Mask of the Fallen: A Cultivation/Progression Fantasy Series: (War Priest Book One)

by Harmon Cooper

  Not only was Arik able to absorb sheer pain in its chi form, he was able to distribute any pain he experienced or absorbed.

  “Master Guri Yarna…”

  The thought of his teacher, a man whom Arik had studied with for well over a decade, caused a flood of emotion to swell in his chest that eventually exited his lips in the form of a long, painful sigh.

  His teacher, his family, his peers, the staff at the Academy of Healing Arts—who had orchestrated such a heinous attack? Who were the men and women in dark-gray robes with demonic masks on their faces? Why? Why of all people, would they attack disciples, those tasked with helping others? Why?

  Arik’s muscles screamed as he dragged himself over a large rock with a smooth surface on one side. He tumbled forward and landed on his stomach, the wind knocked out of him. He began rubbing his good hand against the ground, searching for anything that was alive, a worm, a blade of grass, anything.

  You can do this, find organic life.

  (You must do this.)

  He sent an arm out and pulled himself onto his stomach, his legs still numb, Arik deducing that it had something to do with his spine, his nervous system.

  Water.

  There was water in the vicinity; if he could only reach it, Arik would be able to find something that was alive, be it a plant or an animal.

  Head toward the sound…

  Over the next ten minutes, even as his natural healing ability began to kick into gear, Arik slowly dragged himself toward the water. He would have been able to heal faster had he not been distressed, and had he not fallen so far, but the particular form of chi he used called Revivaura was also tied to his mental health, and what he had just experienced had disrupted it.

  Water.

  The thought of water reminded Arik just how dry his throat was. He couldn’t remember the last time he had drunk something, Arik busy before the graduation tournament with the ritual and family.

  (Water…)

  Thirst became a side motivator, Arik using all the strength he could muster to pull himself closer to the stream that had carved the canyon over thousands and thousands of years. He may have drowned had it been a different season, but his epic plummet had coincided with a particularly dry summer, one in which the Academy had been forced to conserve water.

  Finally…

  He reached something wet, Arik recognizing it as a gathering of mossy stones, the disciple overcome with joy. Pulling himself forward, he traced his fingers through plants that grew along the river bed, and began gathering as many of them as he could in his good hand.

  With a deep breath out, Arik transferred his wounds to the plants. Each time one of them wilted, he grabbed more.

  A sense of elation came over him as his body repaired itself, his breaths more satisfying, his knee snapping back into place, Arik instantly aware that his four severed fingers would take the longest considering the bone had to be reworked. That was fine. He would be able to fix it in the coming day. He would survive this.

  But the world around him had other plans.

  Arik heard a noise that sent a chill down his spine, a sudden high-pitched bark followed by the flapping of wings.

  A pack of hainu.

  The yokai—which was the word used for animals and beings that weren’t easily classified with common creatures—were known to run rampant at night. In the time that Arik had been at the Academy, he had never actually seen a hainu, but he had heard them on multiple occasions, the winged, wolf-like creatures howling and snarling at random points over the night, sometimes close enough to his window that it sounded as if they were just a few feet away.

  And now they were just a few feet away.

  Arik didn’t know how many landed behind him, but he heard a scuffle of feet and the settling of wings as he turned to face his first attacker, his arm going up just as one of the hainu latched onto it.

  This was yet another thing he had experienced before, the Academy of Healing Arts wanting their disciples to truly understand the various types of pain, to really grasp their subtleties. Arik’s experience being bitten hadn’t been with a canine, but it had been with a rabid cougar, and he would later attest that the pain paled in comparison to the bite he had just experienced, the hainu digging in deeper as the others nipped at him.

  Arik’s feet came alive as if they had been lying dormant, waiting specifically for this moment. He began kicking at the yokai, an idea coming to him as the leader of the pack continued to clamp down on his arm, the other hainu beginning to snap their teeth along the periphery of his body.

  (Go!)

  The alpha hainu was suddenly yelping as Arik transferred his wounds to the wolf-like yokai, which caused it to leap backward.

  Another hainu tried to take the leader’s place, its sharp teeth sinking into Arik’s arm as it began whipping its head left and right, snarling. It too began yelping in just a matter of seconds, bolting away from Arik. The hainu were by no means stupid, but it did take them several more attempts to realize that they weren’t going to be able to procure as easy of a meal as they had hoped.

  Soon, they were all lifting into the air, howling and flapping their wings, the pack returning to their endless search for easy prey.

  Arik had survived yet again.

  Even if each bite hurt, and it felt like the leader of the pack had nearly broken his radial bone, Arik had transferred enough of his wounds to the hainu to feel even better than he had upon reaching the water.

  You can do this. You… you have to do this, he told himself, that inner voice growing stronger.

  (You must do this.)

  After a few more minutes of scrounging along the banks of the small river, latching onto any underwater plants he could get hold of, Arik was able to stand. Finally. About the time he got his footing, a faint glow in the distance caught his eye.

  “Help…” Arik said, realizing yet again how dry his throat had become.

  He dropped to his knees before the stream and began lapping up water as if he were one of the hainu that had just recently departed. Once he finished, Arik turned back to the faint glow, completely entranced by it as he wiped the water off his mouth with the sleeve of his robe.

  It was now or never. Arik advanced toward the light at his top pace, not fully healed, but finally able to move.

  Tunnel visioned, his periphery shifting in and out of dark focus, Arik became one with the light, interpreting it as a beacon of hope, a potential end of this terrible dream. This had to be a dream. But why couldn’t he wake up?

  Trying to keep his balance, Arik continued along the banks of the stream, oblivious to his surroundings. He paid the ultimate price as his foot got caught under a root and he fell forward, cracking his chin on a slab of stone.

  The light ceased to exist, but not before something else made its presence known, a hand on Arik’s shoulder.

  “Found one!” a raspy voice called out. “He’s bad off, but he’ll do…”

  .Chapter Two.

  “Ask yourself: who else but you? And tell yourself that you will accomplish your task in time.”

  –A quote from Hidden Warrior Torugan de Avarga of the School of Illusion, Year 1426.

  The horse that Arik Dacre was hitched to moved much faster than he could walk.

  He may have been able to keep up with the steed normally, but after what he had just gone through, from the massacre at his graduation ceremony to tumbling to the bottom of a deep canyon and nearly being picked apart by wolf-like hainu, Arik had reached a new point of exhaustion, one that didn’t seem to matter to his captors.

  From what Arik could tell, the people who had found him weren’t the same masked men and women who had decimated those he respected and loved back at the Academy of Healing Arts. But they had coordinated with the attackers, these men scavengers of sorts, the ones left to sweep up the pieces.

  Monsters, no better than the masked intruders… he’d thought to himself several times through his plight, Arik replaying again and a
gain what happened, and what he could have done differently, if there was perhaps another solution that he hadn’t realized at the time.

  It was still night, his mind foggy, Arik also upset with himself for heading toward the light to begin with. Had he just traveled in a different direction…

  You have to survive.

  (You have to survive.)

  Once again, the voice came to him, followed by its echo. His response was to try to stop walking, but the horse was much stronger than he would ever be.

  Arik instantly fell to the ground, his arms going above him, wrists now cuffed together. He was dragged like this for a few paces, his face grating against the rocks, his robes, once white, now a kaleidoscope of earthy tones interspersed with blips of burnt ochre and fresh blood.

  Eventually, the rider stopped and Arik got to his feet again, which took a considerable amount of effort. They paused just long enough for him to recognize his surroundings, Arik seeing that they were in the mountain pass set just before the winding entrance to the Academy of Healing Arts.

  There were several men on horses all around him, including the man who had captured him, one who the others called Sawtooth. While he didn’t have a mask on, Sawtooth did wear a hood over his head, Arik only able to get a glimpse of the scavenger’s deranged-looking teeth through a hint of moonlight.

  More horses began down the winding entrance to the Academy, each with captives hitched to them. It was dark, Arik not initially recognizing any of the captives, but certainly feeling for everyone around him as they tried to process what happened. Even worse, there weren’t any teachers or disciples, no healers aside from him as far as he could tell.

  With a bloodied face, and his own wounds including four severed fingers, Arik had enough of his own problems to worry about. Yet a very significant part of him had already shifted his concern to the others, to those now being dragged by horses around him.

  “On your feet!” one of the slavers cried as he struck a woman with his crop.

  If only Arik had studied the Divine Branch of Remote Healing like so many of his peers, if only he had chosen this path over Wound Transfer. He could have healed the stronger-looking captives, even if it took everything he had, all of his Revivaura.

  He could have given all of them a fighting chance.

  How am I going to get out of this? he thought as the men regrouped on their steeds and continued on.

  Master Guri Yarna had told him years ago how crucial it was to select a Divine Branch that would both fit the disciple, and help the wider community. Of his class, and of the three classes that had come before him, Arik had been the only disciple to select the Divine Branch of Wound Transfer. At the time, he had worn it with a sense of almost stubborn pride. Even if it had helped him back along the riverbank, he now regretted this decision, especially as the captured souls around him groaned and sobbed, as they dragged their feet.

  Where were they going? Where were these men taking them?

  Boom!

  A thunderous explosion above was followed by a great flash of orange whipping across the landscape, a zigzag flash of light illuminating rocky ledges and mangled crags.

  “No…” Arik whispered, the muscles in his arms tensing, his heart racing as everything came to him at once. The attackers had destroyed the Academy of Healing Arts. “No!” he shouted, some of the other captives shouting as well as another explosion produced a sickening plume of fire. “No…”

  Not only had the masked intruders ruined the most prestigious healing academy in the Onyx Realm, but they had almost certainly taken its archives with it, which were stored in the library of the western wing. All that knowledge, a thousand years’ worth of understanding when it came to using Revivaura, would be ash by the morning.

  Overcome with emotion, Arik fell to a knee, and was just about to give himself up to being dragged until he died when a large hand came around his arm and helped him stand.

  “You can’t,” a man said, Arik so delirious at first that he didn’t immediately recognize the man’s deep voice. “Disciple Arik, you can’t.”

  The gloomy world blurred into focus, Arik recognizing him as one of the Academy’s groundskeepers, a man Arik had personally healed once after he’d fallen while repairing a stone arch on one of the towers.

  “J-Jinmo?” he asked, not able to contain the euphoria in his voice upon seeing a familiar face, Jinmo with short dark hair, square-jawed, not an ounce of fat on him.

  “Disciple Arik, listen to me carefully,” Jinmo said as they continued on. “You can’t say anything to them; you can’t use your powers.”

  Like Arik, Jinmo’s wrists were cuffed in front of his body and roped to a large brindle horse. He walked in a way that told Arik that he had injured his ankle to some degree, which would normally be something the disciple could easily mend.

  “Why can’t I use my power?” Arik asked, trying to make sense of everything.

  Jinmo was silent for nearly a minute as their twisted little caravan continued, his eyes fixated on the hooded men who had captured them as they spoke in low voices, the walls of the canyon they were passing through casting murky shadows over them as many of the whimpering captives.

  “Why? Why can’t I use my power? Your ankle. I could help…”

  “Those men are slave traders,” Jinmo said in a tone of voice that told Arik that he was still coming to grips with this fact as well. “They’re taking us to the Crimson Realm. They have to be.”

  This statement nearly caused Arik to stop in his tracks again, but he kept on, remembering what happened the last time he had tried that maneuver.

  “The Crimson Realm? They’re taking us to the Crimson Realm? Why?”

  “You have more questions than I have answers, Disciple Arik,” Jinmo told him with a grunt. He threw his head back, which moved some of his dark hair off his forehead. “I know one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Arik asked.

  “You may be the last one.”

  “The last… one?”

  “The last healer, the last disciple. I heard the masked intruders talking when they captured me, before they handed me over to the slave traders.” Jinmo looked at Arik, a hint of disgust on his face. “It was what they came to do, why they were there in the first place. They came to kill all of you, master priests and disciples alike.”

  “Impossible…” Arik said, his delirium making it harder for him to follow the conversation.

  “They came for all of you,” the groundskeeper repeated, his voice a few decibels lower than it had been just moments ago. “Everyone else, families and people like me, are collateral. Those of us left alive were given to slave traders. These men… they don’t know who you are, they don’t know you are a disciple. That’s why you must keep your power secret. No matter what you witness here, no matter what happens, however horrible it may be. You must not reveal who you are.”

  “The people that attacked us, those were Crimson warriors?” Arik asked, an image of the dark-robed murderers and their black masks flashing across his mind’s eye.

  It happened so suddenly, but thinking back now, he was sure that they had been trained in ways he had never seen before, Arik nearly certain he would have died had he not been flung out of the window by Master Guri Yarna. But don’t Crimson warriors wear red robes? Those men, and women, Arik thought, recalling the female who had nearly slain his teacher, were in gray robes with black masks…

  “The people who attacked the graduation ceremony weren’t Crimson warriors,” Jinmo told him. “Crimsonians don’t fight like that. I can… I can assure you of that. Are you familiar with the School of Illusion?”

  “Master Guri Yarna said the School of Illusion was disbanded years ago…” Arik told the larger man, recalling what he had heard about the school and its handful of branches in the Jade Realm, which was the name of the country that separated the Onyx Realm from the Crimson Realm.

  Three realms, Onyx on top, Jade in the middle, and Crimson on bottom, made
up the continent of Taomoni. Three very different realms. For years, the Jade Realm had operated as a buffer zone between the Crimson and Onyx Realms, its mysterious School of Illusion one of the things that kept the aggressive Crimson Realm from invading, and the overly defensive Onyx Realm from strengthening and expanding its borders.

  But it appeared as if all that would change after the night’s proceedings.

  “The School of Illusion may have been disbanded,” Jinmo said, his voice wavering in Arik’s head as they continued on, “but those men and women back there were graduates of the School of Illusion, likely shinobi. I’ve seen them before, you know. I’ve been through the Jade Realm. I had to go through the realm to escape here. No, they were shinobi, illusionists. Whatever you call them. That’s what they were.”

  It was impossible to see in the darkness, but Arik knew that Jinmo had a gnarly scar across his back, stemming from the period of his life he had spent as a slave in the Crimson Realm. Jinmo had escaped to the north, where he had been at the Academy ever since. Once, years ago, Arik had asked him why he didn’t have one of the masters remove his scar for good.

  Jinmo never told him why.

  “But… why would the Crimson Realm attack the Academy?” he asked, not able to choke down a sense of bewilderment. All of this had happened so sudden. “Why would they use people from the School of Illusion? It… no, it can’t be possible. Master Guri Yarna said it no longer existed. The School of Illusion disbanded.”

  “I recognize those robes, those masks. Whatever just happened was a true act of war. I know how the Crimson Realm operates, and if the slavers are taking us there, all of this was orchestrated from there.”

  “So these shinobi were… mercenaries?”

  “Anyone who has graduated from the School of Illusion is a mercenary, thief, someone who operates on the outer rim of society, an illusionist. And if they are active again…” he trailed off, never finishing the sentence.