In a rice paddy on the border of the Celestial Empire of the Eternal Flame, half a dozen mortals worked pushing shoots into the wet mud. There was a raised road that separated the sunken rice paddies and for the last few weeks cultivators would walk this road with their contingents. The mortals always bowed low, so low sometimes that their foreheads touched the dirty water.

One of the planters stood up, himself unknowingly sensitive to essence—or, as they called it in that country, qi—and sniffed the air. There was a smell like lightning, but no dark clouds on the horizon. He had half a mind to call out to his compatriots to abandon the rice fields, as he’d seen dry lightning strike before, but before he could utter a word the world seemed to tear over the raised road twenty feet to his left.

Light lensed as space was pushed aside, an unnatural tunnel bowing out until it was as wide and tall as a man. The sensitive planter fell back in the shallow water and stared openmouthed as the portal stabilized and three cultivators walked through. They must have been cultivators, because they wore training gi and each had insignias of raindrops on their chests.

The man scrambled to his knees and pressed his face so low in the water he could hardly breathe. To appear out of midair like that, these must be the most powerful cultivators he’d ever laid eyes upon. To not show utmost deference would be courting death... if he attracted the cultivators’ attention. He prayed they would overlook him and his unworthy kin.

He heard a slight popping sound and the smell of lightning disappeared completely. He shivered under the weight of the massive qi they brought to bear with just their presence.

One of the cultivators said something in a language he couldn’t understand. What was happening?

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“Is that it,” Leopold asked and pointed toward the mountains in the distance. Atop the first ridge were several gigantic buildings emblazoned with banners of every color. He could almost hear the revelry from there.

“Probably,” Jeremy said. Willow shut the portal manually, although the amount of energy used in its creation as dictated by the cubed distance rule had been magnitudes less than they’d used in coming to this country—there was little chance it would destabilize into a doorway in the night.

But she shut it just to be safe.

“We’re miles away,” Leopold said. “Miles. And I don’t look forward to climbing that.”

“I think you’ll find that with your cultivation, the elements will affect you much less than they normally would,” Jeremy said. “Or at least that’s how it works here. I’m not actually sure what’ll happen to you with the way we’ve done it.”

“Cool, cool,” Leopold said, and cut his eyes to Willow, briefly taking in the kowtowing farmers in the ankle-deep water.

“I’ll make another portal after a bit,” she said, looking around at the farmers too. “Not here.”

“Good point,” Leopold said, and started walking toward the mountains. Jeremy took second position while Willow brought up the rear. She spared a last glance at the farmers kowtowing to her, then tried to dismiss them from her mind. There was something deeply disturbing at how people without magic treated those with it in this country. At home it hadn’t been like this at all.

She much preferred it that way.

They were on the road for an hour before the farmers were far enough away that Willow felt confident opening another portal. She didn’t want more people than necessary to see the portal spells or they might start getting ideas, and America was terribly weak to the machines of war this country produced. It was bad enough the emperor might be trying to research their portals—terrible to imagine anyone else gaining access to the ability.

“Do you see that,” Leopold asked Jeremy, pointing ahead.

“Yeah,” he said. “Another group of cultivators.”

“How can you tell,” Leopold asked.

“I can feel them.”

Willow opened her second sight and sure enough it was as if there were three bright candles burning down the road. The cultivators were surrounded by a retinue of dimmer flames which Willow assumed were lower disciples in their sect. If she opened a portal here, would they sense it too like Jeremy could sense them?

“Let’s go put our skills to the test,” Jeremy said in an all too eager voice.

“Wait, what,” Leopold asked. “We’re not fighting here. We’re not even at the tournament yet.”

Jeremy looked pointedly at Leopold’s sky-blue spear slung over his back and the singing sword which hung at his hip. Leopold glanced down to follow his gaze, then back up.

“No. Just because we trained doesn’t mean we have to kill everyone we see.”

“You’re right. That’s what they’re doing,” he pointed at the far away group. “We skipped the trek, but if you’d taken it you’d have no doubt seen bodies or pieces of bodies along the way. Mortals that these cultivators picked for target practice to keep their skills honed on the journey. But they don’t think of it as murder—you’ve got me there. The mortals exist to serve them as they see it, and it’s an honor to die at the fist of even an outer disciple.”

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Willow wrinkled her nose in disgust. True, Jeremy had a hatred of cultivators verging on fanatical, but he was somewhat justified in that. Hundreds of years ago all of the rest of his bretherin—the interlopers, who’d died in the past and been reborn here—were exterminated by the cultivators that went on to build up this government. Even Sun Geon, who she’d killed in America, had been one of those who’d gone at his emperor’s command to exterminate entire villages who still worshiped the deposed interlopers.

“That doesn’t mean we have to kill them now,” Leopold argued. “There aren’t any more villages between here and there as far as I can see. Nobody else is in danger.”

“You’re right, it’s not preventative,” Jeremy said. “It’s retribution.”

With that he shot off toward the group of cultivators. Willow saw their essence flare at the approaching man-shaped missile and she sighed. Leopold looked back at her with alarm.

“We’re not just going to let him do this,” he asked.

“We’re going to have to kill a lot more people than this in a few days,” Willow said. “Every group we remove here is a group we won’t have to face at the tournament.”

“Oh come on,” Leopold said, but Willow had already started in on the multilayer cast which would open a short-range portal. It required nearly no essence at all to connect the two positions within eyesight, just a knowledge of the concepts and layers required to do so. She wove them as second nature after all her practice.

As the portal before her yawned open, she saw the other end open ahead of the group on the road. The lesser disciples were already running toward the tournament grounds, away from the rapidly incoming missile that was Jeremy. Willow stepped through and let her ingrained psychokinetic storm settle into her bones, muscles, and flesh. She quickly cast stone skin and acceleration.

Leopold cursed and came through behind her. She closed the portals as he double-layered acceleration and twittered another spell so quickly she couldn’t understand what it had been. He disappeared from her side and the leading disciple came up short, barely blocking the singing strike of Leopold’s sword.

Willow imagined these disciples as the leaders of the city states which had attacked her and the magical creatures she’d tried to save from Asche. Who had sent through overwhelming forces to destroy her before they could scatter into the mountains to live lives of peace. After all they’d been through enslaved in Asche, they deserved that much.

And so did she. But she only got war, punctuated by brief interludes of rest. Would it ever end?

Yes, it would. Once there was no one left to fight her. Once all other challengers had been dispatched.

Willow exploded from a standstill, past the flashing duel between Leopold and an outer disciple, toward the main group of three powerful cultivators. They flared like torches in the night with their essence and each wore an insignia of a lion’s head. The closest one turned toward her, opened his mouth, and roared.

The air rippled, the ground shattered, and Willow very nearly didn’t dodge the speeding attack. It flashed past close enough for her to touch and she saw the storm of destructive, rending essence flickering within it. This was an attack meant to strip the skin from a man and destroy him utterly. That someone could spend their life training such a repulsive attack was almost beyond belief.

Perhaps Jeremy was right after all.

She kicked off the road, cratering it with her dodge and came in on the cultivator’s flank. With her acceleration turned up to the max, he barely had time to register that she was there. She slammed his ribs with a strike and felt his bones crack with the impact. He shot off in the opposite direction, but Willow reached out and caught his ankle, slamming him into the shallow paddy beside the road. The water fanned in a sheet which would take an eternity to fall in her accelerated state. Hidden from view from her two companions, she descended on the cultivator and struck him in the neck until she heard bone break.

A low wail rose from behind her and she looked back to see that Leopold had sliced the outer disciple in half at the waist. At this acceleration level the singing of his sword was more like a bass drone, but the sacred weapon parted flesh as easily as a knife through butter. Leopold flashed faster than her accelerated eyes could follow and was instantly in battle with the second disciple.

Jeremy met the remaining powerful cultivator blow-for-blow. Willow looked around for a target, but there was no third powerful cultivator—only a spray of gore still in the process of raining down on the young rice shoots to her left. Jeremy had a mirthless grin on his face as he blocked each blow in turn, while the cultivator sweated and grimaced at the interloper’s playing.

Willow picked a rock from the roadside and hurled it at the cultivator with all her strength. Normally a rock or an arrow or even a cannon wouldn’t affect a cultivator’s magically hardened body, but this rock was traveling faster than even the air could stand. Willow saw a distinct ripple in the light and heard the beginning of a crack as it shot toward the cultivator faster than sound.

When it hit the man, it didn’t shatter or pass straight through him. It utterly destroyed his body, blowing fully half of his abdomen forward. Jeremy had to leap away to keep from getting covered in gore, and the cultivator stared ahead in shock as the realization of what had happened set in.

He dropped to his knees as a scream ripped out from behind Willow. Her second sight was all encompassing, and she watched as a disciple’s essence dissipated as Leopold flung the blood from his sword. He’d somehow dispatched the two other outer disciples while Willow had her back turned. But then again, perhaps that was expected of a layered acceleration—something no other mage had ever performed as all other mages could only keep up a single spell at a time.

The cultivator scrabbled in the dirt at his intestines, trying fruitlessly to stuff them back into his ruined body. Did he know yet that he was dead, or was there some cultivator ability that let him recover if he stuffed everything back in haphazardly?

Jeremy smiled and shook his head at the cultivator’s vain attempt. Leopold appeared behind the cultivator and beheaded the man. The head dropped to the road to roll off into the rice paddy, dirtying the water.

“You’re no fun,” Jeremy said. The blood on the singing sword danced in a rhythmic way, then fell to the ground in a single sheet, leaving the enchanted blade clean. Leopold resheathed it, where the singing was mostly diminished.

The look he gave Jeremy chilled her heart. It was like the man sickened him. When he turned his gaze to her, the expression was much softened and tinged with… something. Confusion? Exasperation?

Willow sighed and tried to smile at him, but managed only a half-grimace. He walked up to her, then put his head on her shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his and felt the faint shake of sobs through his body. She held him like that for a long time while Jeremy interested himself with the supplies the sect leaders had been carrying.