Calid had expected for the first argument and repressed desire for revenge to pop up within a few hours. Maybe after they found somewhere safe and the group finally felt like they were stable enough to lead a counter attack without risking the death of everyone in the group as a result.
Said suggestion arrived a few minutes after the last disciple stopped kneeling.
Duan Rong stood up once everyone had gone silent and were focused on the suffering and pain they were feeling in the moment. "We should hit them back," he started, making sure everyone heard him. "They'll never expect us to strike while they are on the offensive! We could do so much! Hit their them where it hurts the most and kill as many as possible before vanishing into the wind."
Calid stood back up from his seat.
Lin Mei noticed him and moved to stand before him just in case.
"The sweep teams operate in fours, right? We have ten Foundation cultivators. Even depleted and injured, ten Foundation Establishment against four Qi Condensation cultivators is—"
"No." Calid stepped past Lin Mei's protection.
Duan Rong's mouth stayed open for a half-second longer than it should have, the way a door stays open when the wind changes direction mid-swing. Around him, several of the older disciples had been leaning forward. Their bodies already committing to the conversation before their minds had finished evaluating it.
Lin Mei's hand had drifted to her sword hilt as she narrowed her eyes at them.
Calid was her patriarch now and he would be respected.
Even the sharp-eyed Foundation Establishment cultivator with the chest wound had shifted his weight onto his better leg. His eyes burned with the same passion Duan Rong had currently.
The Foundation Establishment cultivators were split in half for going out and the other half willing to do whatever Calid decided.
Calid looked at them and saw what he had seen a hundred times before in the aftermath of catastrophe. The desperate, seductive logic of striking back. The idea that if you could just do something, just strike one blow, make one of them bleed the way you were bleeding, then the world would start making sense again and the ground would stop feeling like it was made of smoke.
It was a lie born of helplessness and desperation.
A comforting, murderous lie that had gotten many people he had been standing next to in multiple wars killed.
Organization and structure were more vital in battle than individual strength, even if the mind could not wrap around that idea. It was why generals were so important and logistics the reason wars are lost and won. It was rogue elements like this, placed in the wrong place and at the wrong time that made for disasters.
Calid sighed. "Anger is not a strategy and revenge is not a plan. Both are emotions, and emotions, while valid, make terrible commanding officers. They give orders without consulting the map, they ignore supply lines, numbers, terrain, strength, cultivation levels, and they have a marked tendency to get everyone who follows them killed in ways that are both preventable and embarrassing."
Duan Rong's jaw worked. "Elder, with respect—"
"Patriarch," Calid straightened to the full height of Shao Wen. "You may keep your respect. I would prefer your obedience."
The cave temperature dropped by several degrees, socially speaking.
"We killed a few of their sweep teams tonight," Duan Rong pressed, and the we was generous given that Calid had done it alone, but the boy was trying to build consensus, not accuracy. "They're Qi Condensation. We have Foundation Establishment cultivators that could—"
"You could kill a sweep team, yes. Perhaps two. Perhaps, if fortune smiled and the wind blew favourably and every single one of these Foundation Establishment cultivators performed at peak capacity despite being injured, exhausted, and running on reserves that I would charitably describe as theoretical, you could kill three…"
Calid paused.
None of the Foundation Establishment cultivators met his gaze because they knew what he was saying.
Even in the heat of burning anger and desire for revenge.
"...and then what?"
Duan Rong grit his teeth so hard Calid could hear them. He looked away.
Calid pulled deep from Shao Wen's memory. "The sweep teams report to squad leaders. Squad leaders report to a Hunting Hall commanders. The Hunting Hall commander reports to someone whose Qi signature we felt from multiple li away. That commander is, at minimum, Core Formation stage, possibly higher. I have no data, because I have been fighting Qi Condensation cultivators exclusively, and I can assure you that extrapolating combat capability across cultivation realms is the kind of guesswork that produces early graves for passionate young men your age."
Duan Rong looked sullen and reprimanded.
"I do not know if I can fight a Foundation Establishment cultivator right now. I suspect I can, but I have no proof, because the universe has thus far been considerate enough to only send me opponents I can handle, and I would prefer not to test the hypothesis with fifty-seven lives balanced on the result. What I know with absolute certainty is that anything above Foundation Establishment will kill me, and then it will kill all of you, and it will do so with the same amount of energy it would require them to snuff candles before bed."
The cave was very quiet.
The blind Foundation cultivator's fingers had resumed their drumming pattern on her knee.
"We are not strong enough to fight back," Calid said. "We are strong enough to survive, if we are disciplined and willing to swallow the entirely reasonable desire to make someone pay for what happened tonight. That desire will keep. Rage is remarkably shelf-stable. You can store it for years and it loses none of its potency. But you cannot spend it now without spending your lives alongside it, and your lives are not yours to spend. They belong to the fifty-six people in this cave who are depending on you to still be alive tomorrow. And once we are strong enough, revenge will be had, but until then, you would only be wasting your lives."
Duan Rong's hands were fists at his sides.
His shoulders trembled, a fine vibration that ran from his neck to his wrists, and his eyes were bright and wet in the grey light.
He wanted to argue.
Every tendon in his body wanted to fight back and come up with a good enough argument.
But he looked around the cave and saw the youngest disciples pressed against each other, the girl with the broken leg whose splint was already soaking through, at Liang Hao's round face turned up toward the conversation and the argument died somewhere between his chest and his throat.
He bowed low, tears dripping from his eyes while in that position. "Yes, Patriarch."
"Good. Now, we leave."
The forest was trying to kill them through sheer inconvenience.
This was, Calid reflected, a perfectly reasonable thing for a forest to do. Forests had been inconveniencing travellers since long before travellers had invented the concept of complaining about it, and this particular forest had the additional excuse of being on fire in several directions, saturated with demonic Qi, and populated by hunting parties whose idea of a pleasant morning constitutional involved building pyramids made of screaming heads.
Fifty-seven people moved through the trees in a column that stretched.
Calid had organised them with the efficiency born of experience, having once evacuated an entire Academy wing during a thaumic cascade while simultaneously arguing with the bursar about fire insurance premiums. The walking Foundation Establishment cultivators took point, middle, and rear positions. Lin Mei and Feng Jun scouted ahead, fifty yards out, moving in the paired sweep pattern Calid had described and they had absorbed with the speed of young people with open minds.
Lin Shui had positioned herself at the rear without being asked. Her sword rested in its sheath across her back as her eyes tracked the tree line behind them with a steady rhythm that reminded Calid of a lighthouse.
A lighthouse that could bisect you at the waist.
The wounded were distributed through the column, each one paired with someone strong enough to carry them if the pace increased. Chen Bao had the unconscious girl across his shoulders again while his knees making sounds that suggested they were composing a formal letter of complaint to his spine. The boy with the splinted arm walked under his own power with his good hand gripping the shoulder of the disciple ahead of him for balance.
Calid walked at the centre of the column.
His Qi sense extended to its maximum range, which was approximately two li in every direction and gave him a picture of the surrounding forest rendered in energy signatures and ambient flow patterns. It helped that distinguishing between demonic cultivators and tree was very easy, which was the minimum viable threshold for the current operation.
Hiding didn't seem to be part of the sect's, trying to hunt them down, repertoire.
The first group appeared twenty minutes into the march.
Six signatures, Qi Condensation, moving in a loose patrol pattern a few hundred yards to the northeast. They were heading west, which would bring them across the column's path in a few minutes if both groups maintained their current trajectories.
Calid raised his fist.
The column stopped with a ripple of arrested momentum that was, all things considered, impressively quiet for fifty some odd people, most of whom had never done anything like this before and several of whom had been in the middle of stepping over roots, rocks, and all manner of objects.
He pointed northeast and held up six fingers.
Then made a lateral sweeping gesture that Lin Mei had interpreted correctly twice already during the march: they're moving across our path, we wait here.
The column crouched.
Fifty-seven people became fifty-seven irregular shapes among the undergrowth. Disciples pressed against trunks, tucked behind fallen logs, huddled in bushes, and flattened into depressions. The white robes were a problem, even filthy and torn they caught what little light filtered through the canopy, but the forest floor was generous with shadow and the smoke in the air reduced visibility to perhaps forty yards.
The six signatures passed.
Calid counted heartbeats.
Two hundred and twelve before the last signature faded beyond his sense range.
He waited another hundred then raised his fist again and opened it.
The column moved.
The second group was worse.
Twelve signatures in tighter formation that were moving south on a line that paralleled their own path at a distance of perhaps a hundred and fifty yards. Close enough that a shout would carry… or a particularly loud stumble, clattering of a dropped weapon, or a child's cough at the wrong moment that would end everything.
The column stopped again.
This time the wait was longer as he made sure they were no where close.
The parallel patrol maintained its southward heading for nearly ten minutes, and during those ten minutes Calid stood motionless in the centre of his crouching disciples and felt every single one of their heartbeats through the Qi scaffolding, a percussion section of fifty-seven terrified hearts playing in approximate unison.
The patrol passed and they moved again.
The third encounter was the one that nearly broke them.
Seven signatures, Foundation Establishment, moving in a search pattern that was tighter and far more competent than anything the Qi Condensation teams had managed. These were the real hunters. Their Qi signatures were dense, refined, heavy, powerful, and radiating the particular quality of controlled aggression that said we are looking for something specific and we are going to find it.
They were two hundred yards behind, directly where the column's path had crossed, and they were not moving on.
They had stopped.
Calid felt his stomach perform a manoeuvre that would have impressed an acrobat.
The seven signatures were clustered around a point that his Qi sense painted as a disturbance in the ambient flow, a place where the energy had been recently displaced by movement, body heat, and the residual Qi leakage of fifty-seven cultivators walking in a line.
They had found the column's trail.
Calid's hand signals brought the column to a halt and then, with a series of gestures that he invented on the spot and hoped were interpretable, directed them into a wide arc that would take them west, away from the trail, through denser forest where the undergrowth would mask their passage.
It added an hour to the march.
Nobody complained.
Nobody spoke at all, actually, which was the most disciplined thing fifty-seven traumatised young people had ever collectively achieved, and Calid filed it away as evidence that mortal terror was an underappreciated pedagogical tool.
The Foundation Establishment level patrol followed the old trail north toward the cave they'd abandoned.Calid allowed himself a single breath of relief before the Qi scaffolding on his skin reminded him, through a sharp pulse of pain, that relief was a luxury and his chest was still full of broken glass.