Four hawks spread their wings and beat upon the air, launching into the sky. Their feathers were lined in wisps of blue and white, moving like flames, still cold against the pre-dawn darkness of the sky. The elements within them blended and flowed, wood to fire, but fire turned to piercing metal, or freezing water, and the scent of earth waiting too long in the hot sun for rain. The elements transformed within the spirits in ways that Tian would have said were impossible, shifting in ways he simply didn’t have words for. He knew there were only five elements but myriad variations within them. Once again, he was vividly reminded that he was often wrong.
There was a knot at the heart of them. Tian tried to focus on it and really see what it was. A node of some kind, a twisted mass of energy.
“Shamans! The hawks are Grand Shamans wearing spirits!” Liren yelled as she polled the boat around. She really did have good eyes, and a knack for picking apart formations.
The hawks were beating strongly upwards, climbing for height. Liren thoughtfully bounced a stone in her hand, then threw it hard at one of them.
“Tsch! Dodged.”
“Let them get higher, then use the bewildering mists part of the spell.”
“The what?” Liren gave him a sharp look.
“The cloud that forms around the boat when you use the spell. Did you forget? You can-”
“Turn it into a trapping formation, damn! Distract them while I get it set up.”
Tian nodded and turned towards the rising hawks. They were coming on fast. He might not have Liren’s arm or her supply of head-sized stones, but he did have some useful bricks and flagstones stowed in one of his rings. He found a nice flat stone, a mere four or five pounds, and flicked it towards a rising shaman. It spun through the air with a loud whirr, almost a tearing sound. The Hawk twisted away with frantic flaps. There might be a spirit around the shaman, but nobody reacts calmly to big rocks coming at you fast.
Tian’s hand rose and fell, filling with stones and throwing them, over and over. The hawks were forced to scramble, still rising, but no longer able to come straight at him. Tian refined his technique, staggering his throws to try and cluster three or four rocks around a single hawk. With a bit more practice, he thought he might actually succeed in knocking one out of the air.
He thought too much. He watched the elements twist around the hawks. First one, then the all four wrapped themselves in streams of wind. The rocks were deflected away. Not very strongly, but enough. The shamans started rising quickly, sealing off the four directions before closing in on the boat.
“Those hawk-spirits are very big, aren’t they?” Tian murmured, his eyes moving quickly between them. He kept throwing stones. Anything to keep them distracted. It helped distract him too. Any of the hawks were big enough to swallow their boat whole. It brought back unpleasant memories. “Ascended to the Heavenly Realm, saw visions of the true infinite, and I’m throwing rocks at the birds. Cultivation is a scam.”
The hawks had lost their fear of his rocks. Two flared their wings and held their positions ahead of the boat. Two more came from behind and on either side. Fish on a cutting board. Liren didn’t smile. She clasped her hands, each mudra cleanly executed, the last accompanied by a heavy exhale. The long breath blew out a dense cloud, jet black in the night. The hawks weren’t deterred. They might not be able to see, but the boat was right in front of them. Even if it moved, how far could it shift in a single second?
Not far. They were quite right. Not far at all. A scant fifteen feet. But the bewildering spell in the fog concealed their movements perfectly. The two hawks swooped in, and slammed into each other. Flames of ice and fire intersected, negating each other, or cascading into miniature explosions and implosions, a string of shattering bangs and pops deafening those unfortunate enough to be close. The birds themselves lost their shapes, becoming amorphous.
For a moment, Tian thought they looked more like the sketch of a high flying hawk that a child might draw, than true birds. For a moment, he thought he saw the idea of a hawk. His stomach twisted as his mind rebelled, trying to force what he was seeing into familiar shapes. He grabbed the edge of the boat, trying to steady himself, to anchor himself to something tangible and real.
Liren wasn’t one for waiting. She could see through the cloud much better than Tian could. She also had a much better throwing arm. Her hand raised up, and filled with a short spear. She took a single step, and her arm snapped forward. The spear left her hand in a brilliant flash. There was no scream afterward. Just a rain of blood on the steppes below, and two mangled corpses slapping into the hard earth, messily pinned together.
The two hawks that were blocking the boat screeched in rage, but didn’t rush closer. Tian felt the elements around them twist, forming into dense knots. Wood and fire wove, compressed,
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“Liren, dive!”
Pillars of fire ripped through the cloud, slicing through the darkness. Liren threw the boat into motion, but the flames followed her down. Coming from two directions, there would be no escaping the flames. They had seconds. Maybe just a single second. Liren met Tian’s eyes. Then she stowed the boat in her storage ring.
The two strayed cranes floated in the air, trapped between the heavens above and the earth below. Then they fell. The hawks cried and breathed out their flames yet again, seeing victory in their grasp. Tian and Liren didn’t wait to be hit. Each summoned a flying sword and split apart. Liren dove in, charging straight at one of the hawks. Tian fell back, and circled in the opposite direction from Liren. His fingers twitched, wanting to call out the needles hidden in his sleeve, then stilled.
It wasn’t the moment. Instead, he threw another rock. Then another. Then another. The bird screeched, the Shaman within clearly furious that Tian was still playing around with stones. Another pillar of fire lashed out, tracking the diving and twisting Tian.
“Look down, idiot! Is that your tent on fire, or your mothers? Oh, how thoughtless of me. I just assumed your mother was human. That was rude. Maybe she’s the screaming steak on the hoof.”
Tian’s voice carried through the cold air, loud enough to echo over the rolling grassland. His words weren’t idle. They were battling over the campground. Tian felt a bit sick for all the slaves down there, and the morbid irony of the shaman killing their own people didn’t change that. He wasn’t in a position to protect them. The fortress loomed behind them. He couldn’t get a clean feel on how many cultivators were in there, but he was certain more than one Heavenly Person was stationed inside the wards. Showing excessive concern for human life in front of heretics would be unwise.
“Bastard Sorcerer!” The hawk swooped down and spat a narrow jet of flame. The fire came horizontally, clearly trying to avoid the people below.
Tian declined to cooperate, and dove towards the steppe. “I’m not the one roasting his father and baking his mother. Which tent is yours, I’ll look after your valuables for you. Someone needs to think of your grave goods, and you’ve killed everyone else.”
That wasn’t true. The camp was far, far too big for a few blasts of fire to kill everyone. The screaming horses and people, the smell of smouldering felt and burning wood, that was very real. The pain was real. Tian hoped the guilt was real. Anything to distract the shaman. Anything to make this an unfair fight in his favor. He flew down, not going as fast as he could. He wanted the Shaman’s eyes on him.
“I’ll kill-” Tian spun around and charged at the hawk, pulling his staff from his ring. “Fool!” The hawk flared its wings, and opened its beak spit fire once more.
There was a yell in a foreign tongue. A warning. Too late. The horn spear burst through the hawk, scattering it, leaving a man in a felt robe covered in five colored ribbons hanging from its shaft. A long flick saw the body discarded, falling in a bloody spray onto the smouldering grassland. Tian sped past Liren, straight into the waiting claws of the hawk chasing her. He had timed it exactly, swinging the staff with the full force of his momentum and weight, spiking his staff spell to maximize the impact. Crafted wood met spirit claws with a dull thud. It was hard to say who was more surprised when the hawk was sent tumbling back.
“How? It’s ten times my size?” Tian didn’t dwell on the thought. He dashed in closer, the flying sword carrying him directly to the breast of the hawk. Licks of flame scorched his skin and corroded his robes. The linen couldn’t hold up. The mermaid silk did just fine. His elemental sense was of little help. The flow of qi through the hawk was nonsensical, maddening. But then, that’s why he chose the staff. No need to overthink. Just whack the birdie with the big stick. His back flexed, his snake-tight waist twisted, the heavy staff swinging around like a weathervane in a hurricane. Landing like a weathervane in a hurricane on an inadequately shuttered window.
The spirit bird didn’t have ribs, but something shattered under the impact. The vague elemental blob of the shaman within the hawk came into sharp relief. Tian adjusted his grip, and before the bird could recover, he thrust forward. This time, he didn’t make his staff heavier. He concentrated a narrow pike of wood qi out from the tip, aiming for the heart meridian and the middle dantian. The wooden staff couldn’t reach the shaman. His qi could.
It was, he decided, middling effective. It didn’t kill the Grand Shaman, but it did make his heart speed up, beating furiously. The shaman’s eyes rolled up in his skull, his face flushed as his eyelids fluttered. The spirit hawk screeched in outrage, but its summoner could no longer sustain it, the licking flames of feathers scattering into the night sky.
Tian didn’t leave him suffering. Once the spirit vanished and the shaman was limply falling from the sky, he swung his staff out once more. The shaman’s head exploded. The over-vitalized heart pumped furiously. If the Yuu were right about spirits rising where blood was spilled, Fort Askarmand was going to become a forbidden land full of furious ghosts.
Tian quickly spun around, his staff twirling, searching for new targets. Nothing else showed itself. He slowly breathed out, not completely relaxing his alertness.
“All set over there?”
“Clear over here.” Liren yelled back. “You?”
“No signs of trouble.” The two drifted down out of the sky, keeping a decent distance from the fort and the encampment.
“As ambushes went, not bad.” Tian shrugged. “Pretty good, I’d say.”
“An assault to trigger an ambush to set up a counter-kill. Crazy, but I guess it worked.” Liren shrugged back.
Tian slapped the back of his neck. “Ouch! Ambitious mosquito.” Then froze, his hand still touching the back of his neck.
“Brother?”
“Now that’s not nice. Do you know how expensive it is to breed a Hearthief wasp? No, no, miss. You drop that spear of yours right this second. Refuse, and I will slit your companion’s throat. Or you can watch his soul be devoured and his body become my puppet. Either way, your battle is over.” A thick knife was pressed to Tian’s throat, the heretic emerging from the shadow he hid in. “Baiting an assault to trigger an ambush to set up a counter-kill then launching a counter-counter-ambush. Now that’s how the game is really played. Ah well. At least you learned the rules before the end.”