The sensation of Mistress Bai’s technique clinging to his skin was beginning to itch. It wasn’t a physical itch, exactly – more like the phantom sensation of walking through a particularly dense spiderweb that refused to be brushed away.

  Jiang shifted his weight, fighting the urge to scratch at his arm, and focused his attention on the valley floor below. Greywood sprawled against the cliff face like a festering wound, the rough-hewn timber of the new palisades clashing with the ancient, weathered stone of the original fortress.

  Two figures – Mistress Bai and Li Xuan – walked out of the treeline and onto the open road leading to the main gate. Something about the way they were walking struck him as casually arrogant – like they were so utterly convinced of their power that they may as well have been out for a stroll, not approaching a bandit camp.

  A shout went up from the watchtower. A horn blew, a low, mournful sound that echoed off the cliffside. Figures scrambled along the wall, bows being drawn, spears lowered. “Halt!” a voice bellowed from the gatehouse. “Another step and we fill you with enough iron to—”

  Li Xuan didn’t break stride, drawing his sword with deliberate slowness. The steel caught the torchlight, gleaming like a sliver of the moon. He raised the blade, held it for a heartbeat, and then slashed downward. There was no sound at first. Just a distortion in the air, a vertical ripple of pure, condensed Qi that tore away from the blade and raced toward the gate. It grew as it moved, expanding into a crescent of pale blue light ten meters high.

  When it hit, the entire gatehouse structure groaned, then sheared cleanly in half, the stone archway collapsing in a cloud of dust and thunder. The impact shook the ground beneath Jiang’s feet, half a mile away.

  “Show off,” Jiang muttered, though he couldn’t deny the dry swallow in his throat.

  Arrows began to fly then, a dark rain hissing down from the walls. Mistress Bai didn’t even slow down. She raised a hand, her sleeve fluttering in the wind of Li Xuan’s strike, and made a negligent sweeping gesture. The air above them seemed to solidify. The arrows hit an invisible barrier and shattered, raining down as harmless splinters. She flicked her fingers outward, and the invisible wall became a hammer, slamming into the palisade with a force that buckled the wood and sent a dozen bandits flying from their perches like ragdolls.

  “Well, I think it’s safe to say that’s our cue,” he whispered to Zhang.

  The outer disciple nodded, though he took a moment to tear his eyes away from the spectacle. They moved, slipping back into the deeper shadows of the treeline. In an abundance of caution Jiang could only applaud, Li Xuan had instructed them to wait for a few moments before splitting off to cover the back of the fortress – just to make sure that this whole thing wasn’t a massive trap, and a dozen demonic cultivators weren’t waiting to spring out and surprise them.

  In that unlikely circumstance, they would at least be able to fight – or flee – as a group.

  They circled wide, moving up the slope toward the cliff face that backed the fortress. Below them, the sounds of battle rose to a roar. The sharp cracks of Li Xuan’s sword Qi were rhythmic, like the beat of a terrifying drum, punctuated by the deeper, earth-shaking thuds of Mistress Bai’s attacks.

  Jiang reached out with his senses, careful not to flare his own Qi enough to break the dampener. He could feel the chaotic swirl of energy down at the gate – two blazing suns of power surrounded by hundreds of flickering, tainted sparks. The bandits weren’t routing. Despite the overwhelming force hitting them, they were swarming toward it, drawn like moths to a flame.

  “They’re not running,” Zhang noted, matching Jiang’s pace as they navigated a patch of scree. “Even after that opening.”

  “We knew they wouldn’t,” Jiang said brusquely, more focused on the terrain than the conversation. “Same as with the Dead River Gang.”

  He couldn’t help but notice that he could sense a lot more than the expected two hundred signatures. Mistress Bai and Li Xuan didn’t seem to be struggling, but it wasn’t a great sign.

  They reached the base of the cliff. Here, the fortress wall was nothing more than the natural rock, steep and jagged. But Li Xuan had been right – there were drainage outputs, old stone grates set into the rock to let the snowmelt flow out from the keep above.

  Jiang walked up to the largest of them – a rusted iron grate, half-obscured by a frozen bush. He grabbed the bars. They were thick, cold, and solid.

  “I’m starting to get the impression we don’t need to be worried about anyone slipping out the back,” he said dryly.

  “Their cultivators could break this easily enough,” Zhang pointed out, though he seemed uncertain.

  “You don’t think they just gave us this task to get us out of the way, do you?” Jiang asked, wondering to himself if he would be annoyed if they had.

  Zhang shook his head. “No. This is too dangerous a task to coddle us like this. Still, if they haven’t already removed the gate, I doubt they intend to use this passage to escape. It’s possible they don’t even know of this exit’s existence, or that it may be blocked further in somehow.”

  “So… what do we do?” Jiang asked, feeling increasingly anxious as he stretched out his senses. Deep in the keep, behind layers of stone and timber, something pulsed. Gao Leng’s Qi sat in the centre of the town like a clot, thick and greasy, spreading through the air in sluggish waves.

  Zhang’s response went ignored as he noticed something strange about the flow of Qi. The bandits were running out toward Li Xuan and Mistress Bai.

  But their Qi was flowing in.

  Threads of corrupted, vicious Qi ran from them back towards a central mass somewhere in the keep, and every time one of them fell, the connection snapped like a cut tether, and a tiny pulse of stolen strength flowed back to Gao Leng.

  “He’s feeding on them,” Jiang said, his voice low. “The bandits. Every time Li Xuan or Mistress Bai kills one, their Qi… it’s flowing back to him. Gao Leng is just… feeding the bandits to them, harvesting their energy.”

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  Zhang frowned, reaching out with his own senses. “I don’t feel anything,” he admitted, frustration tightening his features. “The air is thick with corrupted Qi. It’s like trying to see through smoke. Are you certain?”

  “I can feel it,” Jiang insisted. The sensation was distinct, a persistent, hungry tug that vibrated in his bones. It was getting stronger. “The haze is getting denser. The more they kill, the more he gets. They’re not wearing him down at all; they’re making him stronger.”

  He looked at the grate. “We need to get closer. If we wait out here, by the time the others are done with the chaff, Gao Leng will be stronger than ever. We need to be ready to jump him the moment they breach the inner sanctum.”

  “That wasn’t the plan,” Zhang countered, though his voice lacked its usual conviction. “Our orders were to hold the perimeter. If we advance, we risk being cut off. We should wait until Li Xuan and Mistress Bai start their push.”

  Jiang snorted. “You don’t beat someone by letting them have all the time they need to prepare themselves,” he said impatiently. “Every second we wait, he gets stronger. I’m going in.”

  He turned back to the grate. It was solid iron, rusted but thick. He didn’t want to try just ripping the bars from the stone – for starters, he doubted he would be strong enough, but even if he was, it would make an unacceptable amount of noise. He experimentally extended his shadow, forming it into a sharp edge. It was tricky working through Mistress Bai’s shroud, but if he could form a saw or something to cut through the bars, it would make everything much easier.

  Behind him, Zhang hesitated. He looked back toward the sounds of the battle, then at the dark maw of the tunnel. He was clearly torn between obedience and the more immediate danger Jiang had spoken of.

  Finally, Zhang let out a sharp breath. He stepped forward, placing a hand on the lock mechanism. A flare of heat, controlled and intense, turned the iron cherry-red in seconds. The metal softened, losing its temper. Jiang kicked it, and the grate bent inward with a groan of yielding metal.

  Jiang smirked. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “Don’t congratulate me, it feels weird,” Zhang muttered, though he looked pleased with himself. “Let’s move before I regain my senses.”

  Jiang liked this new version of Zhang.

  They slipped through the gap, the darkness of the tunnel swallowing them whole. The air inside was stale and cold, smelling of damp earth and old rot. The sounds of the battle outside muffled to a dull, rhythmic thrum.

  They moved quickly but carefully, Jiang taking the lead. His impatience was growing, a restless itch under his skin that urged him to run, to find the source of that pulsating, greasy Qi and silence it. It was strange. Usually, in a hunt, he was cold. Calm. Now, he felt… eager. Amped up.

  He frowned, pushing the feeling down. Nerves, probably. Or the proximity to so much corrupted energy.

  Suddenly, the air around them seemed to tighten. A pulse of Qi, not from ahead, but from everywhere, rippled through the stone walls, the floor, the very air they breathed. It wasn’t the hungry tug of Gao Leng’s harvest. It was something else. Something structured, something prepared.

  Jiang stopped dead, his heart hammering against his ribs as realisation washed over him.

  He barely had time to swear as the walls around them lit up blood red.

  — — —

  Li Xuan spun his sword in a tight, vicious arc, the blade singing as it cut through three bandits at once. They fell without a sound, their bodies hitting the muddy ground with a dull thud, only to be replaced instantly by three more.

  It was endless.

  The bandits weren’t fighting; they were feeding themselves into a grinder. They had no formation, no strategy. They just surged forward, eyes blank and mouths open in silent snarls, throwing themselves onto his blade with a mindless, suicidal intensity. Some of them were impressively strong – he’d had to actually brace himself against a few blows that would have shattered a normal man’s arm – and fast enough to be a genuine nuisance.

  But that was all they were. A nuisance.

  “This is taking too long,” he grunted, sidestepping a clumsy axe swing and taking the man’s head. “Where are the cultivators?”

  It was the whole reason they had allowed the bandits to close the distance at all instead of throwing out more dangerous techniques – the possibility that the demonic cultivators were simply hoping to sap their strength and reserves. Mistress Bai stood several paces behind him, her presence like a cold knot in the air. The bandits stumbled and collided with one another every few breaths, giving her easy targets for her needle-thin bursts of Qi.

  There were far more of them than expected.

  The first wave had been maybe sixty – already excessive for a group of backwater raiders. Then another hundred had poured out. Then another. Now the valley floor crawled with them, a press of bodies stretching from the shattered gate to the tree line, all of them enhanced, all of them snarling and stiff-limbed with that same unsettling wrongness.

  Their Qi signatures twisted and bucked with every passing heartbeat. Some of them burned brighter – three, four, even five times stronger than a normal man – but without discipline or coherence. Every one of them moved like a puppet being yanked by three different strings. And more concerningly, none tried to avoid his blade. Not a single one balked when approaching Mistress Bai’s quiet, suffocating killing field.

  It shouldn’t have been this easy.

  A demonic cultivator who invested this heavily in thralls would normally be directing them, shaping their attack into something resembling a strategy rather than throwing bodies at two cultivators who could easily cut them down. And even if the thralls were expendable, the master should have appeared by now, if only to protect the investment.

  Li Xuan pivoted, brought his blade down in a short, brutal arc that split the first rank of bandits apart, then risked a glance toward Mistress Bai.

  She was not looking at the fight.

  Her gaze was turned inward, sharp and unfocused – like she was listening to something he couldn’t hear. Her brow furrowed for a fraction of a breath, a tiny crack in her composure.

  Li Xuan’s grip tightened around the sword hilt, a very bad feeling rising in his gut.

  Her head snapped up. “It’s a trap—”

  He moved before she’d even finished speaking. Qi surged beneath his feet as he leapt backward, ready to clear the press of bodies, ready to abandon the position entirely.

  He wasn’t fast enough.

  The air around them screamed. A wall of crimson light erupted from the ground – not just in front of them, but all around them. It shot up into the sky, curving inward, sealing them inside a perfect, shimmering dome of blood-red energy.

  Li Xuan slammed into the barrier mid-leap. It was like hitting a mountain. The impact jarred his bones, and he rebounded, landing in a crouch beside Mistress Bai.

  He slashed at the wall instantly, pouring his full strength into the blow. His sword, capable of cutting through steel and stone, bounced off the red light with a dull thwack, leaving not even a scratch.

  To make matters worse, the bandits continued charging toward them without pause. The barrier did nothing to impede them; men threw themselves through its membrane without resistance, their eyes glassy, their Qi signatures trembling. As they crossed the threshold, something in the array tugged at them – at the implanted Qi in their bodies – tightening the threads that bound them to their master.

  “Any ideas?” he demanded, moving smoothly to cover her as she focused on her Qi senses. She may not have Sect training, but he wasn’t so proud as to deny the fact that her senses were far sharper than his own.

  “They’re not fighting us. They’re not trying to win. They’re trying to die.”

  Li Xuan narrowed his eyes. “Explain.”

  “They were feeding him slowly before,” Mistress Bai said, eyes closed in concentration even as another wave of bandits shoved through the barrier and sprinted toward them. “Little threads. Every time we killed one, the Qi returned to the master. But now—”

  Her eyes snapped open.

  “—now the barrier is accelerating it. It’s compressing the release. Forcing it. Every death inside this array feeds the formation directly and strengthens the core – presumably, where Gao Leng is waiting to take advantage of the energy.”

  Li Xuan exhaled slowly, tightening his fingers around his sword hilt.

  “So,” he said flatly, “we’re trapped.”

  Mistress Bai didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

  The barrier throbbed again, deeper this time, as another fifty bandits hurled themselves toward the jaws of their own annihilation.