I woke with a horrible start.

Raw adrenaline flooded my body.

Wrong! Wrong! WRONG!

I leapt out of bed.

I was halfway up the stairs before some little fragment of my mind remembered to be confused for a second about how I’d ended up back in the bed in the tower, when the last memory was floating in front of the dragon.

Instinct threw me up the stairs.

“WRONG! WRONG!” kept banging loudly in my head, but I now realized that was the warding on the tower alerting me that hostile magic was aimed at the structure.

While the tower had never been attacked while it belonged to Sesako, he’d practiced and drilled for a moment like this, and my motions and instincts smoothly rushed me up the stairs.

Hinete was already at the top of the tower. She stared bleakly into the sky, with her hands pressed together so hard that the knuckles were white. Without looking away from the sky, she said, “Third circle, ten degrees north.”

Despite the fact that consciously the words felt like nonsense, instinct directed my eyes at exactly the point in the sky specified by the coordinates.

I froze.

Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck.

Time slowed down.

Let me be clear, this is not a metaphor. Battle magic which drew upon the blue magic from the third dantian, and that I used by instinct, since Sesako always used it in combat, slowed down my perception of time.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Fuck.

The attack was coming from high in the sky, miles, and miles above. The projectile looked like the shell from a giant battleship, a giant marble cylinder with a conical head, and the back burnt and blackened from absorbing the force that hurled it towards me.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The projectile was ten feet long, and maybe five feet wide.

Heart pounding.

What do I do? What do I do?

The miles between me and the weapon shrank second by second.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Still frozen. Still hard to move.

The whole marble surface crackled blue, purple and gold as magic arced against it. The weapon hit the automatic wardings around the sky of the city that were generated by the network of towers.

These tried to push it aside, but the glowing enchantments carved in endless details into the marble shell resisted these enchantments, without even being slowed.

It was coming for me.

Just a few miles above. Twelve point five seconds.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The magically enhanced mind of a profound soul apparently had a supercomputer inside of it that perfectly judged distances, trajectories, sizes etc. — I realized that without an extensively enhanced visual cortex, the magically enhanced super eyes would not have been very useful.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

It had to be knocked aside. I knew that.

I knew that.

I needed to shove this thing aside.

Fuck.

There was an itching anger inside me, Sesako’s anger at watching my uselessness as that thing hurtled slowly, yet too quickly towards me.

We’d agreed to try to work together during that dream, but we still had no idea how to do so.

Take control! Take control!

I can’t do this!

No response.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Fuck. I needed to act.

Tick. Tock.

The projectile moved at half a mile a second. Memories from Sesako of knocking these aside dozens of times in practice. Of throwing them himself hundreds of times in war.

Hinete stared at me with an open mouth, and growing hatred, anger, and disgust in her eyes.

She’d figured out I was the imposter and not Sesako.

Sesako would have knocked the thing aside miles away and seconds ago.

I needed Sesako’s instincts to take control. I knew that if I just started to act and strike against the cylinder, those highly trained instincts would take over.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

I couldn’t.

Rabbit frozen by the eyes of the predator.

They were trying to kill me, and I was about to die.

I didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to die again. No die again.

No!

No time to freeze.

Bigger, bigger, bigger.

Hinete turned from staring at me to thrust her hand out to strike at the hurtling marble. Her effort did little because she was young and only had a golden core. But the fact that she had acted broke my paralysis, and a half second later, following her example I instinctively pressed the power against the hurtling rock.

It resisted, at first only deviating slightly in its flight path.

Too close.

This was a far heavier projectile than any that Sesako had ever practiced against. There was a reserve of red celestial power flickering in it, keeping it on course, right for the tower. Right for my head.

So close.

I was going to die.

At the last instant, a surge of additional power flooded from my dantians, up my arms, and out into the projectile. It viciously drew on the circles of stored force buried in the basement. The power was drawn not by me, but chiefly by that part of my mind where Sesako’s thoughts sat and brooded.

It was barely enough.

Rather than hitting us, the stone hurtled off into the gardens around the tower.

Crack!!!

The ground heaved, throwing Hinete to the ground.

If I hadn’t had the supernatural stability from my power I would have been knocked aside as the tower shook and wavered, like a model in an earthquake museum in California.

There was a massive explosion, and the trees in the garden all caught fire. The dust and smoke were blown harshly away by some magical force to preserve my view lines. There was a massive crater in the garden below.

Shit. Shit.

The power circlets buried in the ground had been nicked, and two of the three were leaking out power, and they would be empty in two days.

I’d already fucked this up thoroughly.

“Imposter!” Hinete’s shout took my attention from staring at the destruction. “Another stone — fifth circle, west seventy degrees. And sixth circle, north twenty. Will you stop it? Else I will signal the others that Sesako is incapacitated.”

Fuck.

Giant death hurtled towards me.

“What do I do?”

Her sneer suggested I was less than the worms beneath her feet. “Knock it aside.”

The cultivators firing these shots were barely the size of ants in my enhanced vision. Collections of giant hurlers and large piles of ammunition, ten miles high in the sky, and twenty miles away, hovering high over the giant floating island that they’d brought as their base.

Two deep breaths, I looked up at them.

This time I did not freeze, instead I struck at the nearer one, coming towards us, a mile every two seconds. It had already traversed more than half the distance.

The stone resisted, the crimson power imbued into the stone by the celestial emperor flaring, as power that I drew chiefly from the leaking power circles pressed against it.

And then crack.

The shell was now hurtling away from the tower.

Fuck yeah.

I pumped my arm, and looked at Hinete, she was staring horrified at the shell.

It was now aiming directly at the center of the city.

Jesus, goddamn Christ.

It had gone beneath a sort of… horizon, in the seconds since I’d diverted it. I could no longer effectively strike at the hurtling stone.

A powerful burst of magic lanced up from another warding tower, this one in the center of the city, blowing it into several fragments which each separately struck into the city. One of them completely destroyed an eight-story tall tenement building.

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“They’d been evacuated, right?” I said with a gasp.

“Damn you —” Hinete’s reply was sharp, angry, and full of bitterness. “Sixth circle, north twenty. Push west thirty. Sixth circle, north twenty.”

It was only five miles away. Ten seconds.

But the instruction, push west thirty, was enough to trigger instincts, and the expectation of resistance led me to grab enough power to overpower the stone.

The ground only shook a little when the stone struck the mountainside a half mile above the tower.

I sighed in relief, one success after three.

Though I was burning through the magic reserves far faster than Sesako would have.

“Shit.” Hinete groaned. “At least twenty incoming. Fourth circle, north fifteen. Strike south seventy-five.”

I immediately acted as she told me to, ignoring the fear this time that came from so many incoming.

“Fifth, west seventy-five, to south eighty-five.”

She was speaking the instant my magic touched the previous one, and I instantly pushed enough power into it to break the resistance and moved on to the one she’d called.

Going through them one by one, just following her lead I acted on instinct as she called off the locations and strikes one by one, ignoring how the ones that I hadn’t hit got closer and closer.

Several of the nearby towers knocked them aside, seeing how many had been thrown at me, and between the twelve I got, and the eight the other towers diverted, the whole pile was safely managed.

Far, far too much of the power had been used up.

But we survived this.

Some deep sense in me that was familiar with the rhythm of the battles knew that the set of hurlers high in the sky had fired to the point where they needed to be rested while they cooled, and the excess magic in flowed.

The whole reason that the great island was necessary, was because the recoil from hurling multi-ton objects at incredibly fast speeds had to be sent somewhere magically to keep the relatively fragile firing devices aimed and to stop them from tearing themselves apart.

Thirty minutes of rest.

They’d decided that I was the weak point after my first two fumbles, and I did not know if managing the big round convinced them otherwise.

The crowd of the emperor’s cultivators was a little flood of gnats high in the sky, clustered around a bunch of flies.

They thought that I was the weak point. They’d thought I was worthless. They had thought they could kill me. And I fucking killed their projectiles.

Again, and fucking again. I’d won.

At least this round, I’d won.

Fucking everything.

My pounding heart slowly slowed to a calmer beat. I just felt tired.

The trees below the tower burned and smoldered. The big crater was large enough to fit a medium sized tree.

My shoulders slumped. I let out a long sigh, shaking myself out.

And then Hinete punched me.

“Let him out! Let him out! You fucking demon thief! Let. Him. Out.”

Each word was punctuated by a punch.

So. She was not scared that the demon thief would hurt her, and she knew that with only her first dantian opened and developed she couldn’t hurt my body by punching me.

Oh well. Apparently going through a tense situation didn’t always create teamwork and friendship.

I raised my hands and backed away from her.

“This isn’t my fault.” I smiled at her a bit, “You see —”

Punch.

Ouch, that one actually hurt.

Apparently smiling at her had been the wrong move.

“Let.” Punch. “Him — eek!”

This time a defensive instinct led me to grab her arms and hold them wide apart as she struggled to break free. There was an even stronger instinct that made it absolutely impossible for me to hold her in a way that might hurt her.

In fact, it had been Sesako’s concern for her injuring her hand that actually triggered me grabbing her arms.

First the horrifying attack that woke me up, and now this.

I was not having a good morning.

“I. Do not. Know how. To switch places with Sesako.” I spoke slowly, deliberately, and with the slightest tinge of annoyance. “Don’t you think I tried to switch him into control when we first nearly died?”

From her expression that broke through.

I wasn’t quite ready to risk letting her go yet though.

“The dragon told us that we’ll naturally switch who is in control over time. We agreed last night to work together, but I don’t yet know how.”

“The dragon?”

Most of the rage in her face was gone. I let her go and she stepped away, rubbing her hand.

“Now, if you’ll listen to me without any more punching, I am not the bad guy here. I am not some ‘demon thief’ and I didn’t choose to have anything to do with any of this. I am not a volunteer. Your boyfriend fucking died — yes, died — while doing his insane ritual to open the fourth dantian. Then that fat fucking flying lizard you all worship as a God came over to the scene of his self-immolation, and did something to resurrect him, that involved grabbing my spirit from another universe, and stuffing it into Sesako’s body with him. I was suitable because I’m apparently a parallel of him that died at almost exactly the same biological age as him — though he is way fucking older than I was, because your magic is unfair. And that’s what happened.”

“But —” She blew out a long breath. “How do I know you are telling me the truth?”

“Uncertainty is part of life. If you suggest a reasonable experiment, I’ll do it.” I shrugged. “Otherwise Sesako will have control again in five or six hours. You can wait to believe me until then.”

She tilted her head curiously now, and with much less anger. I think the magic words had been ‘the dragon said.’

Fucking girl.

“So, no more hitting. No more insults. Okay — I am not your enemy. And I am not your problem. I gestured out towards the bay where the floating volcano sat. That is your enemy, not me. Maybe y’all can be a bit nicer now, can’t you?”

She nodded.

I felt rather annoyed that whatever phrase I’d used in their language sounded like a Southern idiom in my head.

Another small pert nod. And suddenly her eyes were very full of curiosity. “Another world? — you are unbelievably bad at fighting. Worse than even me.”

“Sensible people avoid situations where other people are trying to kill them.”

That led to a frown, she opened her mouth, but then something in the sky caught her eye.

I saw it with her this time.

Two more shells headed directly at us.

This appeared to be the end of the barrage.

She called out the numbers, and I acted.

After those were cleared — and far more cleanly than the earlier ones, nothing else flew at us from the skies.

“What happened last night? How did I end up here in bed?” I asked her.

“The dragon returned you… Sesako… both of you. You were in a trance, or asleep. I put you to bed, and then the dragon flew over the city, circling three times to bless us before returning to her mountain.”

“Is that blessing thing a metaphor, or did she actually do something to help you fight? — never mind. I remember now.”

It was a bit of both.

The morale effect was perhaps stronger than the direct effect, but the energy she exuded as she overflew mixed a bit of crimson celestial energy into the storage of the city to give a little extra verve to the defenders as they deflected the incoming stones.

Eventually it was a losing proposition — at least if they’d brought enough stones.

I glanced at the fucking mountain, puffing steam away happily.

They had brought enough stones.

It simply took more magical energy to burn through the defenses and deflect a stone within thirty seconds than it did to hurl it. The stone itself was a ridiculously expensive enchanted object. Each one of them took an enchanter with a golden core, like Hinete, a year to carve all of the layers of runes.

And then, the emperor personally infused his own power into each stone that had been hurled.

The reason the defender usually had a substantial advantage was that they had stored vastly more power to draw upon and refill their cores in the structures and warding towers than their enemies could bring. Long sieges involved months or even years during which the attackers seized large parts of nearby region within which they would construct their own towers and filled them with a vast store of their own power, before they actually attacked the defender’s strong points.

The actual attack lasted only a week or two as the assaulting force rapidly hurled enough stones at the defenders to exhaust their magical stores.

Yatamo had underinvested in the defense for its capital city, as they believed that they were safe from a serious siege, because it was impossible to conduct one from the deck of a ship.

Hence why the giant floating volcano had been brought over.

Like usual war here was as much a matter of economic attrition than bloodshed.

And this wasn’t just because cultivators rarely died in battle

The ability to fly at hundreds of miles per hour, having all sorts of disguise spells, and just being generally physically tough was good for fleeing from battles — for example the cratering and ground shaking when the fricking huge marble blocks hit couldn’t hurt a cultivator who was hovering about twenty feet in the air.

Even in titanic battles only a small number of the cultivators on each side usually die, because the losing side ran away before their enemies could get close enough to systematically butcher them on favorable terms.

This war would be different.

Everyone in Yatamo knew, or at least firmly believed, that the emperor meant to kill all of the dragons, and as a result many of them — at least a third, intended to fight to the death.

Even if their sacrifice was, in the end, pointless against the vastly superior force that had been brought to bear.

“Do you know everything that Sesako does?”

Hinete’s inquisitive wide-eyed look interrupted my meandering wandering through bits of his memories. She leaned against the smooth circular marble parapet of the tower.

“I can use his memories… but in a weird way. They do not feel like my own memories, but like something external to me, that I see or perceive when I have thoughts that trigger them — we are not the same. We do not think the same, but when he knows how to do something without any thought — if it is drilled into what we’d call in my world the procedural memory, I can also do it. But if it is something which requires careful thought, and his full knowledge, I cannot.”

“I noticed — I expected a demon spirit drawn by the dragon to aid Sesako to be better versed in warfare.”

“I have told you, I’m a doppelganger, not a demon spirit.”

“You aren’t much of a doppelganger if you freeze like that — Sesako never freezes.”

“Yes, well —”

That feeling from the wards returned. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

This time I spotted the stone before Hinete.

This one came from a different firing group that was out on the opposite side of the island from the others, and only three and a half miles up, and eighteen miles away.

It moved twice as fast as the others, and my stomach seized.

Hinete called out in magically sped up voice, speaking so fast that her words would have sounded like a squeak if my battle magic hadn’t slowed my perception of time, “ninth circle, west eleven. Send south nineteen.”

The circle number referred to how far projectile down the projectile was along the half sphere above me. A zero circle was directly above me, while a twelfth circle is in the same plane that I was in.

As I pulled on the magic in the leaky power circles, I realized that the quantity available had perceptibly dropped since the last attack.

The full amount in the circles represented several years of Sesako’s work, daily cycling magic into the circles and leaving it there.

I’d fucked up badly. What he’d stored here was more than a twentieth of all of the blue profound magic stored in the warding towers.

Not that it really mattered if it took them a thousand shots, or just around four hundred to drain me and the tower, leaving us defenseless. They were winning either way.

At this pace, they’d make it through all the defenses of the city in less than a week.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

I’d agreed to participate in this doomed defense. I’d agreed.

But at least he’d promised not to stick around after it was too late to do anything. But apparently, he didn’t think it was already too late. I kind of really wished it were, and we were just grabbing everything and fleeing.

I didn’t want to die.

No, no, no.

Despite a mini panic attack, I efficiently knocked off the stones tossed towards us. One after another. Hinete called them off — I think Sesako was nudging me and keeping my reactions sharper. He was becoming better at helping me during the time I was dominant. Whenever we weren’t directly fighting, he fiddled with the flows of power coming from the fourth dantian.

After the first ten minutes of this round of bombardment, they stopped hurling stones at our tower, and I was able to watch the throws being sent at the rest of the city.

They bounced off and away, again and again.

The great city of Kyita was laid out beneath my tower, market squares, tree lined avenues, gardens, and fountains. Tall apartment buildings, domed arenas, warding towers, the thousand columns and million multicolored tiles of the great clan house, where the chiefs of the Yatamo met. Dance halls, and the chapter houses of educational sects. A giant central city park with a huge treeless lawn sized so that three of the dragons could land and sit there for major public festivals.

It took a while for me to notice the odd absence.

There were no religious buildings.

Perhaps it was because their gods lived amongst them, in the form of the dragons. Except they didn’t really worship the dragons, so it wasn’t really a religion like we had on Earth. In fact, there were no major religions in the empire, though they had many traditions that reminded me of Taoism. The emperor himself was nearly worshipped.

In Diet Vinh and in Paralei there were a few cults, but a belief in supernatural powers beyond humans seemed to simply not be a prominent part of any of the cultures that Sesako knew of.

Perhaps the lack of supernatural beliefs was because in this world humans had powers beyond what humans ought to have. Given that an actual immortal super being ruled a nation, perhaps it made sense that nobody believed in tales of a hidden and even more super powered being who ruled everything.

But I noticed that I was still surprised, I had expected that everywhere would have theories, myths, and beliefs about what was behind everything.

What was the cause of the visible causes? What created everything?

Small tsunamis washed over the wharfs, and around the docked ships from the stones deflected into the oceans. Little avalanches fell down the pockmarked mountainside, and the whole of the forest above the city was in flames. Also gone were the thickly spaced vegetable gardens, orchards, and pens for cattle that I’d seen when I first flew to the city.

The flames licked at the houses at the very edge of the city, but they were all built of stone, and enchanted to resist mundane fire.

Each of the visible craters were twenty to thirty feet across — yet all of this destruction did little to change the immensity of the mountain compared to the humans crawling and hovering like flies around it.

And then right at the end of the round of bombardment, something happened. One of the towers on the far edge of the city, sitting athwart one of the precipices overlooking the ocean below, was attacked by a dense flight of stones.

It turned out that this flight was made up of trick stones, which fell apart when struck at, leaving a second half of a stone still hurtling in.

One of the stones hit — then another.

Boom.

Boom.

And then a third.

Boom.

And the tall tower was no more.