Yi Cao took one look at the sapphire light gathering in the palm of the over-muscled cultivator and seized the metal case to leap for the other end of the hall only to stop dead at the sight of four more muscular men in crimson shirts waiting for him with their arms crossed.
One of them said something in a guttural language Yi Cao didn’t recognize then laughed.
The metal case jerked out of Yi Cao’s hand and he whipped around to watch it sail towards the rotating curl of light in Mu Chen’s palm.
Mu Chen smiled as he snatched the case out of the air. He tossed it to one of the cultivator’s behind him. Yi Cao took one step towards them, but the muscled cultivator turned his smile into a glare and Yi Cao froze.
“Whatever they’re paying you,” Mu Chen told him, “It can’t be worth your life.”
Yi Cao hesitated but the blue light still flickered in Mu Chen’s hand and Yi Cao’s shoulder still twinged from his simple greeting on his arrival on station.
The light in Mu Chen’s hand flared as it spun and Yi Cao hit the deck, Kow Towing before them.
Mu Chen rolled his eyes then issued orders in their guttural language. The cultivator who’d caught the metal case smiled and raised one fist. Sapphire light curled around it and he slammed it into the box.
The noise reverberated in the close corridor but the case held.
The man frowned and lifted it to glare at the dent he’d made.
Mu Chen turned back to Yi Cao. “You have a key.”
Not a question.
Yi Cao trembled with his face to the tiles. “Please.” He said. “It’s not my life I’m concerned for.”
“The Key.” Mu Chen growled. He stepped menacingly towards Yi Cao as the light in his palm grew. “Hand it over, or you won’t have a life to be concerned for.”
Something popped outside the corridor. It echoed in the open assembly area beyond the crimson clad cultivators as the shirt of the man holding the case liquified and splattered the floor.
It took Yi Cao precious seconds to realize it wasn’t truly his shirt that liquified, or crimson cloth that splattered the hall with gore.
His world narrowed.
Mu Chen and the other cultivators shouted and moved deeper into the hall as they drew on their Ki. Yi Cao felt it itch in his channels as the world grew dark. More pops echoed in the gallery beyond the numbered cabinets accompanied by tiles shattering into pearlescent shards that glittered in a dozen colors before the shadows cut off all but the faintest light from beyond the corridor.
Blue sparks flared in the darkness. They danced as more pops accompanied more tiles shattering. They twisted as one then roared as they coalesced into a single swirl of sapphire power around a dark core.
Mu Chen roared at his fellows as the whirpool roared into existence in the center of the hall, standing upright and facing out. Yi Cao began to slide towards the technique across the floor and scrambled for a purchase on the smooth tile. The whirlpool hissed like the forests he’d grown up beneath in storm, and he felt the cool spray of the Ki Born water as it raged around him into whatever void the technique drew upon for its law.
Someone appeared at the end of the corridor. He wore white from his toes to his head, obscuring all of his face except for two eyes slots. Incandescent white Ki radiated from him like fire as he faced the roaring whirlpool at the center of the crimson cultivators.
The roar of the whirlpool doubled as the cultivator raised one hand, then it lunged down the mouth of the corridor in a torrent of white foam and sapphire spray.
A thunderclap split the technique and blew Yi Cao backwards as the darkness, shadow Ki, some part of him realized distantly as he rolled with the blastwave, fled to reveal the nine red clad cultivators still spinning sapphire water from thin air. Blue light ran from the cultivators in the current of the shockwave, then whips of curling blue water shot for the cultivator in white still fighting the tumbling torrent of water unleashed by the collapsing whirlpool.
A spear slammed into the floor not a dozen steps from Yi Cao shattering every tile for a yard in every direction while a white haze rose from the spears haft.
A figure bundled in white like the cultivator at the end of the hall emerged from the spear, just stepped out of the white haze, spreading frost from every footfall. He scooped up the dented case from the ground and seized the end of the spear to yank it free just as four bolts of blue light snaked into him, coiling like serpents around his arms and legs while the white radiance burst to life around him. A bitter cold rolled off of the cultivator with his Ki and Yi Cao scrambled away as more frost crawled across the broken tiles towards him.
He felt something slick beneath his palms and didn’t look down at the blood smeared across his hands and knees as he backed against a locker marked by the number fifteen.
A new whirlpool appeared at the end of the corridor and surged towards the newcomer. He dropped the metal case in favor of grabbing his spear with both hands. The whirlpool partially froze and shattered into snow as it came on, disrupting the technique without slowing the overall mass of material that swept towards the man. Small discs of ice materialized between him and the men in red, then shattered as they deflected the larger part of the collapsing wave to either side of the corridor. The slurry of ice and water still consumed him up to the waist but some technique held him steady against the flow as new structures of ice appeared over his head and whipped towards the muscular cultivators hidden in sparkling shadows at the other end of the corridor.
Yi Cao had no such protection. The water seized him in icy teeth as it washed over him then it hauled him bodily down the corridor with the corpse of the first dead cultivator and the shards of broken floor tiling while he struggled to hold his breath.
He tumbled, knocked into a floor, a wall, then it slammed him into something hard as he and the water left the corridor. Something hard and flat. Yi Cao felt his feet start to drop and he scrabbled at the thing he’d struck. He got one arm around it just as the water drained away then gasped for air while he clutched to the railing and swung, kicking and twisting, above the drop from the balcony overlooking the staging area below.
Something screamed. It whooped, inhuman and deafening, rising and falling in time to the flashing of bright orange lights while a voice droned something that echoed down the station corridors. Another blastwave shot bits of broken tiles off of the balcony and sprayed Yi Cao with more water while he tried to sort out what was screaming in his ears.
The stars were gone. Broad dark steel plates had slammed shut across the windows at some point in the fight, a fight only seconds old, while faces turned from the staging area towards the balcony Yi Cao hung from. Orange lights flashed while the speakers boomed and the whooping siren howled up and down and up and down.
It didn’t matter. Yi Cao focused, on the balcony. He focused, pulled. Another blast of water nearly dragged him off the balcony, but he levered himself up until he got his elbows over the edge just as something soft and wet thumped into the railing next to him in the current.
A body waited for him as he got his head above the floor. One of the cultivators in red, absurd musculature relaxed in death while red the same color as his shirt ran in the water still flowing towards the balcony ledge from the ongoing battle in the corridor lined by lockers. The dented metal case lay wedged beneath his chest.
Yi Cao glanced towards the two cultivators in white still firing shockwaves down the corridor while miniature lashes of blue black water and whirlpools sloshed out of the mouth.
This was his chance.
Something hard whacked into the tiles next to the Yi Cao, spraying him with broken shards but he grabbed the warped handle of the case before he had a chance to think, then he let himself drop. He caught a glimpse of another white swathed cultivator with a hollow spear pointed in his direction before the floor of the second story cut him off from view. Another pop bit a chunk out of the balcony’s edge, echoing despite the whooping siren in the wide open area.
Yi Cao hit the floor hard. He slipped on the water slicked tiles and slammed onto his back, then rolled, picked himself up on aching legs, and ran for everything he was worth while more water roared overhead.
He didn’t make it far.
Vines snaked out of potted plants along the wide hall and snapped around Yi Cao’s legs arms and chest. A cultivator in ragged brown robes with a cloth tied over his eyes bearing the purple eye of some sect appeared from a side corridor one hand outstretched and rippling with Ki. The vines carried Yi Cao towards him. One vine grabbed at the case and tried to pull, but Yi Cao clutched at it while the cultivator snarled.
“Give it to me!” He shouted as Yi Cao hurled towards him. “You aren’t supposed to have it anyways!”
Yi Cao tried to open his mouth to reply but gagged instead as a root wrapped itself around his throat and curled one sharpened tip up until it pointed straight at Yi Cao’s eye.
“There is no time.” The cultivator told him. “Release or die. You have two seconds.”
Yi Cao heard the rustling of the trees, the gurgling of the boy beneath the bridge, saw a short unimpressive life flash before his eyes.
Two more vines joined in pulling at the case, then the whole hallway went orange.
The whooping of the sirens died. The arrows dancing across the floor walls and ceiling disappeared, all replaced by flowing orange text in a dozen different scripts some of which he could read, others he recognized, and more that meant nothing to him at all.
“Port Guardian Action,” a set of orange sigils read, packed tight into the solid wall of foreign text, “surrender or prepare to show peaceful intent”. Another set of sigils, larger than the rest and circled so that no one could claim they missed it, showed the same symbol used by the Station Security Kiosk alongside a string of other symbols in the same script.
In the silence, techniques from the floor above rumbled like thunder.
“Out of time.” The blinded cultivator hissed.
Yi Cao felt the vines around his throat tense, then the cultivator screamed and convulsed while his vines thrashed at the air.
Yi Cao dropped to tiles for the second time in as many minutes. The orange text flowing across the floor banged painfully against his knees and he sucked for air as he clutched them and crumpled sideways.
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Down the concourse hall, a dozen silver gray figures appeared marching in lockstep across the tiles. Hovering metallic artifacts blinked above their shifting wire framed shoulders while heads set with single myopic glass eyes swiveled side to side. Staves of polished steel shone in the overhead lights.
The feet of the station guardians never left the floor. The gray wires they were made from crawled and twisted so that the legs flowed across the tiling.
One of the little mechanisms floating over the shoulder of one guardian zipped forward ahead of the formation to hover over the collapsed cultivator. Whips of lightning dropped from the machine to coil around the man and he cried out and shook as it lifted him several inches off the floor. A blinking green light at the center of the little T shaped machine turned to stare at yi Cao before it lifted the cultivator and carried him away.
The vines around Yi Cao whipped in an uncontrolled frenzy as he left. Some of them shattered their pots or battered at the orange scripted tiles. One slashed mindlessly at the port guardians only to disintegrate as one of them slapped its steel pole through the vine before it could reach them.
He still had the case.
Yi Cao scrambled on aching knees away from the advancing golems. In eerie synchrony, the machine men boomed something indecipherable that probably meant “halt”.
Yi Cao limped on and no lightning lashed out to paralyze him.
The golems droned on, swapping languages as they marched closer down the long corridor.
Something white, and squishy, fell with a boneless splat to the orange tiles followed moments later by a red tinted wash of filthy water. Six men dropped after him, each in crimson robes ragged from battle.
Mu Chen’s chest heaved as he scowled at the guardians and their compliment of floating constructs. Yi Cao stopped and the man glared at him, then snapped some command that had all six men in crimson raise their hands to draw blue light from their channels.
“HALT”. The sepulchral voices of the guardians resonated in the hall, as they cycled through new languages, repeating the simple phrase.
The saphire technique pulled, and Yi Cao fell over backwards as he was swept into the sudden rush of Ki summoned water. He turned to pull away but couldn’t find purchase on the slick tiling.
The cultivators whipped sapphire light tinged with shadows towards the towering metal constructs bearing down on them. Lightning, and more than lightning, arched to meet them as the hovering constructs opened fire. The water curled around the bolts like living things as the two waves of techniques crossed. Silver wires sparked at the heart of the lightning bolts, wriggling like worms as the curls of water ripped them apart before dissipating themselves.
More lightning shot from the constructs, crackling as they poured from the little machines in a flurry of snapping reports while the cultivators met them with more of their signature whirlpools of Sapphire light, water, and shadows.
Yi Cao grabbed at one of the vines still thrashing in its pot as the two sides clashed overhead. The pot just toppled over, spilling its dirt and vine without slowing his slide towards the cultivators. Mu Chen grabbed the him as he slid by then threw him to one of his followers and snapped out a command.
As one the cultivators took a stance and the same powerful whirlpool they’d used in the clash on the floor above formed between them and the oncoming guardians.
The flying T shaped constructs folded themselves and sank into the guardian’s shoulders as the whirlpool came together. One of the cultivators grabbed Yi Cao then the whirlpool roared and surged forwards, pulling the remaining vines, potted plants and loose bits of furniture into its crushing depths. The golems didn’t even slow. They lifted their staves, lowered their shoulders and marched into the collapsing wave.
A new whirling technique pulled the cultivators into the floor as the guardians disappeared beneath the deluge and Yi Cao was momentarily inundated by frigid water. He opened his mouth to snatch a breath only to choke on the black depths. He gagged, and then tumbled into the air as the water spat him out of another whirling torrent to land coughing and spluttering on a floor somewhere sirens still whooped and flashing orange lights still shone from the walls.
The cultivator who’d held Yi Cao jerked him upright as Mu Chen and the other crimson cultivators stepped through a whirling portal of black water. Mu Chen grabbed Yi Cao by the shoulder and began to squeeze.
“The key.” He growled. Eyes hard and dark as the shadow his techniques relied upon.
Yi Cao cried out and struggled against the hand at his arm.
“We don’t have time for this!”
Mu Chen shook Yi Cao, then he grabbed the leather bag around Yi Cao’s shoulder and gave it a yank. The shoulder strap parted with a snap of sodden leather and Yi Cao found himself rolling painfully across hard white tiles marred by scrolling multi-colored arrows. Mu Chen tore the bag open rather than bothering with the straps while their water portal gurgled and shrank towards its own center in midair.
Yi Cao crashed into a bench surrounded by the ubiquitous potted plants of the station. His ribs screamed at him where he hit it but he scrambled around and turned in time to watch Mu Chen tear his bag open rather than using the straps and jam a hand inside.
Then Zihan arrived.
No flash of light or fancy technique accompanied the Young Master’s appearance. One moment the cultivators stood in a loose circle around Mu Chen and their disappearing portal, and the next the green clad boy was among them.
The arm of one of the cultivators fell with a wet thunk to the floor before anyone had a chance to react.
The cultivator screamed. The Young Master of the Hidden Heart Sect kicked him and he disappeared through the portal whirlpool with a gurgle before the dark pool winked out of existence, returning the hall to the relative silence of howling sirens and winking orange lights.
The cultivators stared at one another for a moment, silent as they circulated Ki and sized one another up.
Mu Chen cleared his throat. “Well.” He said in the imperial language. “You’ve killed one, but do you really want to call down station security before you die?” He spread one hand to show his good intentions. “We’ve just escaped. Let’s talk. I’m sure we can reach some kind of agreement that won’t require violence.”
Zihan smiled and flipped his hair out of his eyes. No part of his smile ever touched his eyes.
Then he burst into flames.
Mu Chen shouted something, probably a curse, as bright orange flames billowed around them. Sapphire water Ki gathered around the cultivators. Some of them drew it into their palms only to shout in pain and stumble away as the inferno caught them, but others drew the water around them in a shell, shielding them while the young master’s sword flicked out to sever a cultivator’s hand from his wrist, dropping the metal case to the ground.
Orange script flooded the hall as water Ki built into the familiar whirl of power once again. The four remaining whirlpool cultivators not incapacitated by the fight spread out as the Young Master blurred among them. Yi Cao felt the pull of the whirlpool again. He leaned into it, let it carry him as he skated towards the metal case only to watch one of the cultivators dive for it out of a curling domain of shadow and flaring blue lights.
A blazing sword parted the cultivator down the middle, spilling smoking guts and entrails from his chest and skull cavity into the rising water in the hallway. Yi Cao cried out at the gore and closed his eyes even as he pushed his hands into the mess to grab the case and turned to run. The current pulled his feet out from under him before he could flee and he found himself rising, screaming and thrashing, into the whirlpool suspended in the middle of the hall.
Lightning shot down the concourse. It wrapped in chains around one of the crimson cultivators who screamed and collapsed in a writhing heap as amorphous shadows flowed into the hallways along the shifting orange scripts.
The golems rose from the floor like primordial giants from an ancient sea, wire frames congealing from the tiles, wide glass lens materializing in the middle of their forehead, metal staves sliding along the floor and into their hands as they reached their nine feet of height. They bellowed in their sepulchral unintelligible language, droning on and on as Yi Cao spun in the upright whirlpool, held tight to the case in his arms, and felt his head submerge into the roiling water.
Weight, crushing weight, and darkness pressed against him as he circled in the water. Sapphire lights flashed beyond his eyelids accompanied by the occasional flickering of distant fires. He thrashed, heard distant shouts, and felt his own distant heartbeat hammer in his skull as the weight against his every surface grew and grew and he spun faster and faster towards the center.
Then it collapsed.
The water roared as the technique fell apart. It surged away from the center of the pool to his and froth across the deck. Yi Cao emerged thrashing and coughing only to bang into a wall length window covered outside by an opaque steel sheath. He coughed as he tumbled in the water, sucked in a breath only to get a lungful of more black water before he coughed it back up. A potted plant thumped into him, spinning in the sudden flood of water, then washed by as Yi Cao bumped into a bench jammed against one of the treelike structural supports of the station. He gasped for breath and wiped water from his eyes as he staggered in an attempt to get to his feet, just in time in time to watch one of the wire golems of station security strike a crimson shirted cultivator in the face hard enough to rip away a section of his skull. His body smashed into the floor hard enough to shatter tiles and roll away.
Fire engulfed the golem, not a brief flame, and not a gout of fire like Yi Cao had seen the Young Master unleash during the festival of testing. The fire lit from inside the golem. It burst from it like a bomb, bright and hot and furious. The gray wires of the golem melted as the fire consumed it, waves of chemical rainbows washing from it in the floodwaters still frothing around its knees. It turned, as though to face the fire raging from its own guts, and the lens in its face cracked before the whole thing collapsed into a slurry of bubbling goo that hissed in the receding water.
Mu Chen roared as he fought two of the guardian machines in a separate corner of the concourse. Water ran around him in serpentine rivers, entering and exiting portal whirlpools no larger than his fists as they formed a complex net of rings around him. He struck at the golems with his fists while two fish, huge and angular, one a sapphire blue and the other black as shadow, prowled around the fighting trio in the air.
Lightning arched and spun through the air in another corner where Zihan, despite the guardians that marched towards him from every side and the floating constructs that hovered around him, dueled withthe remaining whirlpool cultivator in a storm of fire and sapphire light.
Yi Cao ached. Everywhere, he ached. He ached in his lungs, in his bones, even in his channels where the chaotic Ki of battle washed, un-opposed by any law or cultivation strong enough to repel the hostile powers. He pushed himself to his feet anyways and staggered under the weight of the case in his hand as he took his first step away from the fight.
He froze when he didn’t feel the familiar weight of his shoulder bag and he turned back to scan the frothing pools of water.
Zihan killed his opponent then. A burst of flames cut through a miniature whirlpool as the sword slid upwards along the man’s leg chopping deep into him, all the way up to his ribcage from the crotch. The man gurgled as he collapsed while Zihan turned to battle the encircling constructs and golems.
In his own corner Mu Chen cast a whirlpool at one of the guardian’s hemming him in as his two fish struck. They ripped their golem apart while he grabbed the guardian he’d caught in his own whirlpool with two muscular hands then used his Ki to tear it into three separate pieces, each piece sucked away into a different part of his whirling network of techniques. He shouted something, and pointed to Yi Cao, and the two Ki fish turned their noses to glide towards him.
Yi Cao turned in the receding water but felt a current grab him around the ankles and drag him towards the other cultivator. He fell, and turned on his back to watch the jagged mouths of the summoned beasts lunge for him before a gout of fire slammed into the networked whirlpools of water around Mu Chen forcing him screaming back while his huge fish leapt through the air towards Zihan and the guardians that still surrounded him.
They all died in fire.
The fish, the guardians, the hovering machines, even Mu Chen, in the end. Zihan’s blade swung once and a rippling wave of fire expanded from the blade in a half moon. The guardians split around the wave of fire. The floating constructs burst, and the fish simply faded away as the burst of fire passed them. Flames licked from the surface of the receding flood in the wake of the blade of fire and the shield of whirlpools Mu Chen raised to intercept the cut was blasted into mist, leaving him exposed while Zihan stood at the epicenter of the newly born domain of fire with a sword slowly bubbling to slag in his hand.
Zihan threw the lump of blackening steel at the water cultivator. Mu Chen just knocked it out of the air with his hand, but the simple steel sword Zihan pulled from nowhere skewered him just fine a second later, scoring a line in the wall behind him as the Young Master whipped it sideways and split the man in half.
Two pieces fell with a splash as Zihan wiped his blade clean on a smoking green sleeve. Flames still danced from the young man’s skin where it showed around the robes, and fire Ki danced as he turned cold eyes to the boy cowering on the other end of the concourse where he’d fallen when the whirlpool technique dropped him.
Yi Cao stared at the Young Master as the last of the waters drained away, deeper into the station, and the flames dancing on their surface went out.
Zihan glanced down at the bag sitting in a slurry of what was once Mu Chen. He kicked it to Yi Cao who managed to raise one hand in time to fumble and catch it. He rose and stood stock still while the Young Master studied him, fire bright in cold eyes. Yi Cao clasped bag and battered case together in front of him and bowed over them at the waist.
“This Yi Cao thanks the young master for saving his life.” He croaked. He hesitated. “The elders, would be displeased to hear that I failed in the mission they gave me.”
The Young Master glanced at the flashing orange lights on the ceiling as more text scrolled by along the floor, walls, and ceiling.
“Yes.” The young man said.
Then something slammed Yi Cao into the wall faster than he could see. He cried out and tried to get free but froze when he found a hot blade pressed to his throat.
“Yes.” The Young Master said again, the fire Ki in his eyes hot on Yi Cao’s skin. He pressed the edge of his sword a little closer then smirked. “Very displeased.”