The wing of obsidian cut across the sky like a thrown shard.
Radeon folded into the glider harness and dove. Screams and war shouts tilted up at him.
Confused. Half thought he was some cult relic.
The others tried to name a righteous technique he had never heard of.
Cold air clawed at his teeth as he leveled out above the field of breath tempering and cornerstone setting cultivators.
'So many dead. And these idiots still don't know whose tune they're dancing to.'
The blood crystal in the stump of his right arm woke with a dull throb.
The array carved into it flared to life in thin lines of gray fire.
Heat pressed through cloth and leather.
First a floating bead of red. Then a drift of faint pale motes that smelled to him like wet iron and old incense.
Blood. Soul. He had copied the cult pattern from memory then broken it.
No hooks for a full soul. No barbs that tore the core loose. Only a slow pull on vitality to those who had already fallen.
'Worth the risk.'
The crystal deepened from red to near black. Inside it something turned. His soul brushed that turning and shivered.
Strength swelled in him and left a faint ache set into the roots of his teeth.
With a turn, he banked the glider for another run over the field of blood and drifting light.
The men below watched his glider skim past and saw him cut neither cultist nor righteous.
More confusion rippled through their lines.
Then they forgot him and slammed steel and spirit at the enemies in front of them.
'Good. Bleed each other. I'll stay off the line.'
Then one gilded core cultist was not so trusting.
The man spun. His blade swept up.
Sword light screamed free. Three men tall. Blood red.
It tore the air as it chased Radeon. The heat of it dried the spit from his tongue.
The sword light passed under his boots. Close enough that the soles twitched.
He let the glider drop after the flash spent itself and leveled over the carpet of dead gilded cores.
Their armor still smoked. He had taken a few of their broken cores earlier. Now he went back for the rest.
Pouches. Rings. Thin knives and gemmed trinkets that would fit in a single sack. Dead men kept the best pockets.
He hooked light shields from cooling arms and shattered fingers.
One. Three. Five. The disks clacked together as he stacked them along the glider frame.
By eleven, his one remaining shoulders burned from the hauling and the glider listed a touch to the right.
'This covers me later. It has to.'
The righteous finally noticed him. Men of honor. Or so they liked to shout.
Threads of light and shaky talismans flew up in half-hearted arcs. Not enough to kill.
Just enough to say they had tried to stop Radeon from scavenging on their own dead.
One bolt scraped his wing in a bright spray of sparks he had mostly allowed. The glider shuddered just enough to sell the hit.
Acrid smell of burnt chameleon leather stung his nose and the hairs on his neck snapped upright in a show that looked more rattled than he felt.
'One last pass. Then I'm out.'
He skimmed low over the corpses and let his crystal drink one last time.
Soul mist brushed his skin like cold breath. Pouches thumped against each pouch hidden under his cloak.
The stack of light shields rattled each time the glider bucked.
That was enough. Greed had teeth. He knew the feel of its bite.
Radeon banked hard toward open sky and refused himself even a heartbeat more over that killing field.
The light dimmed. Shadows pooled on armor and stone. Above the clouds rolled in a slow grinding circle.
A vast dark eye opened in the storm.
Wind sucked inward and every loose scrap on the ground twitched toward the center of the forming vortex over their heads.
Radeon caught the scent of torn earth and glanced up. Whatever watched through that eye in the clouds had finally decided to blink.
'The sect brass are sick. Those are their people. Why isn't anyone evacuating?'
Radeon shook off the shout and clash below. Men still battled for their lives.
That was their bargain. Not his. The sky was already going wrong.
The air pressed at his ribs like a second chest trying to crush the first.
He rolled the glider away from the seething center of the clouds.
The familiar weight of heavenly pressure settled on his skull. It did not care what he had sacrificed already.
His missing right arm burned with a phantom itch, his empty socket throbbed, and his ruined tongue.
'Guess losing a few limbs wasn't enough to make me boring. Yeah. Probably wasn't.'
Whether he fled or hovered, the intent above did not waver. The vortex turned slow and patient.
Heaven had seen him. So he pointed the glider toward the edge of the storm and chose to run anyway.
If the lightning came, at least no one still breathing would be there to chain a bolt toward him.
'One reason the Heavenly Dao's acting up. There's no Celestial Emperor. Means the immortals are gone. Maybe all of them. I just hope not.'
Radeon no longer knew whether the ones who had survived had slipped into some gentler realm or were drifting blind in the void.
That was not his concern now. Only the sky.
He looked up and the lightning above had thickened into a snarling web that cracked like mountains splitting under a hammer.
The booming was incessant. It rolled over itself until the air shook. Static crawled over his skin.
His hair on stood up in a brittle halo as the world around him filled with the dry hiss of charged air.
Radeon flicked a glance at the sky and poured everything into fleeing the lightning's deadly reach.
"Just survive the first hit. One. Then I'm out of range before the second lands."