by Will Wight
Instead, the soldier withdrew. It joined the others in attacking Yerin.
He couldn’t see the fight except for an occasional flash of black or silver, but after a few minutes Yerin let out a pained shout and hit the ground with an audible thud.
The soldiers retreated, ignoring them both, and dissolved in the shadows of the stone forest. The script beneath them powered down.
Lindon spoke into the dirt. He didn’t have the strength to move, and he knew Yerin would hear him. “At least they didn’t kill us.”
Yerin groaned.
***
“In that case,” Eithan said, “I didn’t have to do much. I could have directed more of the soldiers to stop Lindon, but there was no need.”
“Maybe you should have sent more against Yerin,” Cassias said, wishing he had a dream tablet handy to record the memory while it was fresh. As a sword artist himself, he was left in awe at the level of skill and control she’d already displayed at the Lowgold stage. He bitterly regretted that he couldn’t meet her master.
“She could reach Highgold any day now, if she could let go of that death-grip she’s got on her Remnant,” Eithan said with a sigh. “She might out-rank you fairly soon.”
Cassias watched the girl in the tattered robe as she sprawled out on the dirt, each breath rough and heavy. “Considering what it’s costing us to run these Trials, I’d be disappointed if she didn’t at least take my place in the rankings.”
Eithan gently pushed him into the chair in front of the control array. “The course only runs while the sun is up. Tonight, you can go back to your family. If you’d like to retire early, then by all means…push them until they break.”
Cassias gave him a wry look, but his spiritual perception was already moving over the console. If he was going to run these Trials, he needed to know the controls like his own sword.
***
The crab meat tasted like ash and scorched oil. Yerin almost spat it out, but she’d choked down worse food out of necessity. She separated herself from the taste to chew and swallow out of pure discipline.
Lindon did spit it out, making a retching noise. “That…that cannot be food,” he said.
“It’s the fire that’s rotten,” Yerin said, ripping off another piece of vile meat with her teeth.
It had taken Lindon until well into the night to start the tiny campfire that now smoldered outside their caves. He’d used Blackflame madra to ignite the tinder, and now that power lingered; the aura wasn’t the healthy red-and-orange of a natural blaze, but was tinted with bloody scarlet and corrosive black. The flames gave off too little light, too much smoke, and a taste like burnt death.
But Yerin had experienced the consequences of eating raw meat in the wild. Even a corrupted flame like this one was better than nothing—there was no telling what sort of diseases or parasites these wild creatures carried.
Lindon popped another one of those red-veined black berries into his mouth, wincing as he chewed. Yerin had found them even less tolerable than the meat. They burned her tongue, leaving it unable to taste anything…although that might be an advantage, considering the crab.
She was sure the berries must be low-grade spirit-fruits that would burn away impurities in madra, but she didn’t have the energy to put up with a burned tongue on top of everything else.
Lindon set aside his cracked crab claw, staring into the flames. “I’m sure we weren’t meant to succeed on our first try,” he said.
Yerin’s grip tightened around her own segment of crab. The shell cracked. “You’d contend so, huh? You think a real enemy would be soft enough to give you a second shot?”
His eyes widened at her tone, but she wasn’t feeling charitable enough to apologize. It wasn’t fair to him, likely—he may not have grown up on the battlefield, but he’d faced plenty of real enemies just in the few months they’d known each other.
“We’d have some information about a real enemy,” he said reasonably. “That’s all we were doing—gathering information. We have to know how that construct works if we want to defeat it.”
She shoved another strip of revolting crab meat into her mouth, tossing the empty shell in the fire. “Not a construct,” she said, around the mouthful of food.
He leaned forward, interested. “A Remnant, then? Compelled by the script?”
“You’re Jade now. Did that feel like a Remnant to you?”
“That that exhausts the possibilities I’m aware of, though my experience pales next to yours. If it’s not a Remnant, and it’s not a construct…”
Yerin gulped water from a hollowed-out crab shell she’d filled at the waterfall earlier, trying to rinse the taste out of her mouth. She spat to one side of the fire. “It’s a Forger technique.”
“A technique?”
“Sure. Probably stole the binding out of some advanced Remnant, strapped it into a script circle, and tied it to that crystal.”
Lindon pulled out a brush, dipped it in ink, and began taking notes. What was he even writing down? This was the basic of basics.
“Jai Long does it,” she said. “Fought him for a breath or two in the Ruins, and his moves looked like snakes.”
He nodded along with her words, still writing. “How can a technique have a mind of its own?” He stopped, brush poised, waiting for her answer.
“Plenty of the really powerful sacred artists can Forge something that looks like it’s alive. Carries a piece of their Remnant with it, or so they say, but I can’t speak to the details of it. My master could Forge a sword that would fly around and chase an enemy until they died or broke the technique.”
Lindon’s brush dashed over the page. “So all we have to do is break the technique.”
“All we have to do,” Yerin muttered. “Listen. Whoever left that binding behind was at least as powerful as Eithan. Better, more than likely. And it’s meant to test your Enforcer technique, meaning you’re intended to tear through it. That’s a tall order when I’ve got to fight by myself.”
She slammed the shell full of water down next to her so that it sloshed up and over her wrist.
He blinked, eyes wide and innocent as a child’s. “You were amazing today; I’ve never seen anything like it. I would only have gotten in the way.”
That was the attitude that scraped her nerves. You couldn’t always fight when you had a plan or a secret weapon. Nobody ever waited for you to sleep a full night, have a hot meal, and cycle your madra before they attacked you. No, you were more than likely to fight half-asleep, with a bleeding arm and a gut full of poison.
When she’d fought Jai Long herself, she’d just cut her way through a pyramid filled with dreadbeasts and crazed Remnants. Did he do her the favor of waiting until she was in her best condition? No, and neither would anybody else.
“If I waited to fight until I was ready,” Yerin said, “my bones would be rotting in Sacred Valley right now. You have to dive in there, or you might as well scamper back home.”
Well, at least he had the grace to look embarrassed. “I didn’t expect we would fight right away.”
“Yeah, you thought the Blackflame Trials might be testing your foot speed?”
“I was hoping to gather information. If we could just run past it, we might have been able to walk through to the next Trial. Wouldn’t Eithan be amazed if we left here only a day after we started?”
Yerin gaped at him. “You think Eithan wants us to run out of here quick? You don’t think he’d drop us right back at the entrance if we didn’t learn the lesson?”
Lindon flushed, examining his inkwell as though it held the deepest wisdom of the sacred arts. “No, of course, but surely there’s not just one way to solve a problem. If we come up with a solution on our own, then…”
Yerin stood up, brushing herself off. “I’m going to cycle,” she said abruptly, cutting him off.
She walked off, storming past the swords thrust into the ground in front of her cave. The vital aura had finally started to gather around th
em, generating enough sword aura for her to harvest.
Yerin knelt just inside, calming her breathing to cycle the aura steadily. It had the effect of calming her down as well, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
Lindon hadn’t lost the fight for her.
Sure, it would have been nice to have a second person fighting alongside her, if only to split the enemies. As it was, she had been on the defensive the entire time, battling as hard as she could just to survive for a while longer. That was no way to win a match, and she knew it.
But she’d had no choice. Her madra was squirming out of her control.
Not due to her uninvited guest—it was quiet and placid for the moment, content without straining against the Sword Sage’s knot.
No, it was the Sword Sage himself who was causing this problem.
She had to force her Goldsign to defend her when all it wanted was to strike at the enemy. Her master had left her a second, buried set of instincts inside her that kept trying to teach her how to attack. Her master had been a predator for most of his life. It wasn’t in his nature to stand back and protect himself in front of an enemy. Ever since she’d absorbed his Remnant, she’d only felt fully in control when she was attacking all-out.
Eithan might be right that cracking open her master’s Remnant was the fastest way to Highgold, but that meant there were other ways. Slower ones. As long as she worked hard enough, she could stay a step ahead of her unwelcome guest and keep her master’s voice around at the same time.
Her master was trying to teach her a lesson. And he was going to keep his hand on her sword, pulling her his way, until she learned what he wanted to teach.
This was her last chance to learn from the Sword Sage. She couldn’t waste that opportunity just because Eithan told her to.
Besides….she wouldn’t admit this out loud, but if she tapped into her master’s Remnant, his voice would go away. It would just be her and her unwelcome guest in her head. Alone again.
Yerin continued cycling, focusing on her breath to calm her frustration. She still had plenty of time to reach Highgold. This impatience could only hurt her progress.
Besides, she’d get another crack at the Trial tomorrow.
***
Iteration 217: Harrow
Suriel landed on hard-packed sand next to a lake-sized plate of chrome. In Limit, this had been a piece of a giant machine. In Harrow, a desert.
When Limit lost its grip on the Way and slammed into Harrow, the two worlds merged together and split the difference.
On the horizon, mountains flickered in and out of existence, as they tried to stabilize in one Iteration or the other. Here, Suriel’s presence was stability itself. Her connection to the Way anchored the world around her to order.
For the most part.
A fractal distortion in space unfolded into a field of impossible shapes before blooming into a two-story creature of dark glass. It had the legs of an origami centipede and the body of a black mirage, and it strained her human senses just by its proximity.
The creature of corruption reared over an upturned iron wagon, which had been half-buried in the sand. A woman crouched beneath it, filthy and ragged, having sheltered there for the better part of two weeks as reality crumbled around her.
Drawn to her sentience, the monster would have devoured her to remove her connection to the Way and to extend its own existence in the material world.
Suriel drew her Razor, now a meter-long rectangular shaft of blue metal, and blasted the creature apart. It dispersed into hissing shards of chaos that were difficult to perceive—they looked like burning nightmares.
Suriel activated one of the many functions in her Razor and the armored wagon dissolved, leaving a terrified woman huddled in the sand, surrounded by what looked like a nest of garbage.
Something hissed at the edge of Suriel’s awareness, trying to get her attention, but she ignored it.
[Mu Bak Ti Yan,] Suriel’s Presence said, and the woman’s head jerked up at the sound of her name. [You have been chosen to live. You will begin on a new world, where you will work to settle a wilderness. Do you accept this task?]
Mu Bak Ti Yan stared at the Presence, a gray figure of smoke on Suriel’s shoulder. Then she stared at Suriel.
In her original world, Suriel had been a pale, scrawny woman with hair like seaweed and eyes that took up half her face. That woman was still there, only…perfected.
Her hair was the color of sunlit emeralds, her skin ivory, her eyes a bright violet etched with vivid runes of Fate. Her childhood friends would have said she had the body of an immortal—flawless and statuesque—which was only appropriate, since they had died of old age more than four thousand years before.
She wore the armor of the Abidan, smooth and absolutely white, as though it had been poured into place. Her correlation lines looked like smoke trailing from the fingertips of her left hand up to the back of her neck, though they functioned more like an instrument’s strings. And, of course, she had just used the meter of blue metal clipped to her hip to blast apart an incomprehensible creature of madness.
In Limit, there were beings called Terava, which looked like perfect human men and women but possessed godlike power. The Teravan were natural energy projections that only took human form to feed, but Limit had never learned that.
Mu Bak Ti Yan, born in the dead world of Limit, must have thought she looked like a Terava.
Suriel raised one gauntleted hand in a gesture of peace, but the woman spooked and ran. She kicked up sand and fell to her hands and knees, still trying to crawl.
For the past two weeks, Suriel had been trying to track the human living in this desert. Most of the planet was clear already—its population dead or rescued—and this was the only inhabited planet in this universe.
As the sentient population fell, the power of chaos grew stronger. And the Way more distant.
Which made precisely pinpointing anyone’s location almost impossible, at least for an Abidan. She had relied on her old powers, following the trail of Mu Bak Ti Yan’s life-force, but the corruption of reality interfered with that as well.
Hunting one elusive prey through twenty thousand square kilometers of madness was more difficult than she remembered. Maybe she relied on the power of the Way too much; she was growing rusty.
Suriel waved her hand, and a blue-edged portal flared into being just in front of Mu Bak Ti Yan. It showed a grassland on the newly formed world of Pioneer 8089, where clusters of crude huts surrounded a great silver bird.
The woman stumbled through the portal, and the silver bird crowed, alerting the rest of the population. A tiny orange moon shone alone in the night sky; none of the stars had formed yet.
That was normal. Iterations started from clustered world fragments and grew outward, like seeds.
Suriel cut off the portal, and the door through the Way vanished, leaving Mu Bak Ti Yan trapped in a world far from her own. She had never gotten verbal agreement for the relocation, which was against Abidan protocol, but people usually only refused resettlement until they realized that staying meant horrifying death or mutation.
Of the two-point-one million survivors that had remained human through the merge and corruption of Limit and Harrow, she had saved one-point-four million in the half of a standard year since she’d been working here. The others had either died or evaded her notice long enough that she had no hope of finding them before the end.
On the first day, she’d sent half a million people to Pioneer 8089. They’d had to form orderly lines through the portal. By now, she was lucky to find one a week.
And this world didn’t have a week left.
She could feel it: the Way was losing its grip on this Iteration. Before she could locate anyone else, Harrow and Limit would accompany one another into the void.
Suriel lifted herself into the atmosphere, the land below her shifting from continent-sized machine to desert and back again. The atmosphere was even more chaotic than the surface, twis
ting like six hurricanes at war with one another, but she felt nothing inside the bubble of her isolation shell. She dove into stars under its protection; wind was not a worthy opponent.
From above, the world was a rapidly shifting mass of images and impressions, like a nonsense puzzle with pieces that randomly rearranged themselves. It was straining at the Way, ready to break.
And Suriel finally turned her attention to the hissing that had tried to grab her earlier. It sounded like a whisper just at the edge of hearing, like someone trying to call her name from a dream.
[Further contact established,] her Presence reported. [Transmission location still unknown.]
“Best guess,” Suriel said. She liked talking to her Presence, and had chosen its form for that reason: it almost looked like a person. She enjoyed conversation, and that simple psychological trick was enough to cut away the pressure from the isolation of her job.
Usually.
[The most recent transmission raises estimate accuracy to fifty-four percent.]
It was better than the last three times she’d tried to find the source of the transmission. It sounded like an Abidan beacon, as though someone had left a call for help, but Sector Twenty-One Control would have heard about it before she arrived. And it should have been as clear as a voice in her head.
It was quiet and hidden behind static, which meant that either it was not an Abidan beacon, or it had been broken during the violence of the merge.
Suriel blasted through the atmosphere toward the coordinates her Presence indicated, not bothering to keep herself subsonic. No one would notice, and this world no longer had a connection to Fate that could be disturbed by legends of a flying goddess.
She could have bent space and arrived directly there, but direct spatial travel was imprecise, better suited for very short travel—like range of sight—or very long travel where precision mattered little.
Besides, the beacon had persisted for months in the most chaotic environment possible. It would last a few more seconds before she arrived.
The flight brought her to an ocean. It had been an ocean in both worlds, so it was still an ocean, even if the chaos meant that it sloshed like a cup of water on a flying dragon’s back.