Chương 41

The horned man spat a ball of crimson fire at Lodin's face. Lodin threw his forearms up and it burst against his guard, the heat flashed across his skin, searingly bright even through closed eyelids. He flinched, blinked hard, forced his eyes open a sliver. Just in time to see the heel coming to take his head off. Lodin dipped under the wheel kick and felt the wind of it graze the top of his head, the heat of the crimson fire trailing from the stranger's foot close enough to singe his hair.

The kick passed over him and the horned man planted, reset, and came again. A left palm wreathed in flame came at his temple and Lodin slipped to the inside of it, and the right palm came behind it and he slipped that too. But the head movement made his trunk momentarily vulnerable, so the demon-monk's left hand dropped and drove into his sternum instead. Lodin clenched his stomach and took it, and the impact blew a wave of frost off the surface of the ice.

The palm connected flat and hard and the fire that coated it seared his skin, a sick burn that pulsed with a wrongness he could feel in his bones. Demonic qi. It was only a slight touch, but it ate at him the way acid eats at metal. Lodin drove forward off his back foot and threw a hook at the horned man's liver. The stranger checked it on his elbow and the impact jarred them both, bone on bone, and the crimson fire at the stranger's fists guttered for an instant from the shock.

Lodin saw the gap and threw a cross at his jaw, turned his hips into it, put his weight behind the first two knuckles of his right hand. The punch snapped the horned man's head to the side and a spray of blood spattered the ice at his feet. He stumbled one step sideways, caught himself on a bare foot, and turned back to face Lodin with blood on his tusks and murder in his red eyes.

"Hell awaits you, barbarian," said the horned monk. Lodin grinned.

"Come show me." He closed the distance and threw a jab that caught the monk on the bridge of his nose. The horned man's head rocked back but his feet stayed planted, and he answered with a round kick at Lodin's lead leg, the shin coated in crimson fire. The impact buckled Lodin's knee for a half-second and the burn spread across his thigh in a hot wave. The monk followed with a straight kick to the midsection and the concussive blast of demonic qi behind it drove Lodin back three paces across the broken ice.

The monk pressed forward with a straight knee, a spinning elbow, another palm wreathed in crimson. The knee caught Lodin on the hip and turned him sideways. He rolled with the elbow and let it scrape past his ear. The palm he caught on both hands and held, and the fire seared his palms while he locked eyes with the stranger over the top of their joined grip. Red eyes stared into his. There was a sense of great age in them. They were patient and furious at the same time, like the embers of an ancient fire.

Lodin headbutted him. The crack echoed across the lagoon. The monk's horns took part of the impact and a jolt of pain shot through Lodin's skull, but the stranger's nose flattened and blood poured from both nostrils and his grip loosened. Lodin wrenched the hand aside and threw an uppercut that caught the monk under the chin and lifted him off the ice. Behind them, at the edge of his awareness, the vortex around Lorn intensified. The pull had strengthened.

Elder Wa's glowing white roots pulsed brighter, and now all of the yantra tattoos on Lorn's body glowed bright blue as the triple-vortex warped the air in front of him into an immense swirling cone. Lodin didn't really understand what was going on. But he knew what he needed to know. Lorn stood between the push and pull of two powerful forces. He only hoped they didn't rip Lorn in half. The air cracked like a whip, which drew Lodin's attention back as a gout of red fire swallowed the monk's body mid-flight.

For a moment his opponent was gone. But then he felt something to his left, a hot swell of qi in the air, and an instant later the demon-monk appeared with another blast of flame, barreling toward him behind a spinning roundhouse kick to the head. Lodin blocked it, shot back with a straight right cross the monk twisted away from. He'd never sensed something like that before so early. Whatever Elder Wa has taught him about sensing spirits must have improved his overall perception a little.

The monk vanished in a burst of fire and reappeared three paces to Lodin's right behind a flying knee aimed at his ribs. Again Lodin felt the swell of qi before the flames parted, turned into it, and drove his elbow into the monk's chest as he materialized. The blow launched him backward across the ice and he vanished again before he landed. The heat bloomed behind Lodin's back. He pivoted and his fist met the monk's face the instant the red light peeled away.

His head snapped back, his bare feet skidded across the frost, and he was gone again. Only to reappear at his left. His right. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Above. Behind. Each time that hellfire flared, Lodin turned toward it with a punch loaded. A hook caught the monk on the ear as he appeared at his side. A straight right crumpled him out of a low teleport on the opposite side.

An uppercut met a descending axe kick and the force of it reversed the monk's momentum and sent him tumbling across the frozen lagoon. The purple-skinned demon backflipped away and landed, feet wide apart, head low, chest heaving. Blood covered the lower half of his face. There was a fracture line across one of his horns. He snarled. Lodin shot in, threw a hook to the body that folded the horned man at the waist.

But the monk absorbed it and came back with a palm strike under Lodin's chin that clapped his teeth together and filled his mouth with the taste of copper. They traded blows, close and brutal, too fast for tactics, in a space no wider than a doorframe. And to Lodin's surprise, he realized that even as he kept up with the horned man's fast, furious exchanges, he could sense what was happening around him. The Steel Serpent line held, Shin's voice a bark above the clash of soulsteel on chitin.

The Jade Nettle Sect's wall of holy light had thinned but had not broken. Sarin's crows screamed somewhere to the south, and the pulse of her blood cultivation spiked and faded as she fed and fought and fed again. Jorin Shen and Mayari Lakan had broken off from their groups to engage with the apparent masters of the horde of monsters, the mummified child and the woman with the gown made of faces. And behind him, the pull of Lorn's vortex deepened. The air itself leaned toward his brother.

The vast spirt of Wandering Flame thrashed and coiled in vain as Lorn's technique drew it ever closer. The horned man's knee stabbed up at Lodin's side and he caught it on his forearm. He slipped a flurry of palm strikes and sword hands thrown at blinding speed. He charged shoulder first through a blast of demonic flame. Lodin planted his feet on the ice, set his shoulders, and let his hands go. The first punch caved the monk's guard inward. The second broke through it.

The third, fourth, fifth, sixth landed on the horned man's jaw, his ribs, his jaw again, each one a short sharp piston stroke that snapped out and retracted before the last one finished its work. The ice beneath Lodin's boots splintered from the force he drove through the ground. His fists blurred, and the sound of the impacts melded into a staccato of knuckles on bone. The monk tried to cover up with his forearms, but it was too late. Lodin was a storm of fists.

Wherever he blocked, blows landed on his guard and in all of the other places that were unguarded, at such a speed that the impacts might as well have been simultaneous. The horned man's head wrenched left, right, left. His torso folded forward and snapped back.

Each punch that landed drove him in a different direction and the next one arrived before his body could finish the journey, so he hung in the barrage like a puppet jerked on a dozen strings, limbs loose, tusked jaw slack, blood and spit trailing from his mouth in red arcs that the speed of the blows tore apart before they reached the ground.

The barrage ended with a straight right that connected flush on the center of the monk's chest, and the shockwave blew the frost from the ice in a white ring that expanded outward across the lagoon for hundreds of yards. The horned man flew backward, limp, trailing blood from his nose and mouth. He hit the ice on his back and skidded across the frozen surface, arms loose at his sides, and slid forty paces before coming to rest at the edge of a deep crack in the ice. Lodin lowered his fists.

His knuckles ached down to the bone, slick with the monk's blood. The horned man lay still. His robes were torn to rags. His nose was smashed into his skull. His jaw sat crooked. One eye had swollen shut and the other stared at the sky, red and unblinking. He laughed. The sound came out wet and broken, a gurgle that rose from deep in his chest and spilled through his shattered teeth. Blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth and ran down both sides of his neck. Then every drop of blood on the ice caught fire.

Lodin saw it at the edges first. The spatter from the early exchanges, the spray from the cross that had rocked the monk's head, the long smear from where he'd slid. Each drop and streak and puddle flared crimson, and the frozen surface hissed where the burning blood sat. Then it began to move. Thin red lines of flame slid across the ice, drawn back toward the monk's body like rivers that had remembered their source. The burning blood climbed his skin and back into the wounds from whence they came.

The monk rose to his feet with a broken jaw, a broken nose, a fractured horn, and one eye swollen shut. His wounds wept fire, wreathing his body in a nimbus of blood red flames. He grinned at Lodin, and vanished. The heat bloomed an inch from Lodin's face. The horned man materialized close enough that their chests almost touched, and his fist was already in motion. Lodin's head snapped to the side from the impact and he tasted blood on his teeth.

He fired back, a short hook that caught the monk on the jaw, and the burning man's head turned but his body stayed rooted and his elbow came up under Lodin's guard and cracked him in the ribs. Lodin threw an uppercut into the monk's solar plexus. The monk answered with a palm to his sternum. Lodin threw an overhand right that split the skin above the monk's good eye. The monk threw a headbutt that caught Lodin on the bridge of the nose and white light flooded his vision.

They stood toe to toe on the broken ice and traded, and the speed of the exchange doubled, then doubled again. Fists and elbows and knees from the monk, punches from Lodin, a blur of limbs wreathed in fire that moved too fast to track. The impacts came in pairs, one given, one received, neither man willing to block when he could hit instead. Blood flew from both of them. The surface of the ice beneath their feet shattered from the shockwaves, and the explosive sounds of their exchanges rolled across the lagoon.

Lodin grinned through the blood on his teeth. This was the real thing. The horned man matched him blow for blow, speed for speed, and neither of them would back down. Every punch Lodin threw came back at him in kind, and the fire that wreathed the monk's limbs burned hotter with each exchange. Pain and exhilaration blurred together in Lodin's chest, the pure savage joy of a fight that demanded everything he had. His new perception screamed at him.

A wave of qi swept across the battlefield, vast and clean and sharp, and it cut through the chaos the way a blade cuts through smoke. The monsters on the ice faltered. The spectres recoiled. Even the horned man flinched, and for the first time his face showed something other than fury. Golden light filled the air above the far bank. They came out of the sky in formation. Dozens of cultivators in black and blue robes, swords drawn, descending on currents of wind that bent the trees beneath them.

The Divine Gale Sect landed on the ice all around the battlefield. And they engaged everyone, the Steel Serpents, the Jade Nettles, the spectres, the flesh-crafted monstrosities. Lodin's attention snapped to Lorn. Han Yuan stood before his brother. One hand on the scabbard of his jian, the other on the hilt, the blade still sheathed.

That perfect face was calm, composed, beautiful in the way a painted icon is beautiful, and his white robes fell without a crease despite the wind that whipped across the frozen lagoon. The draw stance of a man who intended to kill on the first cut. Lodin's blood went cold.