Time didn't slow.
The moment my taunt left my lips, the courtyard erupted.
The wind-archer loosed first. The arrow wasn't aimed to kill. It was a Wind-Binder Shot, meant to pin my shadow to the wall, to lock me in place. A capture tactic. They still wanted me alive.
I didn't dodge. I lunged forward, into the heart of their half-circle. The arrow hissed past where my chest had been and thwocked into the stone wall, a vortex of swirling air erupting around it.
My hands flashed to my back. The twin dwarven short swords came free with a metallic sigh. The first two enemies—a sword-and-board fighter and a dagger-wielder, both glowing with the ruddy aura of early 2nd Order—rushed to meet me.
My mind didn't see people. I saw vectors of force, openings, weaknesses painted in the stark clarity of Monarch's Gaze. The swordman thrust, standard academy form. The dagger-wielder flowed low, going for my legs.
Flowing Blade Dance.
My body moved on the instinct of a thousand simulated battles. I parried the thrust with a redirecting slide, my left sword guiding his blade harmlessly past my ribs. My right sword descended in a short, brutal arc at the unprotected junction of his neck and shoulder, above his pauldron.
Chunk.
A wet, meaty sound. Hot blood sprayed across my mask, a coppery taste hitting the back of my throat. He gurgled, eyes wide with surprise, and collapsed.
The dagger-wielder's blade scraped against my thigh, cutting leather and skin. A line of fire. I ignored it. As he tried to recover from his lunge, I dropped my center of gravity and spun, a low, sweeping kick empowered by a jolt of Earth mana. My boot connected with his knee. The sound was like a green branch snapping. He screamed, stumbling.
I didn't let him fall. I rose, my left sword coming up in a vicious uppercut that plunged under his chin and into his brain. The scream cut off.
Two down. Nine left.
"Stop playing! Subdue him!" Elara, the 3rd Order leader, barked, her voice cutting through the chaos.
The big Earth adept, the Rank 9, finally moved. He stomped.
The cobblestones at my feet rippled, then shot upward in sharp, crushing spikes. I threw myself sideways, feeling a spike tear through my cloak and scrape along my ribs. Pain, bright and sharp.
I landed in a roll, coming up as the Fire adept—a woman with her hands wreathed in orange flame—unleashed a roaring Firestream. The heat was instant, blistering. I couldn't dodge the cone. I reached for my own Fire core, the D-Grade power still new and wild. I bellowed it out in a raw, concussive Fire Fist at the ground between us.
The explosion of flame met her stream. The detonation of conflicting heat threw her back, screaming as her own fire rebounded. It also threw me back against the stacked firewood, the breath hammered from my lungs.
Smoke and chaos filled the yard.
This was my only chance. In the confusion, I pushed with my Darkness core. Shadow Step. I blurred, not far, just three feet to the left, behind a large, rotting cask.
A sword meant for my back shattered the cask instead. I emerged from the splinters and shadow, my right sword licking out. The attacker, another 2nd Order swordsman, parried frantically. Our blades rang once, twice. On the third clash, I disengaged, feinted low, and when he dropped his guard, my left sword came over the top and took him across the eyes. He fell, clawing at his face.
Three.
I was a whirlwind of gore and desperation. I took cuts. A dagger in the meat of my shoulder. A glancing blow from a mace that cracked something in my forearm. A whip of water from their healer that lashed across my back, stealing warmth and strength.
But I gave worse.
My Earth-enhanced strength shattered a man's collarbone when I kicked him into a wall. My Darkness pooled around my feet in a Grasping Shade, tripping a spearman, and I ended him with a thrust to the throat. My Fire, used in quick, brutal bursts, seared flesh and ignited cloaks.
The cobblestones grew slick. The air thickened with the smell of blood, voided bowels, and ozone.
I lost count. My world shrank to the next weapon, the next flash of hostile mana, the next dodge, the next kill.
At some point, I found myself standing over the twitching body of the Wind-archer, my sword buried in his chest. I yanked it free, breathing in ragged, burning gulps. I was hurt. Badly. My left arm hung useless, the bone in the forearm clearly broken. A deep gash on my thigh wept steadily. My ribs screamed with every breath. I was painted in blood, most of it not my own, but enough of it was.
I looked up, blinking sweat and blood from my eyes.
Bodies littered the courtyard. Six. I'd killed six of them.
Five remained. But the five that remained were the strongest. Elara, the 3rd Order, her expression now cold fury. The hulking Earth Rank 9, his stony skin unmarred. The healer, looking pale but determined. And two others—a twin-sword user and a woman with gloved hands that crackled with blue energy, a Lightning affinity.
They circled me, more cautious now. The "take alive" order was clearly forgotten.
The pain was a rising tide, threatening to drown my focus. The adrenaline was fading, leaving a deep, grinding exhaustion. The shadow of the tavern wall felt like the only thing holding me up.
And then, a memory stabbed through the haze of pain, sharper than any blade.
Another wall. Not stone, but the fused, crumbling plascrete of a dying city on Aethel. The smell wasn't blood and mud, but ozone, decay, and fear. The roar wasn't of cultivators, but of beastial roars and the shriek of rending metal. I was cornered then, too. Back to the wall, my darkness spent, my body broken by a hulking Void-Spawn. I could see its maw, lined with crystalline teeth, dripping acid, descending.
I'd been ready to die there, too.
Then—a blast of superheated air that made the spawn shriek. A gout of flame so pure it turned the creature's carapace white-hot. Mina. Her face was smudged with soot, her eyes fierce behind her welder's goggles. "Get up, you idiot!" she'd yelled.
From the left, a barrage of icicles sharper than spears hammered into the spawn's side, making it stagger. Karacus, his breath frosting the air, his hands encased in gauntlets of living ice. "We're not leaving without you!"
And then time… stuttered. The spawn's killing lunge seemed to move through syrup. A figure blurred past me, a monochrome streak. Rooley, a look of intense concentration on his face, his knife finding the gap between the melted plates Mina had made, driven in with the force of a paused moment. The spawn collapsed.
Karacus hauled me up. Mina slapped a stim-patch on my neck. Rooley just nodded, already scanning for the next threat. We'd fought back-to-back, a perfect, lethal unit.
A wave of sorrow, so profound and sudden it was a physical ache, hit me in the center of my chest. It was worse than the broken arm, worse than the gash in my leg. It was the memory of not being alone.
In the blood-drenched yard in Ironfall, surrounded by new enemies, a sad, bloody smile twisted my lips beneath the mask. The expression felt foreign on my face.
"I miss you guys," I whispered into the gore-streaked air, the words lost in the panting of the five cultivators closing in for the kill.
The memory didn't weaken me. It did the opposite. It carved a cold, diamond-hard focus from the pain. I had survived then because I wasn't alone. I would survive now because I had learned to be.
And I would paint this entire damn town red to do it.
Elara raised her metal-shod hand. "End him."
The Earth Rank 9 roared, the ground buckling as he charged, a living avalanche. The Lightning woman's gloves crackled, preparing to fry my nervous system. The twinsword user flanked left. The healer prepared a binding spell.
I had no allies coming. No last-minute salvation.
Just me, my broken body, three cracking cores, and a System that had been suspiciously, ominously quiet.
I tightened my grip on my one good sword, the other dangling from numb fingers.
"Come on then," I rasped, the words a challenge and a goodbye. "Let's finish this."