ReportReport
The preparations took eleven minutes of dedicated focus that made his head feel like it was splitting open.
Calid knew the duration because he counted his own heartbeats to keep his mind from breaking the concentration due to the pain he was suffering. This body's resting pulse was a steady sixty-two beats per minute, which was either a testament to Shao Wen's decades of cardiovascular discipline or evidence that the man's heart simply hadn't received the memo about the evening's events.
The armour matrix was not finished.
He wanted to be clear about that, even if only to himself.
What he had assembled in those eleven minutes was to a proper armour matrix what a lean-to made of sticks was to a cathedral. It was structurally adjacent, spiritually unrelated, and likely to collapse if you looked at it with any real expectation.
But it was something.
A few curved nodes at the major joints, shoulders, hips, knees, connected by spiralling channels that let the ambient Qi circulate in lazy loops through the structure. The inner shell hugged his meridian map like a second skin, reinforcing the scaffolding he'd already built. The middle layer was barely a sketch, a suggestion of force distribution that would spread maybe forty percent of an impact across the matrix instead of letting it concentrate at the point of contact.
The outer layer didn't exist yet.
He'd get to it, probably.
If he survived the next twenty minutes.
He flexed his fingers and felt the difference immediately.
The scaffolding alone had made his hands stop trembling. The partial armour matrix made them feel like they belonged to him, as though the borrowed muscles had finally accepted a new tenant and were cautiously willing to cooperate on matters of mutual survival. His grip strength had perhaps doubled, which meant it had gone from "'elderly academic' to 'elderly academic who occasionally opened his own jars.'
His legs were better and the knees held without negotiation, the spine straightened without complaint, and when he took a step toward the cave entrance, the movement was smooth enough that Liang Hao's eyes widened.
"Elder, you—"
"Stay here. Do not leave this cave or make any sounds. If I am not back within the time it takes you to count to five thousand, take the others and go south until you find water. Follow the water downstream."
Liang Hao mimed words before he finally settled on a couple. "Five thousand?"
"Count slowly."
Calid pushed through the moss curtain and stepped into the forest.
The night had deepened since they'd found the cave. The fires to the north had settled into a sullen, persistent glow that painted the underside of the canopy in shades of dying ember, and the smoke had thickened enough to give the air texture. The trees stood their patiently, indifferent to the fact that the world around them had recently undergone significant editorial revision.
Calid stood very still and listened.
The Qi scaffolding on his skin acted as a sensory net, picking up disturbances in the ambient flow the way a spider's web picked up vibrations. The four demonic signatures were closer now, perhaps two hundred yards out, moving in a staggered line that covered a front of roughly sixty yards. Professional spacing, the kind of formation that said we've done this before and we were good at it then and we're better at it now.
They were sweeping east to west, which meant they'd pass within fifty yards of the cave entrance in a couple minutes at most.
Calid considered his options.
Option one was to confront them directly. Four mid-stage Qi Condensation cultivators against one crippled elder with an untested partial armour matrix and a working relationship with the local energy that had graduated from 'first date with a nun' to 'second date where you discover she has strong opinions about astrology… still a nun.'
Option two was to hide. The cave was reasonably concealed, the moss curtain blocked line of sight, and if the sweep line passed without detecting them, the problem solved itself, temporarily. Until the next sweep, or the one after that, or until one of the unconscious students groaned at the wrong moment.
It was no option at all, but he gave it a curious look just in case he was missing something important.
Calid was not.
Option three was to not let them reach the cave at all.
Calid chose option three, because it was the only one that didn't rely on luck, and luck was a resource he had exhausted somewhere around the point where a cat had walked across his life's work and he was blasted through, what he suspected, dimensional barriers that should not have been capable of doing so.
He moved into the trees.
The partial armour matrix changed everything about how the body moved.
Where before each step had been a negotiation between intent and capability, now the Qi-reinforced joints responded with something approaching obedience. His feet found purchase on the pine-needle floor without sliding. His knees absorbed the uneven terrain without buckling. His spine stayed aligned through turns and dips that would have sent him sprawling ten minutes ago.
And he was dead silent in it all.
He was still slow by cultivator standards.
A healthy Qi Condensation practitioner could have outrun him at a sprint. But he was quiet, because five hundred and seventy-four years of working in libraries had given him an instinctive understanding of how to move through a space without disturbing it, and the Qi scaffolding dampened his footfalls to near-silence by cushioning each impact before it reached the ground in a wide cone much similar to an elephants padded foot.
The first signature was the leftmost, the trailing edge of the sweep line. Separated from the nearest companion by twenty yards of dark forest and thick undergrowth.
Calid circled wide, using the trees as cover, and came up behind the figure from the southeast.
The demonic cultivator was a woman that was young. She moved with the fluid grace that marked Qi-enhanced musculature. Her eyes swept the forest in steady arcs, and the dark Qi around her hands maintained a low, ready state, not active techniques, just the ambient hum of someone prepared to kill at short notice.
She was good at her job it seemed. Disciplined and alert.
She was also looking in the wrong direction.
Calid built the matrix six feet behind her.
A compression matrix, tight, focused, and aimed at the base of her skull. He'd refined the design since the clearing, the nodes were curved to match the Qi's flow preference, the focal point was narrower, and the compression ratio was better by perhaps fifteen percent, which was the difference between 'shove' and 'hammer.'
He released it.
The compressed Qi struck the back of her head with a sound like a hand clapping a melon. Her eyes rolled up, knees folded, and she dropped into the pine needles with the boneless finality of someone who had been very thoroughly switched off.
Calid had another matrix to catch her body.
She didn't make a sound louder than the rustle of her robes settling.
Calid checked the other three signatures. No change in movement pattern or alarm. The forest was full of small sounds, settling branches, distant crackling, the occasional pop of superheated sap from the fires, and one more soft thump had been absorbed into the general ambience of a world having a very bad night.
He moved to the second.
This one was male and heavyset, carrying a blade that he held low and ready in a grip that suggested familiarity. He was the closest to the first, twenty yards to the right, and he was moving slightly faster than the others, which meant he was either eager, impatient, or both, and either way it meant he was paying more attention to the ground ahead of him than the ground behind.
Calid built three matrices this time.
The first was a Qi dispersal web targeted and deployed a foot in front of the man's path. When the cultivator stepped into it, his passive Qi reinforcement flickered, just for a heartbeat. Long enough for his enhanced senses to stutter and his reflexes to hiccup.
The compression matrix hit him in the temple during that heartbeat.
He went down sideways, catching a low branch on the way, which slowed his fall enough that he landed almost gently.
Silently with the help of the third matrix that caught his weight.
Two down. Two more to go, Calid.
Calid's chest was burning. The shattered core fragments had shifted during the exertion, and the familiar grinding pain was back, accompanied by a new sensation, a hot, wet feeling in his lower chest that suggested the fragments were cutting things they shouldn't be cutting.
The taste of blood flooded his mouth which was strange to him considering he should have died from blood loss by this point.
He spat, quietly, into the pine needles. The saliva was dark crimson.
The third cultivator had stopped moving.
Calid froze behind a trunk wide enough to hide two of him and extended his Qi sense. The third signature was perhaps thirty yards ahead and to the right and stationary. They were radiating the particular quality of alertness that said I heard something, or I felt something, or my instincts are telling me something and I'm not stupid enough to ignore them.
Calid let a few dozen seconds pass in silence.
Patiently waiting for everything to calm.
The signature moved again, but the pattern had changed. Instead of the steady east-to-west sweep, the third cultivator was angling south, toward where the second had fallen, to check on his companion.
Calid circled north.
The partial armour matrix hummed against his skin as he moved, the Qi cycling through the spiralling channels with increasing fluidity, as though the energy were finally warming to the idea that this particular configuration might be worth cooperating with. His legs carried him over a fallen log without the knee-buckling stumble that would have accompanied the manoeuvre fifteen minutes ago and arms moved with purpose without the customary pain.
He found the third cultivator crouched beside the second's body, two fingers pressed to the fallen man's neck, head turning in slow, scanning arcs. The dark Qi around his hands had intensified from ready to active, coiling in tight spirals that suggested a technique on the edge of deployment.
This one was more dangerous.
The Qi signature was denser and more refined.
Late mid-stage, possibly, or early late-stage based on Shao Wen's memories.
The kind of cultivator who had survived enough fights to develop the instinct that was currently telling him to be very, very careful.
Calid built four matrices simultaneously this time.
The effort made his vision swim. The partial armour matrix flickered as its nodes strained to maintain coherence while his attention was divided between structural integrity and offensive construction. He felt the Qi resist, it didn't particularly enjoy being pulled in this many directions at once or multitasking, it preferred to do one thing at a time and do it at its own pace, thank you very much.
He forced it into the paths gently, but firmly, the way you guided a horse that wanted to go left when the bridge was to the right.
Qi dispersal web. Compression matrix. Deflection plane. Body catching net.
The dispersal web went down first, a dead zone that encompassed the crouching cultivator and a few feet in every direction. The man's active technique died instantly, the coiling dark Qi around his hands unravelled, and his head snapped up with a startled motion of someone who had just felt the ground disappear beneath them.
The compression matrix hit him in the sternum before his mouth finished opening.
He flew backward, hit a tree, and the deflection plane caught the rebound, redirecting his body sideways and into the ground with a controlled impact that was designed to stun rather than kill.
Calid wasn't entirely sure why he'd chosen stun over kill.
Some residual academic squeamishness, perhaps.
Or the practical consideration that dead bodies attracted more attention than unconscious ones. Or possibly the fact that he was an educator, and educators, as a species, had a deep-seated reluctance to permanently end things when a stern lesson might suffice.
The man lay still. Breathing, but still.
He paused over him and really considered what was before him.
Shao Wen's memories made it very clear what a demonic cultivator was and how they got there. Endless killing, murders, brutality of all kinds meant to drive their evil Daos forward in the ways that virtue was used to drive the righteous sects forward.
The White Flame Clover Sect was part of the orthodox path.
Somewhere in between the two that was not made to be heinous and cruel.
Calid sneered in disgust and stomped the back of the head without another moment of hesitation.
Three down.
The fourth signature had stopped.
Calid's Qi sense painted a picture of the last cultivator, the rightmost edge of the sweep line. He had halted approximately forty yards to the north. The signature was fluctuating, brightening and dimming in rapid pulses that Calid's borrowed memories identified as a communication technique.
The cultivator was sending a signal.
Calling for backup, or reporting the loss of contact with three companions, or both.
Calid moved as quickly as the scaffolding would let him.
The armour matrix sang against his bones as he pushed the body into something approaching a run. It was graceless and lurching, the gait of a man whose legs had received instructions from management but were interpreting them creatively, and every impact sent jolts through his chest that made the core fragments shift and grind.
But it was fast.
Faster than he'd managed all night, fast enough that the trees blurred at the edges of his vision and the wind of his passage stirred the pine needles.
The fourth cultivator sensed him coming.
Credit where it was due, the man reacted instantly. The communication technique cut off, replaced by a defensive stance and a blade that materialised from somewhere inside his robes with the practiced speed of someone who slept with weapons the way normal people slept with pillows.
Calid didn't slow down.
He built the compression matrix while running, which was new and made his brain feel like it was being squeezed through a keyhole.
The nodes wobbled, the connections frayed, and the focal point drifted by several inches from where he wanted it.
He released it anyway.
The compressed Qi hit the cultivator's raised blade and shattered it. The remaining force caught the man's forearm and spun him sideways.
Calid was there a second later, closer than he should have been.
Enough to see the red eyes widen and the mouth open for a shout that would carry through the forest and bring every demonic cultivator within a li running.
The Qi dispersal web snapped into existence around the man's head.
The shout died and the dark Qi that had been gathering in his throat for what was probably a sonic technique dissipated into nothing, and the sound that emerged was a strangled whisper, a gasp of disbelief from a man who had just tried to scream and discovered that the universe had declined the request.
Calid's fist, reinforced by the armour matrix, connected with the man's jaw.
It was not a sophisticated technique or a secret martial art.
It was the punch of a five-hundred-and-seventy-four-year-old academic who had learned to throw a fist during the Seventh Mage War because a colleague had pointed out that sometimes the enemy got close enough that theoretical knowledge became insufficient. Those were the worst days of his life as a simple punching combo had been carved into his body and mind.
The cultivator's head snapped back and eyes crossed. He folded.
Calid stood over the fourth body, breathing hard and feeling the armour matrix flicker and stabilise back and forth. His chest was a symphony of pain in several movements, all of them fortissimo. The core fragments had definitely cut something new, because the hot wet feeling had spread from his lower chest to his abdomen, and his robes were sticking to his skin in ways that suggested the stains were going to be permanent.
Four mid-stage Qi Condensation cultivators had been dispatched in under a few minutes.
All dead and unlikely to threaten another soul in the blackness.
He stood in the dark forest and allowed himself a few seconds of satisfaction.
Then he turned south and walked back to the cave, because a few seconds was all the satisfaction the evening's schedule permitted.