by Will Wight
Irritably, she waved her hand to dismiss them. It was hard to give in when they were right. Plus, this place scraped her scales the wrong way; she couldn't even cycle aura here, as the power of water drowned out everything else.
“Watch out for the wildlife,” she called back to them as they left. The fish had been a handful for her, a Truegold, and her attendants were much weaker.
Ekeri curled up on a couch, which she also produced from her void key, and tried to feel like she wasn't wasting her time by staying here.
Several hours later, she had almost drifted off when she felt something pressing against the edge of her spiritual perception. It felt warm and welcoming. Like a roaring fire.
She leaped up and dashed out of the house.
~~~
At first, it had gone so well.
Lindon had already known the basics of veiling his spirit; essentially, he just kept the movement of his spirit slow and quiet, so there was little for an enemy to sense unless they scanned him directly. It was one of the simplest principles in the sacred arts, but as it turned out, Lindon had never had much cause to perfect the technique. He was always so much weaker than everyone else that he was difficult to sense anyway, and pure madra was perhaps the 'quietest' form of power he could practice.
As a result, his veils were sloppy. For eight hours straight, Orthos forced him to practice veiling his power over and over until Orthos could feel the difference from only a yard away in the cave. Lindon pointed out that if Ekeri was nose-to-nose with him, she would be able to see him, which only earned him a lecture about how useful veils were. Especially for him, with his two cores; he needed to be able to hide anything unusual about his spirit at a moment's notice.
On the bright side, the water from the Dream Well made the training practically paradise by Lindon's usual standards. Anytime his concentration wavered from its peak, or exhaustion started weighing him down, he took another vial of purple water and it was like starting over fresh. Lindon was starting to think he'd get addicted.
Dross told him that he was the only sacred artist in the history of the facility to be able to use the Dream Well so lavishly, but as Lindon saw it, the water had been left to pile up for the past fifty-six years. It was about time someone used it.
When Orthos was confident enough in Lindon's veil, Lindon made Dross check the situation outside. He contacted the security constructs and found that Ekeri had blanketed the area in her spiritual perception...but she wasn't physically watching his entrance anymore.
So he'd snuck out quietly to go fishing.
Orthos had declared his veil exceptional; not because of his hasty practice, but because pure madra was difficult to detect by nature. Any veil he made was twice as effective. Which brought up another problem: Lindon couldn't switch cores.
He wasn't skilled enough to veil Blackflame, and that Path was hard to hide anyway. As a fellow dragon, Ekeri would be able to discover Blackflame anywhere within this habitat—which was what Dross called the pockets of air within the giant bubbles.
Which meant Lindon had to catch one of these Highgold-level fish, kill it, and bring it back without using Blackflame. He had a plan for that too, but not one he liked.
He felt like he saw eyes on him with every crunch of his shoes on sand, but a golden dragon-girl didn't leap out of her two-story fortress of Forged madra and burn him to death, so he had to assume he was still hidden. After creeping around, it had only taken him a few minutes to locate one of the drifting fish.
The bear-sized creature slid lazily over Lindon's head, silver scales glinting in the dim yellow light. Its fangs clashed like spears, but it didn't seem to notice him at all. As Dross had said, they seemed to hunt by spiritual perception alone.
Dross, tucked away in the now-purple gem stuffed into the pocket of his outer robes, started to say something. Lindon slapped him. He muttered to himself, but stayed quiet.
Now it was time to execute Orthos' plan, which—in its entirety—consisted of one step: “Hit it with your arm.”
Lindon couldn't help but feel a little nervous about that advice.
Without a full-body Enforcer technique, Lindon had to use basic Enforcement on his entire body. The spirit had a strengthening effect on the body, with or without the guidance of a technique, and all he was doing was pouring effort into that. It was horribly inefficient, and it would exhaust his madra more quickly and provide worse results compared to a real Enforcer technique.
However, it did make him stronger.
Lindon jumped ten feet straight up, seizing the fish's tail in his left hand. He dragged it down to the ground, though the fish fluttered and strained to stay in the air. As it fell, it gave off a deafening shriek.
Now he had a deadline.
According to Dross, the fish screamed to one another every once in a while under natural conditions, so its cry shouldn't alert Ekeri, even if she heard it. However, the other fish would start coming immediately.
He didn't sense any other sacred beasts within a hundred yards, so even in the worst-case scenario, he had a few seconds.
Lindon threw his whole body over the creature to pin it to the ground, though it was still strong. Its flailing and flopping nearly bucked him off. But in a moment, he had locked his legs around it.
Now it was time to execute Orthos' plan.
He pulled back his white arm, filling it with the power of his pure core, and began slamming it into the fish's head.
The sacred beast screamed and screamed. Dross assured him they weren't any more intelligent than normal fish, just more powerful, but the shrieks bothered him anyway. Lindon hammered until the silver scales began to crack, and dark blood splattered his face.
This is why I need a weapon, he thought. Of course, there was every chance he would have lost a weapon at the same time he had lost his pack.
When the fish's spasms began to weaken, he gripped the sharp tips of his white fingers into its newly exposed flesh.
Then he triggered the binding in his arm.
Gladly, the limb started gulping down the creature's madra. The arm seemed to grow more dense as it fed, more real, though strangely enough it seemed to get a shade darker as well. Like it was shading to gray instead of its normal, pristine white.
When Lindon had gotten the arm, he'd hoped that the hunger binding would allow him to steal madra from other sacred artists. That, he reasoned, would help him to learn more Paths.
But other than the obvious practical downsides to such a plan, he'd since learned that the hunger binding was not as simple to use as the Ancestor's Spear had been. Maybe there would be a day when he could use the arm to pull madra into his core.
Until then, he had at least learned one trick.
When the arm had absorbed so much water madra from the fish that it started to tint blue-green, Lindon vented the excess power. Aquatic madra sprayed from his forearm, splattering like rain on the sand before it dissolved into essence.
The arm could swallow some madra of any aspect to strengthen itself, but anything more than that amount would start changing the aspects of the limb's madra. Unless Lindon wanted the limb of a water-Remnant, he had to vent the extra madra before it corrupted the arm too much.
The Ancestor's Spear had a similar feature, and Jai Long had used it in his battle against Lindon. Based on that principle, Lindon had a few ideas for using it in combat, but he had yet to test any of them.
Without its madra, the fish had lost the will to resist. It flopped once or twice more as Lindon drove his fist into its skull until he heard something crack.
Then, at last, the creature was still.
Without missing a breath, Lindon grabbed the creature in both hands and started dragging it across the sand. It wasn't quite as heavy as Orthos, but it still wasn't light.
And silver-blue light bloomed as a Remnant began to rise from the body.
The Remnant looked like a wire model of the same fish, and it pulled itself free of the body as Lindon continued
marching. He kept an eye behind him, hoping to lose it, and let out a breath of relief as he passed around a clump of tree-sized stalks. The Remnants didn't seem as dangerous as their living forms.
When he turned back to the front, he was standing face-to-face with a wall of fangs.
This new fish gave a shriek that stabbed his ears, and Lindon ducked just in time. Even so, the fish's scales scraped against his scalp as it swam past his head.
Lindon turned, following the fish...only to see the shining form of the Remnant drift straight through a stalk.
There was no time to think. Without considering it another instant, he changed the pattern of his breathing and drew from the Path of Black Flame.
Blackflame madra surged through his veins, filling him with heat. His channels still burned, despite Little Blue's healing touch, and he hadn't cycled aura to refill his core. There were only a few dim sparks of madra left in his core.
Though it was enough for a few seconds of Burning Cloak.
Lindon leaped at the Remnant first, kicking off in an explosive burst fueled by the Enforcer technique. He swept his Remnant hand down on the wiry spirit, clawing through its structure. His white fingers seized the pale blue wires that made up the Remnant’s outer layer, and he dragged the Remnant down by its strings.
Then he tore away a chunk of madra.
The Remnant's scream sounded like a crashing wave, but Lindon didn't have time to waste. A Cloak-powered fist punched through its head like a spear, then he turned to catch the living fish that was darting at him.
He caught a lower fang in one hand and an upper fang in the other. The force of the creature's charge pushed him backward through the sand, and its breath stunk like dead fish and rotting vegetation. Nearby shrieks told him more of its school was coming.
Orthos was always telling him that he needed to think more like a dragon. Eithan seemed to agree with him, considering his talk about tiger-chasing.
That was always easier to do with Blackflame raging through him.
Even as his madra started to die, Lindon met eyes with the sacred beast. A dragon could not be defeated by a fish. He was the predator here. He had the power.
The last of the Burning Cloak surged through his limbs, and his arms burned. He roared as he pushed power through both hands.
In a massive rush of strength, he tore the fish apart.
He stood with its body in his left hand and its lower jaw in his right, panting, blood coating the sand. As his Blackflame core winked out, he threw his head back and let out a shout of victory.
Then he switched back to his pure core and instantly broke into a cold sweat. What had he been thinking?
“See,” Dross said from his outer robe, “you're not being stealthy at all. What you're doing there is being loud. You see? You see the difference?”
Before the Remnant could rise from the new body, Lindon grabbed the old one and started running through the trees. Even his pure core was almost out of madra, and he silently thanked Eithan for the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel; if he hadn't been practicing that technique for the last year, he would have run out of madra long before.
By the time he could see the door, he knew he wasn't going to make it.
Chapter 8
He could feel Ekeri even before she leaped from the second floor of her shelter, landing in a puff of sand around her golden claws. Her tail swept behind her, and even though he found it hard to read any expression on her reptilian face, he was sure she was glaring at him.
“The key,” she said, holding out her hand.
Lindon was tempted to give it to her. He could have Dross leave the Eye, then hand over the worthless sapphire, and use it as a distraction to dash for the door.
But he’d have to abandon the fish if he did that, and Orthos was going to need to eat something. Lindon had seen him munch on everything from chairs to boulders, but there must be a reason the turtle hadn’t just taken a bite out of the wall. He needed something more substantial. It was Lindon’s job to bring it to him.
Lindon dropped the fish, balanced on the balls of his feet, and raised his right arm. “Forgiveness, but I have to get past you.”
Her eyes flashed like a flare of sunlight, and she gave a cruel-edged laugh. “You've got a mouth on you, Lowgold.”
He pushed pure madra through his channels, sharpening his focus. He knew he couldn't actually defeat her here, especially not with an empty Blackflame core and a dying pure core. He was here to see how she fought.
She would open the same way everyone else did: with a Striker technique. If he could drain some of its power away with his Remnant arm, then he could hopefully land an Empty Palm when she closed the distance. That would be his chance.
The dragon rushed at him. He reached for her, but she moved like water, flowing around him. Her tail slipped around him, and her fist flashed out.
Pain exploded in his chest like a hammer crashing into his ribs. His back felt like he had slammed into a brick wall, but he hadn't actually moved anywhere.
Her golden scales glimmered from an inch in front of him, her fist buried in his chest. She'd punched him into something solid, but he was sure he hadn't been standing against anything. His eyes widened and he coughed up a mouthful of blood, turning his head inch by agonizing inch to see what was behind.
Her tail. She’d wrapped her tail around his back to keep him from flying away.
His madra stuttered as he tried and failed to take a breath. Light rippled around her feet: the Enforcer technique that she'd used to shorten the distance.
Reptilian teeth flashed as she smiled. One of her hands snaked around his waist and seized the gem, pulling it out. It glinted blue in the dim light.
“You could have handed it to me, you know,” she told him.
Despair clutched his heart as he was reminded of a simple truth: most people who chased tigers ended up killed by tigers. For a moment, he'd forgotten.
With a speed that looked like a blur, her tail withdrew and slapped him across the top of the head.
Lindon slammed into the ground in an explosion of sand. His memory blurred, and his world turned to sand and darkness.
He woke when a clawed foot kicked him in the cracked ribs. It wasn't fueled by an Enforcer technique, or he would have exploded like a sack of blood, but it still caused him to scream in pain and curl up around his knees.
“What is this?” she demanded. He looked up through teary eyes to see her tossing the dull sapphire next to his head. “It's dead. Is this a fake?”
Through the haze of pain, Lindon couldn't understand what she was asking him. But he still flailed with one hand until it closed around the sapphire, pulling it back into his pocket. She didn't stop him, but the air around her grew hot. She drew back for another kick, and Lindon flinched.
A bar of black dragon's breath tore through the air, blasting at Ekeri's chest. She slid out of the way, ducking with the boneless agility of a serpent. She glared in the direction of the technique, hissing through her teeth.
Orthos, surrounded by a Burning Cloak, came to a halt next to Lindon in a spray of sand. He was panting heavily, his spirit a mask of pain, and the crack in his shell vented red light.
A liquid, golden whip spooled out from Ekeri's hand. “Stay still. Answer my questions, and I will spare you all.”
Orthos didn't say a word. He bit down on Lindon’s outer robe.
Lindon reached out with both hands, grabbing the tail of the fish. His thoughts were fuzzy, but he still knew he couldn't leave empty-handed.
He Enforced himself as best he could with his remaining madra, but he ended up doing little but holding on for his life as Orthos kicked his way over to the tunnel.
“Ghost!” the turtle said through clenched teeth.
Dross, a floating ball of purple light, zipped over to the keyhole. A flash, and the stone wall melted.
Golden light bloomed as a Striker technique shot at Lindon, but Orthos slid sideways. He grunted as he took it on
his shell, but kept running.
A second later, they were through the wall, and Dross was closing it behind them.
“Let's look on the bright side,” the construct said. “We have most of a fish. And we've learned so much. An educational opportunity, that's what that was.”
Lindon and Orthos lay on the stone, panting and groaning. Painfully, Lindon inched his neck over to the side to see the fish he'd grabbed.
Half of it was gone. He held a chunk of silver-scaled meat on the end of a wiry tail.
He spoke around his cracked ribs. “We need a new plan,” he said.
~~~
Ekeri stood watching the stone, tapping her claws together and thinking.
There had been a construct in that gem yesterday. Today, it had escaped its vessel and opened the door independently. Meaning it could operate on instructions and had a measure of control over Ghostwater.
Even more interesting, they had evidently known she was here. The Lowgold had come out wrapped in a veil, and hadn't retreated at the sight of her shelter or shown any surprise at her attack.
Was the construct spying on her? Or could they send their spiritual perception out from the tunnels, even though she couldn't send hers in?
Most importantly of all, they didn't have another way out of the tunnel. Otherwise they would never have fought in and out of this entrance, knowing she was here.
Together, this convinced her that she was right. That construct was the key to Ghostwater—if she could take it for herself, it would lead her to greater treasure than anyone else. She might leave this world stronger than Akura Harmony.
And she could have it. The black dragon-spawn was dying, and the Lowgold wasn't worth mentioning. They had risked her wrath for the sake of food, which meant they had no provisions in there.
So they would be coming out of this door. Soon. And she was in no hurry.
~~~
Lindon didn't sleep. Instead, he drank from the Dream Well.
The world sharpened, which in turn drew his attention to his robust catalogue of aches and wounds. He was covered in cuts and burns, his madra channels still gave him sharp pain, and his ribs were definitely cracked. He'd even coughed up blood, and his Bloodforged Iron body was concentrating his madra on healing internal injuries in his chest and stomach.