meant to draw in mana from the environment, but to reorganize the flow of mana within the wearer. Empiti felt greed, and viscous joy, and pride, then annoyance that his newfound power was not proving as overwhelming as he had been led to expect. Sunwhisper could have taken those feelings from him, but to what end?
He broke away from their melee just as he heard his disciples arrive. Ken was trained in a water path as well, and he dispersed the mist as soon as he came within range. Ogumo was lining up to take Empiti from behind, his steel claws posed to strike, but Sunwhisper stopped him with a thought.
“That armor is killing you,” Sunwhisper said.
“What are you talking about?” Empiti demanded.
“The Spiral Dragon doesn’t give gifts. That armor will destroy you in a few years, if not sooner. As long as it can continue to spread, it doesn’t care what the consequences will be to its followers.”
“You know nothing of my path.” Empiti seemed ready to take up the fight again, despite being outnumbered, but he was interrupted by another eruption from the school, followed by the death cries of a wounded bull. Sunwhisper recognized the bellows of Makoto’s familiar even as they choked away into nothing. A winged being appeared in the air over the courtyard, crowned in an orange halo. Mana poured from its wings like a rain of lightning, and cultivators wearing armor similar to Empiti’s fled before its fury.
There was one who did not flee. Metal and ice made up a humanoid shape striding on a cloud. It fought the winged one, striking with Empiti’s speed, but none of his limitations. There was something feminine in the form of the monster, though Sunwhisper would not have called it a woman. Its movements were somehow both graceful and jagged, a predator that had learned to dance only to entice its prey into a state of unwarranted complacency. Even at a distance, Sunwhisper could feel its killing intent, and he recognized what he was seeing.
“Yuyu,” he said, and Empiti laughed at him.
“Look at her! An equal to the master of a heavenly school! That is the power of the Spiral Path.”
Yuyu was withdrawing. Either she was not Furui’s equal, or she saw no benefit in continuing their duel. In one hand she clutched a severed head, wetness still seeping from its neck. It was Makoto Shishio.
Ken called on his spirit weapons, twin curved swords, equally ready to go to the aid of the school’s master or to finish Empiti at Sunwhisper’s order. But the spiral disciples were retreating. Sunwhisper dashed forward, calling Vel once more, and Empiti flashed out of his range, then dodged around Ogumo.
“Come find us! We will see who is stronger when I have my next treasure.” The young cultivator sped away from the school faster than they could hope to follow, his aura blazing red, but the armor on his shoulder devouring that light. Skirmishes across the school grounds were coming to an end, and Sunwisper extended spiritual links to those of the enemy he glimpsed as they escaped.
Yuyu passed overhead, riding on a cloud. She didn’t even look at him, and the connection he made with her frayed and snapped like a string held taut over a bonfire. The Spiral Path resisted bonds, and the links he had formed successfully gave him only the dullest sense of their relative positions.
“Demon, I would speak with you.”
Ken spun his blades to face a new foe, but Sunwhisper recognized the voice, if not the face of the one who had come to them out of the darkness. A great purple crustacean, tall as a man, with a nearly human visage, he held up his claws in a sign of peace.
“This is a request,” he said, “not a demand. I fear there is no one else who can help her now.”
“Ise Ebi?” The creature Sunwhisper saw before him was far more advanced than the lobster he had seen so often at the side of its mistress, almost impossibly so.
Janna gasped. “Is it really you?”
The sacred beast sketched a bow. “You have named me truly. Now I beg of you, listen, I fear there is not much time.”