Instead, he slapped it from the air with Wavedancer’s blade. A gust of the Hollow Domain wiped out a Heaven’s Glory Striker technique, and then he’d located all six flying constructs in the area.
He pointed and wiped them out one at a time with dragon’s breath.
When Lindon hovered over Eithan’s location, he stepped off the Cloud and fell through the trees. A few thin branches snapped beneath him on the way down, but as he landed, a pair of sacred artists aimed weapons at him.
One swung a hammer that gathered earth aura as she swung, and the other was simply planning to club him with a brick of brown Forged madra.
If their sacred arts hadn’t clued him in, their massive badges—almost like breastplates—showed him their identity clearly. These were members of the Kazan clan. Had Ziel brought them here?
He slipped aside from the hammer, letting it crash into the trunk of a tree, and the brick he caught in his Remnant hand.
When he held both Iron sacred artists still, he spoke calmly. “Pardon, but I’m only here to help.”
Eithan, who had been slumped at the base of the tree, sputtered and spat splintered bark out of his mouth. “Is there sap in my hair? You’d tell me if there was sap in my hair, wouldn’t you?”
He looked like he’d just crawled out of a fire.
Half his hair was singed off, his left eye was matted shut with dried blood, and his turquoise robes were burned and shredded. His core was almost empty, and he looked like he had been soaked in blood.
This was the worst Lindon had seen Eithan except immediately after his fight with the Blood Sage, and concern for the man overwhelmed even his worry about the Dreadgod.
Briefly. Until he scanned Eithan and realized he wasn’t wounded at all. He was just tired.
“Not my blood,” said the red-soaked Archlord.
Lindon let out a breath of relief, but responded lightly. “Apologies. I’m afraid your hair is done for.”
Eithan wilted against the tree. His eyes slowly closed.
“Put me out of my misery. Make it quick.”
The Kazan clansmen were murmuring behind Lindon, but their mutters turned to shouts as Heaven’s Glory techniques blasted through the trees.
Though it was a drain on his limited madra, Lindon projected the Hollow Domain around himself and the seven or eight Kazan members in range. There were a dozen nearby, and they began to crowd inside when they saw Heaven’s Glory madra melting at the edge of his blue-white boundary.
“What happened?” Lindon quietly asked Eithan.
“Believe it or not, they took advantage of my compassionate nature. My reserves are finite, especially here.”
“I can’t believe anyone pushed you this far.”
“Lost my Golds at the wrong moment. Hostages are as effective against me as against anyone, but…well, I’ll put it to you this way: they’re running drastically low on manpower.”
Lindon dropped the Hollow Domain, which was tiring to keep up inside the suppression field, just as a trio of Iron Enforcers charged in.
Eithan jerked his head in their general direction without opening his eyes. “If you could clean up here, I’d appreciate it.”
The three Enforcers were covered by three more Strikers, two Rulers, and a Forger. Constructs flanked them all, and they carried steel weapons banded with halfsilver. It was a charge worthy of attacking a Jade, and showed more tactical skill than Lindon had seen from Heaven’s Glory thus far.
[Not bad, not bad,] Dross said. [I’m afraid to say you’ll have to take a hit.]
Ten seconds later, Lindon was pinning the last standing Heaven’s Glory member up against a tree with one hand. “Where are your Jades?”
He released his grip so that the man could answer. Nearby, one of the destroyed constructs finished falling through the air, exploding as it hit the ground.
“Gone, they’re gone, they’re…I don’t know!” The Iron man’s eyes were wild. “They’re dead or crippled. He was going to kill us all!”
“I was not!” Eithan shouted. “I told you that!”
Lindon released the Heaven’s Glory member to stand on his own. “I am Wei Shi Lindon, and I claim Heaven’s Glory School in the absence of its Jades. If you find an elder, bring them to me. Otherwise, you’re to help everyone leave the valley.”
The man glanced down at Lindon’s badge, but Lindon caught his eyes again. “Spread the word.”
The man ran, leaving Lindon to repeat himself to all the other members of Heaven’s Glory on the ground. He’d left them only lightly injured, and as a result he’d taken the cut that Dross had promised. A tiny slice across his left forearm.
It was already healing.
Lindon marched back to Eithan, but he started speaking early. Eithan would be able to hear him. “I can’t imagine that would have been much threat to you.”
“It’s not the first twenty ambushes that get you,” Eithan called.
When Lindon returned to Eithan, the crowd of Kazan members were huddled together, looking to him with awe and fear, as though he might decide to execute them at any second.
Lindon bowed to them. “Gratitude,” he said. “My thanks for protecting my master in my absence.”
At the word “master,” their eyes widened.
“If you don’t mind, you should leave as soon as possible. I can’t be sure that Heaven’s Glory will leave you alone, even now. We don’t have much—”
[Oh no,] Dross whispered.
“What?” Eithan asked. “What is it? I can’t see anything! I hate this place.”
Lindon hopped on his Thousand-Mile Cloud without finishing his sentence, zooming up above the surrounding trees.
He looked over to the west. Something had changed with the Wandering Titan, but he couldn’t identify exactly what.
Then he opened his aura sight.
It was like watching the opposite of an earthquake. Starting from Mount Venture to the west, the ground—which had been steadily shaking all day—stopped moving. Earth aura froze.
The wave of silence reached them, and the rumbling of the ground ceased. Only a few boulders tumbled down the nearby slopes.
There came one, loud crash. Then another. Footsteps.
A dark stone head appeared over the western peak, and the Wandering Titan let out a roar that shook the golden sky.
“Run!” Lindon shouted down. Eithan was already on his feet, shakily ushering the Kazan clansmen forward, but they would only slam into the wall of people trying to choke themselves through the narrow exit from Sacred Valley.
They were beginning to stampede, even trampling each other in their desperation to get away. A massive golden light shone behind Eithan, resolving into his cloudship: The Bounding Gazelle.
It would barely fly in aura this thin, if indeed it would fly at all, but Eithan was clearly willing to try. He ushered the Kazan sacred artists onboard, physically hurling one and carrying two children under his arms before leaping up to the control console.
Lindon began flying away, toward the exit. The Akura cloudships should be gone by now, but he was seeing Fallen Leaf uniforms, and he could feel Orthos around. At least they had made it.
Eithan’s golden cloudship lurched along like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake, barely able to lift up before it had to sit back down, but it was still faster than dragging all the Kazan by hand.
Lindon left them behind, soaring over the line of people screaming and pushing to make it through the Heaven’s Glory exit.
To his relief, he could see a ship on a purple cloud flying off with its deck packed with people. Not all the Akura cloudships had taken off after all. Another, resting on the ground, was steadily filling with people.
But as he looked back west, over Sacred Valley, despair choked him again. There were still uncountably many people left. He couldn’t begin to see the end of the human line stretching off into the distant clan buildings and beyond.