From half a mile away it was clear the village was unlike any place Willow had ever seen. It had all the hallmark attributes of a village: a central dirt road bordered by buildings which looked vaguely residential, vaguely commercial. But the houses were all too short, the road too wide, and there were strange flapping cloths hanging from their eaves.

From a quarter mile away, Willow recognized the paper windows she’d seen from her glimpse at Sun Geon’s quarters. All the buildings seemed to have them, and she wondered if this was what they used in lieu of shutter-covered windows or glass.

The buildings looked so much stranger than she’d expected. All her life she’d been around just one architectural style in Bridgewater. That had changed when she’d come to Durum, and then moreso when she arrived in Asche. But now… this was something else entirely. Not out of place and time like Asche, not monumental like Durum, and not simple like home.

This was just… strange.

There were people in the village, but as she and Leopold approached they seemed to care little for the new arrivals. The villagers milled around, entering and leaving shop-homes carrying bags of goods or small carts behind them. Children played in the streets, old men sat on stoops. All things Willow should have recognized and found familiar, but didn’t.

It was their clothing. Not a single one was dressed like her and Leopold—kit out in their buttoned mage’s robes. These people were all dressed like Sun Geon, with overlapping wrapped shirts over blooming pants. It seemed like everyone was dressed in shades of green and brown.

They didn’t start getting stares until entering the outskirts of town properly, close enough for those milling around to notice their clothing. The villagers stopped and dropped their bags, moving to the sides of the road and waiting for her and Leopold to approach. It was as if the villagers were preparing to perform some unknown action, which set Willow’s hair on end.

An old man dropped to his knees and bowed his head to the ground. Others followed. The young man beside him, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Willow’s, quickly pulled the old man up with shouts that Willow couldn’t understand. They were in a foreign language, just like Sun Geon had said. Willow and Leopold would have a hard time figuring anything out if they couldn’t understand anyone.

The young man shouted, hauling the old man up and pointing at Willow’s eyes. The others looked as well, then began to shrink from Willow and Leopold. They stepped back, turned, and ran back into town. Even the old man gained his feet in the exodus.

“Well, shit,” Leopold said as alarm bells clanged up ahead.

“I don’t know what we expected,” Willow said. “You saw Sun Geon.”

“I didn’t know everyone here would look so much like him,” Leopold said. “I mean come on! There’s enough variability to account for our appearance even in Durum, right?”

“I don’t know,” Willow said. “Not here there isn’t.”

Leopold groaned again and they continued to walk into town. Doors slid shut, shutters lowered, and the street emptied almost instantly. Up ahead a young man ringing a large bronze bell hurriedly jumped from his tower and scampered off into one of the adjacent buildings, which slid its door shut behind him. The only person remaining was an old man who’d been carrying a handcart before he’d stopped in the street to ogle them. His eyes had grown nearly as round as saucers.

“Well, take your pick,” Leopold said and gestured around once they reached the center of the village under the small tower which housed the enormous bell. “We’ve got a million questions, so ask away.”

“Ha ha,” Willow said. “I suppose we should just stay here until they come out again? I don’t see anything weird happening with the essence, as concentrated as it is. If anyone’s planning to attack, they’d do so with normal weapons.”

“Well, I suppose we can handle that,” Leopold said and lowered his pack to the ground. He strode around the tower checking for gods knew what while Willow stayed and eyed the old man still staring at them.

“Maybe we could ask him,” Willow said, and pointed. The old man didn’t squirm or run away. He was slightly hunched and mostly bald save for a white halo of stubble above his ears.

“You might give him a heart attack,” Leopold said. “But a lead’s a lead, I suppose. How do you think we’ll bridge the language gap?”

Willow shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said. “Maybe we can draw stuff in the dirt? There isn’t a translation spell I missed in class, is there?”

“Oh yeah, they went over that on the third day,” Leopold said. “How to start speaking a different language if you ever portal yourself halfway across the planet.”

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“Not appreciated,” Willow said. “I suppose its worth a shot.”

She was halfway to the old man when she noticed a whistling sound. She looked down the street, then higher, higher. A loose constellation of black dots fell from the clouds toward them, fast. They shone in her second sight.

“We’ve got cultivators incoming,” Willow said and Leopold was instantly by her side. They quickly cast stone-skin and time acceleration, and the incoming cultivators slowed as their perceptions sped up. There was no telling what kinds of warriors were coming, but they had to be prepared.

The group of five cultivators landed explosively in the town square, sending up gouts of dirt and knocking the bell tower over completely with the shockwave. Willow sought around her for the attack which would come after such an obvious distraction and concealment, but it never came. The dust took forever to settle, but when it did the five men were standing in a line in front of them, half the square ruined from their impacts.

They hadn’t sought to blind Willow and Leopold. They just… didn’t care about the damage?

The cultivator in the middle, whose body shone like a bright lamp with the essence flowing through his limbs, raised his hand slowly, ever so slowly, to point at Willow and Leopold. They both went into fighting stance, but the man opened his mouth and began speaking instead.

Willow turned down her acceleration. The cultivator’s voice sped up until it sounded like it was in the human range again, but that didn’t make what he said any more intelligible. He was, of course, speaking a completely different language.

Willow caught Leopold’s eye then looked again at the group. They were clothed in the same colors that Sun Geon had worn, although that wasn’t definitive proof that they were from the Driving Rain sect. The small patch above each of their hearts that depicted a drop of rain provided that.

“Hello,” Willow shouted, and the man stopped gesticulating at them, cut off seemingly in sheer surprise. The dust settled more and revealed the old man still standing there with his cart, still staring hard at them, unshaken by the violent arrival.

“Um, is it too much to assume you speak English,” Willow shouted. The lead cultivator looked around at his compatriots, but they shook their heads in confusion.

That was a pretty universally understood ‘no’ then.

“We’re not from around here,” Willow said, and straightened up into a much less intimidating stance. She held her hands out to her side, palms forward. “We come in peace.”

The lead cultivator said something—not to her, because it was too soft, but to his group—and they assumed fighting stances. The old man’s face behind them twisted into a sneer of hatred. Willow watched as they flared with essence like lit torches.

“Oh! They might think we’re interlopers,” Leopold said.

“Yeah, I got that,” Willow said, and narrowed her eyes.

“No magic, just speed. Nothing they haven’t seen before. I don’t want to show our hand unless we have to.”

“And if we have to,” Leopold asked.

Willow dialed up her acceleration to the max. “Then we leave no survivors.”

The five exploded from their positions at once and shot around until they encircled Willow and Leopold equidistantly. It was clear they’d practiced such a formation before. In her second sight Willow saw their essence contort in what looked almost like a spell.

“Disrupt whatever they’re doing,” Willow shouted as she shot toward the one in front of her. Leopold fired off at an angle to intercept a man two points down and Willow tried to engage her target in hand-to-hand combat.

Just at that moment, the circle’s technique solidified.

Willow bounced off a clear barrier and fell to her ass in the dirt. Leopold grunted behind her and she assumed he’d run headfirst into the same thing. She got up and met the eyes of the man in front of her.

He was smiling. A ruthless, mirthless smile. The smile of a predator. He was saying something to her, but she couldn’t hear it through the barrier and her own acceleration. She didn’t dare dial down her spell again. Instead, she spread her fingers out on the invisible barrier and let her psychokinesis reach out.

The barrier was a cylinder twenty feet high and, unfortunately, capped. From the way it bowed when she pressed with even a little bit of psychokinetic force, it shouldn’t be hard to shatter. But that would show her hand, and she’d done enough of that with Sun Geon. If she was trapped in this land until they got the answers they sought, she wasn’t going to lay it all out on the table.

“Options,” she said, and luckily for her Leopold was still on the same acceleration level because he understood her nearly-ultrasonic squeak.

“Assuming you don’t want to just blast this thing,” Leopold said. “We could tunnel down. I don’t know if they thought of that.”

“Too much time,” she said as the sect members moved back together, walking leisurely. Were they going to leave them here encased in this barrier until someone else arrived? Or were they going to stay and watch? Whatever these people had in mind for her and Leopold, she didn’t want to kill them just yet. Not unless she didn’t have a choice.

The group of cultivators met on her side of the barrier and began to talk. The leader turned his eyes away from hers to accept a compliment from one of his teammates. That’s when she saw the old man move.

He let go of the handcart and launched himself over the wooden bar. He sped toward the group so fast there was no way they’d be able to see him. She could barely see him move, and she was under the influence of an acceleration spell.

One, the blade of his hand through a neck.

Two, a kick that splattered the cultivator’s separate halves against the barrier wall.

She missed three and four, but the fifth cultivator similarly splattered against the barrier, a fan of brains flung out to spray over the ruins of the square.

Something struck the barrier like a gong and the coagulated essence shattered. With nothing to cling to, the remains of the cultivators simply fell to the ground in a series of wet plops.

This old man was… beyond anything she’d seen. His speed was beyond even Sun Geon’s at the height of their battle. Willow seeped her psychokinesis into every fiber of her body and prepared for another devastating encounter.

Instead, as the sheet of gore finally landed, the old man was standing at his leisure, straight-backed and watching them. His eyes twinkled and there was the touch of a smile on his mouth.

“I wouldn’t call the language you speak English, per se, but we’ll get along well enough,” the old man said, then looked back at the mountain whose pinnacle was hidden in a rapidly darkening cloud.

“But we better get out of here, and quick.”