Lindon slid past the real strike, letting the illusion pass through him, and seized the man by the neck.
He Consumed enough White Fox madra to replenish the amount that already moved through his veins; he couldn’t hold much without taking it into his core.
The man’s madra was weak, diffuse, dirty, and he was using it wrong.
A wave of attacks had pierced the decoy Lindon behind him, and his Forged madra dissipated, but Heaven’s Glory had gotten in on the action now. A wall of golden glass madra was Forged in front of him.
He conjured purple flickering Foxfire, and the Striker technique burned a doorway-shaped hole in the wall. They used their Striker technique only to inflict the illusion of pain, but it was a spiritual attack. It could fight against other spiritual energies, just like pure madra could.
Two Iron Enforcers waited for him on the other side, using the Foxtail, but he used the technique on his whole body at once.
His image lagged behind, and their real spears clashed in the middle of his afterimage. Lindon had never stopped walking up the hill where the elders stood.
Foxfire brought them both down.
He Forged a paper-thin illusion behind him according to the Fox Mirror. It was literally a huge blank wall. An Iron stumbled through it almost immediately, tearing the illusion apart.
But it did its job. It just needed to interrupt the view of the people behind him.
A pair of Akura Golds soared in on clouds, demanding to know what was happening, striking down a few who dared to launch techniques at them. They could handle themselves.
Lindon advanced on the two men who hadn’t run.
The Patriarch and the First Elder.
The elder looked regretful, sighing into his long white beard. The Patriarch remained stone-faced.
“Why?” Lindon asked.
“You may have learned powerful sacred arts,” the Patriarch said, “but you haven’t learned how the world works. You do not have absolute power. You tire. You will run out of madra. You cannot take the Wei clan from us so easily.”
In disbelief, Lindon turned to the First Elder. Was that really what they thought he was doing?
The First Elder regarded him with sad eyes. “Revenge does not become you, Lindon. If you had come to us with this talent, we would have welcomed you with open arms. But this…scheme…” He shook his head. “You never learned the real lessons you needed to.”
“You…” Lindon didn’t even know what to say. “…have you lied for so long that you are blind to the truth?”
The First Elder shook his sleeves out. “You may have great power, but we have honed our techniques over many years. You have never seen the true Path of the White Fox.”
The aura in Lindon’s mind was pinched with a deft touch. The First Elder was smoother, subtler, more skilled than anyone else Lindon had seen use the Fox Dream.
[He wants to distort our eyes so we see him to the right of where he actually is,] Dross reported. [Too bad his technique is…hm. Is it bad that I want to say “his technique is dross”?]
The Fox Dream technique itself was flawed. From the pathways the madra took through the First Elder’s spirit to the way he moved the aura, every step was clunky and inefficient. He had developed great skill with the technique, but the tool itself was lacking.
He was a self-taught swordsman who didn’t realize he was using a stick. No matter how skilled he became, he would never be as dangerous as someone with a real weapon.
At the same time, the First Elder Forged the image of a sword. He drew a three-foot blade from a sheath at his side, but the Forged image was a few inches shorter.
Between the Ruler technique and the Forger technique, anyone relying solely on their senses would be skewered before they realized what happened.
The elder twisted his sword through the air, lunging at Lindon in a practiced motion.
Lindon stepped to one side, seizing the First Elder’s arm in his white hand.
“No,” he said, “this is the Path of the White Fox. Pay attention.”
Madra leaked into Lindon, refilling his channels again. The elder broke his grip, and Lindon allowed it.
He left an image of himself standing still while he ran invisibly toward the First Elder and cast the Fox Dream over the man’s mind. The older man broke the Ruler technique, but Lindon had already caught him in the chest and shoved him back.
“One,” Lindon said.
He threw a punch, and the Elder twisted to one side to avoid it, but Lindon had concealed his movements with the Foxtail technique. His real punch clipped the Elder on the chin.
Lindon held back so he didn’t shatter the man’s jaw. The Elder only missed a step.
“Two.”
A sword came flashing in, but Lindon hurled a purple fireball and allowed the sword to land.
It stabbed into his shoulder…and stuck. With such little strength behind it, the blade couldn’t penetrate his Underlord body any deeper than the skin.
The Elder dispersed the first ball of Foxfire, and the second, but then Lindon used the rest of his White Fox madra. A barrage of Striker techniques struck the Elder all over, sending him falling to his knees in a cry of pain.
The ground rumbled. Earth aura flashed.
“Three,” Lindon announced. “I killed you three times.”
With that, he returned his attention to the Patriarch. Wei Jin Sairus scowled at him. “You disrespect your elders, Shi Lindon.”
His image stayed standing where it was. A Fox Mirror. But really, he crept invisibly to Lindon’s other side, a dagger clutched in his hand.
Lindon had seen him use this technique in the same way before, but not so clearly. The Patriarch had done this against Li Markuth, the winged terror that Suriel had banished. Markuth had not been fooled either.
Lindon dipped his head to the Mirror. “Patriarch.”
The Forger technique returned the gesture. Sairus really was skilled. “Unsouled,” his illusion said.
Lindon turned his head to meet the eyes of the “invisible” Patriarch. “Not anymore.”
As Sairus tried to plunge the dagger into Lindon’s side, Lindon ducked and drove his palm into the Patriarch’s core.
Pure madra flashed blue-white in a massive handprint that covered Sairus’ entire midsection. The Empty Palm wiped out his madra, flooding his system…and the power of Lindon’s spirit overwhelmed his.
Channels broke, his core cracked, and he convulsed with the pain in his soul. He made a choking sound and his eyes rolled up into his skull.
Without a word, the Patriarch fell to the ground as a spiritual cripple.
The First Elder straightened himself up in a display of dignity. “You will still not have your way. We will resist you to the death.”
Lindon felt like his bones had turned to lead. The Heaven’s Glory School had surrounded the hill. They were putting down more scripts. They still wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t listen to reason, and they wouldn’t listen to force.
He had accomplished nothing.
The ground was shaking constantly now, and he finally realized that the power of the earth aura had not subsided. Instead of ebbing and flowing, as it had been doing for days, it had grown and grown without cease.
He felt what was about to happen and looked up to the sky. Suriel had shown him how to prevent this from happening, but he had to wonder if she had foreseen this. Was this why she hadn’t saved Sacred Valley herself? Because it was futile?
Why had she even saved Lindon?
One of the Akura clan shouted down to Lindon. “Honored Sage, we must leave! The Titan!”
Lindon nodded. Only a few more days, and they would have been able to evacuate everyone.
But what did it matter? These people didn’t want help.
He seized the First Elder by the scruff of the neck, hauling him up bodily with one hand. He spun the old man around facing west and shook him.
“Look at the aura!” Lindon demanded. “Look at it!”
Around Mount Venture, the squat red-tinged peak to the west, the earth aura was growing brighter and brighter as the ground shook. So much that it began to bleed into visibility.