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2.22 - King Hao
🕑 Added 2024-02-08 23:00:01 +0000 UTCThe first two sentries never had time to realize what had happened. Before they lay dead in the road, the three disciples were a good three dozen yards up the path. The second set of sentries fared a little better, at least managing to get their weapons out before they, too, were cut down. Shouts rose from the bandit camp, a makeshift thing with the beginnings of a palisade that suggested the group had intended to settle in for an extended stay in the region.
The alarm didn’t help though. The three Shrouded Peaks disciples breached the outer perimeter—such as it was—with movement techniques well before the bandits could begin organizing anything resembling a defense.
He Yu leaped over a barricade with his movement technique, wind curling around his guandao. He steeled his heart at the sight before him—a boy not much older than he was, staring up at him with wide, fearful eyes.
He hadn’t even managed to pull his sword from its sheath before He Yu fell upon him. He Yu held the image of slaughtered peasants in his mind. It helped, if only a little, as he killed his first human opponent.
He didn’t have time to dwell on it. As soon as the boy’s body hit the mud, he found himself rushed by half a dozen other bandits. He used his movement technique and the Five Crescent Winds freely, thanks to the robe he’d received from Yongnian. The bandits fell as quickly as they came.
Nearby, Li Heng flashed from one foe to another. The White Hare Dance carried him effortlessly between opponents, and the Winter Moon Reflection gleamed despite the brightness of the day. His time with Old Guo had clearly left its mark, as Li Heng fought with far more aggression than he’d displayed even in their spars during the last month.
Yan Shirong flitted about the edges, cloaked in shadow and using both that spray of shadowy thorns and his throwing knives to good effect. His dark tendrils rose from the bandits’ shadows to bind their limbs and their weapons, allowing He Yu and Li Heng to cut them down all the more easily.
In the span of only a few minutes, several score of bandits lay dead or wounded, and the rest had turned and fled. A good measure of this was clearly due to the disciple’s sudden attack, but He Yu couldn’t shake the recollection of how absolutely helpless that first one had seemed before him. This was what it meant to truly face a cultivator in battle. Thankfully, before he could lose himself in rumination over the fact that he’d just killed a dozen or more people, a booming voice interrupted his thoughts.
“What’s this,” King Hao roared, finally revealing himself. “The sect dogs have returned?” The Ox King was dressed as he was before in his worn lamellar, his massive bronze mace propped on one shoulder.
“We’re here to deliver justice,” Li Heng said. His voice was an icy calm, and He Yu was thankful that he hadn’t needed to say anything himself. He didn’t trust himself to speak quite yet, the image of a young bandit staring up at him in fear still burned in his mind.
King Hao threw open his arms. “Then come and deliver it or die like dogs!” he shouted.
Li Heng flashed over to King Hao in the instant the bandit leader was exposed. His sword traced a silver arc through the air and his lunar qi shone sharp and cold. In the moment of his attack, Li Heng’s presence manifested itself more clearly than it ever had previously. It was a snow-covered field, with countless stars quietly winking while a sword-sharp crescent moon bathed the world in silver light. Despite its silence and serenity, danger lurked at the edges of things barely seen, and in the glint of moonlit snow.
A massive weight of knobbed bronze slammed down on the edge of Li Heng’s blade as King Hao reacted to the attack. The Ox King’s spirit flared, a massive stone fortress with gates bound in iron. It carried an impressive spiritual weight with it, given that he was of the Third Realm, but He Yu could immediately tell it was less defined than any of their own had become in the time since their first fight. Old Guo had been right about the benefits of training their foundations, and He Yu began to believe that they’d be able to win here.
Li Heng spun away from the bandit king, his jian tracing a silver arc as he carried the momentum from deflecting King Hao’s blow into another attack. He was wholly unburdened by the weight of his sword as he had been during their previous fight—yet another benefit of the training they’d received. Despite Li Heng’s improvements, He Yu knew that he wouldn’t be able to handle King Hao alone.
Activating both the Empyrean Ninefold Body Tempering and the Sky Dragon’s Flight, He Yu joined the fray. His skin took on a slight reflective shine as his movements accelerated to the limit of what he could control. Wind curled around his guandao, and tiny sparks of heavenly qi flashed within the torrent. The Peerless Judgment flashed a warning, and He Yu deftly avoided a sweep of King Hao’s mace. He’d forgotten that the bandit had a movement technique of his own.
Li Heng flashed to the opposite side of the bandit with the White Hare Dance, and his eyes flicked up to meet He Yu’s. A slight nod was all the response he gave, and with the weight of half a year’s worth of intense training together, they attacked as one.
The shadows around King Hao’s feet churned, and a dozen tendrils rose, rooting him to the spot. Yan Shirong emerged from a billowing cloud of darkness above the bandit, held aloft by yet more strands formed of shadowy qi. His presence had become one of darkness and silence. A sense of absence that weighed on the senses through the lack of what should be. The three disciples attacked as one.
* * *
For so long, Li Heng had been using the Winter Moon Reflection incorrectly. He’d been such a fool. Yes, the moon was a manifestation of Yin, receptive, cold, and dark. But cultivation was about balance. To bring out the true nature of the technique, it required its complement. The Yang had to come from somewhere, but he’d always thought that it came from the attacks the technique received. Old Guo had shown him how incorrect that was.
He’d long known that the advancement of an art, especially an art so sublime as his family’s Lunar Mirror Sword Art wasn’t strictly tied to a cultivator’s advancement. While higher cultivation was certainly required to bring out the fullness of one’s techniques—and to make use of more advanced ones—the key to mastering an art was understanding.
Now, after these months of training, Li Heng had begun to grasp that understanding. The Yang needed to come from him. He attacked—and the art sang in his spirit. The edge of his grandfather’s jian shone with the brilliance of a blow he should not have been able to take, but in balance, he’d found the way forward. Moonlight shone down, illuminating the snowy field of his spirit. Illuminating a path.
Li Heng now took the first step on that path, and the patterns of qi formed in his mind’s eye. He activated the Darkmoon Strife.
* * *
Yan Shirong supposed that he shouldn’t have been all that surprised when Li Heng debuted a new technique in the middle of battle. Even he knew enough to gauge such things to be foolish—new techniques could be difficult to use properly, even in the best of circumstances. So much could go wrong in the heat of an actual fight. Despite that, something had changed within Li Heng since returning from his individual training with that old monster—and it would have needed to manifest eventually.
He could also appreciate the other noble’s sense of presentation. The silver light that limned Li Heng’s jian winked out mid-swing, taking the blade with it. The momentum of his attack carried him past King Hao and away from any retaliation, leaving three parallel dark scars on the world. Blood spurted from the newly made rents in King Hao’s armor.
Again he told himself that he didn’t mind that he was so far behind. They would bury this trash, take their spoils, then return to the sect and receive payment. He would buy a mountain of pills and elixirs, then spend every waking moment until the tournament in secluded cultivation. When it came time for the tournament, he’d have some new tricks to unveil—and tricks had always been what he was best at.
* * *
It was only the Cloud Emperor’s Peerless Judgment that allowed He Yu to see through the cloying mass of shadow that rose around King Hao following that flashy new attack Li Heng had just used. He supposed Yan Shirong had spent enough time sparring with him to know that He Yu wouldn’t be impeded by it, but they really ought to coordinate that sort of thing. Still, he capitalized on the bandit king’s momentary distraction as King Hao tried once more to tear himself free of the ever-growing number of shadowy tendrils winding around his limbs.
Wind howled along the length of his guandao, and tiny arcs of lightning danced along the leading edge of the blade. After a month of training and cultivation of the Empyrean Ninefold Body Tempering, his qi had gained a heaven aspect that complimented the Peerless Judgment well. He supposed that shouldn’t have been all that surprising—“heavenly” was in the name of the art, after all. But more importantly, it felt as though his spirit had settled for lack of a better term. Like—as the name of the stage implied—he’d forged a foundation for his future. Wind, water, and heaven.
The water aspect was the most underdeveloped. There were aspects of it in the Cloud Emperor’s Peerless Judgment, and it was only the cultivation of that technique that gave him the certainty that a new stage of the Heavenly Palace art lay just beyond his reach. A stage that would bring the water aspect into balance with the others. But for now, wind and heaven were enough. He couldn’t help but laugh as he zipped around the lumbering brute of a bandit, his earlier misgivings all but forgotten.
Then, King Hao roared. Shadows flared up around him, but not any of Yan Shirong’s creation. They were tinged red, and He Yu had to cut off his use of the Peerless Judgment at the wave of wrongness that accompanied the sound.
He Yu shuddered as he got the impression of a distant, bloody sunset. The impression was faint, but he somehow instinctively knew that it was far stronger than anything he’d ever experienced. Something was weakening it, and without that weakening, the presence would have crushed everyone present.
That faint, distant presence wrapped itself around King Hao, and his qi flared. He seemed to shrug off all the damage they’d done up until that point and settled into an aggressive stance.
His eyes were tinged red as he glared at the three disciples. “Time to die,” he growled.
