The disciple faced her master’s ghost with sword bare. She was a mundane echo of the Remnant; its red ring was her belt, its black ring her tattered robes, its white ring her pale scars, and its chrome her shining blade.
“Disciple greets her master,” she said quietly. A student in her place would normally have saluted respectfully, but she kept her eyes on the spirit.
For a long breath, the Remnant remained quiet. Powerful enough spirits could speak, and there was no doubt that this was the most potent he’d ever seen. It would talk soon, and the reunion of master and disciple would give him time to set the boundary. The Remnant had crashed through the door before he could lay seals, but he’d watch for a chance to hit it directly with one.
Six limbs of liquid metal sprouted from the Remnant’s back, flattening and sharpening until it stood under a halo of blades. It still didn’t speak.
Without a word, it attacked.
The Remnant’s main body stood like a statue, but its blades were invisible as they whispered forward. Yerin moved in response, and weapons crashed in an explosion that sent sharp ripples in every direction. The stairs under them cracked, shards of stone blasting into the air, and gashes appeared in the thick pillars. Snow split as though invisible giants hacked away at the ground with hatchets, and a nearby boulder slid into two pieces.
Lindon hopped onto the Thousand-Mile Cloud and fed it all the madra he could. He hadn’t seen a single meeting of blades, but he heard them all, filling the mountainside in one seemingly constant note. Whatever Yerin might believe, he would never be able to approach the Remnant like this. He’d never see the cut that killed him. He could only hope that she would wound it badly enough that it would lose some of its substance. Without a supply of external energy, it wouldn’t recover, so it should get weaker as the fight progressed. But then, so would Yerin.
A spray of blood told him that the unconscious Heaven’s Glory guards hadn’t made it after all. Two Remnants rose from the corpses, one a string-puppet of burning gold lines, and one a skeleton of yellow-tinged glass. They hadn’t even straightened to their full height when more invisible blades minced them to chunks.
We don’t have time for this, Lindon thought, as he fled as fast as his cloud would carry him. They needed to end this fight before Heaven’s Glory showed themselves, but he couldn’t get close enough to set up his barrier. She had already demonstrated her Endless Sword technique; with two experts using it, they might have been surrounded by hundreds of whirling invisible blades. To pass close enough to plant a flag would be to risk death, and if he reached the Remnant with a seal, he’d be shredded.
He glanced behind, in case the battle might have crept closer to him, and from farther back he could see something he hadn’t noticed before. There was a small wooden hut sheltered in the shadow of the Tomb, and a child in white robes was peeking around the corner at the battle.
The child raised his arm, and golden light lanced toward the fight. Lindon’s heart stopped.
Elder Whitehall.
Something deflected the beam, sending it arcing into the sky, but neither girl nor Remnant could spare the attention to deal with the intruder. He was the vulture, waiting for the wolf and the tiger to kill each other so it could feast on both corpses. He would never let Lindon approach with the seals.
The freezing mountaintop wind felt very close. Whitehall hadn’t noticed him yet. He had a chance here, a chance to at least stall the elder and give Yerin a chance.
But he had no time. Whitehall could notice him any second. He had to act now.
He removed the glass ball with its azure flame, rolling it in his hand. If Suriel looked, what would she see in his fate now?
Before he could think himself away, Lindon leaped onto the red cloud and sped out in a wide arc. He couldn’t move nearly as fast as Yerin could, but it was enough. He circled behind Elder Whitehall.
Then, still scraping the back of his brain for ideas, he charged.
In the eyes of a Jade, the fight between the girl and the Remnant was nothing short of spectacular. An ocean of silver sword-aura gathered around them, rolling like a sea in storm. Even to Whitehall, their blows moved at a speed that he could barely catch. The disciple in black gathered aura with every motion, which condensed around her blade in a steadily increasing silver glow. She leaped, ducked, slid, and dodged, her weapon never pausing, meeting every strike from the six-bladed Remnant with her own sword or a blast of razor-edged madra.
Whitehall knew some peers in the Golden Sword School that would have sacrificed three fingers for a glimpse at this fight. This was a sword-aspect Path taken beyond anything in Sacred Valley, beyond what anyone could conceive.
He drew Heaven’s Glory energy from his core, focusing it according to the Heaven’s Lance technique. The energy struck out in a line of light and heat, scoring the floor between the two fighters. The girl faltered, taking a narrow slash across the cheek as the glow around her sword flickered. Even the Remnant slid slightly to the left. Whitehall might not have been able to kill either of them on his own, but sparrows didn’t bring down hawks by attacking head-on. They nipped and circled until the larger bird collapsed from exhaustion and fell from the sky.
Then the treasures of the Sword Sage, relics of a world beyond this valley, would be his. Not only might he restore his body, he could become the first Gold since the founding of the Heaven’s Glory School.
He’d leveled another golden lance when something slammed into him from behind.
A thorn of pain blossomed in his shoulder as he pitched forward, and the lance of light flew wild, scorching the surface of the Ancestor’s Tomb. But it didn’t last as long as it should have, guttering out like a candle as the madra in Whitehall’s body went wild.
He landed face-first in the snow, his insides twisting as though his intestines had tried to coil up and escape through his mouth. His spirit burned and writhed in chaos, searing him from the inside out, and he coughed a mouthful of blood onto the ground.
With one hand, he reached up and pulled the spike out of his shoulder. It glittered in the morning sunlight: a halfsilver dagger.
Whitehall turned in a fury, bloody dagger in his hand. His body was still Iron and his spirit Jade; he would recover in minutes. His attacker had done nothing but earn a quick death.
Wei Shi Lindon loomed overhead, and though his spirit made him weak, he had the body of a strong man. Even the huge pack on his back lent an intimidating cast to his silhouette. Whitehall hesitated for a mere instant of purely instinctive fear, the gut reaction of a child facing down an angry adult. His mind was still that of an expert, but there was something primal about looking up to a human being twice his size.
During that half-second of vulnerability, Lindon pivoted and planted a fist in Whitehall’s gut.
The impact didn’t do much—despite his advantage in weight, Lindon still hadn’t reached Iron, so Whitehall had the absolute lead in strength—but pure madra leaked into Whitehall’s core from outside.
His training took over, and he cycled madra defensively, but he might as well have saved his effort. Nothing happened.
Whitehall couldn’t deny a small measure of relief. The Unsouled might as well have tried to put out a forest fire with a splash of water. He grabbed the young man’s wrist in an iron grip, locking him in place, and took a moment to savor the sudden look of fear on Lindon’s face.
Then he struck back.
Lindon was actually grateful for his experience at the Seven-Year Festival. Without all that practice fighting eight-year-olds, he would never have been able to accurately strike Whitehall’s core.