July 25th, 2019, the Himalayas near Tibet...
Sama was grinning like the cat that had eaten the canary.
She had long completed her survey of the various surviving Sects and the accompanying analyses, and now she was undertaking another raid into Cultivator territory.
Well, it was more than a raid.
The Heavenly Sky Sect had risen to prominence by dint of one little secret of theirs... the ‘back end’ of the Sect’s territory bordered on the phasma from Tibet.
That was great combat training for the Sect’s members, and even if the phobos didn’t give them goodies like Powered did, they gave the Sect’s members experience in battle, and that was no small thing in a culture as ripe with martial rivalry as that of the Daoists.
What it meant was that there was a constant flow of Sect members moving back and forth from the main Sect to the Tibetan border. Sama had discovered this during her scouting mission here, and come back to release some of the pent-up killing urges in her heart.
Taking Powered babies away to be rendered down into pills, calling them out as ‘dangerous mutants that would be safely disposed of’ as they did so. Conscripting ANY of the Primos with suitable meridians now. Even if they’d never get above Three and get their souls freshly eaten, they could be abused easily, yet were still tougher than mortals and obedient slaves to the rest of the Daoists.
Turning the world into this stinking Qi-filled ecosystem that spontaneously birthed overpowered sapient Spiritual creatures programmed to consider humans and any magical lifeforms good eating.
Utterly hypocritical bastards. Their distant politeness to normal humans was just to encourage them to breed and make more Cultivators. Oh, and grow food.
So, she had started just out of sight of the main Sect, and began killing the Heavenly Sky Disciples in transit.
They were usually in batches of ten or so, juniors led by a senior disciple, maybe one of the lesser Masters. They stayed fairly close together, which made things much easier for her. Cleave Trains made the world go ‘round.
She had to borrow a perfectly non-magical adamantine Sword, since she didn’t want to set off their big magic-detecting alarm yet. Tremble was, of course, very irritated with this, and really looking forward to coming out from bodyphase inside her and showing these bastards a REAL Sword that they dearly didn’t want to see.
They called themselves swordsmen, and they did prefer the sword, but in front of Seven Dragons swordplay, they were laughable. Their style was mostly based on the Tai-chi sword, a dueling weapon with a lot of fencing involved, and when backed by Qi and Techniques, certainly capable of being used against the monstrous phobos inside the fog of the phasma effectively.
Against a Forsaken Seven Dragons sword-Hag who loathed them all?
Her first Cleave Train blew through the group of Heavenly Sky Daoists and slaughtered them all. The Senior Disciple took two cuts, the rest only took one.
With a pulse from Tremble to her hands, just a second of a blip, she set one of them on vivic fire, and spread the fire to the rest of them. Their Qi-engorged corpses went up like tinder, and she inhaled deeply of the temporary relief from the stinking pervasiveness of the Qi in the area before shooting off along the well-traveled path the Sect members had been following for years.
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She killed her fourth group, which included a returning master, before the alarm went out behind her, a great wailing alarm horn echoing off the mountain peaks as another team found the dead and the great swathes of white (and all the clothes and stuff strewn around) that indicated vivic fire had fed a bunch of them to the Land, munch-munch-burp!
This last team had been flying on swords, which was very cute when facing a Forsaken with Stillflight. Not expecting anything like that, the whole team went into sudden nosedives when she put her foot down: King Gravity blinked and woke up on His throne, decided He didn’t like Qi fliers any more than anyone else ignoring his lofty status in Reality, and suddenly the flying swords, weren’t.
The master and senior disciple were pretty quick-witted, jumping towards the mountainside laterally, hitting it and rolling down the slopes. They were only about a hundred yards up, which wasn’t enough to kill anyone... but as they crashed to the slopes, rolled, and got to their feet, venting Qi, Sama was coming in.
Two notes reverberated off the mountainsides, and their blood ran cold. They’d heard that Song repeated by disciples who had fled from the front. It carried across the miles, and was hummed by their enemies almost wherever they fought.
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Where that Song rose, fear and death followed, and the burning line coming in at a speed that shocked even the most arrogant of them didn’t help things at all.
Some of them had time to scream, some had time to quaver. Not many of them actually managed to lift their swords to try and fight.
These were basically all Senior Disciples. It didn’t matter, they all died in one Sword-cleaving hit from Tremble, the shattered remnants of any Weapons raised to parry preceding them into death.
The master took two swings as well, the Finish and Hew on his favored disciple carrying through her silks-clad body as Sama cut reinforced flesh and bone in two, Qi venting uselessly to try and stop the blow. Tremble’s Singing point proceeded through the gold-scarlet-black white-burning bloodspray, flames like illusions around it, and slipped past the parry to bury her point into the Master’s chest.
He grimaced, Qi venting and keeping him alive as he thrust for her throat. Her bare arm came up to take the hit as if it was made of bronze, turning the sword sideways and forcing it away with superior strength, leaving him wide open.
His eyes were staring wide as her spear-hand went in between them, and came out the back of his skull.
Her Ring of Telekinesis kept their bodies from falling down the mountainside for the moment, removing valuables from the burning corpses before letting them slide away. The bundles of Swords and things that were useful from the prior kills came scooting up on the Disk that had come out of its shrunken state inside Tremble’s Hilt, where her Rings and Scarab had also been stored.
Of course, this was pretty potent magic, and right about now she heard the wailing in the air from the Sect as they sensed it. The Badges she’d collected were all buzzing with the alert.
The more sophisticated Badges could actually convey messages, so they’d know someone was out here.
She smiled as she looted via TK, and Daoists burned. Qi-infused Weapons, light Armor, and knickknacks like the Badges spun through the air and piled up on her Disk, her payment for ridding the world of these abominations.
Twenty miles to the phasma. “Over hills, over dales, as we hit the rusty trails...” she laughed as she took off, sticking to the trail.
The Daoists ahead would be locked into fighting with the phobos. By her estimation, they would just consider themselves a wall she would run into if she went that way, while the main surge would be coming from the Sect behind her, spreading out in a wave to force her to the edge of the territory or into the phasma alone.
But, come on. There were scores, if not hundreds, of ready-to-kill Daoists up ahead of her. Could she possibly turn that down?
No, no, she could not. Humming very happily with the joy of finally reaching Nine, she sprinted off for the experiential training grounds of the Heavenly Sky Sect.
They’d know her magic was still here, and roughly the range, but the Astral Ward on her Oathring would completely obfuscate the direction. The lack of response from the Badges of those she’d killed would give them her rough location, and they’d come boiling out of the Sect, itching for revenge.
Yeah, she knew that feeling they had. It welled up in her whenever she had to smell this stinking Qi.
It smelled like rotting stone and moldering snow here, carried on decaying wind and hyperaggressive allergens. Most of those smells didn’t even EXIST naturally. UGH! They all deserved to die just for introducing her to the broad array of stenches they had forced her to experience...
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They really didn’t expect her to go all the way to the training area. A shocked squad managed to get off a Message from five miles away before she slaughtered them all, but there was a problem in responding to the reality of the situation.
Most of the Daoists were out there in the yellow fog of the phasma hunting phobos, which were also hunting them. Their spiking fear and alarm was actually sending roiling currents through the phasma, congealing newer, faster creatures for them to fight out of their own emotions.
The boogey-men inspired by Powered coming to hunt them created more boogey-men. Their urgent desire to retreat to a place of safety drew more phobos in like bees to honey trying to stop them from doing just that, and the general retreat became quite a frenzied, hacking mess as the Heavenly Sky Sect members tried to withdraw along the miles they’d come into the phasma and get back outside it.
Five miles at a sprint from Sama, even in these mountains, took less than three minutes.
The first groups coming out from the fog were generally the weakest disciples, those who stayed closest to the border area, and so were definitely the least qualified to take her on.
“Tremble, oOoO, Tremble, She comes...” came the haunting Voice rising from the Sword in her hand.
They knew of the Dao of Song, and tried to steel their thoughts against the sonic effect, but it wormed its way into their hearts as she came burning up the valley pass. The Words were echoing off the sides of the mountains, growing as they did, fast, so fast, coming for them with the Banefire that burned the same exact hue as their own blood, the terrible hungry unwhite fire... and the burning judgement of truly Holy flames.
Their screams seemed to become just side notes in the Song as she tore into them. The shrieking, whistling Techniques of windblades and Distance Death and Driving Points and Whirlwind Cuts and everything else tore apart the stones around her and in front of her... and vanished within ten feet of her like rain falling into a lake. They were devoured as surely as their hopes fell into her blue eyes and were taken from them in an explosion of violence.
“The Sky is falling, Heaven has come,
Sama is here to ruin your fun.
She tastes your fear in this stinking fog,
She sees you cringing like a beaten dog.
The Yellow King and his waxen grin,
Sees you where the fog runs thin.
His Curse, His doom, upon you all,
Your souls to the Land on which you fall!
Tremble, oOoO, Tremble, She comes...”
Blades, thrusts, stabs, scythes, arcs, and wedges of sword-Qi cut wildly everywhere, and Sama ignored them. Multi-colored flames, all of them hungry for Daoists, looking like the leashed fury of Creation coming to devour them, ripped into them as they tried to scatter and surround her... and more than a few of them went stumbling and sprawling in shock when their lightfoot and movement techniques failed to work. Easy jumps that should have covered dozens of paces barely got them off the ground, and unprepared, they went tumbling and sliding clumsily across the rocky ground of the mountains.