Willow opened portal after portal almost effortlessly and they summited the mountain in disjointed steps. With such a short distance the essence and effort required was close to zero, so they only stopped for a few seconds between portals for Willow to get her bearings on where the next one should go.
Jeremy handed Leopold spiritual pills and he popped them like candies. Willow could feel the churning essence in his body, constantly at war with the confines of his physical form, but Leopold had gotten good at circulating while doing other things. Even while he walked he pushed the essence back and forth across his body, widening the essential volume his body could contain. That change would eventually affect how much he generated as well, but over a longer period of time. Luckily, they had plenty of essence in the air of the Celestial Empire itself.
Every portal opened higher than the last and brought with it a faint crossbreeze from the pressure differential. Willow at times could hardly see the switchback trail carved in the jagged mountain range, and when she lost it altogether she’d open portals in the sky above and peer through the gusty apertures until she found it again.
They encountered two other groups of cultivators traveling up the switchbacks. The first was close enough to their exit point that they bowed at what they thought were sublimely skilled cultivators using a hidden technique for travel. It was only when Jeremy rushed into their midst and began splattering them against the rocks that they realized the three of them were no traveling group of cultivators at all, but something else entirely.
Leopold sat out the next raid and Willow and Jeremy dispatched the weak cultivators with ease. But on the last raid up their switchback trail he was forced to intercede.
These cultivators were more powerful than Willow had suspected. Jeremy told her, in the breaths he could catch between blows from the two senior disciples he was fighting, that cultivators oftentimes shrouded their true strength unless in the heat of battle. That explained why in Willow’s second sight they had appeared as little more than mortals upon attacking, then grew to human-sized flares in a fraction of a second.
Willow fought a senior disciple one-on-one while Leopold fended off the three outer disciples who had taken him for the weakest target, not incorrectly. He parried blows using his fists alone, leaving his singing sword forlornly wailing in its scabbard. From the speed of his hands Willow knew he was barely using acceleration to counter the blows.
Then something she did not expect happened. The man she was fighting, middle-aged with the front-half of his head shaven back to a raven-dark ponytail, twisted his fingers in a peculiar way and she saw the essence bloom into a spell-form. It rushed out through his feet into the rock surrounding them.
The mountainside shattered and razor-sharp flakes of slate shot toward her. She barely had enough speed to dodge the blurred missiles even with her acceleration turned all the way up, and when she did the cultivator was right there waiting for her. He smiled as he pulled his straightened fingers back for a lethal strike at her throat.
A bang like a cannon made her flinch and the cultivator’s eyes went wide with shock. He looked down, leading Willow’s eyes down as well, to the hand thrust through his chest from the back, gripping his still-beating heart. Willow looked over his shoulder to see Leopold glaring in fury at the man, only to disappear an instant later like a phantom, leaving the heart to fall to the ground between them.
Blows from back down the path echoed up the cracked mountainface and Willow watched as Leopold fought the outer disciples like he hadn’t just destroyed one of their elders with a single punch. He was slow again, barely keeping up with their jabs, but there was a tortured fatigue in his movements. Even then, seconds later and without another witness besides her, the death sat heavy on his soul.
She didn’t go to help Jeremy with his two cultivators. She rushed to Leopold and simply threw the three outer disciples off the mountainside. They plummeted without a sound into the mist. Leopold was shaking again.
“Leopold…”
“I’m okay,” he said, but his teeth were chattering, his right hand still stained with gore and flecks of bone. Jeremy shouted in the distance and she heard a cultivator cry out, then the sound of a splash against the rocks.
“No, you’re not,” she said. He moved against the mountainside and closed his eyes hard. “It’s affecting you.”
“I’m not weak,” he said. “I’m not… not…”
“You’re not weak,” Willow agreed, feeling the weight of guilt settle around her. She was the reason he had to do this. She was the reason all of this had happened, and she had to watch as Leopold’s humanity was stripped away one death at a time.
“But you’re human. Still human—”
“So are you,” Leopold said.
“Not like you. Not after what was done to me.”
“Do you ever wish we could just go back,” Leopold whispered. “Back to our home. Live in the country? I’d like that. That small town where you killed the salamander.”
“Even further away,” she said, and when he looked up she was smiling. “In the forest where it would just be us and the elves. No more magic, no more fighting. Just the trees, the streams, and what life we could make ourselves.”
“It sounds wonderful.”
Footfalls proceeded Jeremy as he approached, arms soaked to the shoulder in blood.
“We’ll get there someday,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Leopold said. “I wouldn’t want you to do this alone. And we have to do this, don’t we?”
Willow nodded. “After: that little house in the woods. Just the two of us. Maybe more, someday. I’d like that.”
Leopold nodded and reached for her. She took his hand and drew him up away from the sheer rock wall. Jeremy approached.
“Lookee here,” he said, and dropped a chest on the ground. “More pills.”
He held one out to Leopold and her beloved took it without question.
🜛
By the end of the day they’d reached the top of the mountain range and the entrance gate to the fairground. Great wooden pillars clustered together with strange symbols and swirls of essence between them whose smell warned Willow that attempting to cross between them would be foolhardy at best. These weren’t the paltry barriers that those outer disciples of the Driving Rain sect had erected around her. These were powered by vast stores of essence the likes of which she hadn’t seen since Andrew’s underground cells.
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Men in essence-swirled armor manned the large gate at the top of the switchback trail. It was clear that this was the only way in or out of the fairground, unless Willow wanted to portal in. But, she suspected that the density of cultivators would be so high within that there would be little chance of the portal going unnoticed. That’s why they’d climbed the last hour of the switchback.
“Mind your manners,” she warned Jeremy as they walked with him at the center. “I don’t think we can fight out way out of this one.”
“I’d put us about even odds,” he said, then his head twitched slightly toward Leopold. “Maybe a little greater than even.”
“If we blow it now, we won’t be able to find the emperor. We won’t be able to stop his portals.”
“Right, of course. Caution’s the word.”
Jeremy approached the guards with a smile on his face and they bowed low. He spoke quickly and with mirth. The guards looked at his outfit, recently cleaned from the gore of the sects they’d attacked on the way up, and especially at his sect sigil. They said something back which sounded like a question.
Jeremy didn’t falter for a second, waving the question away and laughing his response. The guards looked to each other, then stepped away from the gate and allowed them to enter. Passing through the giant wooden beams which made up the gateway tingled Willow’s skin to the extent that she wondered if perhaps these wards could have held back the warbeasts Andrew had sent against Durum.
Then, they were through and into the fairground proper. Willow walked close beside Jeremy.
“What did they say,” she whispered.
“That the Driving Rain sect was already here with their cultivators. I told them we were their simple retainers.”
“And they bought that?”
“It appears that you and Leopold have mastered masking your qi, because they addressed me in the way one would an outer disciple.”
“Your language is so confusing,” Willow said, but relented. They’d made it into the fairground, now they only had to figure out their next move.
The interior of the tournament grounds were studded with grand tents every dozen or so yards. The colors were so gaudy and bright that Willow could only assume they were the colors of the sects residing within. She had only to look for her own outfit’s colors on a tent to find the Driving Rain sect further along the main thoroughfare, toward an interior shrouded pavilion.
“There,” she said. “Our doppelgangers.”
“We won’t get far if anyone from the sect challenges our presence here. I guarantee that they know every face in the sect.”
“So we take their place,” Leopold said from behind them, and they both turned. “We replace them. We get their tent and no suspicion is cast.”
“Except for the huge battle that’ll be fought in the process,” Jeremy said. “That’ll probably raise a few eyebrows.”
“Eyebrows will be raised whether we fight or spend the night loitering around because we haven’t come with a tent nor supplies,” Leopold said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
He led the way to the gaudy tent emblazoned with the raindrops of the Driving Rain sect. Jeremy cast a look at Willow that she could only shrug in response to. What was Leopold doing? What was his plan?
He didn’t wait before the tent, but walked straight in through the hanging fabric door. Willow quickly followed, then Jeremy. Within, everything was orange and brown. There were cloth partitions raised which blocked off some sections of the room, and Willow could easily enough locate the three outer disciples and the three inner. Within the tent they didn’t bother to hide their essence.
At their entrance an outer disciple turned and approached, only to come up short at seeing their outfits. The young man asked a question in a language neither Leopold nor Willow could understand.
In response, Leopold wove the same privacy spell Carl had used so many times during their sensitive discussions at a maniac speed, no doubt assisted by his own acceleration, and pumped it into the cloth wall of the tent. The orange and brown hangings shimmered with the spell.
The outer disciple knew something was wrong. Nobody used magic like that in the Celestial Empire. He shouted, but there was no time. Not for him, not for anyone else.
The room exploded all at once. Beds and tapestries and desks shattered and were thrown about in an instant. The orange and brown color scheme splattered with red and Willow saw across the room Leopold with his sword unsheathed, singing against the restraining hand of an inner disciple.
The cultivator said something low and smiled in Leopold’s face.
“Don’t touch the walls,” Willow shouted at Jeremy and shot across the room toward Leopold. She was intercepted halfway by the second inner disciple. She had just enough time when blocking his blow to survey the scene. The three outer disciples were strewn in multiple pieces around the room, and the essence boiling off the fourth body told her that Leopold had killed an inner disciple by surprise.
Willow shot back from the impact of the cultivator, but clawed herself to a stop by burying her hands in the hard slate under the lavish rugs. The second cultivator didn’t waste any time with taunts, instead twisting his body in a technique that rapidly created a spell-form. She saw the character of his essence and its shape and recognized it immediately.
A single drop of water coalesced in the air at the nexus of his essence and the cultivator smiled. With this, he surely thought, she was as good as dead. With barely a twitch of his eyebrow the drop shot forward toward her nearly faster than she could track.
Willow countered with a burst of unconcepted essence as shockwaves rippled through the tent at the battle between Leopold and the cultivator. With Jeremy there they should have had no problem dispatching the remaining cultivator. What the hell was he doing?
She didn’t have time to look for him. The drop faltered in its headlong rush and vaporized as Willow shot through the intervening space. The cultivator’s face registered a moment of shock before Willow delivered a rapid-fire series of blows to his chest that nearly threw him into the tent wall, before she grappled his foot and slammed him into the ground.
The cultivator looked dazed, but nearly uninjured. He concentrated and Willow felt the nexus form again behind her. He was trying to impale her with a sneak attack, but her second sight saw it nonetheless. The droplet shot down and she dodged out of the way just in time.
The look of surprise on his face barely had time to form before he tensed with concentration to prevent the drop from skewering him instead. In that brief second of concentration, Willow delivered a hammerblow to the top of his head, which he did not escape. He jumped back, but fudged his footing and went down on one knee.
Willow took the opportunity to search for Leopold, only to find him facing off against the cultivator with his sky-blue spear, the singing sword sunk down to the hilt in the slate. She cut her eyes back to her own cultivator as he attempted to rise, then stumbled.
One eye had become lazy, half his face seemed to be melting like wax. She’d seen this before when she worked in her mother’s office, but somehow she hadn’t expected to see it so far from home in someone who’s body had been so highly refined.
She’d given the man a stroke.
He said something, but the normally clipped language came out slurred and watery. He staggered forward, then went down to his knees.
Willow walked forward and grabbed him by the throat before he could attempt to run. With a quick slice his head toppled to the ground. She searched again for Leopold.
Leopold was standing above the body of his cultivator, sliding the sky-blue blade out of the man’s chest. He wiped the blood off it with his hand, then flicked that blood onto the ground. The cultivator’s face was frozen in a mocking grin.
A slow clap came from the entrance to the tent. Leopold cast a cryptic glance at Jeremy and remounted the spear on his back. Willow looked back to see their interloper smiling.
“I must say, I’m impressed,” Jeremy said.
His glittering eyes told her he was more than just impressed.