A mathematician would have wept at the elegance of the curve. Anyone who had ever received an errant blow to a tender place would weep, or at least wince, at where the curve ended. Still, the aesthetic quality of the moment couldn’t be denied. A young, pretty looking madman displaying extraordinary muscular control and coordination, driving his dainty foot directly into an austere, older man’s crotch with the speeding fury of a charge of lancers and the profundity of a natural law.
Alas, the beauty of nature is often corrupted by the meddling of men. Tian felt his foot land on something not-quite-solid, like he had kicked heavy mud. Whatever it was, it blunted the impact. It did not, however, completely cancel the inertia. Tian lifted Heartmend up off his feet and eight inches into the air, though the heretic did manage to land on his feet in a stumble.
Heartmend didn’t freeze up. While he found his feet, his hands were in motion, striking out with unadorned fists that traveled lightly but made the air crack as they moved. Tian met clenched fists with open palms, reveling in the feeling of fighting at full strength. He worked towards the older man’s chest, striking out, trying to land a Thunderous Palm somewhere terminal.
“You don’t care what happens to the town behind you? Perhaps you are more indifferent to mortal morality than you pretend.” Heartmend sneered. Heartmend didn’t care to let Tian land a slap, sharp punches snapping out, trying to leave a fist sized hole in his head.
“You already claim to have the power to destroy it. Why should I give you power over me too?” Tian flowed through Thunderous Palms, swinging heavily, high and low. Each move was countered, bruises rapidly forming on the insides of his arms, and half his mind was fixated on dodging. Heartmend’s boxing seemed simple, but it was brutal and incisive. Utterly free of any ornamentation or refinement. A true killing art, Tian realized. One refined through endless suffering.
Heartmend wasn’t some untrained bandit getting by on raw cultivation. He was an old monster, the product of the cruel selection of the heretics. It was axiomatic amongst the Outer Court- a low level heretic was no trouble at all, but their higher levels were nothing but trouble. Jabs and hooks rushed out, quick steps controlled the distance. The struggle was as much about who controlled the timing as it was about who could land the heaviest blow.
“I would spare the town if you agreed with me. If I had been able to persuade you-”
“If you had persuaded me, I wouldn’t have cared about the destruction of the town.” Tian shook his head. If he wasn’t fully occupied, he would have rapped his knuckles against his skull. Despite everything, Heartmend had managed to drag Tian into his rhythm of thinking.
“Why the hell am I still talking to you? Sis’ Liren, are you having a snack or something? Get this bastard!”
There was a muffled oath, and then a rush of feet as Liren charged in with her spear.
“Two on one? How virtuous. What chivalrous heroes you are.” Heartmend’s long sleeves were flying now, whipping around to parry Hong’s spearthrusts as he relied on his footwork to keep away from Tian.
Tian couldn’t read the flow of elements through Heartmend. The man was plainly using his vital energy, and the whole world was made of the five elements. You couldn’t just not use them. He could just about believe his awareness of them could be suppressed by an array…
“Array master! You are a damn array master. You set up the array at the Copper Roof Inn too!” Hong roared. “What the hell is it with you and kids, you nasty bastard?”
His sister really was very smart. When her brain was working properly.
“Children are the future. A future of misery. How much better for them to be spared-”
“This rot again? Try harder, not even you believe that!” Tian snarled.
“All that crap about an emperor to come?” Hong asked, her spear thrusting at Heartmend’s guts with great enthusiasm.
“Nothing to do with me. Just a story people tell themselves. I’d tell them otherwise, if they asked. But they didn’t.”
Tian grunted. Heartmend had moved entirely to defense once Liren joined the fight, but he still sounded composed. Which meant he wasn’t really pressured, which meant he was stalling. And you never, ever, gave an array master time to prepare. The image of five array masters killing hundreds of horrors from tens of yards away, dozens at a time, remained vivid in Tian’s mind. He desperately wished he had his rope dart. This would be much easier if he did. Well, easy or not, it had to be done.
Tian rushed in, getting as close to Heartmend’s chest as he could manage. No geomantic compass, so that meant whatever was being activated was, almost certainly, pressed against the older man’s skin.
Tian slapped out with his palms, driving his right hand straight for Heartmend’s chest. As he shifted his weight for the palm strike, he drove his knee into the heretic’s thigh. Not debilitating, but it threw the older man off balance for a moment just as he would rather retreat.
“Naive!” The heretic chopped his hand down towards Tian’s neck, not bothering to protect his chest. Tian’s palm landed, and it might as well have been striking a steel pillar wrapped in pillows. He had only felt something like this once before- on the top of his foot, as it drove into Heartmend’s crotch.
“A soft inner armor that covers everywhere his robes do?” But that was fine. He wasn’t aiming for an immediate kill. Besides, he had his sister behind him. As the chop came down, it was intercepted by a thrusting spear aimed at Heartmend’s forehead. The heretic changed his chop to a sweeping block with an oath and tried to dodge. With his weight thrown off, the best he could manage was a stagger back at an angle to the thrust.
Tian didn’t have all his fingers. The ones he did have were quite strong. He latched on to the lapel of the heretic’s robe, and fell back in the opposite direction to the older man’s retreat.
The raggedy old robe didn’t rip apart. It did, however, yank open, revealing the soft armor below. Though soft armor hardly seemed adequate to describe it. Threads of gleaming crystal wove through a softly lustrous grey fabric. If there was a pattern to the flow of the elements through the glimmering threads, Tian couldn’t see it. The lines seemed to scatter the elements, making them more chaotic, but also blending them into the chaotic qi of the atmosphere. Blinding the senses he developed in the Five Turn Caverns.
It also let the heretic shrug off his palm blows like he was wearing steel armor. Which was frustrating. Worse was that, this close, he could feel the qi gathering on the robe. It was gradual, but it was definitely building.
“Sister-”
“I know.” Liren kept stabbing at Heartmend’s face. She had told Tian many times that, while it often made sense to stab the rest of the body, stabbing someone in the face tended to grab all their attention. She was right, too. Heartmend ignored Tian and focused on defending his head, trusting his soft armor to protect him.
Tian decided to see if the knees were as well protected as the chest. He started moving to flank the array master, his kicks low and heavy. He didn’t have any profound art backing them up, just a lot of weight and muscle in a dense package. The results were mixed. The legs were armored too, but the armor seemed to diffuse the impact rather than simply make it vanish, confirming what he had guessed before. Tian grinned nastily, and tried a kick to the ankle. Heartmend stopped his wheeling parries to jump back.
“You two are more than testing my patience. I pursue indifference to the world. I didn’t say I had found it yet!”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Qi convulsed around Heartmend, rushing down the glassy threads like a riot of rainbows. Snaking pythons of bluish light condensed around his arms- serpents of fog and moonlight, carrying a freezing air.
The heretics’ movements changed, flowing from defense to offence, letting the blue-white pythons fly towards Tian and Hong. The snakes grew and retracted with each swing, first longer than Liren’s spear, then barely longer than Heartmend’s arms. A change he used to his advantage when turning or blocking.
The appearance of the ghostly snakes turned a one sided beating into a one sided beating in the opposite direction. Tian and Hong were forced to focus completely on defense as the whipping snakes struck from bewildering angles and a constantly changing range. Liren tried to block with her spear, only to see the shaft pass through the snake without a ripple. But when the snake landed, it froze the skin and deadened the vital energy. Liren staggered back, suddenly gasping, trying to keep her spearpoint up and aimed between Heartmend’s eyebrows.
Tian dashed in from the rear, trying to capitalize on the older man’s distraction, but wound up dashing back out again. The snakes were not bound to inertia, and launched themselves backwards, directly into the line of his charge. Tian desperately shifted from side to side, trying to keep up the pressure. Eventually, someone would show a gap, and then they would die. Tian was determined to make it the Heretic. As was a conspicuous absence from their party.
A shadow passed overhead, like a drifting cloud across the sun. Tian swallowed a grin as he dodged the snakes, letting some graze against him. His Hell Suppressing Sutra broke down the invading cold. It just took a little time. He was happy to look like weakening prey. Desperate prey.
“Same old formation, Sis. I’ll hold him, you hit him.” Tian rushed in, dodging what he could dodge and simply accepting the blows he couldn’t avoid. His every move screaming his will to sacrifice himself for his sister.
“Fool!” Heartmend gathered the cold snakes onto his palms and slapped them down towards Tian’s head. Tian nimbly ducked and with an explosion of energy, launched himself backwards. Carefully timed for Hong’s spear to drill towards Heartmend’s head yet again. Heartmend shifted away with an oath, not able to get a hand up in time. Once again he was off balance, all his weight concentrated on one leg.
Pinned, immobilized by weight and inertia. Just for a single second. Just for long enough. A torso sized boulder fell like a meteor from the heavens, smashing into the heretic’s back. The crane flew in behind the rock, stabbing furiously with her beak, trying to rip apart the same kind of evil creature that had shoved it into a cage.
The defensive array in the robes could withstand a lot. They couldn’t take all this. The array exploded into bewildering streams of color, flashing and moving and changing as Heartmend staggered around. They started making a keening wail, sliding and strobing across the auditory spectrum, as their lights dazzled and blinded.
You could crack an array by destroying the nodes, by disrupting the energy flow, or just by hitting it a lot. The crane had decided “Big rock from high up, moving fast” was hitting it hard enough. It seemed she was right.
“Got you!” Hong’s spear lashed out, drilling towards the heretic’s chest. There was enough power left in the robe that she didn’t manage to pierce through. That was fine with her. The flashing lights pulsed, then contracted-
“BACK!”
Then exploded.
It took the dust and echoes of the boom a few seconds to clear away.
“Your eyes always were faster than mine, Sis.”
“I dunno why. Not like my perception art is anything special. You really don’t see how they all move?”
“I see it, just not as fast as you. It’s usually gone by the time I know where it is.” The two walked over to the shallow crater. To their shock, Heartmend was still alive at the bottom of it. Though that didn’t seem likely to last long. Blue-white mist was rising from him, frost corroding his body from his fingertips and toes, rolling upward and inward.
“Good news. Or, I suppose, indifferent news. You get to return to the immensity of the dao sooner rather than later, spared the irrationality of the world. You… really just coincidentally ran into us here?” Tian squatted down next to the dying heretic.
“Not exactly. I was looking for you, but not very hard. I heard the Black Acacia Daoist had killed you, but I thought that if you did live, you would come through this way and it was something to do. I was delayed coming here when an old diviner insisted on reading my fortune. I humored him for a few minutes then left. The marrying maiden appeared when he tossed the sticks- unable to have things my own way. I was coming to find converts in the town, using the rest to fuel their growth. Ah, this poor suffering world. This poor suffering world.”
Hong shoved Tian’s shoulder roughly. “Hell with all that, how do you get those damned spikes out of the kids? You made them-”
“I? That is far beyond my abilities. Those are some of the unnecessary things the Gorge gave me. As far as I know, once on the spike, never off it. At least not in this life.” Heavenmend’s voice was starting to slur, his breaths were coming in gasps. “There are a half dozen of them in my ring, you will have ample opportunity to examine them, I’m sure. I’ve answered you honestly, but I demand one answer from you. Do you truly believe this kingdom is worth saving? That your damned mountain is worth saving?”
They looked at each other for a moment, then Tian answered. “No. But some of the people are, and that’s worth the effort.”
“Absurd. Mere sentimentality. How absurd.” Heartmend’s voice trailed off.
Hong reached out and removed the storage ring from his frozen finger, then asked, “What are you doing?”
Tian had started gingerly untying Heartmend’s belt. “You aren’t curious about how he was able to do all that?”
“Not really. Whatever was built into his robes just got destroyed.”
“Still. Worth searching him.” Tian’s fingers danced over the freezing skin and icy cloth. “A diviner stopped his path for just long enough to run into us. What a… curious coincidence. Incidentally, Daoist Bonecaster, if you try to run, please do remember that my sister and I are very fast, and the crane is even faster.”
“Why would I run?” The scruffy diviner laughed awkwardly. He had put himself between Cao Sen and the battle, protecting the tormented man from any careless attack that might have reached him.
“You just happened to be here?” Hong asked.
“I did. I truly did. I’ll swear on my dao heart, I came here because of the omens and for no other reason!”
“Let’s see, there was Daoist Starcaller who stopped us long enough to intercept the Yellow Bandana Bandits…” Tian kept his hands moving. “Then Outspread Discombobulated, who was able to provide remarkably exact directions on where to find the crane…”
“Wait, what was his name?” Hong asked.
“Outspread Discombobulated. You didn’t ask?”
“He just gave me the directions and said I was supposed to tip him!”
“Oh that little…! He was paid in advance!” Tian snorted in irritation. Anything else that might have been on Heartmend had been destroyed.
“And then we have the good daoist Bonecaster, who happened to be moved by pity enough to comfort Cao Sen here, based on what he read in his tortoise shell.” Liren continued to connect the divinatory dots.
“It’s the truth, Daoist Hong. My oath on it.” The diviner nodded strongly.
“I believe you.” Tian stood and dusted his hands. They had gotten very cold. Whatever had happened when the array shattered was apparently still happening. “However, what you think you saw and what actually happened can be two very different things. Tell me, Daoist Bonecaster, do you know the daoist title ‘Starsieve?’”
“Eh? I would assume every diviner in the kingdom knows that honorable ancient’s name. He compiled the Three Divinatory Classics and freely distributed them to the people. That was many thousands of years ago, of course, but his name is still faithfully stamped on each copy printed. A good reminder that one’s virtue can outlive them.” Bonecaster smiled slightly and stroked his broom-beard.
Tian and Hong shared a long look. “We need to get back to the mountain now.”
“Yes. Yes, we really do. I think it’s long past time we had a chat with our elders. A good chat.” Tian nodded.
“Yeah. Respectful, but frank. We should pick up snacks as souvenirs.”
“Good thinking. Cao Sen?” Tian squatted down in front of the tormented man.
“Yes, Immortal?”
“You really would rather suffer in that horrible thing?”
“I dare not remove it. If I took it off, I would be outlawed, executed, and the debt would fall on my family. They might even share my guilt and be judicially punished too.”
“Lovely.” Tian shook his head and looked over at Hong, who nodded and pulled out a piece of gold.
“Can we trust you to see the debt is paid off and this… thing… comes off his neck lawfully?” She asked Bonecaster.
“Of course, Daoist Hong, of course! I’d only be too happy.” Bonecaster nodded fervently.
Tian turned away and looked up the mountain. This whole time, they had been dancing in the Elder’s palm. Ever since they went onboard the Windblown Manor, ever since they returned to the Kingdom, Starsieve had been there to nudge them along.
“Alright, you have shown us everything,” Tian muttered. “But why is it so important that we understand? And even if we do understand, just what do you expect us to do about it?”