Chương 25

The mountainside flew beneath his feet. Each stride ate ten feet of the steep slope. The compound grew larger against the night sky, its walls ringed with torchlight, its ramparts alive with armed figures. Lodin watched them scramble into position and felt the battle lust kindle in his chest. Heat spread through his limbs. His hands curled into fists. A pressure built behind his sternum, hot and tight, and he recognized it as rage. It was strange. He never considered himself someone who felt righteous anger.

Not like Akiyama Shin, who had bristled at the mere mention of demonic cultivators. Master Yan taught him how the Jianghu worked, and he had seen it firsthand in Dragon's Rest. The strong abused the weak. The weak suffered what they must. It was what it was. He accepted it the way one accepts the weather. So why did he want to tear them apart with his bare hands? Whatever it was, the presence of Sarin Jeida by his side seemed to inflame it. Sarin tore up the hillside at his left, teeth bared, eyes wild.

He watched the way her long, shapely legs drove her up the slope. The way her black hair whipped behind her. The feral joy on her face as she ran toward violence. His pulse quickened. A small voice in the back of his skull warned him. This woman had just drunk his blood. Whatever she felt, perhaps some of it bled into him now. A contact high. Her bloodlust tangled with his rage, her hunger twined with his own. He should be wary of that, keep his head clear. But it felt glorious. For now, he let it take him.

A shout echoed from the ramparts, then another. An arrow hissed past his ear. Lodin shifted left and kept his pace. A second came and he ducked beneath it, legs still pumping. Impatience clawed at his chest. Black light bloomed on the wall above. A bolt of demonic qi shrieked toward him, cold and hungry. The hair on his arms stood on end. He threw himself right and the bolt scorched the rock where he had been, left a smoking crater in the moonlight.

Arrows clattered off stones around him, bolts of black qi gouged craters in the dirt, and darts sparked at his heels as the sentries on the wall fired everything they had at them. Lodin didn't have an answer for any of it, except to run faster. But the night sky itself had an answer. A flood of crows, which Lodin had not realized were circling above the ramparts, poured down upon them.

They struck the whole length of the wall, and caws and screams tangled in the air as every sentry along those ramparts found himself under attack. Bows clattered on the ground. Bolts of qi flew in random directions. One unfortunate sentry tripped and stumbled over the wall and fell past them. Lodin grinned. Sarin was full of surprises. The wall was within reach now. Lodin looked up, judged the distance, and leapt. The stone shattered beneath him.

He shot through the air toward the ramparts, and something inside him broke loose. A roar tore from his throat, raw and animalistic. The rage he had held coiled in his chest unspooled into his limbs, burned behind his eyes. He cleared the wall by ten feet and came down in the middle of a cluster of sentries. The first one turned to face him, sword drawn, mouth open to shout. Lodin's fist caved his face in. The impact sang up his arm. Bone crumpled beneath his knuckles like brittle clay.

The man dropped and Lodin felt something loosen in his chest, a knot of tension he hadn't known he carried. Another came at him from the right with a hatchet raised high. Lodin stepped inside the swing and buried a left hook in his ribs. The man folded forward and a right cross to the side of his head put him down. A third thrust a spear at his chest. Lodin slipped to the side of it as he advanced and drove a right hand into the man's sternum hard enough to send him flying off the rampart.

Three men down in as many heartbeats. A grin split his face. Then a scream tore across the rampart to his left. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Lodin turned to see that Sarin Jeida had landed ten feet down the wall. A sentry lay at her feet, opened from shoulder to hip, and two more closed on her from either side. She was inside their reach before they could blink, and her swords did the rest.

Her red blades swept out in opposite arcs, and both men dropped with their guts spilled across the stone. The swords had a strange quality to them, a flexibility, as she slashed at them the blades subtly extended as if reaching for prey of their own volition, and then contracted at the end of each stroke. As the blood sprayed from their wounds it flowed into Sarin's blades, drawn up into the red steel like water into dry cloth. A fourth sentry charged her with a spear.

She sidestepped the thrust and opened his throat with a flick of her wrist. A fifth came at her back and she spun and drove both blades through his chest, lifted him off his feet, and hurled him over the rampart. Her crows descended on the bodies around her feet. He watched them feed. Watched her stand among them, the blood spattered on her body disappearing as her skin absorbed it, her chest heaving, blades gleaming red. This, too, was strange. It felt like there was a primal message coded into her movements.

It was as if something hidden behind her presence was looking right at him, speaking directly to him. Telling him his anger was not simply justified. It was natural, and good. Watching her felt like a receiving divine sanction to kill and to enjoy the killing. He took a breath and scanned the compound below. The outer wall formed a rough circle, its ramparts wide enough for three men to walk abreast. Torches guttered in iron brackets at regular intervals.

The wall curved away from him in both directions, and at the far end it met a circular keep of gray stone that rose three stories against the night sky. Doors on either side of the keep opened onto the ramparts, and a larger set of heavy double doors faced the courtyard below. And below them, what ought to have been a courtyard was a deep, dark pit.

Where there ought to have been a space for disciples to train and meditate, in its place there was something like a large mine shaft dug straight down into the hill itself. A wooden platform hung from chains over the hole, rigged to a massive pulley at the edge. They were looking for something beneath the compound. Or building something. A horn sounded from the keep. The double doors burst open and bodies poured through. Dozens of them, weapons drawn, black qi rolling off them like smoke.

They were gaunt, their complexions gray, the hallmarks of men who lived on black opium and no food. They flooded the ramparts on both sides and spilled down the stairs into the courtyard. Among them strode a figure that stood a head taller than the rest, loosely robed in black. His skin had the color and texture of granite, gray and rough, and where his robes parted Lodin could see the ridges of bone beneath the surface, as if his skeleton had turned to stone and pushed outward against his flesh.

His eyes were pits of dim yellow light. Sarin appeared at his side.

"You take the ugly one," she said.

"I'll chop up the disciples."

"They're all ugly," said Lodin. She grinned at him.

"You're not." Then she threw herself into the horde before he could answer. Lodin grinned and charged. He crashed through the disciples between them like a warship through the surf. Bodies tumbled aside. Someone swung a blade at his head and he ducked it without breaking stride, drove a fist into the man's chest as he passed. Their Patriarch loomed ahead, granite skinned and yellow-eyed, and Lodin closed the last ten feet at a dead sprint. His fist cracked against the stone man's jaw before he could set his guard.

The impact shuddered up his arm, hard as striking bedrock, and the Patriarch's head barely turned. Those yellow eyes fixed on him as a fist of stone swung at his skull in answer. This one wouldn't break easily. Lodin slipped the punch and drove a hook into the Patriarch's ribs. His knuckles stopped dead, as if he'd struck a wall. The Patriarch's knee came up and caught Lodin in the stomach. The force of it surprised him.

Stone ground against flesh and the blow shoved him backward, scraped his boots across the rampart. Before he could reset, a headbutt came for his face. Lodin jerked back and the Patriarch's stone forehead grazed his chin, left his teeth ringing.

"Fool." The Patriarch's voice sounded like it echoed up from the bottom of a cavern.

"We knew you could come." Lodin answered with an uppercut that snapped the man's head back. The Patriarch stumbled, caught himself, and drove both fists down at Lodin's shoulders in a hammerblow meant to flatten him against the stone. Lodin sidestepped and the fists cratered the rampart, sprayed chips of masonry across his shins. The Patriarch pressed forward. Each blow came heavier than the last, stone fists that cracked the air and left Lodin's forearms numb where he blocked them.

This was no brittle shell of a defensive technique. The man's body had transformed at a fundamental level, flesh made mineral, bones dense as iron ore. Like a twisted, yet permanent version of Akiyama Shin's technique. Lodin slipped a straight punch and countered with a hook to the body. His knuckles found a seam where granite met granite, a thin line at the ribs. The Patriarch grunted, the first sound of pain he had made. Lodin pressed the weak spot.

He dug to the body, left right left, targeted that seam with each shot. Chips of stone flew from the patriarch's side. The Patriarch swung wildly in answer and Lodin ducked and came up with an uppercut that caught the stone jaw clean. The crack echoed across the compound. The Patriarch staggered back toward the pit. Lodin grinned and stepped in for the finish. Then the Patriarch's hand shot out and caught him by the throat. Stone fingers closed like a vice around Lodin's airway.

He grabbed the wrist with both hands and pulled, but the grip held fast. Those yellow eyes burned into his.

"I know this face..." the Patriarch said.

"He told us we would see you soon. Pity you have come all this way for naught." Black qi erupted from his palm. The blast struck Lodin square in the face. Ice cold, it bit through flesh and seized the marrow of his bones. The force blew him backward off his feet, out over the pit. The darkness swallowed him. Stone walls blurred past. He struck one side and spun, struck another and caromed off. Rock cracked against his shoulders, his ribs, his skull. The torchlight above shrank to a pinprick, then vanished.

He hit the bottom and the world went black. Everything was silence and darkness, a void without shape or boundary. He floated in it. Or sank. Time had no meaning. He could not feel his body, could not remember his name. There was only the black, vast and patient space between worlds. Life on one side. Death on the other. He stood at the threshold and did not know which way he faced. A hand seized his shoulder, shook him hard.

"Lodin... Lodin..." The voice cut through the dark. Distant at first, then closer. His brother's voice.