Night fell on the fairground—the last night before the start of the tournament. The ruckus outside began to settle down as the gathered cultivators drifted back to their tents to cycle in preparation for their coming battles. While others were just beginning to sleep from the daytime revelry, it was time for Willow, Jeremy and Leopold to go to work.
Leopold had been cycling the ever-increasing grades of spiritual pills nonstop since the end of their battle with the Driving Rain sect. Willow took care of the bodies, dumping them through portals into the mountains surrounding the fairgrounds. By the time the bodies were found, if they were found, it wouldn’t matter. Willow and Leopold would hopefully be long gone, back across the ocean and finally living in peace.
After his fourth pill Leopold looked up at Jeremy’s shaking head while Willow dumped the last severed limbs through the hole in space. It closed as she slid the singing blade from the slate and resheathed it.
“It’s time,” Jeremy said, breaking the privacy spell by peeking through the front flap of the tent. There were very few people out now and they looked as though they were outer disciples on errands from their superiors.
“Ready?”
Willow looked at Leopold with concern, but if the bloody battle had affected him he didn’t show it. Not now in front of Jeremy. She couldn’t help keeping a running tally of the deaths he’d caused and how each must torture him. It was like counting thread by thread as a rope was slowly sawn down.
Leopold blurred as he amped up his acceleration and cast three more spells. Had he been under acceleration this whole time? The sword and sheath disappeared from her hand and the sky-blue spear similarly from where it had been leaning up against the central tentpole, then the door flapped and he was gone.
“He’s gotten fast, hasn’t he,” Jeremy said.
“What’s in those pills you’ve been giving him?”
“Nothing that isn’t in yours. You’ve both been coming along swimmingly, but I have to say Leopold’s rate of progress is almost meteoric. If I had to guess, he’s trying to catch up with you.”
Willow remember his face when he put his fist through that cultivator and ripped out the man’s heart. The hatred that someone would get so close to delivering her a mortal blow.
“Yeah,” she said, then began to weave two separate invisibility spells. One she settled over Jeremy, the other on herself. There was no way she could hide her appearance around here; that they hadn’t been questioned on the way in was probably because they were presumed under the protection of the Driving Rain sect. Now that they were the Driving Rain sect, questions would come far too easily.
Willow stepped out through the flap and immediately spotted a tent two down whose fabric was impregnated with the privacy spell. She didn’t want to think about what was going on in there, but with invisibility Leopold should have a major advantage. She started toward one of the nearby tents and slipped inside the slightly parted flap.
Carnage. Leopold had already been here. The inhabitants of the tent had been sliced apart in a half dozen different ways, the severed limbs just beginning to ooze blood. When had he done this?
Willow looked back out and the tent she’d spotted before was already free of the privacy shielding. Another beside it was now cloaked with the spell, and as she watched, that spell blinked off and another one rose to take its place farther down.
He was catching up with her, different and the same. She hardened her heart to her task and walked in the opposite direction, toward a soft conversation which she couldn’t understand. She passed through a tent flap and nobody seemed to sense her entrance.
Willow let her psychokinesis soak into her bones and calculated the most efficient path to kill everyone inside before anyone realized what was happening.
🜛
The next morning was a long time coming, but by the time pale sunlight tinged the sky to the east they’d finished their task. Leopold had returned to the tent first and Willow found him absentmindedly rubbing the length of his singing sword with a strip of cloth. There wasn’t a speck of blood on it or the cloth, but he scrubbed blindly nonetheless. He only stopped when Willow laid her hands on his arms. The way he stiffened gave her a moment’s premonition that he’d attack her automatically, but he relaxed into her embrace and let out a shuddering breath.
Jeremy returned last and Willow didn’t bother to look up from Leopold to acknowledge him. What was there to say? If all three of them were back it meant there was no one left to oppose them on the tournament grounds. When the sun reached its zenith and the tournament itself started, there would be no teams to enter the field. The emperor would look out on the devastation of his most elite fighting forces and they three would have the chance to discover just how much progress he’d made in reverse-engineering her portal spell.
Bells began to ring, but they didn’t sound like the waking variety. They sounded like alarm bells. Jeremy sighed and exited the tent and the alarm bell stopped short. There was some shouting, a small explosion, then the silence of the dead. Jeremy returned and washed his hands in the basin.
“No use cycling anymore,” he said. “The moment of truth has arrived.”
Willow nodded into Leopold’s back and squeezed him slightly. He pulled her arms around him for a moment, then got up. She followed, and the look she managed to sneak of his face was one of grim resolve.
“When will he arrive?”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“Should be the start of the tournament,” Jeremy said. “But I don’t know. Maybe he only comes for the end. Maybe he’ll be alerted in some other way not to come.”
“Then we’ll have wasted an awful lot of time,” Leopold scowled.
“We can always go to him,” Jeremy said and shrugged.
“Let’s go then,” Leopold said, and retrieved his weapons. The singing sword had a chip in the blade from where he’d probably had a brief battle with a senior cultivator, but the spear he slung to his back was unblemished. Willow and Jeremy exited the tent in nothing but their gi.
The silent tournament grounds were even eerier in the full daylight. She had almost been able to pretend it was normal for things to be so quiet in the night, but not with the sun beating down from on high. It was still too early for the bodies to stink, but stink they would. Jeremy and Leopold hadn’t had the ability to cast the remains into portals, so Willow hadn’t bothered either. This tournament ground would become a vast sky-burial.
The inner structure of the fairground was composed of large, brightly adorned wooden poles driven into the slate close together. Unlike the ringing poles these didn’t have any spells on them to prevent access, which meant they were strictly decorative. Willow couldn’t imagine how much effort had gone into planting these poles deep around the fighting ring.
They passed down a dark tunnel, burned-down torches smoldered in sconces, before emerging into daylight once more. Rows of benches rose high into the air in a perfect circle. Several special groups of benches in back had been specially cordoned off with bright ribbons. She supposed those were reserved for especially powerful or renowned sects, but she hadn’t noticed much of a difference in the power of her victims last night. They all died unaware, silently. Like those they called mortals.
In the center of the rings of seats was a flattened rectangular white stone stage which looked carved out of a single slice of marble. It had etched lines denoting boxes on either side, she supposed for the cultivators to begin in. Several smaller seats around the stage were probably for referees.
One section of seating caught Willow’s eye immediately. It was entirely enclosed with panels of red paper supported with beams of either gilded wood or actual gold. Carved birds which Jeremy pointed out were phoenixes adorned the corners of the enclosure. White sliding panels were where she supposed the emperor would observe the fights.
“Well, I suppose we really did get everyone,” Jeremy said. “I can’t sense a soul within a couple hundred feet. You?”
“No cultivators anyway,” Willow said. “Your mortals are a little harder to see, but I’d have to agree.”
“They were probably all cultivators,” Leopold said. “You said the mortals would collapse under some of these peoples’ spiritual pressure.”
“I did say that,” Jeremy said, and spit on the polished marble stage as he walked across it. “Good riddance.”
“So what do we do now, wait,” Leopold asked. Willow sensed a bubbling anticipation from the way his essence churned. He’d been all geared up for battle again and the discordance was eating away at the fragile mental barriers he’d erected between who he was and what he’d done these last few hours.
“Until the emperor comes,” Jeremy said and sat down in the center of the stage. “A day, a week. After two weeks lets consider opening a portal to the imperial capital.”
“Are you saying,” Leopold grated. “That what we did last night was for nothing?”
When had Leopold’s hand moved to his sword? Willow’s eyes went wide and her heart seized.
“Not for nothing,” Jeremy said. “Rats need exterminating.”
Leopold flashed so fast Willow barely caught him with psychokinesis in time. He thrashed in the air, trying to cut her spells with his sword unsuccessfully. When he screamed, it was a primal thing full of insanity and incoherence.
“I’ll kill you,” he shouted. “I’ll kill you.”
Jeremy sighed and got to his feet, turning to face Leopold head-on. His essence flared but, whether it wasn’t his true strength or time had changed things for her, it didn’t feel nearly as suffocating.
“I thought we might come to this,” he said.
“Stop,” Willow whispered, but the deadly intent in her voice was enough to turn Jeremy’s head.
“If you so much as look at him like that again, I’ll kill you myself.”
A war of emotions played across Jeremy’s face. A flash of entertainment, surprise, hatred. He opened his mouth to respond, eyes narrowed in fury, when Willow sensed a change in the enclosed space at the other side of the stadium.
Jeremy and Leopold must have sensed it too, because Leopold immediately stopped screaming and thrashing and Jeremy turned to face the decorated enclosure.
In her second sight Willow saw essence begin to stir in the ether. The natural flows of essence twisted and eddied like water near a drain. Currents changed course and drew inward, funneling toward the enclosure and passing through its physical walls. A great suction concentrated all the natural essence into a single point.
Then that point inverted into a torus. It grew, and in its center Willow sensed a completely different essence distribution. The paper walls of the enclosure bowed outward slightly and she knew they were reacting to an air pressure differential.
The portal was opening.
Leopold dropped to the ground as Willow focused the vast majority of her power into supporting her bones, muscle and skin. Leopold finally drew his sword, which he’d left sheathed in his blind rage, and locked onto the widening portal. Jeremy folded his arms across his chest as if only mildly surprised.
A man walked through the portal. Willow could tell that much about him from how he looked in her second sight. That, and he was a powerful cultivator, but not more powerful than any she’d dispatched that night. He stepped into the box, looked around for a moment, then waved his arm.
The entire front of the box shredded from the passage of his hand, rending in a loud crack and tear of wood and paper. The posts fell and clanged down on the ground, confirming that they were indeed made of solid gold. The man, robed in gilded red with an elaborate hairdo which could easily have been a headpiece all on its own, stepped up to the ragged edge and looked down on them.
“Please, don’t stop on my account,” he said in perfect English. “Continue your bickering.”