Chapter 45- Finding What Matters

A mathematician would have wept at the elegance of the curve. Anyone who had ever received an errant blow to a tender place would weep, or at least wince, at where the curve ended. Still, the aesthetic quality of the moment couldn’t be denied. A young, pretty looking madman displaying extraordinary muscular control and coordination, driving his dainty foot directly into an austere, older man’s crotch with the speeding fury of a charge of lancers and the profundity of a natural law.

Alas, the beauty of nature is often corrupted by the meddling of men. Tian felt his foot land on something not-quite-solid, like he had kicked heavy mud. Whatever it was, it blunted the impact. It did not, however, completely cancel the inertia. Tian lifted Heartmend up off his feet and eight inches into the air, though the heretic did manage to land on his feet in a stumble.

Heartmend didn’t freeze up. While he found his feet, his hands were in motion, striking out with unadorned fists that traveled lightly but made the air crack as they moved. Tian met clenched fists with open palms, reveling in the feeling of fighting at full strength. He worked towards the older man’s chest, striking out, trying to land a Thunderous Palm somewhere terminal.

“You don’t care what happens to the town behind you? Perhaps you are more indifferent to mortal morality than you pretend.” Heartmend sneered. Heartmend didn’t care to let Tian land a slap, sharp punches snapping out, trying to leave a fist sized hole in his head.

“You already claim to have the power to destroy it. Why should I give you power over me too?” Tian flowed through Thunderous Palms, swinging heavily, high and low. Each move was countered, bruises rapidly forming on the insides of his arms, and half his mind was fixated on dodging. Heartmend’s boxing seemed simple, but it was brutal and incisive. Utterly free of any ornamentation or refinement. A true killing art, Tian realized. One refined through endless suffering.

Heartmend wasn’t some untrained bandit getting by on raw cultivation. He was an old monster, the product of the cruel selection of the heretics. It was axiomatic amongst the Outer Court- a low level heretic was no trouble at all, but their higher levels were nothing but trouble. Jabs and hooks rushed out, quick steps controlled the distance. The struggle was as much about who controlled the timing as it was about who could land the heaviest blow.

“I would spare the town if you agreed with me. If I had been able to persuade you-”

“If you had persuaded me, I wouldn’t have cared about the destruction of the town.” Tian shook his head. If he wasn’t fully occupied, he would have rapped his knuckles against his skull. Despite everything, Heartmend had managed to drag Tian into his rhythm of thinking.

“Why the hell am I still talking to you? Sis’ Liren, are you having a snack or something? Get this bastard!”

There was a muffled oath, and then a rush of feet as Liren charged in with her spear.

“Two on one? How virtuous. What chivalrous heroes you are.” Heartmend’s long sleeves were flying now, whipping around to parry Hong’s spearthrusts as he relied on his footwork to keep away from Tian.

Tian couldn’t read the flow of elements through Heartmend. The man was plainly using his vital energy, and the whole world was made of the five elements. You couldn’t just not use them. He could just about believe his awareness of them could be suppressed by an array…

“Array master! You are a damn array master. You set up the array at the Copper Roof Inn too!” Hong roared. “What the hell is it with you and kids, you nasty bastard?”

His sister really was very smart. When her brain was working properly.

“Children are the future. A future of misery. How much better for them to be spared-”

“This rot again? Try harder, not even you believe that!” Tian snarled.

“All that crap about an emperor to come?” Hong asked, her spear thrusting at Heartmend’s guts with great enthusiasm.

“Nothing to do with me. Just a story people tell themselves. I’d tell them otherwise, if they asked. But they didn’t.”

Tian grunted. Heartmend had moved entirely to defense once Liren joined the fight, but he still sounded composed. Which meant he wasn’t really pressured, which meant he was stalling. And you never, ever, gave an array master time to prepare. The image of five array masters killing hundreds of horrors from tens of yards away, dozens at a time, remained vivid in Tian’s mind. He desperately wished he had his rope dart. This would be much easier if he did. Well, easy or not, it had to be done.

Tian rushed in, getting as close to Heartmend’s chest as he could manage. No geomantic compass, so that meant whatever was being activated was, almost certainly, pressed against the older man’s skin.

Tian slapped out with his palms, driving his right hand straight for Heartmend’s chest. As he shifted his weight for the palm strike, he drove his knee into the heretic’s thigh. Not debilitating, but it threw the older man off balance for a moment just as he would rather retreat.

“Naive!” The heretic chopped his hand down towards Tian’s neck, not bothering to protect his chest. Tian’s palm landed, and it might as well have been striking a steel pillar wrapped in pillows. He had only felt something like this once before- on the top of his foot, as it drove into Heartmend’s crotch.

“A soft inner armor that covers everywhere his robes do?” But that was fine. He wasn’t aiming for an immediate kill. Besides, he had his sister behind him. As the chop came down, it was intercepted by a thrusting spear aimed at Heartmend’s forehead. The heretic changed his chop to a sweeping block with an oath and tried to dodge. With his weight thrown off, the best he could manage was a stagger back at an angle to the thrust.

Tian didn’t have all his fingers. The ones he did have were quite strong. He latched on to the lapel of the heretic’s robe, and fell back in the opposite direction to the older man’s retreat.

The raggedy old robe didn’t rip apart. It did, however, yank open, revealing the soft armor below. Though soft armor hardly seemed adequate to describe it. Threads of gleaming crystal wove through a softly lustrous grey fabric. If there was a pattern to the flow of the elements through the glimmering threads, Tian couldn’t see it. The lines seemed to scatter the elements, making them more chaotic, but also blending them into the chaotic qi of the atmosphere. Blinding the senses he developed in the Five Turn Caverns.

It also let the heretic shrug off his palm blows like he was wearing steel armor. Which was frustrating. Worse was that, this close, he could feel the qi gathering on the robe. It was gradual, but it was definitely building.

“Sister-”

“I know.” Liren kept stabbing at Heartmend’s face. She had told Tian many times that, while it often made sense to stab the rest of the body, stabbing someone in the face tended to grab all their attention. She was right, too. Heartmend ignored Tian and focused on defending his head, trusting his soft armor to protect him.

Tian decided to see if the knees were as well protected as the chest. He started moving to flank the array master, his kicks low and heavy. He didn’t have any profound art backing them up, just a lot of weight and muscle in a dense package. The results were mixed. The legs were armored too, but the armor seemed to diffuse the impact rather than simply make it vanish, confirming what he had guessed before. Tian grinned nastily, and tried a kick to the ankle. Heartmend stopped his wheeling parries to jump back.

“You two are more than testing my patience. I pursue indifference to the world. I didn’t say I had found it yet!”

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Qi convulsed around Heartmend, rushing down the glassy threads like a riot of rainbows. Snaking pythons of bluish light condensed around his arms- serpents of fog and moonlight, carrying a freezing air.

The heretics’ movements changed, flowing from defense to offence, letting the blue-white pythons fly towards Tian and Hong. The snakes grew and retracted with each swing, first longer than Liren’s spear, then barely longer than Heartmend’s arms. A change he used to his advantage when turning or blocking.

The appearance of the ghostly snakes turned a one sided beating into a one sided beating in the opposite direction. Tian and Hong were forced to focus completely on defense as the whipping snakes struck from bewildering angles and a constantly changing range. Liren tried to block with her spear, only to see the shaft pass through the snake without a ripple. But when the snake landed, it froze the skin and deadened the vital energy. Liren staggered back, suddenly gasping, trying to keep her spearpoint up and aimed between Heartmend’s eyebrows.

Tian dashed in from the rear, trying to capitalize on the older man’s distraction, but wound up dashing back out again. The snakes were not bound to inertia, and launched themselves backwards, directly into the line of his charge. Tian desperately shifted from side to side, trying to keep up the pressure. Eventually, someone would show a gap, and then they would die. Tian was determined to make it the Heretic. As was a conspicuous absence from their party.

A shadow passed overhead, like a drifting cloud across the sun. Tian swallowed a grin as he dodged the snakes, letting some graze against him. His Hell Suppressing Sutra broke down the invading cold. It just took a little time. He was happy to look like weakening prey. Desperate prey.

“Same old formation, Sis. I’ll hold him, you hit him.” Tian rushed in, dodging what he could dodge and simply accepting the blows he couldn’t avoid. His every move screaming his will to sacrifice himself for his sister.

“Fool!” Heartmend gathered the cold snakes onto his palms and slapped them down towards Tian’s head. Tian nimbly ducked and with an explosion of energy, launched himself backwards. Carefully timed for Hong’s spear to drill towards Heartmend’s head yet again. Heartmend shifted away with an oath, not able to get a hand up in time. Once again he was off balance, all his weight concentrated on one leg.

Pinned, immobilized by weight and inertia. Just for a single second. Just for long enough. A torso sized boulder fell like a meteor from the heavens, smashing into the heretic’s back. The crane flew in behind the rock, stabbing furiously with her beak, trying to rip apart the same kind of evil creature that had shoved it into a cage.

The defensive array in the robes could withstand a lot. They couldn’t take all this. The array exploded into bewildering streams of color, flashing and moving and changing as Heartmend staggered around. They started making a keening wail, sliding and strobing across the auditory spectrum, as their lights dazzled and blinded.

You could crack an array by destroying the nodes, by disrupting the energy flow, or just by hitting it a lot. The crane had decided “Big rock from high up, moving fast” was hitting it hard enough. It seemed she was right.