Unfortunately for the citizens of the Blackflame Empire, that largely meant they killed their way through the population in whatever direction they thought led to safety.
The Emperor had whipped his Underlords into hunting them down. Except for one minor detour to pull his disciples out of a basement, Eithan had spent the past several weeks hunting emissaries. This was a huge opportunity for the Empire; they would never have another chance to deal such a blow to Redmoon Hall. The Akura clan would reward them handsomely for each Underlord head.
But their strategy was all dependent on their advantage of numbers. Each Redmoon emissary counted as two opponents, since their Blood Shadow could fight independently. So they operated in teams of three Underlords apiece.
They only had three such teams, along with one Overlord, but it had been effective so far. They had collected two Underlord heads out of a presumed six remaining in the Empire.
However, now the weakness in their plan was revealed. Instead of three-on-two in their favor, it was now four-on-three against.
Naru Saeya drew a sword of transparent, shimmering light from her soulspace. It looked like it was made of crystalline stained glass or fractured rainbows; whatever Soulsmith had made it, Eithan appreciated their aesthetic sense. “And you had to drag a Highgold into this,” Saeya said. “I just hope you can fight.”
“What if I couldn’t?” Eithan proposed. “Boy, that would be embarrassing in this situation, wouldn’t it?”
Longhook noticed him, and his lips tightened. Eithan couldn’t read what that expression meant—was he excited to see Eithan, as an opponent he’d beaten before? Disappointed? Angry that he couldn’t finish Eithan off last time?
Before Eithan could decide, there was a red hook rushing at his face.
Longhook’s long hook was his Blood Shadow wrapped around an actual sacred weapon: a long, heavy chain with a thick meat hook at the end. It carried enough force to punch straight through their ship, and Longhook could manipulate it with shocking grace and speed. As Eithan had learned last time.
Eithan met this attack with the same strategy he’d used last time. He poured madra into his iron fabric scissors and slammed them into the hook.
He wasn’t using a proper Enforcer technique, but he was using a lot of madra. The hook stopped, the chain rippling like a sea in storm. Eithan was pushed a few steps backward, but he took them gracefully.
And this time, Eithan wasn’t alone.
Saeya swept in as a green blur, her rainbow sword flashing. Longhook’s weapon coiled back of its own accord, blocking her sword, but her free hand came up and made a fist. Loops of green madra wrapped around him, locking him in place.
Eithan followed up with the simplest Striker technique anyone could use: a pulse of madra focused in a line. In his case, the pure madra passed through the chain of Longhook’s weapon, weakening the Blood Shadow and causing it to falter for a second. Saeya was coming around for another pass.
So far so good. They were keeping Longhook under pressure.
Which meant...
The red on the emissary’s hook oozed back, revealing dark gray metal. It boiled away as Longhook drove Saeya off with one fist, pulses of force madra pushing her back.
In an instant, he’d gathered up his Blood Shadow. His hook started to slide back up his sleeve, one link at a time, and he looked from Eithan to Naru Saeya.
“Go home,” he said, the words scraping out. They were barely audible over the rolling thunder. “We are leaving your lands. You will not see us again.”
“You dare ask us for mercy?” Naru Saeya’s voice was hot. Her bright green madra took Longhook in the gut like a fist, carrying him off his Thousand-Mile Cloud and into the wind.
His Blood Shadow caught him.
It formed into his copy, standing on the railing, its hand grabbing him by the leg and pulling him back onto the ship. Longhook didn’t even look surprised, his coat fluttering in the wind as he landed.
“This will be worse than last time,” the emissary promised, locking eyes with Eithan.
Eithan drew himself up, cycling madra through his channels. He let his power as an Underlord blaze forth, matching Longhook face-to-face.
“It will,” he declared. “Last time, I did not reveal to you my ultimate technique.”
A flare of chaotic madra from below his feet was all the warning Longhook had. Eithan had scripted the veils into the cloudship’s cabin himself.
Then a beam of deadly madra, thick as a barrel and bright as the sun, blasted through the cabin of the ship and washed over Longhook. The light streamed out in a bolt like condensed lightning, too bright to watch directly, streaking from the ship up into the sky. It faded out as quickly as it had emerged, the light fading to a thin line.
Longhook fell from the ship, smoking and unconscious. He would probably survive the impact with the ground, but he wouldn’t be happy.
“I call it the ‘ambush,’” Eithan said.
Fisher Gesha poked her head through the ragged hole in the ship’s deck. She held in her hands a smoking, twisted launcher construct. It looked much like one of the simple, physical weapons some lower sects used for defense: a cannon.
“I didn’t miss! Hm. I told you I wouldn’t miss.”
Fisher Gesha, a shrunken old woman with gray hair tied up into a bun, looked like she shouldn’t even be able to hold the cannon. Spider legs stuck out from beneath her, as she stood on her drudge construct for transportation. And to reach things on high shelves.
Most Gold-level techniques couldn’t do much more than scratch an Underlord’s skin. But she had come up with a plan for a compound launcher construct that used six Striker bindings at once. If they were properly contained and focused, she had theorized, they could produce an effect that was greater than the sum of its parts.
Under normal circumstances, the weapon would be too unwieldy to set up and use. The enemy would sense it coming a mile away, and activating six Striker bindings at once put too much of a strain on the construct’s vessel. It was the sort of method that sounded better than it was.
But Eithan had found her plans, and had wanted to see them in action.
“A lovely strike!” Eithan called. “How did the script hold up?”
“Strained.” Gesha tapped a ring on the metal of the cannon’s outer layer. “Warping already. And the Song of Falling Ash binding is an inch from falling apart, if you ask me. Not that you did.”
“We’ll need more goldsteel plating,” Eithan mused aloud. He couldn’t afford that himself—not without the resources of the Arelius family. That irritation still threatened to prod him to anger. He would have to deal with that, when he was done mopping up Redmoon Hall.
Of course, he could save up top-grade scales and eventually afford most of anything in the Empire. But it would have been so much easier with the family behind him.
He pushed that annoyance aside and returned his attention to the battle in the sky around them.
“What was that?” Naru Saeya asked, holding her rainbow sword to one side, staring blankly into the rain. She ended up repeating herself: “What was that?”
Chon Ma was bleeding from a cut on his face now, delivering a speech about honor to the remaining Redmoon Hall emissary, whose arm hung broken and bruised from his shoulder.
“You skulk in the shadows,” the Cloud Hammer Underlord proclaimed. “You rely on power that will never truly be your own. This is why you are weak.”
Eithan turned to Fisher Gesha. “Do you think you could squeeze out one more shot?”
The construct flared to life.