by Will Wight
“I'm headed outside,” Yerin said, bracing herself for Mercy’s arguments.
Mercy’s hand froze. “I guess we have to go sometime.” She rubbed the remaining salve from her fingers, grabbing her bow—which was still in staff form—and pushing herself to her feet. Using the staff to brace herself, she picked herself across the crowded tent.
Yerin didn’t move. “Thought I was going to have to wrestle my way past you.”
“You want to put yourself in danger to push your advancement, right? Not a bad idea, but it would be safer with someone watching you.” Mercy started to run her fingers through her hair again, but stopped and pushed it back down to her side. “I’m not eager to take more fire madra to the face, but we can’t stay here forever.”
With a deep breath to cycle her madra, Yerin moved to push debris away from the entrance. Mercy stopped her.
“One Highgold,” she said.
“Not looking to bleed, am I?” Yerin said. If she lured in a Truegold—or worse—then she’d get no chance to advance. There was risk, and then there was stupidity.
“One Highgold. If there’s more nearby, we back out.”
In Yerin’s judgment, two Highgolds would be safe enough, but still she agreed.
She pushed her way out, into the clearing outside their handmade cave. After stretching out the last week of cramped muscles, Yerin knelt in the middle of the clearing. She breathed deeply, cycling sword aura to every limb.
“Keep their breath off me,” Yerin said. Her sword-aura couldn't deflect madra, but it would do a decent job with everything else. So long as she handled it right.
Mercy bent Suu into a bow, nervously fiddling with the bowstring. “You can do this. One Highgold, you start to advance, and I'll tie him up. Then we run.”
Yerin tore the veil from her spirit.
Her perception immediately extended; the veil dampened her spiritual sense like wearing a cloth over her eyes. Golden spots of heat flared into existence nearby.
The closest one started moving toward her. Perfect.
“They're all around,” Yerin reported.
“Plenty of targets,” Mercy said, but her voice was higher-pitched than usual.
Yerin focused on aura. Her sword shone silver at her hip, though she didn't draw it. Her Goldsigns were dimmer, but still useable. She summoned the image of the Sage's Endless Sword, keeping it focused in her mind.
A delicate, controlled touch. Like plucking a string instead of hammering a drum. Aura like the wind.
The first Lowgold dragon veiled himself as he approached. Yerin saw him before she sensed him, a rustling in the brush followed by a flash of golden scales and silver claws that flashed in the sunlight. It happened so suddenly that it didn't feel real.
But Yerin was prepared.
As a Lowgold, this dragon was more ruled by his instinct. He attacked like a beast, pouncing on her with fangs and claws extended.
She tapped the aura around her sword, and sparks exploded from the dragon's claws like he'd run into an invisible steel bar. He was slammed back, twisting in midair to land on all fours, staring at her with clear surprise.
Not enough.
That had looked fine, but Yerin could feel that something wasn't right. It had taken too much concentration to deflect one clumsy attack.
She met the dragon's eyes. “You waiting for sunset?”
The beast leaped at her again.
Once more, Yerin knocked him away. It wasn't enough. What was missing?
Extending her perception, she found that the nearest dragon was a Highgold. Abruptly, she stood up. “Let's take this on the road. Mercy, I'm done with him.”
Mercy nailed him to the ground with several arrows, but Yerin didn't stay to watch her work. She was already headed for the Highgold.
When Mercy caught up, she was out of breath and leaning on her staff. “You know, I don't have unlimited madra.”
“Good thing you're not fighting, then.”
They were walking away from their cave, but if Yerin failed here, they couldn't defend themselves. When your back was against a wall, you had to bet it all.
She found the Highgold dragon eating a deer. It turned and saw them, then lazily licked its snout clean. “Humans,” she said in a feminine voice, her speech surprisingly clear. “You should have stayed holed away.”
Yerin knelt again. Though dropping to her knees before a fight felt wrong, she was putting herself in a place where she had nothing to rely on but the Endless Sword.
Mercy waved to the dragon. “My name is Mercy. What's yours?”
“Derianatoth,” the dragon said. Her eyes flared. “The girl you Skysworn killed was my cousin.”
She leaped over Yerin, then. Straight at Mercy.
Yerin kept her breathing steady, and her sword rang. The dragon staggered in mid-pounce, like something had struck her a glancing blow, but she wasn't knocked backwards. She landed next to Mercy, gathering up her breath.
Yerin drew on the Steelborn Iron body. In one jump, she closed the distance between herself and the dragon, planting her foot in its ribs.
Combined with her momentum, the kick sent the cow-sized sacred beast tumbling into a tree. It crashed into the wood, giving it a healthy dent.
Mercy froze with an arrow half-Forged on her weapon. “Nice hit!”
“Not enough pressure,” Yerin muttered, walking closer to the dragon.
Derianatoth was enraged now, shaking debris from her scales like a dog after a bath. She swept a razor-sharp claw, and Yerin could already feel that there was a second coming. She felt the pressure from a dragon as advanced as she was, born with a body no human could match. Unstopped, this blow would tear Yerin in half like a piece of bread.
Perfect.
Yerin struck the Endless Sword, the weight of battle keeping her mind tightly focused. The claw bounced away, struck aside by a blade of sword-aura, but a second had already closed, a hair's breadth from tasting blood.
Another pulse of the Endless Sword knocked it back, but the claw had been so close that it nicked the side of Yerin's chin.
She'd done it twice, and that second technique had been both faster and more precise.
“Are you...practicing a technique right now?” The dragon asked. As she spoke, Yerin could hear her disbelief turn to fury.
She roared, swiping with both claws.
Yerin stopped them both with one pulse of the Endless Sword, but it still wasn't fast enough. Not sharp enough. She could do better.
Another claw was deflected in a spray of sparks, and Yerin stepped closer. The sense of danger in her spirit spiked, but that was what she was looking for.
After a second flurry of blows was met by invisible swords, the dragon backed up.
Yerin, still with her sword in its sheath, stepped forward.
The dragon may have been furious, but she wasn't stupid. She recognized sword aura and filled her mouth with orange-gold light.
A black arrow slammed into her from above, tying her jaw shut.
Madra sprayed from the sides of her fangs, and the arrow dissipated, but it had done its job. Yerin turned her attention to offense.
Her sword rang again, and three white lines appeared across the dragon’s throat. That was a step forward; only three lines meant she was more controlled. But when it was like the wind, her Endless Sword would leave only one line. And those scales would be nothing.
Now the dragon was truly infuriated. She dashed away and pushed her madra to its limit, shining in Yerin’s spirit.
“You should run farther,” Yerin advised.
“Who’s running?”
A Truegold aura flared in the distance, taking to the sky immediately.
Yerin regretted the loss; she could tell she was only a finger away from a real breakthrough in her understanding. But they couldn’t play any longer.
“Truegold,” she called to Mercy, dashing away. “Game’s up.”
That burned. This was an opportunity she hated to pass
up, but she’d pushed it too far already. There was a line between flirting with death and throwing yourself at him.
Then another light dawned in her spirit, much brighter. The Lady.
She was close.
Yerin skidded to a halt, Mercy right behind her. The Lowgold’s senses weren’t as sensitive, and she gave Yerin a look of confusion.
“Underlady,” Yerin said.
Mercy instantly drew her bow back and loosed an arrow. There was a screech from Derianatoth. “To the tent?”
That was the decision. They could try and hide again, but the Truegold and the Lady were close. If they were found this time, that would be the end.
“No,” Yerin said.
There was only one way out now.
She rushed back the other way, running for the approaching Truegold. As she ran, she pushed deeper into her spirit, reaching out to her master’s memories.
Give me something, she begged silently. Anything.
Madra flowing through her Steelborn Iron body, she ran like a rushing river. The Highgold dragon was waiting for her, but she leaped over the giant golden lizard, still aiming for the Truegold.
There was one great thing about the Endless Sword, however she used it: it didn’t take much madra. She had plenty left for her Iron body.
A stream of orange madra spewed out behind her, but she flipped around a tree and kept running, focusing on her spirit.
This was it. She was in the final, no-escape corner that her master had always said was the best for forcing an advancement. She’d advanced to Lowgold after her showdown with his spirit, and Highgold in the middle of the battle with Jai Long. It was time to go beyond herself again.
She had to make it if she wanted to reach Lindon.
But as she thought of it, that reason rang hollow. It wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t enough. There was more. Something deeper.
If she didn’t advance, she’d have to rely on her Blood Shadow.
That wasn’t it either. She knew she’d have to get used to the Blood Shadow soon. As much as it sickened her, she couldn’t run from it forever.
She dug for more.
If she didn’t advance, everyone else would leave her behind. Lindon would keep growing, she’d never catch up to Eithan, and even Mercy had her advancement written out for her.
The Truegold appeared over the treeline, glittering in the sun, standing on a small golden Thousand-Mile Cloud. His draconic face turned down to her.
A memory boiled up, and Yerin couldn’t tell if it came from her or from her master’s Remnant.
She was maybe ten years old, standing with her master beside a stream. Every morning, he would bring her a boulder and have her try to cut it in half with the Rippling Sword. Every morning, she failed, and he took the stone away, only to bring a new one the next day.
She’d thrown her training sword aside in disgust. “I can’t do it,” she had said.
“Been waiting for you to say that,” he’d responded.
He had taken her to a cave behind a waterfall, where he had kept all of the stones she had tried and failed to cut. There were the marks of her failure: slashes in the rocks where her madra had cut. The scars started faint, but they got wider and deeper. And the stones got bigger.
“This is what you did yesterday,” he’d said, pointing to the largest rock, the one with the deepest cut. “I can’t wait to see what you do tomorrow.”
At the time, neither could Yerin.
Now, she stood under the dragon, feeling the echoes of her master’s spirit inside her.
“Surrender yourself, Highgold,” he said. “We will not make this painful.”
Yerin’s sword rang like a bell.
He reacted to the sword aura, striking with the back of his hand against the rush of silver. He knocked away the blow, but one tinkling scale was knocked free.
It took with it a drop of blood.
This time, the technique had felt right. It resounded in her master’s spirit, resonating between the two of them. She basked in that feeling, memorizing it.
Then the barrier in her spirit crumbled.
Her madra faltered, slipping from her fingers. This was the hazard of pushing for advancement in the middle of battle; it tended to throw you off your game. And this time, her opponent wasn’t sweet-minded enough to give her some time for herself.
Scenting blood, the Truegold dragon jumped down from his cloud.
“Page three,” Mercy announced.
Yerin had time to wonder why Mercy had said that out loud before an arrow the thickness of her arm pierced the dragon through the gold-scaled chest. Mercy’s Truegold aura blanketed the clearing in heavy darkness, and this time, the arrow didn’t feel like one technique. It felt like three different techniques crammed into one arrow, and two of them were not friendly.
The force of the arrow carried the dragon back, so he fell to the ground far away from Yerin, but he burned it away almost immediately. His scales oozed blood—so at least this technique did some damage, unlike the arrows Yerin had seen her use before, which didn’t even break the skin.
But now, the darkness that crawled over his skin felt like poison. He screamed, breathing fire on himself, but the darkness kept creeping.
That was all Yerin saw. Rivers of silver aura rushed to her, blinding her, filling her spirit. They flooded into her veins, far more than she could ever cycle, rushing to her core.
Her master’s Remnant blurred, soaking more completely into Yerin’s madra. The sense of his presence weakened again, as it had when she’d advanced to Highgold.
Then, like a deep breath released, the sword aura burst from her in a wave.
Every tree in the clearing exploded under the strike of a thousand axes. Mercy wasn’t spared; violet crystal covered her chest in a breastplate, taking the brunt of the force, but scratches still appeared all over her body.
The Highgold dragon Derianatoth had been webbed up by Mercy at some point. Yerin guessed when she was focused on the Truegold. She couldn’t defend herself, and her black cocoon burst into sprays of blood.
Blood spurted from the Truegold’s scales too, but it wasn’t enough to kill him. Not until she followed it up with a Striker technique.
Seconds after the wave of sword aura passed through the forest, his body fell into chunks of flesh and bone.
And then the forest was quiet.
Sunlight streamed down on them, unfiltered by branches. A chill wind blew through now that it wasn’t blocked by trunks. Mercy’s presence faded back to Lowgold, and her bow relaxed to a staff. She hobbled closer to Yerin.
“Congratulations! Should we run?”
“Not yet,” Yerin said, eyeing the bodies. “Can’t leave the Remnants to follow us. And we can’t look like cowards in front of our new guest.”
Guided by her Truegold perception, she turned to look into the forest.
A young man stood there, emerald horns shining very slightly in the shadow of the trees that still stood around him. He wore a faded gray cloak, leaned on a hammer as big as he was, and wore an expression like he’d died two days before.
“Looking to pick off the winner?” Yerin asked, her sword starting to shine with the Flowing Sword Enforcer technique. It hummed with a might she’d never felt before; the strength of a Truegold.
He took a long, slow breath, letting it out like it was his last. “…no,” he said.
It looked like it had taken him a week of effort to force out that one word, but she had Remnants to deal with. They rose like sunset-colored serpents from the bodies of the dragons. At least in death, they looked like proper dragons: flying, serpentine creatures of flame.
As she’d expected, they both turned to Yerin.
Sword aura wouldn’t do much against these non-physical Remnants, but madra would. She whipped a Striker technique at the Highgold, dashing at the Truegold herself. A few strokes of her master’s blade left the Remnant in a few hissing puddles on the ground.
The whole time, she
’d kept her perception locked on the newcomer. He didn’t feel like he was ready to step in. He felt like he would fall over at any second.
“We have to go,” Yerin said to Mercy. She didn’t like running past an unknown threat, but the Lady was coming from the other direction.
Wait…no, she wasn’t.
Yerin’s spirit crawled. In the instant she’d taken her perception off the dragon, the woman had covered miles.
Dreading what she would see, Yerin looked behind her.
The Underlady stood there, a sword in hand. It crackled with orange lightning. “On my blood and my name,” she whispered, “I swear that you will suffer as none have suffered.”
Perfect.
Yerin’s Blood Shadow spun out from behind her, and this time she didn’t try to stop it. Like a red Remnant copy of her, it spread its Goldsigns. Its right hand flattened into another sword, and it leaned forward, ready to fight.
“Don’t suppose you have another one of those shields,” Yerin said. Mercy gave a flat, lifeless laugh.
The stranger stepped out of the trees, dragging his huge hammer behind him. It carved a furrow in the soil as he walked, as though he barely had the strength to pull it. “I am the Beast King’s witness,” he said with a sigh. “I witness a Lady attacking two Golds. Fall back, or he has cause to intervene.”
The dragon’s shrieking laughter pierced the forest. “And who are you?”
“Underlady,” he said, “believe me when I say that I am no one at all.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she took him in from the tips of the horns to the bottom of his time-worn cloak. She bared fangs. Then more.
“No,” she said at last. “I will not bow to you. Nor even to your master.”
With a sweep of her sword, she whipped a rush of liquid flame at Yerin.
Yerin had expected it all along. Together, she and her Blood Shadow both launched a Rippling Sword at the incoming Striker technique. The Blood Shadow’s technique did about as much good as a kitchen knife against a tree. Her own wave of silver energy crashed into the flow of orange flame.
But the Underlady’s technique, like a river of fire bursting through a dam, pushed right through.
