Free Web NovelChapter 117: The Standing Man
Xuan picked his corner of the slaughter before his boots had finished crossing the threshold.
Six of them had clotted together against the eastern wall, panicked into a knot the way frightened men always knot, shoulder to shoulder beneath the spirit ore’s blue shimmer, swords out and shaking. They had watched their own elder skewer a brother on a spear, and their minds had curdled to soup. They were staring everywhere at once, which meant they were watching nowhere, which meant they were his.
’These six are mine,’ he told Mira, and went.
He opened with Storm Dragon.
Marrow Dragon woke into a whirring lattice of cuts, the blade scoring four lines through the air faster than the eye trailing it could file them, a churning grey blur threaded with the lightning-flicker the form took its name from. He was not swinging to kill. He was swinging to shatter. The fan of strokes raked across the huddle and unstitched it at the seams, splitting throats and forearms and the meat of shoulders, scattering the six out of their cluster and into the open where they could no longer prop each other up. Two crumpled where they stood, ribboned. A third lurched away cradling a wrist that had quit answering him.
The cost stacked fast, the way it always did with that form, his dantian draining in greedy mouthfuls, but he had budgeted for the spend. He let the chain die and read the wreckage with a swordsman’s cold patience.
One of the survivors over-reached, plunging into the gap the storm had carved, his guard gaping wide on the right. A textbook error, and Xuan handed him the textbook answer for it.
Piercing Dragon.
He dropped his weight, coiled, and uncorked the thrust along a single ruthless line, body and breath and steel all rushing forward as one shrieking point. The Qi crammed into the tip released on contact, and Marrow Dragon punched through the man’s sternum and out his spine before his lunge had finished arriving, a streak of brilliant red that winked out the far side of him like a thread snapped under load. He folded before his knees caught up to the news. ƒгeewёbnovel.com
That left two with fight left in them and one who had misplaced his.
The cleverest of the bunch chose the worst option on the table. He sprang backward and up, kicking off a support beam to vault past Xuan’s reach and steal the half breath he needed to fill his lungs and scream the floor awake.
Cute.
Soaring Dragon plucked him out of the air. Xuan detonated upward out of a low crouch, legs firing, a thread of Qi feeding the leap until he climbed alongside the man rather than beneath him, Marrow Dragon rising in a silver arc that began at his hip and finished with the point aimed at the rotted ceiling. The edge opened the leaping man from groin to collar on the way up. The shout he had been hoarding spilled out as a wet rush of nothing. Xuan touched down first. What was left of the man dropped in halves.
The last two went down on reflex, faster than thought, and the corner was his.
He cut his eyes to the edge of his vision out of old habit, half expecting the little ledger to unroll.
Nothing surfaced. No points, no karma tick, the system not bothering to keep its books on garbage like this.
[ Don’t waste the glance. ] Mira, dry as struck flint. [ That lot wasn’t worth poop. You’ve squashed mosquitoes that earned you more. ]
’Charming. Lovely to know my craftsmanship moves you.’
The rest of the chamber sorted itself around him as his breathing evened. His father had barely shifted his stance; a Foundation patriarch did not stoop to chasing Qi Refining chaff, and the few who staggered into his orbit simply stopped being. Lin Kai worked the right flank with a focus that shamed the brittle creature he had been a fortnight ago, his mother’s blade drinking the forge-glow red as he hewed a road that begged no quarter and gave none. Wei held the left, white-knuckled and ungainly and very much alive, which was the entire job. The two core disciples wiped out their corners with the unbothered thrift of people who had done this work many nights before.
And through all of it, the grey scythe at the heart of the room never once slowed. Han Ying carved through his own sworn brothers with a spear that grew heavier and quicker with every life it drank, and not a soul under that ceiling save Xuan grasped what wore the old man’s hide.
The end arrived sooner than the opening had threatened. Han Ying ran the last breathing Blood Fang through the back as the man clawed for the stair, pinned him to the packed dirt, and gave the haft a single turn. The body bucked and quit. With that, the racket of forty deaths snapped off into a thick, dripping hush, scored only by water threading the walls and the slow wheeze of the demonic forge guttering in its alcove.
Xuan let his shoulders ease a notch. Two years that glowing seam had fattened another sect’s coffers, and inside the span of one foul night it answered to Skyedge again. He tucked the satisfaction away where no face could read it.
Across the gore, his father walked a slow turn through the emptied chamber, weighing the prize he had crossed two days of cruel country to take back. Whatever churned behind the patriarch’s eyes, he kept his own counsel on it.
Which left the one fixture in that room nobody but Xuan could account for.
Han Ying.
He alone of all the Fang in that mine was left on his feet, spear lowered now, blood ribboning off the head to puddle around his boots. He had gone motionless the heartbeat the last of his brothers dropped, rooted among the corpses of men who had marched at his shoulder for fifty years, placid and unreadable, awaiting a cue only Xuan could have spoken.
The group rounded on him together.
They closed in by inches, a cinching noose of lifted steel. Lin Kai on the near side with his red blade high, the two core disciples splaying wide to seal the stair, Wei a half pace off Xuan’s shoulder and still gulping air. Six sets of eyes nailed to an enemy elder who had just gutted his own for reasons none of them could chase down. Ally, snare, or lunatic, no one could say, and the blank where the answer should sit honed every edge in the ring.
Xuan held his face bolted shut and let Mira keep the puppet meek, spear canted at the dirt, the whole shape of a man with no fight left in him, surrender painted plain for an audience that needed to find surrender there.
Lin Zhen stepped to the lip of the ring. He raised his blade until the point hung a hand’s width off the old man’s gullet, and his voice fell out flat and final, carrying easy across the dripping quiet.
"Talk. What in every hell turns a Blood Fang elder loose on his own?"
