Except for the color, he looked like a Remnant of darkness and dreams. A spirit born from nightmares.
Angrily, he tapped the chalkboard again.
“‘With a crimson desire for violence,’ all right, is this a poem? Are you writing a poem? Crimson desire?”
The Remnant picked up chalk and circled the word ‘desire’ three times.
“I’d give my left arm to know why you’re giving me the theoretical…” She only spent a second hunting for the right word before the spirit scribbled the word ‘underpinnings.’
“…underpinnings of a cycling technique.”
When the spirit began furiously pointing from one word to another symbol, making a case once again for why she needed to learn the basis of the technique.
“I can already do it, can’t I? Just need to sharpen it up. We’ve been practicing in here so long I’m turning gray. If you’ve got pointers, I’ve got two ears, but I couldn’t tell you what I’m missing besides practice.”
The Remnant, predictably, pointed to the words ‘crimson desire.’
Yerin massaged her eyes. On some level, she understood what the Sage’s spirit was trying to tell her. Manifesting an Icon was just making herself resemble a concept, so it made sense to look at it conceptually. She needed to change the way she did things, more than what she did.
According to the Blood Sage, anyway.
…and according to the Sword Sage, which was the only reason she listened to Red Faith at all.
She’d been enduring Red Faith’s silent lectures for days and trying her best to apply them to her cycling, but it seemed like so much smoke and nonsense so far.
Meanwhile, Lindon was having a battle with Monarchs outside. While the information from the outside world trickled in slower than syrup in winter, the constructs brought her the sense of the mythic war he was fighting to protect them.
While she was here. In a classroom. With a mute nightmare skeleton who wouldn’t stop tapping the word ‘desire.’
Yerin wished she could trade places with Lindon. He would enjoy this.
But she couldn’t trade places with him; she couldn’t fight on the same level. Which was why she needed to be here in the first place.
That cycle of frustration kept her thoughts moving in a circle until she wanted to pick up her sword and go to battle with the Blood Sage just for a change of pace. And because she still thought he deserved it.
The Remnant spat out air again, then used a cloth to wipe a small corner of the board clean. Quickly, he wrote out ‘I killed your family.’
Yerin’s breath almost stopped.
He erased that and replaced it. ‘I planted that Blood Shadow.’
“What is this? Trying to unload guilt after you’re dead? You wanted me to bury you, all you had to do was ask.”
‘All to find someone like you.’
He was trying to goad a reaction out of her, but she couldn’t imagine what he was expecting other than a sword through the chest. Which he was about to get.
‘I would kill your family a thousand times again.’
Yerin’s sword stabbed through his hand, the chalkboard, and the stone behind it. A severed chunk of Remnant hand fell to the floor.
“Whatever you’re after, you’ve got a breath left to get there,” Yerin said, an inch away from his face.
The Remnant didn’t seem to care about his loss of a limb. Remnants usually felt pain, but he wasn’t showing any. Still with the same amount of irritation as before, the Sage’s Remnant reached up with his one remaining hand and tapped the most common symbol on the board.
It meant ‘cycle.’
Yerin spared him another glare, but she dropped into a cycling position and began weaving all the elements together. Her Path of the Endless Sword cycling technique, modified to incorporate blood aura. Then the hunger technique they’d cobbled together from the Blood Sage, from Redmoon the Herald, and from Northstrider’s Consume.
She was in the process of juggling everything when she heard more tapping and briefly opened an eye.
The Remnant was re-absorbing his severed hand, but in the meantime, he tapped the sentence she’d split in half. ‘I would kill your family a thousand times again.’
Her spirit flared with anger and a desire to kill him.
And the technique clicked into place.
Suddenly it was like every separate piece had been designed to work together from the very beginning. It all fell into step like a regiment of trained soldiers, and a faint reddish haze appeared all over Yerin’s body. Like crimson moonlight drifting into her skin.
The Remnant jabbed a finger in her direction.
Her cycling technique wasn’t stable yet, it fell apart quickly, but she finally understood what he had meant all along. Her attitude was the key piece.
The more she wanted to kill her opponent, the easier it would be to steal their power. And if she wanted to keep this up all the time, she’d have to do more than draw blood. She’d have to get to a place where she wanted to draw blood.
Yerin didn’t like that. But she did admit that the Remnant had been guiding her in the right direction.
“Thanks,” she muttered.
The crimson skeleton threw its hands—well, its hand and its slowly regenerating stump—into the air with exasperation. Then it wiped away its taunts.
She jerked her chin at the sentence. “How much did you mean it?”
The Sage’s spirit scoffed again in a hiss of escaping steam. It scribbled two more sentences.
‘I don’t keep track of every Blood Shadow’ was the first one.
And the second: ‘I didn’t care about you.’
“Now that,” Yerin said, “I can believe.”
She wanted to show Lindon her new hunger technique—now that she had her own version of Consume, she could catch up.
But he was fighting Monarchs.
Worry itched at her, but she shoved it down and went into the sparring hall. The wide, open building had been reinforced by rare metals and scripts laid by Lindon and Ziel until the place could handle even her Final Sword without collapsing.
As long as she didn’t hit the wall directly.
As Yerin entered, she threw open her void key and tossed out a couple of Underlord Remnants. Lindon had kept them in storage for training, and knowing him, he’d make them into constructs eventually.
The two spirits—a blue one that looked like a half-liquid lobster and a sort of squat mechanical squirrel—trembled at the feel of her spirit, but she gave them no attention. Yerin closed her eyes, aligning her breathing to the pattern of her new technique.
It took her a breath and a half longer than she wanted, but she got her madra moving. It still felt clunky, like trying to walk in a pair of shoes made for someone Lindon’s size. Until she focused on her heart.
She wanted to kill them.
The technique lined up, but not perfectly. Not as it had with Red Faith. She focused harder.
It was the Monarchs she really wanted to kill. They were responsible for the Bleeding Phoenix staying alive at all.
That was a little better. She began to hear a sound, not like the distant sensation of an Icon, but like the song of a nearby Remnant. It was coming from her, but she didn’t inspect it closer.
Eyes still shut, she pushed further.
She remembered Reigan Shen’s face as he looked down on them in the labyrinth. When he hovered over Redmoon Hall and mocked her. She pictured Malice, treating Yerin like a worm on a hook. And doing worse to Mercy.
The sound burst into full song, and Yerin opened her eyes.
Soft red moonlight drifted off her in a subtle aura, and a sound that reminded her of the Bleeding Phoenix’s song drifted around her. Now, at last, this was more than just a cycling technique. She’d finally pushed it into the shape she wanted.
The spirit Enforcer technique filled her, preparing her soul.
With one motion, Yerin cut the two Remnants in half. They weren’t the ones she really wanted to kill, but this was a necessary step.