Unless, it seemed, you threw it with overwhelming strength.
The sword blasted straight through the center of the Elder, leaving a bloody hole in his middle and a crater in the earth behind him.
The man looked down at himself. His jade badge was gone.
He collapsed in a heap.
The Enforcer landed a hit, his two-handed hammer crashing into the side of Lindon’s head. It had slightly less effect than a spoon tapping the side of a teacup.
A white hand closed around the neck of the Heaven’s Glory Enforcer.
Gold walls were already going up around the rest of the area, and Kelsa knew from experience that, when broken, those panes of Forged madra burned like live coals.
Lindon gripped the Enforcer by the neck, then looked down the hill at the Forger who was raising her own defense.
He threw the full-grown Jade in his hand at the Forger in an overhand pitch.
The man blasted through three layers of Forged Heaven’s Glory madra, and his clothes were burning with natural fire when he collided with the other Elder.
“Collided” was actually too polite a word. Together, they smashed against the bottom of the hill with a sickening crunch.
White light swelled into a bubble next to Kelsa, and she dodged backwards. She didn’t sense Heaven’s Glory madra from the light, but she knew it had to be an attack of theirs. Kelsa immediately wove her madra into Foxfire. She was draining her spirit dry, but she extended her perception to find the one who had cast the technique.
In the center of the white light, a girl appeared.
Shorter than Kelsa, she was compact, with flowing black hair interrupted by a streak of blood-red. Six arms of metallic crimson metal extended from her back, their ends sharpened and hammered flat like sword blades.
Hurriedly, Kelsa redirected her Foxfire and hurled it into the newcomer.
One of those sword-arms flicked the Striker technique out of the air. The scarlet girl turned, steadily getting her ragged breathing under control.
She didn’t seem to move quickly, but before Kelsa knew what was happening, a hand grasped her by the throat.
Kelsa looked into red eyes and prepared to die.
“Hey, give me your name.”
Kelsa found she had no trouble speaking. The young woman’s grip was loose.
“You first,” Kelsa said.
A faint smile pulled up the corner of the new girl’s mouth. She let Kelsa go and turned to Orthos, taking in a sharp breath. “You look about five miles past dead.”
He rumbled agreement. “Something stranger has happened to you.”
“Can’t argue with that.” She placed a hand on Orthos’ head, though even standing close to him must have been agonizing in the heat. “Wish you’d been with us.”
She was Orthos’ friend?
That meant…she didn’t exactly match the description, but she must be Yerin. The girl who had taken Lindon away from Sacred Valley.
But Kelsa couldn’t think about that now. There was still a battle going on.
Before Kelsa even looked back down the hill, she knew it had gotten worse. The heat had grown stifling, red fire aura rising by the second. The Heaven’s Glory School must be gathering their Ruler techniques…
It took her a few seconds to put the scene together.
Lindon stood in the center of the burning wreckage that had once been the camp. Shattered Heaven’s Glory Forger techniques surrounded him, licking his feet with flames, but even his shoes weren’t burned.
Heaven’s Glory Enforcers crawled away from him. As she watched, he caught one of their Striker techniques. The beam of golden light sank into his Remnant hand, and after only an instant he sent it back. It was tinged slightly darker than before.
But most of the enemies were fleeing. Maybe a hundred, maybe more, including some she recognized as Jades.
They fled because the sky had turned dark.
Hundreds of feet over Lindon’s head, black and red aura swirled so intensely that they had become visible as a dense, spinning cloud of dark fire.
She spent several breaths fumbling with her new Jade senses, trying to unravel how Heaven’s Glory had used such a Ruler technique and how Lindon had gained control of it.
Finally, she came to the inevitable conclusion: he had generated this all by himself.
“You should stop him,” Orthos said. “He’ll regret this.”
Yerin patted him on the head. “You’ve been gone an age and a half. It’s your turn.”
Orthos lifted his wounded leg. “I’m not running anywhere.”
Yerin lifted her hand from him and vanished in an implosion of light. She reappeared at the same instant next to Lindon, panting.
He turned immediately, focusing on her instead of Heaven’s Glory, reaching out to steady her. She didn’t need his help, but rested a hand on his left arm anyway.
Interesting.
They exchanged words, Lindon gesturing angrily to Heaven’s Glory, but Yerin pointed back toward where Orthos stood.
The turtle inclined his head once.
Again, Lindon moved with speed Kelsa couldn’t track, but this time she could at least see a blur like a flying arrow as he ran up the hill and came to a stop next to the turtle.
“Forgiveness,” Lindon said. “I lost my focus.”
When the dark fire and red circles bled from his eyes, leaving them human black, he looked to Kelsa with apology in his eyes.
That was the first time she really recognized her brother.
He gave her a gesture of acknowledgement, but first he turned to Orthos and threw his arms around the turtle’s neck.
The sacred beast closed his good eye and rumbled deep in his chest.
They didn’t say anything, but when Lindon separated, his eyes were wet. Only then did he return to Kelsa.
When he did, he bowed deeply over fists pressed together. “Forgiveness. I left without telling you. I…I had no idea you were…I didn’t know things were this bad. My deepest apologies.”
At the moment, Kelsa didn’t understand her own feelings.
She was glad her brother wasn’t the type of person to completely butcher a retreating enemy…but she had wanted him to do it.
He could never have known what Heaven’s Glory had done in his absence…but part of her still blamed him for it.
For years, she had believed that he was dead, and was glad to see him alive…but he frightened her.
Orthos had told her stories about sacred artists outside, and about Lindon in particular, but her imagination had not been enough. She felt like she was within arm’s reach of a wild tiger.
He was still bowing to her, and he would stay that way until she responded.
He had always been like that.
Kelsa’s eyes filled, and she took in a rough breath. “You took too long,” she said in a broken voice.
Lindon straightened, now even taller than she was, and she wrapped him up in a hug before she wept. From the shaking of his chest, she knew he was crying too.
7
Lindon watched Eithan spread his arms wide as if to embrace the crowd before him, his smile gentle. “Brothers and sisters of the Fallen Leaf School, I am humbled and grateful by this overwhelming show of hospitality.”
All thirty-two Jades of the Fallen Leaf School knelt on the ground in front of him, their foreheads pressed to the dirt.
They had seen Lindon face Heaven’s Glory, and that had been enough to stop them from pushing the exiles back. It hadn’t made them open their doors.
That had taken the arrival of the Akura Golds.
If Eithan’s power and skill hadn’t intimidated them, the arrival of over two hundred and fifty new Jades—as the Sacred Valley inhabitants would see them—had certainly done the trick.
Lindon had seen only glimpses of the process. He’d been catching up with Orthos and waiting for Kelsa to find their parents; it was only at his sister’s insistence that he hadn’t gone to find them immediately.
In the few fragments he’d seen of Eithan’s negotiation, the Fallen Leaf School representatives had gone from wary to goggle-eyed to tripping all over themselves to agree as more and more Golds in black and purple descended from the skies.