Silver light spun in her core like thread spun upon a wheel. It poured from her hands, half illusion, half real, and cut as sharp as a blade. Yuyu used her water dance to walk on falling snowflakes. It wasn’t true flight, but it was enough to keep her in the same arena as Furui. The elder must have considered himself a master of the sky. Certainly, his wings and his elemental affinity allowed him to rise and fall on a whim, moving as if neither gravity or inertia were forces with which he had to contend. But everywhere he went, she could follow.

Furui tried to blast her off her feet with gusts of wind, intending to give her nothing to stand on. The blizzard she had summoned was too vast and too thick for a tactic like that to be successful, as every gust only brought more snow and ice for her to dance upon. He avoided her whips of silver mana with relative ease, responding with a hail of feathers hard and sharp as kunai. She dashed up, her feet tapping balls of hail as she propelled herself further into the sky.

Their contest had already taken them far above the students and instructors who were fighting their way through Fringe Town, as both of them strove to gain an advantage in height over the other. The silver whips spun around her continuously in an ever shifting barrier, and Furui changed tactics, executing a long loop to attack her from below. He lost the tips of a few feathers as he dodged through the spinning silver threads, and they exchanged a series of snapping blows, each testing the strength of the other.

A cultivator earns their fourth star by forging a bond with a sacred beast. The fifth star is attained when that bond develops to the point that the cultivator and his bonded beast can complete a fusion technique, combining their attributes in a manner that results in a single being more powerful than the simple sum of their parts. Furui was a six-star cultivator, and the sixth star is more subtle than the fourth or the fifth.

The nine ranks of cultivation are commonly divided into three stages. Each stage is a triad, the first being the Awakening Stage. The cultivator learns to call upon their affinities, first their element, then their hue, before the stage culminates in the generation of a mana body. Most artists never reach this far. The transformation process is dangerous, and often ends in death or permanent deviation for those who are not ready to attempt it. No amount of physical training can grant an initiate the iron will required to complete it, and various tests exist to discourage cultivators from attempting the transformation when they lack the necessary qualities.

The Union Stage is the second or middle stage. To reach its end, an artist must deepen their bond to the point where there is hardly any distinction between beast and man. They share their hearts, their thoughts, and their techniques. While there is no outward or obvious difference between cultivators of the fifth and sixth star, those with eyes to see can instantly discern the enhanced nature of their bonds.

This is the accepted path forward for all pure artists. It is the only gateway into the third stage, the Transcendent Stage. To abandon it is to abandon advancement. That is what Yuyu had been taught. But the Spiral Dragon had shown her another way.

Furui was under her feet, his attacks driving her further upward until they reached the storm clouds. Darkness was all around them, and freezing cold, and driving winds. Ice formed along her metal skin, and his feathers were tipped in frost. He activated a technique, taking the winds under his control and creating a vortex within the cloud with both of them at its center in a space of clear air. Yuyu was denied her footholds, and she began to fall.

She had entered into her contract with the dragon as a willing partner, knowingly giving up her own bond. Ise Ebi, her friend and companion for many years, was no longer with her. She could not feel him anymore. Most of the artists who had taken the scales had not had bonds to lose, but the loss of her bond had not been without recompense.

Yuyu angled herself to fall toward Furui, who batted her down with one of his wings. She grabbed it, accepting the lacerations that came as his razor sharp feathers found their way through the gaps in her gauntlet, and called upon the Path of Infinite Spirals. Her mana spun out, infused with the destructive patterns that the dragon had taught her, the power to sever bonds, and Furui’s fusion technique was undone.

The elder, his eagle, and Yuyu were all knocked in different directions by the chaotic eruption of mana that followed, and orange plumes battled with silver threads as they fell. The eagle was unconscious, and Furui controlled his fall like a skydiver so he could intercept the bird. The clouds were still forced open by his technique, so they fell together through the eye in the storm he had created.

Yuyu followed him, seizing his leg and drawing him back to her, striking with the edge of her other hand. They struggled in the air, trailing mana as they went, by all appearances like two gods descending from the heavens. Furui landed a solid blow to her stomach, denting the metal that guarded her there, but it unbent in the next instant, as supple as skin. Cuts appeared on Yuyu’s face, and Furui’s hands and arms, as they lashed each other with mana.

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Furui summoned his spirit weapon, a spiked mace, but he was holding onto his eagle as well, and Yuyu was able to twist it out of his grasp before he could strike her with it. He called on armor of his own, a glowing orange cuirass, and she shattered it. Mana constructs could not withstand the unraveling techniques of the Spiral Path.

They did not speak to each other as they fell, there was no time to spare for threats or niceties, as each fought to their utmost and the ground rose to meet them. In the last seconds before they would have crashed into one of the new towers of Fringe Town, Furui produced a small treasure, a lodestone circled in charged scripts. He activated it with his will, and the resulting pulse rent them apart. With a twist of his hands and feet, he called on the winds to catch him, slowing his descent so that he could land with grace and aplomb.

Yuyu crashed, the winds gave way, and the blizzard covered them both once more. She felt her shoulder dislocate as she landed, and one of her collarbones snapped. It wasn’t pain so much as a distant awareness of the state of her body. She channeled mana to the damaged areas to reinforce them, speeding healing even as she popped her shoulder back into its socket. Protecting her head with her arm had been enough to prevent her from being knocked unconscious, and she found herself standing in the wreckage of carts and construction materials that had been part of the town’s most recent development.

She didn’t see Furui, and she was prevented from searching for him by the charge of a girl with a golden ax. The purple haired woman burst out of the driving snow, her aura blazing, and her face contorted with anger. Yuyu was a little slow to respond, still recovering from the fall, but in the instant before the edge of the massive axhead met her neck she unleashed a wave of silver mana from her entire body. The wave was composed of countless threads, each of them constructed according to the patterns of unmaking. They could only exist for a moment before they tore themselves apart, but a moment was enough. The ax broke into a thousand shards of golden light that poured harmlessly over her.

The young woman barely broke her stride, though robes had been shredded, and her body was suddenly covered in weeping red lines. As blood flowed, so too did her attacks. Flames enveloped her fists, and rather than meet her blow for blow, Yuyu called upon the special speed of her path to dash a dozen paces to one side so she could have a moment to recover.

“You aren’t weak,” she said. “Why don’t you join us, rather than dying here?”

“I am Ryo Hinata, first among the initiates of the golden branch of the Heavenly School of the Azai!” the young woman proclaimed. “I will never join you!”

“Why?” Yuyu was buying time, continuing to channel mana to her injuries, but she was also genuinely curious. Why was this girl so loyal to the school? Did she think this was a play, where good and evil could be written into the script? There was nothing noble about the Azai. They fought and they killed like everyone else, like the animals they were. Cultivators had such high opinions of themselves, but they were more like their beasts than they knew. One could reject the base nature of the world, its violence and its hunger, or embrace it, and Yuyu knew which answer she preferred.

“You killed Shishio!”

Yuyu was so surprised by this response that she was almost swallowed by the column of fire that followed behind Hinata’s words. She dove to one side, rolling back up onto her feet in time to disperse the next blast of flame with a whip of silver mana. She could feel the weakness in her body growing with each passing second. Her duel with Furui had cost her too much, and it wasn’t over yet. She couldn’t afford to play with this girl, and yet she didn’t want to kill her.

“You think you loved him?” she asked through a haze of smoke and steam. “You were one of his playthings, nothing more.”

“What do you know about it?” Hinata snarled, sending another line of flame only to have it dispersed just as easily as the last.

“He got what he wanted from you,” Yuyu said. “But that wasn’t love. You were an amusement, soon to be replaced. You don’t know what he was.”

“I knew him,” Hinata declared. “I loved him. I am not a child.”

“I was,” Yuyu said, feeling her collarbone knit itself back together. It wasn’t as good as new. The kind of healing her new path allowed, even with the techniques provided by her water affinity, left scars. But she was used to those. The prospect of facing Furui again had excited her, but this encounter was stealing her enthusiasm even as her mana guttered in her core. Her thoughts flew back to when she was a child, and she employed a meditative method to banish the memories, further cooling her killing intent.

Shishio was gone. She had ended him herself. It wasn’t that she had expected that killing him would make her happy, but she had not predicted that the emptiness would increase. With so much of her life devoted to plotting against him, she had not invested much thought into what would come after. Kill Shishio, then kill the ones that had shielded him. Carve a line of blood all the way to the feet of her family's patriarch and finish it there. It was what she had wanted for so long, and now it was ashes in her mouth.

Hinata looked confused, but in the absence of any clarification for Yuyu’s flat statement, anger quickly took precedence again. Elder Raibu materialized at her side, a host of crystals floating around his head, each glowing with a different light.

“Are you alright?” he asked her.

“I will be,” Hinata said, launching herself into a charge.

Yuyu regarded them both with dead eyes, and vanished in a burst of impossible speed.