by Dante King
“I have a potion!” Regina announced, pulling one from a storage container in the back of the cart. She hastened to bring it to the cultivator, her expression almost comical in its worry. Bao would be alright.
“Whatever you hear,” I told Lyra, “Don’t follow us in.” Next to me, Anna had already begun to transform. She wavered somewhere between a woman and a weapon now, her long hair sharpening into the blade of a scythe. “This isn’t going to be pretty.”
Lyra nodded gravely. “Give ‘em hell.”
With Anna in my hands, I stepped inside. The cave was dark and sloped gently downward, with stalactites in the ceiling stretching down to form a kind of makeshift path. The air tasted of mildew and old dirt—and beneath that, a tang of something strange.
Anna picked up on it long before I would have. “Oh fuck,” my girlfriend whimpered in my head, sounding almost afraid. “This place is bad news, baby!”
“Bad news how?” I whispered, making my way down step by step. The floor was surprisingly slippery, formed of sheer rock and covered in tiny gradations caused by years of water erosion.
“You don’t smell that!?” She sounded amazed. “This cave reeks of blood, Eric. A lot of blood. Like, way way more than any one duel could possibly produce.”
Oh shit. That was bad.
“Why do you think that is?” I asked, wading further into the darkness. I could see a faint light in the distance, but crossing to it was going to involve a bit of trial and error. I couldn’t see where I was going.
“I don’t know,” Anna spoke in my head, “but you’re walking through a slaughterhouse, sweetheart. Be very, very careful…”
Crossing through the darkness was the worst part. Anything could be hiding in the shadows waiting to take a stab at me, and there was no time to stop and open myself to my enhanced senses. I kept moving forward, expecting an attack at any moment, listening to the sounds of Hazel’s grunts and counterstrikes.
It was then I realized that I could only hear Hazel. Whoever she fought wasn’t making a sound. Who could possibly keep up with that warrior and stay totally silent the whole time? It sent shivers down my spine.
Seth is bad news, I thought, pushing toward the light. The blood, the rumors about the woods, the attack on Bao — all of them added up to a truly awful conclusion. This man wasn’t just a rotten cultivator, but some kind of monster. The sort even more dangerous than a Bronze Shade or a swarm of Rust Beetles.
I stepped into the light. For a few moments as my eyes adjusted, I thought Seth had hung some kind of punching bags from the ceiling of the chamber to practice his cultivation on. Then I saw what they were, and my blood froze in my veins.
“God almighty,” I whispered. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
They were bodies. Dozens of them, tied to hooks embedded in the stone ceiling of the cave. Most of them hung upside down like meat being sold by a butcher, but more than a few had their hands and arms trussed, makeshift gags tied over their unmoving mouths. An overwhelming majority of them wore the unassuming robes of peasants, but here and there lay a wealthy merchant—a prostitute—a cultivator.
None of these people had died easy. Buckets lay beneath most of the corpses, filled with dried blood. Seth had caught it all as he wounded his prey, for reasons I didn’t want to understand. Stab wounds covered the corpses, and for every body sporting an almost-merciful slash across the throat, there were a half-dozen who’d been left with non-fatal wounds to bleed out, get infected, or simply die of the horror.
I thought of serial killers back on Earth: men with dozens of victims, killed in horrible ways. If this cultivator had been sent back to my world, he’d rank right up there with the worst.
“Eric.” Anna’s voice was practically a squeak in my skull. “This is like something out of a fucking horror movie.”
It was—but it was real at the same time. Careful not to make too much noise, I slipped between the corpses to the back of the chamber. The thought of touching them made my stomach turn, but I had to get to Hazel. She sounded close now, as if she were right next door. The sounds of fighting grew sharper, Hazel’s cries becoming ever more desperate. She needed me now!
This was clearly the space where the occupant of the cave lay his head at night. A makeshift bed lay in the corner, and candles burned at intervals to give the place a wan, unflattering light. As I pushed into the room, the two figures at its center gave a start and pirouetted away from each other.
It was Hazel and Seth. The pair looked like they’d been locked in combat for some time now, with neither of them giving any indication of giving up the ghost. Sweat stood on nearly every inch of Hazel’s skin, and several shallow cuts covered her arms and legs. Her robes hung from her in tatters, the chunk of fabric we’d found in the woods clearly just a small piece of what she’d lost in her hunt to bring Seth down.
Hazel’s eyes widened. “You,” she whispered, the word filled with both shame and awe. Shame that she’d run from me. Awe that I’d managed to track her down so quickly.
Seth retreated from the center of the chamber, leaning on a rickety shrine in a corner of the room. Arcane symbols covered it, a structure like a pyramid sitting atop the pedestal that formed its base. The youth looked like he’d taken the worst of the battle with Hazel, but like her seemed in no immediate danger of succumbing to his wounds. I wondered how long the two of them had been fighting like this.
“Hah, the bastard cultivator,” Seth said haughtily. “Our new Governor. Should have known you’d come running to protect your skank, wouldn’t you?”
The insult carried no sting. “You’re a monster,” I said, meeting the man’s eyes. “I saw what you did to those people.”
For an instant, guilt flickered on Seth’s face. Then his arrogant nature reasserted itself. “You wouldn’t understand,” he grunted, sparing a glance for the shrine sitting next to him.
“Try me,” I said, feeling an eerie calm settle over me.
Seth met my gaze a moment longer, then shook his head and laughed. “Two on one then, is it? I thought you were supposed to be honorable, Eric.”
His attempts to rankle me were destined to fail. “Honor is for human beings,” I told him, readying Anna in a battle stance. “Someone who would do the things I saw in that room isn’t fit for that title.”
Seth bore his teeth like a rabid dog. “Fuck you!”
“He’s right,” Hazel said, putting an arm on my shoulder. “You can’t interfere, Eric. This battle is for me alone.”
I was so taken aback I was sure I must have misheard her. “Excuse me?”
“You have to let me kill him myself,” Hazel explained. “With my own cultivation.”
“Ohhh yes,” Seth chuckled, sounding more like a disgusting little worm than ever before. “With the powers you got from rutting with him like a whore!”
“Shut the fuck up!” I snarled, not wanting to hear a single word come from that demented twerp. “I’m not letting you fight this asshole alone, Hazel. No fucking way.” The wheels in my head had already begun to turn, linking this encounter to our greater fight. “If anything, we need to take him alive.”
Now it was Hazel’s turn to be shocked. “Are you kidding me!? This man deserves death a thousand times over!”
“I agree,” I said with a nod. “But if we kill him here and now, he’s just a psycho in the woods. We drag him out into the public square with evidence of his crimes, and he’s a representative of the Hollow Frog Guild. He’s proof they’ve been looking the other way on more than just smuggling, corruption and drug dealing. They’ve been harboring a fucking murderer in their midst, without even investigating him!”
Hazel shook her head. “This is a matter of honor,” she snapped. “My honor.”
From his perch next to the shrine, Seth began to giggle. It made him sound almost girlish, but the sound turned my veins to ice. He’s completely insane, I thought.
“You’re so naive it’s almost funny,” Seth said, poison dripping from
every word. “You really think the Hollow Frog Guild doesn't know what I’m doing?”
Hazel and I froze. I felt the depths of Anna’s shock as a startled silence in my head. No. Surely this was too much.
“If anything,” Seth continued, “I’ve done far less harm than most cultivators of my rank. Drug dealing, prostitution, human trafficing: those things destroy entire communities! All I do is occasionally satisfy a little appetite of mine. And all those I’ve killed were… undesirables, anyway. Not fit to wield their gifts.”
I thought of the handful of figures I’d seen wearing cultivator’s robes in the chamber of horrors, and Seth’s words began to make a hideous kind of sense. “Your own Guild turned those cultivators over to you, didn’t they?”
Seth shrugged, a look on his face like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Sometimes Guildmaster Ji needs a threat to his power removed,” the man said, checking his nails. “Or someone starts asking the wrong questions, or poking their nose in where it doesn’t belong. Like a couple others I could mention.”
My vision swam. A red film covered the world, flickering before my eyes like a bad batch of celluloid. “You almost killed Bao, you asshole!”
“Almost?” Now Seth did look surprised. “Hmm, that means you must have saved the old codger. Which doubtless means you have friends outside who I’ll have to kill once I deal with you.”
Oh fuck no. The thought of this monster laying his hands on Lyra, Regina or Kim—subjecting them to the same treatment as those poor people in the chamber of horrors—was utterly intolerable.
“You won’t get the chance,” I growled, brandishing Anna. “Because you’re not leaving this chamber alive.”
It tore every instinct I had. Everything inside of me wanted to lunge forward, unleash every bit of energy I had on Seth’s stupid, smug face. I wanted to tear him limb from limb, until he made the bodies hanging in his secret chamber look like works of art in comparison.
Only one thing held me back. Hazel’s honor as a cultivator.
I knew I had to give her this one thing in order to solidify her within the group. If I did it, she’d follow me to the gates of Hell and back. But if I turned her down, I’d never be able to tame her—she’d always run off, always abandon the group in times of need.
Sure, she was going to get some discipline from me. A hell of a lot of it, in fact. I was listening to Lyra with open ears. But on this one, single point, I felt compelled to allow her to have her way. You’d better savor it, honey, I thought, looking Hazel up and down. Because this is the last time. I’m the one in charge of you from now on.
I could tell from the look in Hazel’s eyes she understood that on some level. One of her legs trembled, either from exhaustion or fear of me, I couldn’t tell.
“Well?” I asked, jerking a thumb over my shoulder. “What are you waiting for, Hazel? Kill this fucker.”
For a moment, Hazel’s face filled with disbelief. Then a slow, wicked smile spread from ear to ear, and she lifted her dao sword.
“That’s right,” Seth said, shifting nervously from foot to foot. “Bring your whore magic. It’s nothing compared to the might of a pure-blooded cultivator! No filthy gutter skank who spreads her legs for her power can possibly triumph over me—”
Hazel sprang forward, aiming a cut at Seth’s legs, and the battle began.
I won’t bore you with the details of the play by play. Suffice to say, the sounds of combat I’d heard on the trip through the cave were nothing compared to the grunts Hazel made as she threw herself into the fray. If their first duel had been a playoff game, this was the Super Bowl itself—and Hazel had no intention of losing.
Her first strike nearly cut Seth off at the knees. The cultivator jumped backward, opening his senses to the world around him as he readied a terrifying spell. With a start, I realized something awful: his aura tingled with that same black, corrupted strain I’d seen inside the Cores I’d taken from the bodies of the Governor and the Bronze Shade. Whatever dark, sinister form of cultivation those orbs were linked to, this man had aspected himself to the same element!
No wonder he’s completely insane, I thought, watching the pair fight. I almost wondered if Seth had been a more or less normal cultivator who’d ingested one of the corrupted orbs and gone bad, but either way I didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy for the man. He’d committed too many heinous acts to be forgiven, no matter what had spurred him to his depravity. If the Cores were part of it, that just meant I needed to be doubly sure of cleansing them before using their strange power.
As Seth stepped backward through the room, twisting away from blow after blow, it became clear the man wasn’t normal in any sense of the word. He didn’t strike back, or even cry out as Hazel’s Dao Blade whizzed past his head—he just kept backing up, moving in a slow circle around the room.
Hazel began to get frustrated. Her blows came faster, striking out with greater variety, but every swing of the sword or sudden kick met only empty air. Was this what I’d been hearing while I navigated the cave with Anna in my arms? Something about it made my skin crawl.
“If you jumped in there,” Anna whispered as the man’s back passed me, “you could take him down with one blow. It would be so easy, Eric…”
It would. And Hazel would never forgive me for it.
A sleazy smile spread across Seth’s face as Anna began to tire. Hesitantly, with great curiosity, I opened my senses further, trying to see the moves of the dance of combat before they happened. What I felt sent a shock through me—Seth was not only conjoined to that strange, dark energy, he was pulling it into his body as we spoke. No wonder he was always one step ahead of Hazel!
“We’ve done this several times, in case you were wondering,” Hazel said, with the air of someone who’d been over this method of fighting hours ago. “This man is a troll. He tries to tire me out…” she swung with the dao sword, an inch from Seth’s head, “…then, when I’m at my weakest, he strikes! Then and only then do our blades cross.” The corner of her mouth rose in a smirk. “You can see how these cowardly tactics are going for him so far.”
I could. Blood dripped from Seth’s wounds, reopened from the mad dash around the room. He hadn’t even reached for his own weapons yet—a pair of jagged, zig-zagging knives that looked like something the bad guy in an Indiana Jones movie would use to make human sacrifices. Black stains covered the steel, which meant he’d struck Hazel at least once with those blades. Whatever wounds he’d dealt to the blonde warrior, she didn’t show them in the least. She charged in like a bull, trying to break the younger man’s guard.
“I don’t have to justify my fighting style to anyone,” Seth hissed. The air began to ripple with barely concealed power, more of that strange energy flowing into the man’s body. Whatever he was about to do, it would shake the foundations of this cave. I was certain Hazel hadn’t dealt with it before.
Indeed, there was a worried look on the warrior’s face as she noticed the change in the air. Hazel threw everything she had into a flurry of kicks and punches, dancing from strike to strike in moves so smooth she ought to have been in a kung fu movie.
None of them touched Seth. And as my senses sharpened, I finally figured out why.
Those trails of dark energy touched two different points in the room. One was Seth’s body, of course. The other was the strange shrine in the corner of his den.
Darkness rippled from that pyramid-shaped tower. Whatever significance it might have held for Seth, religious or otherwise, it amplified the dark energy rippling through his body.
I couldn’t interfere in the fight, not directly, at least. But as a smirk spread across Seth’s wicked face, I knew there was one thing I could do in Hazel’s favor.
I walked across the room—then stumbled over a rock and slammed shoulder-first into the shrine.
“Oops!” I yelled, laughing at myself as I tumbled into a wall. “Clumsy me!”
The black pyramid tumbled from its tower, crashing to
the stone floor of the cave. As it hit it shattered into a thousand glittering shards, gleaming like daggers in the dim light. Seth screamed in mingled pain and rage—shattering his shrine had clearly done a number on him.
Hazel sensed her moment and struck. She swung the dao sword in an overhand cut so telegraphed it had to be a feint. At the last moment, she twisted and aimed a kick to the left of where the blade would have fallen.
Her heel crunched into Seth’s face. The man lost his balance and staggered, missing a step in the dust. He went down on one knee, grimacing with pain as he finally drew one of his black daggers.
Too late.
Without missing a beat, Hazel smacked the man’s palm with the flat of her dao sword, knocking it out of his hands. The metal slid across the stone floor, coming to a rest in a corner by the bed.
Seth reached for his other knife, but by then Hazel’s blade was already at his throat. The cultivator tensed, his power ebbing, defeat written on every inch of his face.
“Go on and do it,” he growled, spitting in the dirt. “Kill me, you bitch…”
Hazel glared down at him, her face unreadable. The dao sword retracted. She casually sauntered over to the man’s dropped knife, snatched it in a loose grip, then tossed it at his feet.
“Pick it up,” she instructed, her tone like icicles falling down a canyon.
Seth stared at the blade, his face filled with wonder. “Why?” he grunted, looking up at the woman. “You could have killed me…”
Hazel pointed with the dao sword—at me. “He helped,” she said flatly. “He’ll say it didn’t count, but it did. When the light goes out of your eyes and you get sent to the nine hells for your crimes, monster, I want you to know the truth. I want you to know that it was I who sent you there. Who bested you fair and square.”
Seth didn’t look like he would waste his second chance. The cultivator snapped up the blade and rose to a battle stance, favoring his uninjured leg. That limp was a major disadvantage, and Hazel could see it. So could I.
I also couldn’t believe she hadn’t killed the bastard.
