54. Light
“For the first three hundred miles we encountered only those souls who were fleeing south. We gave them directions to join the caravan and tried to gather as much intelligence from them as we could, but the language barrier got in the way. They repeatedly grew distressed when we expressed that we were heading north, and that we refused to turn back.”
Sonilla paused, gasping as her organs shifted. She pushed against her bandage and her stomach slipped back into place. She’d be dead were she not a cultivator. As it was, she had perhaps fifty-fifty odds of surviving.
“We continued to travel until we reached a city. The streets were empty. We found nobody, no bodies. We arrived at dusk and made camp in the governor’s mansion to continue our search by daylight.”
She gasped again, pausing her narrative as she touched the wind and light construct. “Mother, they came during the night. Uncounted and terrible. Some were only children, but so many. Each of them with the power of a cultivator, ranging from an early purification realm cultivator up to the silver path. I and Toras and Pholonia escaped while the others bought us time, but I was injured. If I do not see you again, I love you.”
She gasped again and sent the communication construct flying away. It shot over the horizon in a breath, its light vanishing into the distance.
She lay back down and closed her eyes.
Her breath slowed.
Her heart stopped.
Time passed.
She sat back up, adjusted her wounds. The gaping maw in her chest healed over, and she stood up.
She had lain down as a cultivator of the bronze path.
She rose at silver rank. But there was no light in her eyes.
~~~~~~
The necromancer stared at the magical projection of Atla, studying its energy flows. It’s leylines. It’s blood and bones. He grinned to himself. This was actually going better than he’d expected. While he’d initially been ordered to simply find the unbound soul and deliver it to Empress Nadia, he was actually establishing a foothold in a dimension where the Divine Fates empire was weak.
What had initially been nothing more than an attempt at tracking the soul through blood ties was building up a degree of momentum and inevitability. As each corpse-soldier killed, it created more undead. As each peasant starved to death or died of disease due to the conditions that were progressively getting worse, they too would rise.
And they were infecting the world’s energy with his necromantic flavored Qi. It was slipping into the world’s heart and slowly changing the very nature of life on Atla.
Soon, his corpse soldiers would begin to rise in the south. And on the eastern and western continents as well.
Very soon, they would be begging their lord for intervention, but the necromancer would not let them get that relief. He would snatch the prize away once he had enough energy, pulling the entire world into his own dimension.
Then, it would be only a matter of time until he found the unbound soul hiding within the remaining populace.
He did the math, and decided that it would only take a billion more deaths before he could reach this goal. He was patient.
It would only take another year or so.
After a certain point, these things had a way of moving on their own.
~~~~~~
The disciples sat around the table, joking and laughing as they ate. I sat with them, listening to the rise and fall in their voices.
The threads of fate continued to twist and turn, leading towards two outcomes.
Either Atla would fall, the corruption that was infecting it destroying the planet and its people,
Or the Lord of the Realm would purify it before that happened.
But the strands of fate that were coming from off-world were so far away, so impossible to read. I could not determine what was happening in the court of the ascended ones.
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I had to make my own plans.
The two options were corruption and purification. I had to ensure that it was the latter, and not the former, which took place.
The hall grew silent and I looked up, realizing that the others were looking at me. I realized that it was time for me to announce the pairings for today’s duels.
Instead, I decided that it was time to move on.
“We will be doing something different today,” I informed them. “Meet me outside in an hour. Be prepared to fight as though your life is on the line.”
~~~~~~
Hien Ro studied the others, wondering whether he’d be about to fight one of them, and if so which. He had, over the last few weeks, gotten intimately familiar with each of their fighting styles, and they with his.
That they were equals was no longer in question. While they had set off on this journey at different points in their cultivation progress, somehow Little Bug had put them lockstep with each other. He wasn’t certain how the young Awakened Soul had done it, but while it was true that they had bad match-ups and certain wins in their duels, there was nobody who stood at the apex except for Little Bug himself.
That they each had strengths and weaknesses for the others to be wary of or exploit was besides the point. Hien Ro had strategies to fight each of his potential opponents, and they would have strategies to deal with him. The outcome was never certain, never foregone, and always open for interpretation as while they jokingly kept score, there was never a real winner or loser in the duels. They simply fought until they were out of energy, and then they returned to camp to eat and joke around with the other disciples.
It had been surprisingly intimate, getting to know the rest of them through combat. While they were each fiercely competitive, a respect had grown among them. Even Xol, who continued to taunt the others that he was ‘First Disciple.’ Even Polkluk, who remained uncertain of himself even as he demonstrated time and again that he belonged here. Even Thaseus, who slowly had come out of his shell to embrace the camaraderie with the others.
Even Hien Ro, he thought to himself, who had only become a cultivator because he had lied about seeing a light above an elder’s hand when they had administered the test.
As they reached the summit, Hien Ro realized that he had been to this spot before. It was the place where Little Bug had collapsed after attuning the lightning element. He glanced at the boy, wondering what this was about, when Little Bug suddenly turned around.
“You will be fighting together today,” Little Bug said. “You may work as a team, or in teams, or by yourself. But you will be fighting me. I shall not be holding back except at the last possible moment, when to do otherwise would cause death. Come at me with everything you have. Let us see how far we can walk this path together.”
The others considered his words for a moment, but no sooner had they stopped speaking than Hien Ro dashed forward, empowering himself with the strength of the earth and the Iron Monkey’s Strength technique, summoning a massive sword of fire which he swung at Little Bug.
Little Bug split off an Avatar, and Hien Ro was profoundly disappointed when that Avatar turned to face him rather than Little Bug himself. But then he did not have time to question his worthiness, as the avatar matched his tactics, pulling strength from the earth and conjuring a blade of fire.
The two massive blades of Fire Qi impacted each other, and the confluence of energies threw both Hien Ro and the Avatar back. Hien Ro landed on his feet and dashed forward again, and the Avatar landed on his feet and dashed forward.
They clashed, blade against blade, for five minutes, neither backing down and neither giving any advantage.
It’s like fighting a mirror, Hien Ro thought to himself.
Every strategy he employed was countered exactly the way that he’d do it, and every weakness he presented was exploited exactly the way he’d do it.
Hien Ro chuckled. If that’s how it was, then --
A lightning blast suddenly took his avatar in the chest, and the avatar burst into mist. He turned to see Polkluk running towards him.
“Tag!” the older boy shouted, and Hien Ro grinned, for the disciple from the Raging Rivers Sect had the same idea that he’d had. He charged at the avatar that had been dueling Polkluk even as the one that had been mimicking him began to reform.
Hien Ro dashed and narrowly avoided the lightning bolt that his new target sent his way. He fought like he would fight against Polkluk, redirecting lighting bolts and deflecting them with shields of earth while simultaneously fighting against the storming wind.
His flames were smothered by the oncoming storm, but Hien Ro had mastery of the earth as well, and the earth endured in the face of any storm. He charged forward, conjuring a blade from the earth and--
Little Bug’s Avatar turned to mist before he struck. He watched as the mist swirled and combined with the mist that had made up the opponent that Polkluk had been fighting. When the combined avatar took shape once more, it was in the form of a Mirror Walker, a being made of glass and silver that wasn’t supposed to actually exist. They were the reasons why peasants never put a mirror in a child’s bedroom, for they were said to be children which had fallen through a mirror and entered another world.
Shivering, Hien Ro brought up his blade in defense just in time, as the Mirror Walker swung it’s long arm and conjured flame and thunder at him at the same time. The wind knocked him off balance, and the earth shook beneath his feet.
He was struck by the lightning, and he fell to one knee. Polkluk lasted not much longer.
“I said I wasn’t holding back,” Little Bug said. “So come at me once more. With everything.”
One he had recovered from the electrocution, Hien Ro nodded at Polkluk, and together they dashed forward at the Walker Avatar and began the fight in earnest.