The formation spread across the sky like a living thing. Tendrils of gold and red light unfurled like ferns, spreading geometric traceries across the sky. Seal scrips in some ancient tongue manifested in squares and circles, defining spaces within the broader eight sided formation.
The three headed, formerly six armed, heretic turned one head in the direction of the fortress, and for a moment, his attacks slowed. Heretics were, if nothing else, quick on the uptake when it came to betrayal. A pair of leonine eyes blazed with fury, but didn’t bother with any harsh words. The human head spat out a clot of blood that spread into wings tens of yards wide, but barely thicker than a shadow. The wings attached to his back, as the heretic launched an explosive flurry of attacks at Tian and Hong. The whole process took less than a second. The giant was clearly done with the fight.
The fight wasn’t done with him. Tian bodily flung himself at the heretic, batting aside weapons and techniques before stowing his staff and trying to grapple with the hideous thing. The cow head bellowed, and snorted a jet of boiling hot sulphurious steam at him. Tian couldn’t dodge it, the best he could manage was ducking behind a robe covered arm and trusting in the inner armor to block the worst of the damage. The trade worked in his favor. He had the heretic’s full attention for just long enough that Liren could bury her spear in the center of his chest.
The cycling qi changed too quickly for Tian’s eyes to follow. There was only a normal-ish human form falling to the steppes, and a smell of burning meat.
“One down.” It was Deadheart who had spoken, the indifferent voice echoing across the steppes. “To win without acting is the highest form of strategy, they say. Of course, this is mere tactics, but I suppose the difference doesn’t matter to you.”
The Tower Lord was suddenly chatty. The two glanced at each other, then looked out at the expanding formation. It hadn’t slowed its expansion at all. It really wouldn’t take long to complete. They really wouldn’t want to find out what it did when it was complete.
Tian and Liren turned and bolted away from the fortress. No tricky maneuvers, just forcing as much qi into their flying swords as they could manage, trying to get out of the range of the formation before it was established. They leaned out over the front of the swords, wringing out every ounce of speed they could.
“Naive!”
The ground around the fleeing pair burst, masses of roots and twisting vines exploding into existence and grasping for them. Breaking their path forward, or trying to slow it. Before they could divert upward, more explosions in the air saw roots bursting from seemingly nowhere. The Fortress Master was trying to leave nowhere to run in the heavens or earth. Tian didn’t bother trying to batter through the barricade. He moved his sword to be just behind Liren, nearly touching her back. Liren thrust out with her spear and ploughed through the obstacles. Such summons might have stopped weaker cultivators. Not Liren.
She was still using one of the spears looted from Lian’s warehouse. If she was using an art, it was one Tian didn’t know the name of. All she was doing was flooding the spear with her yang qi, rigid, piercing and fiery. Anything standing before her was pierced, broken through and smashed to the side. The spear took a ferocious beating in the process, but Liren didn’t turn a hair. As for Tian? He stayed close on her back, looking sharp for sudden ambushes. His eyes were constantly raking the darkness, wondering what else might be concealed in the seemingly empty air.
He thought too much. The Fortress Master seemingly didn’t care for complicated games. He just sent more and bigger root explosions. Simple, brutal, and it was destroying Liren’s spear. Tian could see the head starting to chip, its tip no longer straight, the wooden shaft creaked to the point of screaming with hairlike splinters sprouting from the bends. They were still some little way from the edge of the formation when the spear finally cracked. Not a dramatic shattering, it broke quietly, like a heart too long abused.
Liren threw it without a second’s thought. Abused or not, it could still provide a final service. The ruined spear struck a still-unfolding knot of spellwork, bursting the formation node in a final display of valor. The array, vast enough to cover miles, stuttered. Tian’s lips pulled back, his teeth giving a hungry reflection to the flickering spell light. Liren had figured out how to crack arrays years ago. You just had to know the knack of hitting and making it sting. It seemed that bigger arrays just meant more places to hit. Liren drew a new spear from her ring as she crashed towards the edge of the array. With a fierce howl, she stabbed outward, piercing the stuttering node. Ropes of qi exploded outwards as they burst through, escaping the array.
The ropes of qi lashed around, snapping backward. Dense streams of qi returned to nodes never designed to handle such a load, causing them to degrade, then explode. This created more lashing ropes of qi…
“No. NO! Damn you!” That once dead-sounding voice coming from the fortress was much more animated, Tian noticed. Liren slowly straightened up, planted the but of her spear by her foot on the sword, and placed once fist behind her back. She then turned to face Tian.
“True skill lies in overcoming complexity with simplicity. A master can defeat any obstacle with a single move. Observe closely how I turned this villain’s formation back on them. You might learn something.”
Tian nodded. The rolling explosions were sweeping out over the sky. Rather beautiful to watch, but he could see the instability gathering at the heart of the formation directly above the fortress. So far, they weren’t doing any damage to the fleeing lives on the ground, but the sheer quantity of energy involved told Tian that was a strictly temporary mercy.
“You had no idea this was going to happen.”
“I wouldn’t say I had no idea.”
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“Let me rephrase. You had no idea this was going to happen.” Tian nodded amiably. “Though credit where it is due, you do look quite domineering in that pose. A real air of the expert about you, though you should lift your gaze slightly, as though earthly matters are beneath your notice. Yes. That’s the way. I have taught you well. Truly, you are my second finest student.”
“Oi! Second? And student?”
“Well, you aren’t quite on Burning Heaven’s level, are you? Oh, look! The Fortress Master is making a move!”
A new formation rose from the fortress- an eight sided bagua wheel in freezing bluish-white qi rose. It exerted a suppressive force, slowing the rate of collapse and stabilizing fraying nodes.
“He must be burning a mountain of spirit crystals to power all this. That, or I don’t think we are going to find many living survivors in the fortress. What am I saying, of course he’s using human sacrifice instead of crystals. He can get more slaves anywhere, but crystals are expensive.” Tian’s voice turned heavy.
“Can’t have that.” Liren grunted, and rapped the butt of her spear against the flying sword. “I want to be on the ground for this.”
Liren descended to the steppe and carefully measured the distance to the spinning baghua formation with her thumb. She raised the spear above her shoulder in an overhand grip, took three running steps, then launched the spear upwards. A blazing line of golden fire rose from the rolling grassland, and crossed the miles to the formation nexus.
“I’ll be damned. That actually-” Her muttering was cut off. The explosion came like a sudden sun, then vanished. The shockwave was strong enough to send Tian tumbling through the sky, trying to stay on the flying sword and swearing sulphuriously as he was thrown around. The sound came with the shockwave, a squealing sound that turned into a groaning rumble. The pressure wave shook his eardrums, pain drilling inward. Suddenly, finding up and down was impossible. Being stable on his sword was impossible.
For a tumbling, twisting, tumultuous moment, Tian was lost between heaven and earth, with no place for a man to stand.
The shockwave passed, and Tian let gravity guide him downwards. Gently. His hands were shaking. For a moment, there had been a feeling of obliteration. Not the ecstatic mindlessness of a revelation, just terror and a physical disorientation so profound, it destroyed all thought.
“Zihao?”
“I’m alright. You?” Tian thought that ‘alright’ was probably a safe choice of words. He didn’t seem to be injured physically, much. That probably qualified as alright.
“About as alright as you. Doing better than the Fortress Lord, though. Deadheart or whatever his name was.”
“Was? That’s a lively breath he’s got for a ‘was.’” Tian eyed the exploded fortress. To his mild shock, it wasn’t demolished. The top of the towers were blown off, major portions of the wall were gone, and even he didn’t want to inhale whatever that smoke was that was pouring from, at a guess, a massive hole in the drill yard. However, the wards were finally down. He could count the surviving immortal breaths. Among them, there was one that still had some strength to it, still dense with more qi than he could muster.
“Was. He just doesn’t know it yet. Come on. One last push. Can’t let a tiger return to the mountain, and all that.”
“Yes, I too, dislike tigers.” Tian took an extra moment to steady his breath, then flew upwards once more. “In my defense, they all try to eat me.”
Tian nearly fell off his sword as a thought struck. Both tigers had been guarding mushrooms that wound up being stolen by him. Was this some twisted sort of fate?
Liren flew up eye-wateringly high, high enough that the fortress became small enough to cover with a single hand. She then pulled out some head-sized rocks, and started throwing downward.
“Did you smooth these rocks out a bit? They look a bit more oblong, rather than round.” Tian asked.
“Don’t ask me why, but the ones shaped this way are more accurate. Maybe it’s some lingering effect of my spear dao, I don’t know.” She kept her hands moving, pausing now and then to refine the shape of the rocks with a few passess of her hands. “I was right to be cautious. Look, you can see-”
“What’s that purple light?” Tian’s eyes narrowed. “It feels demonic.”
“I guarantee he had demons sealed away, ready to pounce on anyone who got past the wards. And since he’s still breathing, he must have more backup wards, or at least some kind of personal protective device.”
“How many rocks do you have stowed away?”
“Just a few. Dozen. In this ring.” She grinned at him, the exhaustion not dimming her eyes. “I swear you are rubbing off on me. I snagged two extra rings and just filled them with rocks and barrels of water.”
“Barrels of water?”
“Damn heavy thing, water.” She nodded sagely. “Not much penetrating power, but it still lands with a big thud, and you can always drink it in a pinch. Let’s try a couple, see what happens.”
She threw a couple of barrels down. They tumbled through the air, not accurate in the slightest. She refined her technique with the third one, and the fourth seemed to actually hit something.
“Looks like there is steam rising up?” Tian asked. “It’s hard to tell in the dark.”
“Steam, and, feel that! Deadheart’s qi breath is weakening. A lot.”
“Huh. Keep up the water barrels!”
“You brats think I can’t reach you because you are flying high? Did you think I can’t fly or something? Die for this old man!” From out of the ruined fortress rose an emblem of wrath. Daoist Deadheart could no longer keep his detached image. Now he howled upwards in a cloud of purple blazing skulls, each screaming in a subtly different key. No wings, no swords, no glowing clouds or rainbows or magic boots. Just the souls of the suffering dead, and the beneficence of demons. Seeing his face, a hole where his nose should be, skin like stretched rawhide over bone, a jaw that unhinged far too widely, anyone would think he would be right at home in Hell.
“Sister, leave him to me.” Tian roared, his voice mighty in the night. He cast his sleeves wide, then summoned his staff into his hand. “Face me, demon!”
“Ant!” The swirling cloud of purple skulls congealed for a moment, then vomited out a bolus of stinking green-black flames. It curved through the air, tracking Tian’s movements. There would be no clever dodges, no last minute shifts to escape the attack.
“Hell Crushing Divine Staff Technique, Seventh Form- Lightning Punishment!” Tian raised the staff high overhead with both hands, plunging towards the rising heretic like heaven’s wrath in the flesh. White hair trailed behind golden robes, radiating righteousness. Truly radiating righteousness, for just as Tian could see the sinflame around Deadheart, Deadheart could see the golden merit radiating from him. He was the very image of an outraged orthodox cultivator, attacking openly, honestly, and from the front.
Alas, there was no one Deadheart could seek justice from when he was silently struck from behind, beneath and above by flying needles. Forty seven acupoints were accurately hit, three meridians severed, and each of the five viscera and six bowels were perforated by long needles. The damage was total, instant, and fatal.
And then the needles began to vibrate.