Chapter 15 | A Cry For Help

The first wave broke, but the second wave was smarter.

They didn’t come through the gap.

They came over the ridges. Climbing the rough limestone with Qi-enhanced grips and pulling themselves up the fifteen-foot faces with a speed that made the height irrelevant. Three came over the eastern ridge, two over the western, and suddenly the defensive line at the approach was flanked from above.

Lin Shui met the three on the eastern ridge alone.

Her blade moved in katas that the sect’s sword manuals had names for, River Parts the Stone, Crane Descends Through Mist, Autumn’s Last Branch, but the names were nothing but theoretical because they weren’t a sword sect and the reality was a fifteen-year-old girl fighting three grown men on a narrow ridge top with a drop on one side and death on the other.

She killed one and wounded another.

The third got past her.

He dropped into the corridor from the ridge top, landing among the Qi Condensation disciples with a grin and a blade that dripped dark Qi.

Feng Jun hit him with a calling stone.

It caught the demonic cultivator in the temple forcing the grin went away, and the cultivator turned toward Feng Jun.

Su Lan was there with a blade she’d taken from one of the earlier kills, and the cultivator stopped being a problem because she decapitated him in front of everyone without a second of hesitation. The youngest among them stared with shock even after everything they’d seen, a head rolling on the ground still blinking was not something they had gotten used to.

The western ridge produced its own crisis.

The two climbers crested the top and dropped into the corridor’s western side, where the Qi Condensation disciples had been positioned as support. Chen Yi met the first with a technique that Calid would have recognised as a basic compression form that was badly executed and just barely sufficient to stagger the attacker long enough for Wei Ping to drive a sword through the gap in his guard.

The second climber got further.

He made it ten feet into the corridor before Fang Yue appeared and ended his advance with a single thrust that was so clean it could have been used as a textbook illustration under the heading ‘Efficient Application of Lethal Force’.

The third wave brought the southern approach into play.

Lin Mei heard it before she felt it, the crash of bodies against the rockfall that blocked the southern gap and the scrape of boots on stone. Plus the grunt of effort as demonic cultivators hauled themselves over the obstruction and dropped into the corridor’s southern end.

“Zhao Ping! South!”

The blind cultivator was already moving. She had pulled two of the remaining Foundation Establishment cultivators from their formation nodes, the ones with shattered ribs and spasming meridians, the ones who could barely circulate Qi, and positioned them at the southern rockfall.

The southern line barely held as they fought for their lives harder than ever.

The fighting became a blur of steel, Qi, dark energy, and the sounds that combat produced when it occurred in a confined space between limestone walls, sounds that echoed and amplified and layered over each other until the corridor rang.

Lin Mei fought at the northern approach until her arms burned and her sword grew heavy. The gap in front of her was slippery with red blood, viscera, soiled and released intestines, and worse things she did not think about. Duan Rong fought beside her until a dark Qi bolt caught him in the side, punching through his guard and his robes and the skin beneath. He staggered back with a sound that was half gasp and half a grunt of a man who had just received his second significant injury in a couple days and was running out of places to be injured.

Tao Shen pulled him back and took his place.

Who held the line for ninety seconds before a blade found the edge of his barely-healed chest wound and reopened it. The attacker certainly hadn’t intended it but achieved regardless.

Fang Yue rotated in.

She held the line and killed a couple before she took a cut across her thigh that she ignored with detachment and continued to fight.

The Qi Condensation disciples fought on the ridges, in the corridor, at the approaches, with blades, techniques, stones and, in one memorable instance, a tree branch that Wei Han had picked up and was wielding with more enthusiasm than skill but enough of both to matter.

Yet, no matter how many they killed, more of the demonic cultivators kept coming.

Not in waves now, but rather in a steady, grinding surge of bodies replacing bodies at the approaches, climbers replacing climbers on the ridges, the twenty becoming a rotating force that tested every point of the defence and probed for the weakness that would let them pour through.

Lin Mei’s spiritual sense, stretched to its limit, caught new signatures at the edge of her range.

More of them that were coming from the northeast.

Another patrol, drawn by the noise and Qi disturbance. Gleeful for the unmistakable signature of combat that propagated through the ambient energy the way blood propagated through water.

She counted nearly thirty more since the fighting kicked off and the number kept climbing

The total force converging on their position was approaching fifty demonic cultivators not counting the ones they had killed.

Worse yet, the number was still growing, because every patrol within a li was turning toward the sound of fighting the way moths turned toward flame, and the flame was getting brighter with every passing minute.

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Lin Mei’s sword arm trembled.

Her Qi reserves were dropping precipitously. Each technique costing more than the last and deflection drawing from a well that was not bottomless and was, in fact, approaching a bottom that she could feel rising toward her. It made her meridians ache and core tremble dangerously close to damaging it permanently.

Duan Rong was down and propped against the eastern wall, his hand pressed to the wound in his side. His face the colour of ash. He was conscious and his eyes tracked the fighting, but his body had fought till the end until he no longer had the strength to pick up his arms.

Tao Shen was down beside him with the chest wound reopened fully, the bandages soaked through, and his breathing had the shallow, rapid quality of someone whose lungs were negotiating with fluid for space.

They were dying if they didn’t get help.

Two of the Qi Condensation disciples had been dragged back from the ridges with injuries that the recovery formation was working on but couldn’t fix fast enough. A third sat against the wall, staring at a hand that was missing two fingers and hadn’t yet processed the information.

On the eastern ridge, Lin Shui fought.

She had killed four and wounded six. Her robes were torn in places that suggested near misses measured in fractions of inches, and her sword arm moved with the same fluid precision it had started with, because genius didn’t tire the way talent did, but even genius had limits, and the limits were approaching at the speed of fifty converging signatures.

The first of the reinforcements reached the northern approach.

All of them were fresh and eager.

They hit the defensive line without preamble.

Lin Mei met the first attacker and her blade turned his aside and her counter found his ribs and he fell, but the second was already there, and the third behind him, and her arms were heavy and her Qi was thin and the gap was two people wide but the people filling it were endless.

A blade got through and caught her across the left forearm, a shallow cut that burned with demonic Qi contamination. Her grip on her sword loosened for a half-second that nearly cost her everything. She recovered, reset, parried, countered, and the attacker fell, but her left hand was numb from the elbow down and the numbness was spreading.