The battlefront was only eight hundred miles away. That was only a few hours travel, at most, for a Heavenly Person Realm cultivator with a flying artifact. The Inner Court was up to its elbows in blood, but the heretics were sending endless waves of demons to meet them. They sent swarms of insects so large, they blotted out the sun. Sinister curses that could freeze your bones and turn your blood to boiling lead. Rumor had it that there was a sixth level Heavenly Person Realm poison master on the field, and the Inner Court was running through antidotes like charcoal in winter.
It was all rumors. Nobody told the Outer Court much of anything, on the basis that what they didn’t know, they couldn’t be made to tell. The heretics were masters of torture. Some viewed it as a supreme art form. Tian had his doubts when he heard that. Then he found a broken bit of shoulder blade during a patrol, and carved into it was the word ‘regret’ over and over and over. Sometimes the strokes were blurred, or simply wrong. It seemed the ‘paper’ jerked.
It was two months before Tian saw his first heretical cultivator. Tian was part of a scratch squad put together from a couple of towns and sent to patrol fairly close to the base. The reason was simple- most of the members of the squad were kids. ‘Kids’ being defined as ‘below Level Nine and below fifty.’
There were two Level Nine’s supervising. They were everyone that could be spared. West Town Temple had done better than most, but Tian had already seen four of his brothers dragged back more dead than alive. Three of them were still in the hospital. Festering wounds were another high art amongst the heretics.
There were endless jobs, and not enough bodies to throw at them.
The patrol was sweeping a stretch of black sand desert with deep channels etched through it. At the very bottom of the channels were thin rivulets of bitter, salty water. It was, by the standards of the wasteland, a little paradise. Lichen grew thickly on the inside of the crevices. Billions of teeming mites feasted on the lichen, occasionally pushed aside (or consumed) by snails.
Then came the larger predators. And the predators that ate them. The channels the water ran through, and the crevices above them, were rarely wider than a handspan across and two knuckles deep. Yet there was no shortage of enormous predators coming to feast. The food chain was more of a vertical stack than a web here.
But not a very high stack. Rarely anything out of the middle of the Earthly tier. Perfect for the kids.
Tian didn’t really know the other cultivators. Only one was about his age, the rest were considerably older. That ‘one’ was Hong Liren, and they had never chatted before coming to the wasteland. It hadn’t significantly developed since. Their relationship was based strictly on bickering. This was despite them having gone on a few missions now. It frustrated Tian. How could he help someone that refused to realize they were brain damaged? He still stuck close to her. He trusted his sister more than the other people they were sent out with.
He saw how the other cultivators looked at them. He might call them Brothers and Sisters as etiquette demanded, but he didn’t trust them. They looked like rock throwers. Only, they wouldn’t throw rocks. They’d throw him and Hong at the monsters and run away. Hong didn’t see it. She was glaring at the black sand and rock, spear in hand. She had left her back to her ‘comrades.’
“Contact left!” one yelled and leaped forward with a slash of his saber. It was a beautiful cut, and perfectly sliced apart an animal skull tumbling in the wind. “Never mind. False-”
A man burst out of the black sand, his hand flashing, stabbing, ripping holes in the young cultivator’s back.
“Bastard!” One of the Level Nines roared, her flying sword streaking out to take the ambusher’s head. Two more men burst out of the sand on either side of her and fell on her, stabbing with their dark blades. Over and over, a dozen times in half as many seconds. She was dead before the sword hit.
“Ambush! Ambush!” Tian didn’t know who was yelling. He had his rope dart spinning, creating a deadly zone around him. He saw Hong stabbing out, her spear finding a throat and tearing it open like a bolt from the heavens. He saw the sand shifting behind her. Just a little. Or maybe adrenalin gave him that half second edge.
Tian whipped the dart up, around and whistling down again, catching the ambusher just as he made his move. The heretic’s head exploded, white bone and grey brains bright on the black sand. Some sprayed on the back of Hong’s protective robe. She didn’t notice. She was on to the next heretic.
It seems she was right to trust her back to her comrades. Or at least one of them. Tian didn’t share her faith. He lightened his body and ran, whipping the dart around him. He threw the dart towards an enemy and jumped after it, letting the dart’s momentum pull him. The dart was deflected, and Tian resumed his normal weight, black sand spraying as he braced himself and whipped the dart back around. The heretic’s arm was snagged and yanked out of position. The sister he was fighting smashed the heretic with an iron club. Tian didn’t stick around to watch the body fall.
They can’t ambush you if you are moving faster than they can react. That was his hope, anyway. Besides, someone else needed his help- him. He didn’t know who it was, but someone was launching needles at him. They had a damned quick eye. Their aim kept pace with his erratic movements.
Tian stopped suddenly behind a heretical cultivator. The man kicked a Brother in the gut and turned towards Tian, a long knife moving fast enough to make a ripping sound as it went for his neck. Tian dropped nearly flat and kicked at the heretics' ankles, making the big man trip. Then with a press of all four limbs, Tian hopped straight up and flung the dart at the big man’s eye. It went in easily. Tian was sure it didn’t go all the way into the brain. He felt it stop on bone.
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He recovered the dart and got low again as the big man covered his eye and roared. The heretic’s knife waved wildly in the air as he rushed for Tian. Tian backpedaled. He could see black skin rotting off the man, and the long needles sticking out from him. Tian had set him up just right to be his shield.
It wasn’t hard to see when the poison reached the brain. The big man just stopped.
“I can’t let myself get hit. I can’t get hit.” Tian wasn’t sure if he was speaking aloud or not. He was desperately trying to see which bastard was launching the needles but didn’t see any likely suspects. He kicked the dying heretic up and out, his endlessly cultivated muscles launching the man ten feet through the air. Tian rushed behind him, launched the dart at a heretic on the left, ripping open their thigh. Then he dodged right, tripping a claw wielder just before they ripped open a Sister’s back.
He caught it then. A little shift of dirt. The heretical scum was still hidden under the sand! Tian charged in with a snarl, recovering the dart and smashing it down where he had seen movement. A heretic popped out of the sand, grabbing the dart in one hand and aiming a tube at Tian with the other. His face was covered, but somehow, Tian knew the heretic was sneering.
Tian jolted forward and to the right and stomped on the rope. The heretic was jerked to the side, his needles spraying wide. Then Tian blurred forward at his absolute top speed and slammed his palm into the man’s chest. He felt a rotten heart explode. He felt a lot of other things rot and die too. Things that had no business in a human chest.
Not his problem. Hopefully. He yanked his dart free and ran on.
The battle lasted less than three minutes. Out of the ten orthodox cultivators, four still lived. Only two were lightly injured. The youngest two- Hong and Tian. Neither of the Level Nines made it. The two seriously injured cultivators could go at any moment. But all the ambushers were dead.
“Six, and maybe it’s going to be eight, brothers and sisters died to take out fifteen heretics. And I’ll be damned if one of these dogs was over Level Seven.” Hong spat in the black sands. “A nice easy mission for the kids.”
Tian kept his eyes, and hands, moving. Following protocol, he collected the storage rings of the fallen cultivators on a string and put the bodies and weapons into his own ring. “Can you patch those two up?”
“No. Do I look like a doctor?” Hong snorted.
“I don’t either, but I’m going to be the one patching them up. I guess that makes you the person who searches the heretics.”
“I do have some spare antidotes, however, and an expensive salve I could apply.” She was already moving towards the injured. Tian figured that would be the case. He really didn’t want to touch the heretics either.
“Best leave it to the competent.” He urged.
“No, no. Quality medicine over quarter competent skills. It’s no contest. Good luck, have fun.”
Tian swore. She wasn’t wrong. He had learned how to find and harvest herbs, a little bit of herb preservation, and an even smaller bit of medicine compounding. Calling him a quarter competent was generous.
He looked over at the bodies. He wasn’t squeamish. He was worried the bodies might be trapped. Out of an abundance of caution, he flicked his dart out and let it stab a dead heretic in the guts. Nothing happened.
He snorted and got a little closer. They were wearing equipment that wasn’t that different from what the orthodox cultivators were wearing. In some cases, he would have bet that they were wearing looted gear. Tian sighed and pulled out a saber from his ring, and started hacking off hands. He was damned if he was going to carefully remove the protective gear just to find out where they hid their storage.
One of the injured didn’t make it. Hong called for Tian in the end, but he couldn’t save her either. The two kids, neither more than thirteen years old, held a middle aged woman's hands as she choked to death. Something sealed her throat and stopped her lungs. Some poison or evil technique. They couldn’t figure it out in time. Tian removed her storage ring and collected her body.
The other woman, probably not more than twenty, was alive and barely conscious but in no state to walk. After some consultation, they made a stretcher out of two spears and some spare robes. They lashed her to the stretcher, then took turns dragging it behind them. One on guard, the other hauling. They made a beeline for the base. It still took two hours to get back.
There was a terrible moment when scorpions burst up from the sand. Hong and Tian looked at each other and a dreadful decision hung between them. Then Tian picked up the stretcher around the middle, activated his light body technique and sprinted away, leaving Hong to fight the rearguard action. She managed to break contact, but was swallowing an antidote of her own by the time she found where Tian was kneeling and panting on the black sand. They had to patch up the injured woman again. Her wounds had reopened.
They got no heroes welcome when they made it back. They got questions. Endless questions. Barrages of questions. This was the worst single loss Forward Camp Redknife had suffered in the current war, and the two who made it back were the two youngest and weakest? The wounded woman was patched up and then subjected to her own deep interrogation.
Something didn’t add up. Somewhere, there was a rat. Tian looked like a rat, his interrogator said. He was ugly enough to be a heretic. Honest cultivators didn’t have mutilated hands and ugly faces. The exterior reflects the interior. Did he cut off his fingers himself? Bite them off? Sacrifice them to some hideous demon? Fed them to gu? They had ways to find out. Endless ways. Endless time too.
Tian asked for Brother Fu. He was told that he could sit in a cold jail and answer questions instead. Whether he ever saw anyone from West Town ever again was still an open question. Whether he would have eyes in an hour was still an open question.
Then he was turned loose. It turned out that he was just lucky, and that he survived thanks to the heroic efforts of one Hong Liren. Hong Liren was clearly a phoenix on the rise. She would soar, so long as she wasn’t dragged down by a pig of a teammate like Tian.
Tian stopped listening to his interrogator. He saw why he was turned loose. Hong was talking to a beautiful woman decked out in the Inner Court Uniform. The True Disciple resembled Hong so closely, they could have been sisters born seven years apart.
Hong’s grandmother had arrived.