Eclipse Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 2)

by Gage Lee

  Professor Song’s new meditation style changed that.

  The regimented motions opened a new understanding within me. I suddenly understood how my core worked with my body to harness and direct the sacred energy that was the key to all life. The sweep of my arm wasn’t just muscles and bones moving according to the demands of my mind. It was an extension of the natural flow of jinsei through the universe. When I was in tune with what the jinsei wanted to do, everything was easier, simpler.

  That revelation allowed me to harness more spiritual power without enticing the dark urge to surface. On one crisp Wednesday morning in the middle of February, I found myself so deep in Professor Song’s guided meditation that my core ached with the power it contained. The rest of my class disappeared from my thoughts as I filled my core to its limits.

  And beyond.

  My thoughts exploded out of the meditation. My back arched, and every muscle in my body tensed at once. Jinsei crackled in my aura like a living flame, spearing toward the roof of the dojo in a golden rush. The power carried me with it. I hung, suspended in the air by the forces that had rushed through me during my explosive advancement.

  My core had transcended to adept level.

  As the rush of power subsided and my feet settled to the floor, I took a deep breath and felt a surge of jinsei pass into my core. It was as if I’d spent my whole life up to that point breathing with only one lung.

  A gasp rustled through the students in the dojo. The weight of their attention fell on my aura like tiny hailstones, a pinging rattle that I banished with a thought.

  I only had to glance around the room to see that, except for Professor Song’s, my core was the most powerful one in the dojo. The rest of my class were still initiates, much more powerful than the average person, but nowhere near as powerful as I now was.

  Finally, all the grinding and frustration had paid off. I’d done it.

  “Congratulations are in order, Mr. Warin,” the professor called from his position at the head of the dojo. He strode through the other students, a smile beaming on his face, his eyes lit up with pride as he approached me. “That was an impressively quick advancement for a student.”

  He stopped a few feet away, and I bowed respectfully, my eyes never leaving his.

  “Thank you, revered Professor,” I said. “I’ve been working hard, and your teachings helped me find the right path.”

  “You honor me,” the professor said, returning my bow, his eyes cast to the floor. “It has been my pleasure to instruct a student with such ferocious determination. Perhaps when you have some time, you can show me that technique you used in your duel against Rafael.”

  “It’s not all that impressive,” I said, trying to deflect the conversation. “My time in Mr. Reyes’s lab taught me to gather aspects from the environment quickly. The technique is merely an extension of that.”

  “I see,” the professor said. He thrust his hand forward, and I took it. “Again, congratulations on your advancement to adept. You may find the change disorienting at first. I’ll dismiss you from class early and will let your other professors know not to expect you today. You should return to your quarters, meditate, and rest. Feel free to explore your new abilities, though it’s important you don’t push yourself too hard just yet. Your core is very sensitive after an advancement of this magnitude. A new world has opened to you—be careful not to trip when you cross its threshold.”

  Professor Song shook my hand vigorously and clapped me on the shoulder as the rest of the class burst into applause.

  I let myself bask in their admiration and thanked the Grand Design that everything was finally going my way. Even my duel with Rafael had worked out for the best, because I’d learned a new technique. Clem and Rachel were, if not friends, at least friendly toward one another, and I had a girlfriend for the first time in my life. And the dangerous work I’d done for the elders was getting me closer to finding my mother while I made the world a safer place.

  The advancement was the icing on the cake.

  “Thank you, Professor Song,” I said. “It has been my honor to be your student and learn from your teachings.”

  With that, I left the dojo. I’d grown stronger during my time in the Five Dragons Challenge, my body hardened by the combat training. But that paled in comparison to the strength I’d gained from my advancement. It was as if I’d been a child, and now I was a full-grown man. My strides were smooth and long, my legs carrying me with no effort at all. My robes felt tight against my biceps and across my shoulders, like I’d gained muscle mass.

  Maybe I had. I’d never known anyone who’d advanced from initiate to adept. There was no telling what sorts of physical changes might accompany such a dramatic shift in mystic ability.

  And that had increased dramatically. I noticed faint swirls of golden light at the corners of my vision as I walked through the halls, and when I focused on them, they snapped into sharper relief. The luminous threads crawled along the walls and floated in the air. The longer I stared at them, the more of them I saw.

  With a start, I understood these were currents of jinsei. The School’s walls were riddled with them, which made sense. The architecture could shift and move because it was built on a base of sacred energy. I’d just never realized how much jinsei was around me at all times. It was overwhelming.

  I was still marveling over this new ability when I reached my quarters. My eyes followed the glowing threads as the door opened, and the inner workings of the mechanism were obvious to my new senses. Sacred energy not only parted the doors, it lubricated the tracks and dampened the sound of their travel. There was so much more to jinsei than I’d ever noticed before.

  If the halls had been brimming with jinsei, my quarters overflowed with the spiritual power. The boundary between the school and the forest path that led to my cottage was surrounded by a rectangle of golden light so bright it was difficult to even look at. It had to be a portal of some kind, stable and fixed in place and filled with energy so it didn’t have to be activated. The amount of time and effort that had gone into creating such a thing boggled my mind.

  There was so much sacred energy in the air, I had to readjust my vision to ignore it. It was difficult at first, and I stumbled more than once when I misjudged where the ground was behind the swirls of power that emanated from it. The trip across the lake’s bridge was nerve-racking, and I was relieved to make it to the cottage’s front door without tumbling over the rail.

  “I need coffee.” I shambled through the sitting room and into the kitchen.

  The advancement had filled me with jinsei, amplified my senses, and left me suddenly wiped out. It wasn’t yet nine in the morning, and already I needed a nap. That wouldn’t do. There were so many new things about my core I wanted to explore. Its capacity to store jinsei. The effect it had on my techniques. What it had done to my body.

  I was pulling the coffee supplies out of a cupboard when a floorboard behind me creaked a warning.

  A rough hand slammed my face into the cupboard. The coffee set fell from my suddenly nerveless fingers and shattered on the floor. A burst of stars exploded across my vision, and a terrifying weakness spread down my spine.

  Fingers closed in my hair and drew my head back, then slammed my skull into the granite counter. With a snarl, my unknown attacker hurled me across the kitchen and into the side of the stainless steel refrigerator.

  A few days ago, even an hour ago, that series of attacks would have killed me. With my new core, though, my body was more resilient and able to withstand the damage. The attack hurt, but my skull was intact, and my nose wasn’t even broken. My rattled senses snapped back into focus, and I pushed jinsei out of my core and into my body’s channels. If the intruder wanted a fight, he was going to get one.

  I bounced away from the refrigerator on the balls of my feet just in time to avoid a brutal punch that smashed a dent into the side of the appliance. I almost hadn’t seen the attack at all, because my foe was wrapped head to
toe in a strange field of jinsei that obscured every detail of their form. The humanoid swirl of power jumped away after their missed attack and threw their arms up to defend themselves.

  “Who are you?” I demanded, settling into a ready stance. It was hard to concentrate on the figure in front of me, as if the jinsei surrounding them didn’t want me to see them at all. If I’d still been an initiate, the field might have made them completely invisible.

  My advancement had just saved my life.

  The assailants didn’t waste any words. They lunged forward, throwing punches and kicks in a blistering flurry of raw aggression. Unfortunately for them, the kitchen was cramped, and that limited their range of attacks to easily blocked straight-line strikes.

  I defended myself and cycled my breathing to bring my body, core, and aura into alignment. My opponent had pulled back to evaluate me more closely, and I wondered if he was surprised at the strength of his target. I found myself excited by the fight, ready to test my abilities against a serious opponent. There’d be no pulling punches in this sparring match.

  My attacker switched tactics and summoned a fusion blade in the blink of an eye. It was a strange, spear-like weapon, and the attacker threw a blistering series of thrusts toward me. The jinsei-fueled attacks came fast and furious, forcing me into a defensive stance.

  I kept the fusion blade’s business end from punching holes in my chest and gut with counterstrikes and parries, though my defense cost me numerous cuts across my forearms and the backs of my hands. My Thief’s Shield wasn’t enough to save me here. Even if I stripped the aspects and jinsei out of my opponent, the speed and savagery of his spear thrusts would leave me full of holes.

  Summoning my own fusion blade wouldn’t do me any good in the cramped quarters, either. The long hilt and blade would be useless for defense or offense, just as they had been in Albert’s dinky apartment. Meanwhile, my opponent’s short stabbing weapon was the perfect tool for poking a bunch of holes in an opponent at very short range, very quickly.

  As if he’d read my mind, my blurry attacker executed a series of short, sharp thrusts that backed me against the kitchen wall. With nowhere to go, I slapped the first few attacks aside, took a cut across my forearm, and narrowly avoided losing an eye by jerking my head to the side at the last minute.

  Through it all, I cycled my breathing, drawing in beast aspects from the catfish that swam in the lake around the cottage, the birds that nested in the building’s eaves, and, yes, the rats that cavorted in the fields that surrounded the lake. While my opponent had focused on murdering me, I’d been preparing a riposte.

  In the instant he extended himself to drive his spear’s point through my face, I formed serpents from the beast aspects and struck.

  Each of the glowing tendrils was as thick as my wrist and narrowed to a sharp tip. My first serpent looped around my foe’s fusion blade and spiraled down his arm to stab his bicep. In the same moment, the other serpent speared into his core.

  Or, they would have.

  The jinsei that surrounded my assassin wasn’t just camouflage, it was also powerful defensive armor. My serpents bounced off it with a pair of loud cracks and recoiled as the sacred energy they’d struck lashed out at them with jolts of lightning-aspected jinsei.

  The unexpected retaliation drew a grunt from me, and if I’d been any weaker, it would’ve stunned me into immobility.

  Instead it just made me mad.

  My opponent tried to free his weapon from my serpent, with no luck. Rather than continue the fruitless struggle, he let the blade dissipate and came at me again with his hands and feet. This time, the golden energy around him shifted to red and black, powerful destructive aspects from his aura flooding into the sacred power.

  A counterpunch from my left hand drove his right fist into the side of the refrigerator, leaving another dent in the appliance. I trapped his right hand with a sweeping block that pulled it under my left arm and tight against my body. The buzz of his armor’s defenses was annoying, though hardly enough to stop me.

  “Who sent you?” I demanded in the brief space between attacks.

  The assassin wasn’t talking. He tried to headbutt me, and when that missed, he threw a knee at my midsection, grazing my ribs with little effect.

  With one arm trapped, the enemy couldn’t defend himself against my blows. I hooked a series of rapid uppercuts into his abdomen, lifting him off his feet with every strike. He grunted with the impacts, but didn’t fall.

  The damned armor was blunting my offense.

  I unleashed the Thief’s Shield technique and my aura siphoned aspects of fortitude and resilience out of my attacker. It wasn’t the usual rush of power I’d experienced when using the technique against other opponents, though. It was a slow drip of aspects and jinsei. Enough to weaken my opponent. Not enough to drop him.

  My attacker realized the new danger and tried to free himself with a sudden frenzy of activity. His knees bounced off the outsides of my thighs as I raised one leg then the other to fend off his strikes. His free hand clawed toward my face, and I slapped it to the side with a backfist. He gambled on another headbutt, and I stopped it cold with a short, sharp elbow strike across his chin.

  My technique had drained enough power from my attacker’s armor to let that attack through, and the blurred aura that had surrounded him faded. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of gray eyes between layers of black cloth. I reached for the man’s mask, hoping to tear it free and get a good look at him. The elders would want to know who’d tried to kill me.

  My Eclipse nature wanted to see its victim’s face. The dark urge had been amplified by my advancement and rose up within me so quickly I didn’t notice until it was almost too late. If the man hadn’t been protected by his armor, he’d have been drained dry in that moment.

  Instead, my Eclipse nature gorged itself on half the jinsei in his core and stole away the last of the protection aspects in his armor. He was vulnerable. I could disable him and haul him off to face the elders.

  Unfortunately, my assassin had an escape plan. He knew when he was outclassed and decided to run away to fight another day. The masked man made a complex gesture with his free hand and vanished in a burst of red light. A cloud of thick, stinking smoke filled the kitchen.

  I staggered back into the living room and took a deep, shuddering breath. I raced upstairs to make sure there wasn’t another attacker hiding in my bedroom. The windows on either end of the upper floor gave me a good vantage point to confirm there were no other enemies hiding outside the cottage.

  The assassin had come alone.

  How the hell had he gotten into my quarters in the first place?

  I stormed back to the school. Hagar and I needed to talk.

  The Lure

  I HAD NO IDEA WHERE to find my handler, so I started with her room. I banged on the door, and when that didn’t work, I pounded at her neighbors’ doors until someone answered.

  “I’m looking for Hagar,” I told a final-year student who looked more than a little annoyed to have been woken up before his first class. “Have you seen her?”

  “You know what time it is?” he asked. “Have you checked the exercise yard? I know she likes to do her calisthenics before breakfast.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I hustled down the hall and willed the school to show me the fastest way to the courtyard. I was surprised to find how much more quickly I could move through the building, now. It was as if my advanced core exerted more control over the shifting architecture.

  Hagar wasn’t in the courtyard. Of course not, nothing could ever be easy.

  I concentrated on my handler, fixing her image in my mind. When I had it as clear as I could manage, I demanded the school take me to her.

  I wound my way up and down staircases, through twisting halls I’d never seen before, and up a spiral ramp lined with burning candles glued to the walls by ridiculous stalagmites of once-molten wax. I raised my fist to hammer on the door at the to
p of the ramp and almost punched Hagar in the face.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. For a moment, she looked as angry and displeased with me as the old Hagar.

  “Someone just tried to kill me.” I showed her my bloodied arms through the shredded sleeves of my robes. “In the cottage.”

  “That’s not possible,” she started, then shook her head. “Of course it’s possible. It happened. You can’t come in here. Let’s go back to your cottage.”

  “What if they send another killer?” I asked.

  “You defeated one, you can defeat another. Plus, I’ll be there to back you up,” she said.

  “What if they send something else? Like a bomb.”

  “That’s a fair point,” she said. “Give me a second.”

  There was a loud clatter inside the room, and a series of grinding noises like Hagar was dragging furniture across the wooden floor. Light flashed under the doorway, red, green, and a shade of blue so bright it was nearly white. Finally, the noise stopped, and the door flew open.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I followed my handler into a room that was as plain and boring as any I’d ever seen. The circular chamber had stone walls topped by a plaster-domed roof crossed by a heavy pair of dark support beams. There were no windows or furniture, and no decorations on the walls. The only door was the one we’d entered through, and the only light came from a single dim orb floating near the ceiling.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “A meeting area,” Sanrin replied as he walked through the wall. “Tell me what happened, every detail.”

  I spilled my story for the elder and answered a barrage of very specific questions. Where, exactly, had the man been standing when he vanished? What did he smell like? Was he wearing gloves?

  Finally, after a solid ten minutes of interrogation, Sanrin crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. His lips moved slightly, like he was having a conversation in his dreams. After a few moments of that, he opened his eyes and nodded.