…and the blade is already halfway, a cold silver line arcing through torch-smoke, when something splits the night louder than steel:
"STAY YOUR HAND!"
Cho Min's stave hammers down from the darkness above the pine limb. Wood meets metal with a crack like lightning striking a gong, jolting shock up every spine in the clearing. The cultist's knife ricochets, skids into loam. Won-Il flinches, cup toppling, fear-drip spattering the moss.
Cho lands between prisoners and captors, skirts whirling, Heron-Loop pivot cutting open a breath of space. He should be elegant—Jang has spent days admiring that footwork—but right now it is frantic, unfinished, powered less by art than by horror at what he almost failed to stop. A second cultist lunges; Cho flicks an ankle, redirecting momentum, and the attacker's own claw buries in his comrade's rib. Screams ravel into the night air.
The momentary reprieve buys Jang exactly three heartbeats.
First heartbeat: he tries to rise. His Gate convulses in answer, a rusted hinge shrieking. Vision collapses to a tunnel of white sparks. He tastes iron and pine resin, feels blood heating the side of his neck.
Second heartbeat: Cho Sun-kyu, the lantern guard, drags Won-Il by the collar, yanking him clear of the pine trunk—more to secure hostage leverage than to save a life. Seo Yun-tae is shouting for an organised fallback, voice slicing through the chaos like a whip, yet his own sword points toward the track that leads away from the wounded, away from everything messy and unglorious.
Third heartbeat: a stray torch rolls near Jang's knee. Its cloth sputters, brightens, then catches spilled tincture. Flame spreads across the ground in a sheet of blue-white, illuminating the carnage with alchemical brilliance. For one crystal instant he sees the field as the crows circling overhead must see it: servants staggering like ants among shards of carts, cultists in dark feathers weaving between ruptured barrels, disciples retreating in disciplined knots around a single silver chain glinting beneath Han Jeong-il's cloak.
Keys, locks, meat, Jang thinks—then the thought disintegrates as heat licks his trouser leg.
The sudden pain drives breath into his lungs. A fragment of Lotus cadence answers, half-remembered, tattered. He drags flame-slick cloth through damp soil, snuffing it. Knee under him. Then foot. World tilting but holding.
Across the fire sheet the cultist who lost his blade snatches a fallen arrow, snaps off the toxin-glazed head, and rushes Won-Il anew. Cho Min is two steps out of reach, repelling another foe. Sun-kyu's lame leg tangles; he stumbles, releases Won-Il. The captive reels, wrists bound, throat exposed.
No one else is close enough.
Jang lunges. Everything inside screams. The kitchen knife he used before lies somewhere in darkness; he has only the broken stave half still clutched in his hand. He thrusts it forward like a spear, not elegant, not trained—just desperate.
The sharpened end punches through the cultist's forearm as the arrow-shard descends. Bone crunches. The fragment clatters harmlessly to the ground, point skittering into the leaf-litter.
Momentum hurls Jang past his target; he hits shoulder-first, both of them tumbling. Pain detonates along bruised meridians, but he uses the roll to wrench the stave free, whirl, and jam the jagged tip into the attacker's sternum. Once. Twice. A wet thud, then stillness.
Silence rushes in around the heartbeat thunder. Won-Il's gaze fixes on Jang, equal parts relief and dawning horror. Blood beads down Jang's splintered weapon, smokes where it meets the ground-fire heat.
Cho Min's voice: "Pull back, now! They have what they came for!"
Jang scans, confused—what? Han Jeong-il is retreating along the track, chain still hidden, relic secure. Yun Mi-rhe lobs smoke pellets to cover the withdrawal. Cultists do not pursue the disciples; their focus remains on the servants, on fear and dripping cups and whatever ritual the vulture creed demands.
Realisation dawns like frost: servants are still the buffer, even in retreat. Grey-ink expendables, left to slow the enemy's teeth.
Won-Il trembles beside him, wrists bound, cheeks sliced. Jang hacks at the ropes with the bloody stave point until fibres part. His friend collapses into his arms, breath hitching. "Keep… keep that promise," Won-Il rasps. "Teach me to breathe like stars…"
Jang's chest Gate howls. He tastes blood again, fresh flow slicking teeth. But he answers anyway: "After we live through tonight."
A new whistle—different pitch, heavier—cuts the smoke. Hollow-Maw bear roar, not of the beast itself but of a weapon shaped in its mirror: a metre-long javelin with hollow core, hurled from somewhere unseen. It strikes the medical wagon axle. Wood explodes; shards and blue fire splinter outward. Cho Min is flung into a tree. Sun-kyu screams as shrapnel bites his bad leg. The blast quenches nearby torches, plunging half the clearing into strobing dark.
Jang hauls Won-Il toward the only light left—the guttering fire sheet near the cart. He drags, staggers, drags. Every pulse threatens blackout. But footsteps approach through the smoke: Han Jeong-il, sabre bare, chain glinting bright as dawn. He plants himself between the servants and the advancing cult line, flanked by two remaining Inner disciples.
"Ring to me!" he commands, eyes never leaving the enemy. Not to protect the servants, Jang knows, but to fortify the relic's last wall. Still, a wall is shelter, however poisonous its mortar.
Jang pushes Won-Il toward that narrow refuge. Before he can follow, a cultist barred in feathered leather dives from the side, aiming talon claws for Won-Il's spine. Reflex moves Jang first: Branch-Step pivot, stolen Heron loop—raw, imperfect, but enough. He intercepts with the stave, parry strengthening into a shove that redirects the attacker past Won-Il into Han's sabre reach.
Steel arcs. Feathered head rolls.
Han flicks blood from his blade, meets Jang's dazed stare for the first time tonight. A curt nod—recognition of usefulness, nothing more—then he steps back, chain-hand checking the relic at his chest. "Grey boy, hold your line," he orders.
Jang laughs, a cracked, delirious sound. Line? He is a broken hinge. Yet he plants feet, tries to raise the stave again.
The Gate finally shatters.
Sound implodes; light floods to white; his body folds like paper. He sees, as he falls, Seo Yun-tae sprinting past with two disciples, eyes wide at the madness he has abandoned. He sees cultists circling, cups of fear-blood sloshing. He sees Won-Il trying to crawl, shouting his name.
He sees the blade that rises a second time, silver in the ruin-light, aiming for his friend's throat.
Jang's body meets ground before his scream reaches air. Limbs refuse. World narrows to tunnel, to flicker, to a single command echoing in the dark:
Move.
It is no longer his own voice but Won-Il's, Cho Min's, the dying boy's, the servants already trampled—one chorus begging the same impossible thing.
Move.
Vision gutters to black just as steel begins its fatal descent…