Calvin heard the sounds of the battle long before he was close enough to see it through the trees. Shouts and cries of pain mingled with the clash of weapons and the occasional voices of what sounded like panicked mortals. That was good, it meant they hadn’t been too late, but mortals would not last long if they were anywhere close to where cultivators fought. It complicated matters.
No longer bothering to ration his qi, Calvin accelerated, flashes of yang qi tracing his footsteps as he shot through the trees. Each stride carried him dozens of meters and avoiding the thinning trees became a challenge even for his cultivation-enhanced perception. Soon the edge of the forest neared and he slowed down slightly as he caught his first glimpse of Amber Crossing.
From a distance, Amber Crossing looked much like the other settlements he’d seen in Nine-Pine Gulch. A walled town stood at the center of a large open expanse cleared of trees, a dirt road leading up to the gate and fields of grain growing around it. This town’s only particular standout features were that it had two gates, one in the north and one in the east owing to what was ostensibly two ‘roads’ that passed through the town, and the distant rumble of a fast-moving stream that ran near the southern edge of the village.
Calvin was relieved to see pointed roofs peaking over the walls, with only the occasional curl of smoke rising from a chimney. He was a lot less happy about the shattered gate and scattered corpses surrounding it, but clearly the demonic cultivators had not had free reign of the village for long.
It was starting to get dark, but not so much as to impede Calvin’s gaze. Even from a distance he could see the fighting. Lulu and Wallis stood back to back in the road not far from the broken down gate, surrounded by no less than fifteen men in a hodgepodge of black robes and mortal clothing and armed with an equally eclectic array of weapons. Two corpses lay at their feet, several more scattered between them and the gate, and another robed corpse was pinned to the ground some distance away by a chunk of shattered gate longer than he was tall that had been driven through his back like an oversized stake.
Nearby huddled a small group of mortal men and women, bound hand and foot and dressed for farm work. Many bore injuries of varying severity, and they looked both terrified and overjoyed by their sudden rescue. Calvin guessed that these were the villagers who had been outside the walls when the demonic cultivators arrived, and had been gathered up in short order to ensure no one escaped their assault.
Seeing both Lulu and Wallis in one piece and still fighting took a huge weight off Calvin’s shoulders. The gulf between a Gathering and Foundation realm cultivator was vast, but far less so than the gap between later cultivation realms. Enough Gathering realm foes could bring down even capable fighters like Lulu and Wallis, especially since the cultists had Foundation realm cultivators of their own.
Still, it was a good thing that he had arrived when he did, because neither had lasted so long completely unscathed, and while the battle was not yet lost, they certainly weren’t winning either. Though he couldn’t make out the precise wound, Wallis was clearly favoring his left leg and the sheen of his metal-coated arms was beginning to grow dull as he ran low on qi. Lulu had lost one of her two spears and was fighting with her backup, the primary snapped in two with each piece left impaling one of the fallen foes littering the road. She had a nasty looking wound on one of her arms and a second on her forehead, blood dripping down her nose and into her left eye.
The two of them were being pressed hard, attacks and techniques coming at them from all angles giving them little choice but to stay on the defensive. The men stayed well out of range of Lulu’s spear and Wallis’s fists, slowly wearing them down. They did not seem to be particularly skilled fighters, wielding their spears, pikes, and occasional swords more like tools than weapons, but there were a lot of them and the four robed men among them seemed capable of several blood-based ranged techniques. One controlled a vicious looking blood whip, a second fired tiny knives of glistening blood, and a third used an acidic spray that Lulu was forced to redirect with gusts of wind. Calvin wasn’t sure what techniques the last of the robed men might be capable of, but he certainly looked menacing.
It was easy enough to guess what had happened. Lulu and Wallis had arrived soon after the demonic cultivators had broken down the gate and spread out among the village, leaving a handful of their number to watch the already gathered mortals and keep an eye out for anyone trying to escape. His friends had quickly overwhelmed that initial group, as well as the first few reinforcements, but then got bogged down and surrounded instead of implementing a fighting retreat.
For a team of two, they were in a very bad spot. At the current rate it would probably take the cultists another ten or twenty minutes, maybe longer, to fully wear the duo out, but when they no longer had enough qi to power their techniques, they would fall in short order. A final, desperate attack might claim the lives of a handful of cultists, but they were unlikely to successfully make a break for it, and even if they did succeed all these mortals would die and the cultists would vanish from this region like smoke.
But there was a reason that the Eight Peaks sect sent its disciples out in groups of three.
Calvin did not bother with stealth, for shock and speed would serve him better here than surprise. There was little he could do from so far away to help and he had no confidence in approaching such a large group unnoticed. Almost all the enemy cultivators were fully focused on containing Lulu and Wallis, and even a moment of distraction might give his friends the opportunity they needed to break their encirclement. If not, he’d do it the hard way.
He charged out of the forest faster than a galloping horse, ruddy orange fire blazing with lavender sparks gathering around him in a shell. Each step left a deep indentation in the ground beneath him, bursts of qi launching him forward faster and faster with each passing moment. Cries of alarm rang out from the cultists facing him and men spun around raising weapons, but he was already almost on top of them.
He flared his qi, aura crashing down on the nearest cultivators like a heavenly punishment. They outnumbered him significantly, but most were only in the middle stages of the gathering realm and they were already dealing with Lulu and Wallis’s own auras. One man’s knees buckled and gave way, and another had to grab at his neighbor’s shoulder for support.
Calvin set his gaze on the nearest of the robed cultivators, the one with the blood whip. It was hard to be certain through the haze of clashing auras, especially since all of the enemy cultivators had very similar qi attunements, but he was pretty sure that the robes denoted the leaders of the group and most likely the strongest cultivators among them. Them being in the Foundation realm would also explain why they were the only ones using active techniques. Five Foundation realm cultivators was one more than they’d estimated, but conveniently Wallis had already taken care of the extra.
The man was still turning when Calvin reached him, blood whip coiling around him like a snake ready to strike. He was a visibly older man and had likely only ignited later in life, his thinning hair and weathered skin a clear sign of someone who’d aged as a mortal. He had pale, sunken eyes, and a strange symbol drawn in blood and glowing with qi adorned his forehead. Though his robes were cut like a cultivator’s, from up close it was clear they were made from mortal fabric, cheaper than the most basic robes issued to all new disciples back at the sect. They looked alright, but they would not hold up to the rigors of a cultivator’s life for long.
Calvin reached the edge of the road where the ground went from soft soil to packed earth and leapt, twisting in mid air and condensing the fire he’d gathered into a blazing corona. Some of the men around his target swung at him with their weapons, but they were painfully slow and clumsy and he contemptuously shifted his body to avoid the only strike that wasn't going to miss either way.
[Fire on the Peaks]
The blood whip interposed itself between Calvin’s descending foot and its master, but it was clear that it was no true defensive technique. His descending foot sheared through it without slowing, disrupting the technique and sending a rain of boiling blood in all directions. He met the arm the man raised in a reflexive defense as though shielding his eyes from the sun and felt bone shatter and flesh burn, driving the man into the ground. Before the men around him could react, he kicked off his downed foe’s side and leapt back, narrowly avoiding a rain of crimson knives that reeked of rot and decay.
The man wasn’t dead, just driven to the ground with a broken arm and some bruising. Foundation realm cultivators were tough, difficult to seriously injure with blunt force alone. Even a serious break like that could be healed in just a matter of hours, less if he knew an appropriate technique. Then the brilliant trail of fire following in the wake of Calvin’s kick like a comet’s tail, blindingly bright in the twilight gloom, reached him and he screamed high and shrill, wildly clawing at the flames that clung to him like sticky sap.
Through the newly formed gap in the encirclement, Calvin grinned at Lulu and Wallis, ignoring the cries of panic, grief, and dismay from the demonic cultivators. After seeing their handiwork first hand, he had no pity left for them. “Figured you guys could use a hand!” he called out. “Sorry if I spoiled your fun!”
Unfortunately the cultists didn’t seem keen to give them time to banter. The fourth—now third—robed cultist, the one who’d been just standing menacingly while the others fought, brandished a wavy knife that looked like it was formed from crystalized blood with a spine for a grip. He looked young, barely more than a boy by mortal standards, but with the pristine features of a cultivator that made true age nigh impossible to judge, and on his face was a crazed smile. Crimson symbols blazed on his forehead, cheeks, and the backs of his hands, and now that he was closer, Calvin could sense the dense, coppery aura of a blood attuned cultivator standing at the peak of the Foundation realm. “Another sheep for the slaughter,” he cried out in apparent glee, “we shall feast well tonight my brothers!”
Well, that complicated matters. No wonder Wallis and Lulu had gotten bogged down.
No doubt this was the cult’s leader and the source of their issue here in Nine-Pine Gulch. Though his features looked local enough, Calvin could only assume that he was a disciple of some demonic clan or sect, perhaps one with a grudge against the Eight Peaks sect, sent to foment chaos in the sect’s territory.
That would explain the demonic hound—some manner of damaged familiar, now useless to its true master, offered to a disposable pawn as a potent force multiplier. With the beast at his side, he had a weapon that registered to most senses as being in the Foundation realm, but with enough power to put down an entire team of unprepared Foundation realm cultivators. If he’d been lucky, it might have taken two or three groups from surrounding powers before he drew the response of a higher-realm cultivator from the sect or a nearby city, by which time he would have been able to cause untold amounts of damage and potentially use the slaughter to advance to the Core realm himself.
It had been a good plan, but fortunately for everyone (except the cultists) the three of them were a lot more capable than the average group of Eight Peaks Outer Sect disciples that took missions such as this one.
Calvin leaned out of the way of a clumsy thrust from one of the spear-wielding cultists and shattered the weapon’s shaft with a casual flick of his hand. It was a mortal weapon, likely taken from a guard killed in one of the other villages they’d hit, and thus wholly unsuited for any true combat between cultivators. Sure the sharp point would injure even someone like him with enough force behind it, but it was simply too fragile to survive a clash with a cultivator’s strength behind it.
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The man stared for a moment at his suddenly useless weapon and his already pale skin went ashen. He was thin and reedy-looking, wearing a finely made but ill-fitting coat that hung off his narrow shoulders like a coatrack, the sleeves nearly covering his hands. He looked scared more than anything, but the Gathering realm aura of blood and death radiating off him was an unmistakable death sentence in most civilized parts of the Empire without the backing of a major power. There were very few acceptable ways to cultivate such an attunement.
The man dropped what was left of his looted weapon and tried to scramble back away from Calvin, but the cultist behind him roughly shoved him back towards Calvin.
Calvin scanned the faces of the cultists and found apprehension and fear lurking in the eyes of many of the Gathering realm demonic cultivators. They’d seemed all confident and gung ho when they’d had Lulu and Wallis surrounded and at their mercy, but now the situation had changed and they were not nearly as eager to fight and die as their leader. Taking out one of their ‘elites’ in a single blow—even one that had taken surprise and several long seconds to execute—had likely shaken their resolve.
Even one of the other robed men—the one with the caustic blood mist rather than the knives—looked somewhat out of his depth. Calvin wondered if he’d ever even met a Foundation realm cultivator outside his little murder circle before today. He’d probably felt invincible butchering mortals for power, and now realized that he had only seemed like a big fish because he was swimming in a very small pond.
Calvin decided to strike while the iron was hot. He flared his qi higher, the air around him fizzing with sparks of pale lavender and crimson as it clashed against the auras of the demonic cultivators. Several of the surrounding men took instinctive steps back and the man he’d disarmed whimpered and dropped to his hands and knees, scrambling back a half step until he ran into the man behind him again.
“I am Calvin, disciple of the Eight Peaks sect. You hunt mortals on lands given by ancestral right and Imperial treaty into the care of my sect. Surrender now and cooperate, and you may be granted leniency.” That was a lie. They were all dead men, except perhaps the ringleader if he could prove he was someone worth sparing. That idea stung at Calvin, especially after seeing first hand the atrocities he’d perpetrated, but that was the way of things sometimes. The sect would be extremely upset with him if he knowingly killed the grandson or nephew of some Soul realm elder from a rival sect.
Seeing what he was doing, Lulu and Wallis joined him, flaring their qi higher and pressing down on the surrounding cultists with their auras. Doing so was more costly than simply flaring one’s qi regularly, but it was a very intimidating display to an already fearful enemy.
Some of the cultists looked around fearfully, seemingly waiting for someone else to speak up first. None of them looked like they wanted to be the first to surrender, eyes flickering to their impassive leader, but neither did they seem keen on continuing to fight. Many threw terrified glances at the unmoving figure in burnt-through rags lying in a limp pile of blackened flesh and charred fabric. He’d stopped screaming after only a few seconds and now lay still, the last lingering shadows of his aura slowly dissipating like bloody smoke in a stiff breeze.
He’d been a lot weaker than Calvin had anticipated, barely a step up from the man Lulu and Wallis had dealt with back at the farmstead. He’d expected his technique to seriously injure the man, or at least reveal any defensive trump cards he might possess, but instead he’d just…died. It was almost pathetic. How many mortals had he killed, and for what? A Foundation of sand and untreated wood. What a waste.
The leader of the group looked at his faltering men and scoffed. “Tch, cowards!” he spat. “It is just one more sect dog baying at his betters, while we are the chosen few!” His voice echoed in the dark stillness, the glowing symbols on his face casting his features into stark contrast against the darkness and highlighting the pallor of his skin. No one moved. “Gah!” He spat on the ground. “Must I do everything myself?”
Calvin moved before the other peak Foundation realm cultivator could raise his oddly shaped blade, a burst of golden sparks erupting from his feet and hand extended with metal qi sheathing his fingers like the blade of a knife, but he was still too slow. The boy slashed his palm open with the tip of his crimson knife, far too much blood spraying in all directions to come from such a small wound, and raised it in the air in front of him.
The boy’s hand flared with crimson light that briefly turned twilight into day and erupted in a wave of coppery qi that rapidly expanded in all directions. The technique slammed into Calvin with all the subtlety of a raging bull in a china shop, a blinding haze of red hot violence clawing at his eyes and inhibitions, and continued on, not differentiating between friend and foe. For a single instant an intense, addictive desire for violence almost consumed him, drowning his thoughts and feelings in an ocean of blood. He wanted to fight, to kill, to torture. His teeth ached to bite into tender flesh and he could almost imagine the orgasmic sensation of rivulets of blood leaking down his chin as hot, fresh meat kissed his tongue.
An hour ago, the technique might have caught him. It was powerful, profound, and overwhelming. It attacked his mind, body, and spirit from a thousand angles, countless razor sharp needles digging into his skin and wriggling into any tiny gap they found. It was extremely reminiscent of the hound’s howl, a nigh identical delivery method with a different payload behind it, and with only a fraction less power behind it than what the crippled Core realm beast had been able to muster. His usual methods to fight off such a technique would have been ineffective at best, and potentially actively harmful if he wasn’t careful.
But Calvin refused to fall for the same trick twice. He’d already seen one way to combat such a technique, and though it was hard to say for sure in the moment, he thought the hound had actually been more proficient with its version. He’d spent much of the time he’d needed to recover and reach the village considering how he could have defeated the spirit beast without relying on a mysterious treasure to save him, and now it was time to put theory into practice.
Calvin met blood with fire, molten qi flooding from his channels into his body and spirit in a makeshift reinforcement technique that hurt like hell but burned away the foreign influence like frost before the rising sun. It was not a perfect solution, but it would do until he could find or develop a better counter.
He was not a moment too soon. He dropped to the ground, a spray of tiny, wicked-looking knives of crystalized blood passing through where his head had been a second earlier, then lunged at the blood cultivator with his hand extending towards his target’s throat like a striking snake. The man seemed shocked by his instant reaction, eyes widening as he backpedaled, nearly tripping over a pothole in the ill-kept dirt road in his haste. At the last moment, with Calvin’s hand only inches from his body, he raised his still-bleeding hand and a translucent dome of crystalized blood formed between them.
Calvin’s hand struck the hastily raised barrier with the force of a charging bull. The impact rang like a gong, dust blasting away from the two of them and Calvin’s robes snapping in the wind. The barrier warped where his fingers hit it, distending under the force before springing back into shape, but there were visible cracks in the structure spreading away from the point of impact like an enormous spider’s web. Behind his barrier the demonic cultist suddenly looked much less sure of himself, eyes wide as he gnawed on his lower lip. It was hard to tell through the dome, but Calvin thought the glowing symbol on the back of his bleeding hand had dimmed somewhat, as had the one on his left cheek.
Calvin was loath to take his eyes off the enemy, but he risked a glance behind him. Even in just the short few moments that had passed, the tense standoff had devolved into a bloodbath. Lulu and Wallis fought back to back against a half-crazed swarm of lesser cultivators, the other cultists fighting each other almost as much as they were his friends. They’d managed to at least partially resist the technique, at least in so much as to avoid fighting one another, but it was clear that it was affecting them regardless.
Wallis fought with a reckless abandon utterly at odds with his usual surgical precision, accepting glancing blows that left red marks on his skin and tore his under layers in order to dish out crude strikes with unarmored fists and even occasional kicks. Lulu meanwhile was clearly fighting the urge to surge into the thick of things and leave Wallis’s back exposed, striking out with her spear and then catching herself before she could follow up on an opening. It made her slow and clumsy, her mind clearly elsewhere as she fought purely off reflex. She was still holding her own, but she was barely a shadow of her usual self. If not for the discord in the cultist’s ranks, the two of them would have been overwhelmed in short order, drowned under the weight of their foes’ numbers.
Calvin met the cult leader’s eyes. The crystalline nature of the barrier distorted his vision, but not so much that he couldn’t see the other man’s face. “Last chance,” he told the man flatly. “Disperse your technique and surrender, and maybe I’ll leave your cultivation intact when I drag you back to the sect. You’d better hope whatever idiot made you think causing trouble in the territory of a Great Sect was a good idea has the influence to bail you out.”
The man barred his teeth, pearly whites tinted crimson by the barrier between them. “You sect dogs are all the same,” he spat. “You talk a big game, but you’re nothing but bark. Mortals, cultivators, everyone dies just the same. Sheep to the slaughter, blood to the altar.”
Calvin smiled back. “Oh good. The hard way it is.” He twisted his torso and, in a single smooth motion he’d practiced a million times, struck, a flare of yang qi accelerating his fist just as it could quicken his stride. His fist impacted the barrier in the same spot as his fingers had only seconds before and an even louder bong rang out across the field, scaring a flock of birds from their perches in the forest. The barrier shivered, droplets of blood spraying from it to speckle the cultist’s robes and face, and the cracks deepened, spreading to cover nearly the entire dome.
It held, but only barely, and Calvin was pleased to see the glowing rune on the back of his enemy’s right hand nearly go out. That was a neat trick. A talisman more than a technique, perhaps. He wondered how many more tricks the walking corpse had under its belt before it gave up and died.
The cultist took an instinctive step back, then stepped forward again and brandished his knife in Calvin’s direction with almost impressive bravado. “I don’t know how you broke my technique, but it’s time for you to die. Let me show you what a real hound does to a runty pup like you!”
The man clenched his cut open hand into a fist and the trickle of blood leaking down his hand and forearm became a flood. The rune on the back of his injured hand flared to life and he shoved two fingers into his mouth in a gesture Calvin hadn’t seen anyone use in years but recognized instantly. He was pretty sure he knew what was about to happen, but if he was wrong…
He struck again and this time the barrier shattered, a fine mist of blood spraying away from the point of impact to paint the ground, grass, and his foe’s pale skin a ruddy crimson. Still, it did its job, halting his strike for the crucial moment the cultist thought he needed.
The man blew and qi erupted from his mouth in a rapidly propagating wave, carried along with an earsplitting whistle loud enough to be heard for miles around. Calvin clenched his teeth in pain, the sound loud enough to hurt even with his enhanced constitution. Hopefully the mortals nearby were okay.
A smug grin spread across the young cult leader’s face and he spread his arms, palms raised to the heavens. “Behold, Clive of the Eight Peaks sect, your doom!”
Calvin tilted his head to the side, pretending not to be searching every shadow behind the man for a sign of a second Hound of Conquest. “Wow, impressive,” he deadpanned.
The cultist blinked and spun around, clearly shocked by what had happened. “Huh?” he exclaimed, voice losing some of its crazed menace. Calvin wondered what exactly that technique had been meant to do. Perhaps the Hound had had some manner of stealth or movement technique, and the whistle was meant to signal it to appear? Or maybe it was a more complex spatial technique, meant to summon a familiar to its master’s side? It had certainly used a lot of qi, the symbol on the back of his bleeding hand having lost a great deal of its radiance as he whistled.
Whatever the case might be, there did not appear to be a second hound. Calvin reached into his robe and withdrew the beast core, ignoring the Scroll’s sudden influx of information as he held it in his palm. “You mean this doom?” he questioned casually. “If you think an oversized––”
The man took one look at the beast core in his hand and blanched, his already pale skin turning as white as a sheet. Without a moment’s warning he whirled around and bolted down the road as quickly as his feet could carry him. A moment later blood formed a crystalline shell around his feet and he accelerated, sliding across the packed dirt like it was ice without leaving a single trace of his passage.
Calvin blinked once, genuinely shocked. Then he cursed loudly, shoved the beast core back into the pocket from which he’d taken it, and took off after the fleeing cultist.
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