Threads 41 Justice 2

For once, Ling Qi did not soar as she took off toward her destination. The expense to her qi, small as it was, was not one she was certain she could afford.

The map that she had memorized showed that the terrain was mostly flat, and while the marshy terrain would have been an obstacle for most, for Ling Qi, it meant little. She dashed through the trees, flickered from branch to branch, and sprung from one muddy islet to another. Her feet left no impression in mud or grass, and even the thinnest branches barely swayed in her passing.

As she ran, she planned. Cai Renxiang and the soldiers would not be too far behind her. She just had to slow or halt the bandits for long enough that they could catch up. Of course, if there was one thing Ling Qi felt confident that she could do, it was bogging down her enemies in illusions and mist. She knew that she could go all out on the offensive as well, but…

She thought of squealing rat things down in the dark, exploding into bloody snowflakes. Could she do that to a person even if they were a criminal? Ling Qi wasn’t eager to find out. For a moment, she felt a strange stirring of excitement at the thought. The scent of blood and burning wood seemed to fill her nose, and her teeth ached as if in sympathetic memory of that time she had been caught up in a tide of vermin on the hunt. Unsettled, Ling Qi shook the feeling off, focusing on her mission. In the back of her mind, Sixiang stirred in discomfort.

The bandits’ trail was not difficult to follow, but it was less obvious than she might expect for seventy people barging through a marsh. The Cai scouts had already marked the boundaries of the illusion traps which peppered the route, though she could mostly sense them herself if she focused. It still saved her time. Soon enough, she heard boots pounding on mud and voices cursing laggards to keep up.

Catching her first glimpse of their rear guard, men and not a few women in eclectic and poorly repaired armor, she sprang into the air and flew. Curving left to circle around them and catch up, she kept a tight grip on her qi, fading into the shadows of the tree cover. Her eyes flickered silver, and she scanned her surroundings.

Flitting from branch to branch, she began the first step of her plan. Raising her flute, she played the Spring Breeze Canto technique. As the notes of the song spread and echoed, so, too, did her senses. She saw each member of the bandits’ formation. The majority were red souls, as reported, but there were still nearly twenty yellow souls of varying strength in their formation. The bandits mostly carried bows but a miscellany of weapons were also represented; a few of the stronger yellow cultivators had talisman crossbows stowed on their backs.

Of their two leaders, both were early green. One was a tall, spindly man with furtive features and long ill-kempt hair. He clutched a war fan in one hand, and his eyes never stopped moving, darting over the surroundings with a sort of nervous energy. He wore the same sort of mismatched light armor as the rest, but the dark green cloak around his neck glimmered in her qi senses.

His counterpart was almost his opposite, a short, stoutly built woman. She carried a heavy war axe. Of the bandits, she was the only one wearing fully metal armor. More importantly, the white cloth-wrapped package and its Cai emblem on her back were just a decoy. She managed to peer beneath the illusion and see the plain wooden box and the paper talisman pinned to its side as her perception technique faded. No matter where she looked, Ling Qi neither saw nor sensed any sign of the actual package. Hidden in a storage ring perhaps?

As the sound of her song washed over the bandits, the tall man stiffened and more than a few other heads snapped up. The bandits’ swift march began to pick up despite the first whorls in the area’s qi beginning to bloom as defensive techniques began to activate within their formation.

Ling Qi felt Sixiang’s readiness and Zhengui and Hanyi’s excitement. She once again felt a strange thrill of excitement. There was no turning back now.

Her qi surged as she shot through the shadows like an arrow. Color and sound exploded outward from her position, raucous phantasms erupting in a wave of mad joviality to engulf the nearest bandits. She felt a pulse of power pushing back against her technique, but in her mind, Sixiang laughed as the dispersal technique met the muse’s power and dissolved away like a fading dream.

Cries to “fall into formation”, “keep moving”, and “find the caster” were drowned out by laughter and song, and men stumbled in confusion, swinging weapons fruitlessly at dancing and laughing phantoms. Even with that promising start, Ling Qi was swiftly reminded that these weren’t her usual opponents, badly organized teenagers with only minimal experience at working in tandem.

The men weren’t losing cohesion; they used their closeness to each other to stay oriented amidst the chaos. The second realms raised their voices to shout over the song, and first realms formed up around them. Eyes and ears flared with qi, and light bloomed on drawn weapons and armed crossbow bolts. Qi echoed between the members of the formations, empowering flesh and spirit beyond what a single first or second realm cultivator could achieve.

Arrows and bolts flew out, and a half dozen phantoms burst into butterflies and laughter, but more than a few sizzling bolts hissed through the air where she had been. Ling Qi slipped between revelers without a sound, flowing around a crossbow bolt. It struck the mud behind her, detonating with thunderous force.

The spindly man at the head of the formation waved his fan, and she felt a surge of disorienting lake qi. For a bare instant, she felt strange as if her channels were in the wrong places and her mind had forgotten how to command them, but then Sixiang’s chaotic qi washed out, cleansing the taint and banishing the feeling. But men were already orienting on her at the leaders’ shout, peering through the phantoms. She couldn’t just stand and accept their fire; it was too much even for her.

But she only needed to delay them. And she had a new technique to try.

The Joyous Toast technique, the third technique of the Lunar Revelry art, amplified the power of other techniques. So as the melancholy sound of the Forgotten Vale Melody rang out, revelers roared in raucous joy, their stamping feet and hooves providing an accompanying drumbeat, and the world filled with mist. Bandits cried out in alarm as the mist rushed out like a tidal wave, consuming their entire formation and beyond, spreading for hundreds of meters through the swamp and rising hundreds more into the sky, reducing the afternoon sun to a pale memory.

In the dark of the mist, red eyes bloomed, and the laughter of the revelers became cruel mockery. Hands and paws which had grasped at limbs to tug them into a dance became talons that drew crimson lines of blood. In the confusion, Ling Qi shot back into a man’s shadow and vanished from the field, uncaring for the arrows and blades carving uselessly through her phantoms.

The bandits’ leaders shouted something to each other, and the man raised his warfan while the woman struck her fist against her breastplate, making the metal ring like a gong. Ling Qi felt twin pulses of power, stronger together than alone, push back against her mist. Around the leaders, the mist began to lighten, ever so slightly.

Ling Qi focused, and Sixiang wove her power through the breeze, amplifying her song. The mist crashed back down darker than ever, drawing a snarl of frustration from them both.

Ling Qi circled the bandit formation silently as the bandits regrouped themselves. To her frustration, their organization kept them together, and shared defensive techniques shielded them from the worst of her phantom attacks. Orders had rung out, distorted and warbling, to hold fire and press forward. They were near the border.

She was more than happy to let them try. While she couldn’t easily emerge without risking being riddled by the sheer number of arrows, her mist was not such an easy thing to escape. So as the bandits bulled forward, seeking the exit from her techniques, Ling Qi remained in shadow, only briefly diverting to play an Elegy of the Lost, entrapping a straggler or two and draining their qi to restore her own.

For a full fifteen minutes, she held them, nipping at their heels and vanishing before more than a smattering of bolts could fly her way. Slowly, painstakingly, she shifted her mist, lightening it here,thinning it there, letting the confusing qi soak deeply into their senses. And gradually, she turned them around, first until their steps took them perpendicular to their path, and then finally running them backward through the swamp. Perhaps this alone would be enough for Cai Renxiang and the soldiers to catch up.

Naturally, as that thought flitted through her head, she noticed something wrong. She felt ripples in her mist, places where her qi was being pushed aside. In the depths of a gnarled tree’s shadow, Ling Qi scanned the mist and saw them, figures that seemed spun from glass, visible only by the distortion in the mist.

It took a moment, but she counted six of them, their power obscured from her eyes. She saw the spindly man leading the bandits shout something to the closest figure, which replied in a hissing voice, chastising him for uselessness.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Ling Qi felt a sudden surge of power and moved on instinct as six arrows carved through the tree and its shadow, where she had hidden. Sizzling with toxic purple qi, they pierced straight through the trunk and sank into the ground until the fletching vanished under the mud.