Chương 43

Han Yuan vanished from before Lodin and reappeared five paces from Lorn, feet already set, hand at the hilt of his jian in a draw stance. If it took him more than a breath to get there, the God-Slaying Threefold Cut could be in play. Lodin's feet blasted off the ice. The blade was halfway out of the scabbard when Lodin's right hand arrived and caught Han Yuan flush on the jaw, knocking him across the ice. Lorn stood a pace behind him.

White fire rolled off his brother's shoulders and climbed the air above him, pale and clean, and where Huihun's blue ghost-flame had burned ragged and furious, this light held steady. It felt cleaner, purer. Lorn's eyes met his. They were pale, and clear, and human. Something hot pressed behind Lodin's sternum. His fists opened and closed at his sides.

"You good?" Lodin asked. Lorn gave him a small nod.

"Yeah." The knot behind Lodin's sternum broke loose, and warmth flooded his chest and throat and the backs of his eyes. His jaw trembled for half a second before a wide grin broke out across his face.

"Let's beat some ass then." Lorn smiled at that.

"Yes, let's." Han Yuan rose from the ice, blood on his teeth, and called his sword back to his hand. The demon-monk stood twenty paces to the left, his red eyes fixed on Lorn. The two men looked at each other askance. Han Yuan tilted his chin toward the brothers, and the demon-monk rolled his shoulders and settled into his stance, and the two of them turned their attention to Lodin and Lorn. Lorn held out his hand and a bar of glowing white qi formed there, shaped itself into a long jian.

He held out the weapon toward Han Yuan and beckoned him with the tip, and the swordsman obliged him. Lodin turned his attention to the demon-monk then, raised his fists and spat blood onto the ice. They all moved at once. Lodin launched off his back foot and the distance between them vanished. His right hand found the monk's sternum and at the same time an elbow wreathed in fire came down on the crown of his skull. The ice beneath their feet cratered.

Lodin's teeth clacked together and his vision went white, and the demon-monk folded over his fist and coughed out a gout of burning blood. At the corner of his eye he saw Elder Wa battling monsters and spectres alongside Sarin and Dae Han. In the distance, Jorin Shen and Mayari Lakan engaged the masters of these creatures in a titanic struggle. And then a burning fist sped toward his face, signaling the end of the moment he had to survey the battlefield.

Lodin angled his head and the punch blazed past his ear, and at the same time he stepped inside its arc and drove a hook into the monk's torso. Ribs cracked beneath his knuckles. The horned man snarled and the fire around him flared. Lodin and the horned man traded blows at a speed that turned the air between them into a haze of fists and feet and knees and elbows, and each impact sent cracks racing through the ice and sprayed dark water up from below.

The monk's fire seared Lodin's skin and Lodin's fists split the monk's flesh, and neither man stopped to acknowledge the damage. The sound of those blows landing carried across the lagoon like the beating of giant drums. The horned man broke off the exchange and leapt back three paces. His hands came together in front of his chest and fire gathered between his palms, red and dense, a ball of compressed heat that warped the air around it and turned the ice beneath his feet to steam.

The veins in his neck and arms stood out. His horns glowed at the tips. The fire between his hands grew and grew until it was the size of a man's torso, and the heat of it dried the blood on Lodin's face from ten paces away. Lodin lunged after him, and the world turned red. The blast caught Lodin square in the chest and launched him off his feet, and the heat of it seared his skin and filled his lungs with burning air.

He tumbled across the ice, and a blade of peerless soulsteel drew a bright red line across his chest as he passed through Han Yuan's space. The Patriarch's face flashed past him, pale eyes wide, and then Lodin hit the ice and carved a shallow trench through it with his back. He rolled to his feet. Blood ran from the slash across his body and steamed where it hit the ice. Han Yuan stood before him, sword raised, his attention snapped from Lorn to this new arrival in his space.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Behind the swordsman, the horned man charged after Lodin, but Lorn stepped into his path. Lodin streaked forward and Han Yuan's blade came for his throat. The swordsman cut and Lodin slipped, and Lodin punched and Yuan turned the strike aside with the flat of his jian and riposted in a single motion.

They circled and clashed and separated and clashed again, and the speed of it climbed with each exchange until the sword was a silver blur and Lodin's fists were streaks in the air. Soulsteel opened cuts across Lodin's forearms and ribs and chest, and Lodin's knuckles found the swordsman's jaw and face and torso.

Han Yuan fought as a Nascent Immortal ought to fight, his movements clean and precise and without flaw, and Lodin fought the way he had always fought, always moving straight ahead, fists first, grinning through the blood. Right next to him, Lorn and the horned man were engaged in an equally furious exchange. Lorn glanced over at Lodin just as he was glancing over at Lorn. They grinned at each other, and Lodin's heart felt a thousand pounds lighter.

Lodin turned back to Han Yuan in time to catch a thrust for his heart. He caught the blade in his fist and ripped it sideways. Han Yuan stumbled after his weapon and Lodin let go of it and hit him with a jab that split his bottom lip. The cross came behind it and found the Patriarch's cheekbone, and the bone gave with a sound like a twig snapped underfoot. Han Yuan's head rocked back and Lodin followed with a left hook to the body. And then a right to the temple.

And then another left that crunched cartilage in the swordsman's nose. Blood sprayed across the blue silk of Yuan's robes and Lodin felt each impact travel up his arms and into his chest, and it felt fucking good. It felt like the best thing he had ever done. Han Yuan's legs buckled and Lodin grabbed him by the collar and hit him again, a short right that snapped Yuan's head back violently, and after that his sword arm went limp and the jian clattered to the ice and the great swordsman crumpled.

Lodin glanced left to watch Lorn's white blade flick out and slice off the demon-monk's cracked left horn. The cut was so clean and so fast that the horned man did not react immediately. He reached up and touched the stump where the horn had been, and his fingers came away wet. His red eyes went wide. His jaw clenched so hard the tendons in his neck stood out like rope. Lorn stepped in and the white jian took the monk through his right eye and out the back of his skull. The demon-monk went rigid.

His arms dropped to his sides. The blade of white qi burned inside his head, and the light of it shone through his open mouth and the gaps between his teeth. His remaining eye rolled toward Lorn's face, and what it found there was calm, and patient, and utterly without mercy. Lorn held him there for a heartbeat. Then he pulled the blade free. The monk staggered back and fire erupted from every inch of his body, a pillar of red flame that climbed fifty feet into the sky and turned the air to a furnace.

The wound in his eye socket sealed over with scar tissue before the blood could fall. His horns, both the stump and the one that remained whole, blazed red-hot and his fists burned like brands, and he threw himself at Lorn in a frenzy of strikes that had abandoned all technique in favor of raw, animal fury. Lodin saw a chance to be of assistance. He stepped in from the blind side and put every pound he had behind a right hand that caught the horned man flush on the jaw.

The demon-monk's head snapped sideways and his feet left the ground, and before he could land Lorn was there. The white jian swept through the monk's left arm just below the shoulder, and the limb tumbled away trailing cauterized blood and hit the ice with a heavy, wet sound. The demon-monk looked down at the burning, bleeding stump where his arm had been. His remaining eye bulged in its socket and the veins in his neck and forehead swelled against his skin.

He threw his head back and his mouth stretched open wider than a human mouth should go, and the scream that came out of it was a sound like tearing metal, raw and shrill and so loud that Lodin's eardrums throbbed and the frozen surface beneath his feet hummed with the pitch of it. Burning blood poured from the stump and from his ruined eye and from the stump where his left horn had been, and his whole body shook as if something inside him was trying to claw its way out.

Fire gathered around his body, dense and bright and building fast. Lodin felt the heat of it on his face and knew what was coming. He grabbed Lorn by the shoulder and threw them both backward. A detonation of red fire blew outward from his body and swallowed everything within fifty paces. The blast tore open a hole in the lagoon the size of a courtyard, and dark water heaved upward through the gap in a column that boiled before it could fall. Flesh constructs tumbled across the ice like ragdolls.

Elder Wa leapt clear with Sarin Jeida and Kang Dae Han close behind. The shockwave hit Lodin in the chest and drove him back across the ice, boots carving grooves in the frost, one arm across his face. When the light died and the steam thinned, the crater stood empty. Dark water churned in the hole where the demon-monk had been, and the severed arm lay at the rim of it, fingers still curled into a fist. The horned man was gone. To the right of the giant hole in the ice, Han Yuan rose to his feet.

He took his time about it. One knee beneath him, then both feet, and he stood and rolled his shoulders and let his neck crack once to either side. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the stain on his fingers the way a man might inspect a spot of wine on a good shirt. His jaw was swollen and his nose sat crooked on his face and his left eye was black, but none of it showed in his posture. Even now, the Patriarch of the Divine Gale Sect stood with poise and dignity.

He opened his hand, and his jian dissolved from the ice where it had fallen and reformed in his palm with a yellow glow. His fingers closed around the grip and golden qi flooded the weapon and climbed his arm and spread across his body in a nimbus of light that reached his eyes, made them into pools of light. The air around him went still. His robes, torn and soaked in his own blood, settled against his frame as if pressed by invisible hands.

"I have been trained to kill things far older and stronger than you," he said, and there was an otherworldly hum behind his voice. Lodin looked at Lorn. Lorn looked at Lodin.

"Sorry about before," Lorn said.

"Bury me under another mountain and I'll whoop your ass," said Lodin. A grin split Lorn's face, and Lodin grinned back. Then they turned to face Han Yuan together.