Three days.
Jin has stood on this ridge for three days looking at his world changing gradually. A slow change, caused by a leeching force that seemes hell bent on sucking it dry.
The breach along the northern range, th source of this phenomena, was looming over him, four days old by now.
*Almost,* he thought. *A little more. And after i finish dealing with this, I am going to let Lin enjoy himself with those greedy brats. To think that they forget whom this world belongs to, or did they? *
The mana inside him had reached a depth most practitioners only read about in records left by people who watched those that had not survived the reaching. He could feel it the way he felt his own heartbeat — not as power but as presence, total and continuous, the accumulated weight of three days of stillness and the world's slow current moving through him. He had long since reached the peak of the known world and even improved beyond what everyone else's perceived. For the attackers to think they stood a chance against him and in his home world, Jin couldn't stop feeling that something is wrong.
Ninety-four percent.
Behind him, somewhere near the boulder to his right, Lin had gone quiet. He felt it too.The strangeness of the act.
He did not open his eyes. But the small part of his awareness Jin kept permanently turned outward registered the silence and did not like it. In three thousand years, he had learned to read Lin the way a sailor read weather — by quality, not quantity. Lin's silence is rare and had varieties. But there had never been a silence like this one.
*Lin,* he thought, reaching outward. *What—*
The binding detonated.
Fourth-tier compressed lattice, northeast anchor — he read it in the half-second before it snapped shut, the spell , the mana, all felt familiar to him. Precise work. Someone had spent considerable time on that construct. It closed around Lin before either of them could react, and even held with a monster like Lin struggling within it.
*"Release me , you ugly nipple head."* Lin's voice, muffled but entirely itself, sounded with a tone that could strip paint. *"Release me now or I will reach through these bars and dismantle your body piece by piece. I will find the thing you love most in this world and —"*
The strike hit Jin from the left.
He went to one knee.
The mana inside him lurched — three days of accumulated work shuddering like a tower in an earthquake, finding its base, holding. His shield ,that he always kept up, had caught enough. Not all of it. He could feel his left side already composing a detailed report on the nature and extent of its grievances, which he would address shortly.
He stayed on one knee. Breathed.
Forty-two meters behind him, slightly elevated, southeast of the boulder: a stillness with intention behind it. He knew the mana signature. He knew the technique. He knew — and this was the one that made it all clear and required a moment, even now, even with everything — the precise window in his casting cycle that had been chosen. The five seconds where his defenses ran on habit rather than attention. He had mentioned it once to his disciple, as an example of a vulnerability to guard against.
He had mentioned it to be helpful.
*So, That explains a lot.* he thought.
The few words contained many things. He filed most of them under *later* with the practiced efficiency of a man who had learned across centuries that feelings were real and useful and had their time, and their time was not this specific moment. He would get to them. He always did.
He stood up, with the same confidence he always had ,even through his bloodied body.
---
His disciple was standing in the long grass with a bewildred expression , not believing that even with all the preparitions he made , his master is still alive. The mana around him crackled with borrowed power — gathered from sources that didn't belong to him, assembled with the desperation of someone who had needed to be certain and had still not quite managed it. Years of training visible in his posture, his grip, the precise angle of his casting stance.
Years of everything he had been taught by his master mixed with years of desperation and struggle. .
He opened his mouth but Jin's first spell left before words could.
It was not the kind of work he was known for. He was known for precision — for the mana craft that looked effortless and accomplished large things quietly. What he released now had none of that. It was built from haste and urgency, and he released it with the particular clarity of a man who has stopped being careful about a specific thing, aimed at a specific direction, without elegance or ceremony.
The long grass lay flat for miles and stayed there.
Yet, He was already turning toward the sky.
*The sealing is not possible,* he acknowledged, clear-eyed about it. *Not like this.* After a quick calculation, Jin decided the plan and without looking back he decided to sacrifice a part of himself. he would burn a part of his soul using a forbidden technique to complete the sealing. The outcome will be the same ,the price however was very steep.
The spell spread upward and the wrong color in the northern sky stopped advancing and started shrinking instead.
*Good,* he thought. *That will do. Now , It has been a while since i felt this expectation rising in me.*
Behind him, the fourth-tier lattice came apart.
What came through it was compact, unusual in shape, and running at a temperature of fury that made the nearby air feel different. Lin's true body landed in the flattened grass and looked at the far end of it, where the grass was flattest, and was very still.
*"Tell me,"* Lin said, with immaculate precision, *"that he is dead."*
"He's alive."
The silence that followed was the loudest Lin had ever been without speaking.
*"Then I will go and fix that,"* Lin said. *"Right now. That piece of horny crap , I -."*
"Lin."
Lin stopped. That single word still worked — had always worked, across every version of himself he had cycled through, across every change and loss . He had never taken it for granted.
*"Do not 'Lin' me,"* Lin said, though the forward motion had ceased. *"Do not use that tone. That spineless prick struck you. He planned this. He waited for the window you told him about and he—"*
"I know," he said. Quietly.
Lin went still in a different way, with wide eyes as this didn't adhere to his Master usual persona.
Jin looked at his companion — at that face he had known longer than most civilizations, currently arranged in an expression he could not entirely read because it contained too many things at once , briefly, and did something that made Lin's fury recede behind something larger and more complicated.
Lin looked up at him. In those ancient eyes, something shifted.
*"What are you doing,"* Lin said, desperation rising.*"What is that."*
Jin had already closed his eyes.
The third spell turned inward, and from the outside it was nothing — a man standing still. From the inside it was the most difficult thing he had done in three thousand years.
When he opened his eyes, Lin was staring at him with an expression he had never produced before — not in three thousand years — and he filed this under *later* with everything else and began the last spell.
It moved differently. Not outward, not upward. But along a direction the physical world offered no name for. The mana folded around him. The grass went cold at his feet. At the edges of his perception, the world grew thin.
*"Master,"* Lin said. Something surfacing for the first time, something that Lin almost never let reach outside. Something that had been kept carefully managed for a very long time. *"Where are you going. Tell me where."*
"Somewhere quiet," he said. He was already going.
*"That is not an answer—"*
"Take care of things here," he said. "You know what needs doing. I Believe in you."
A pause. He could feel Lin working through it — the fury, the fear, the calculation, the acceptance arriving last and with the least grace. Lin had always arrived at acceptance last. He found this, as he had always, quietly valuable.
*"You impossible—"* Lin started.
The corner of his mouth moved. Barely. The way it always moved, with him — present for a single moment, gone before most people thought to look.
Lin saw it. Stopped.
*"You are smiling,"* Lin said while sighing. *"Right now. with all this mess, you are smiling."*
"Go to work, Lin."
And before Lin responds ,He was gone.
---
Lin stood in the flattened grass for a long time.
The shield held across the northern sky. The wrong color pressed against it and did not advance.
*"Somewhere quiet,"* Lin said, to the space where Jin had been.
The stars were beginning to show in the east. The valley below was settling into the specific quality of silence that followed something large having happened , temporarily still.
Lin looked at what had been left behind. Not words. Not objects. A missing part in his soul and a direction, pressed into Lin's awareness like a brand — the shape of work that needed doing and the shape of what would be required to do it, and beneath that, deeper, a thread so fine it was barely there.
A resonance. An anchor. Something to follow.
"Reckless brat, always leaving me with the crapiest work to do, Ahh, I am too old for this."
Lin looked at it for a long moment.
Then Lin looked north at the breach. At the shield. At the considerable distance between the current situation and anything resembling resolution.
*"I will find you,"* Lin said quietly. *"And when I do, you are going to-"
Another pause then Lin straightened, and got to work.
---