Feet swept across the smooth surface of the tiles. The spear shaft pivoted in the milk-skinned grip. The gray metal point shifted, snapped over, rolled down, and then through a short figure eight. It dove beneath the oncoming blow and launched into an abrupt thrust toward the weekly armored knee joint even as the weapon's wielder sidestepped just enough to slide beyond the reach of the deadly strike. The tip of the pick passed beyond the edge of the battle robe no more than a hair's breadth distant from the outer fibers.

  Against this move the Fuming Shade was forced, unbelievably, to dodge back. Ember eyes widened beneath his mask. Rage kindled in his breath. That should not, could not, have happened.

  Conceding nothing, he attacked again, this time with a series of sharp jab strikes alternating height and angle even as he shifted left in an effort to flank past his opponent’s guard using the unmatched swiftness provided by his strength and fluid form.

  For the second time, a perfect pirouette and counter-thrust disrupted his maneuver. He jerked the war pick back lest the spearpoint find his fingers. In the same moment he thrust his right hand out, palm up, and unleashed a blast of billowing ash summoned from the depths of his core.

  The orange-haired cultivator bent with grace that would have shamed a masterful ballet dancer and allowed the wave of burning flakes to skim across her sleeve. It did no more than lightly mar the weave of her brilliant gown. Never stopping, she launched a brilliantly swift tip slash with her spear even as she limbered upright, preventing any follow up and regaining the initiative.

  Gritting his teeth, the Fuming Shade launched into a multitude of attacks. He drove forth blow upon blow, seeking over and over to break through this woman's seemingly effortlessly impregnable guard. Paving stoners shattered. Huge chunks of sod were launched into the air from the shockwaves. Entrenched formations in the distant wall strained and cracked as stones buckled beneath impacts of overflowing blasts. Countless ghouls and one unlucky cultivator in the body refining realm suffered shattered bones as the echoes ripped through their bodies.

  The spear never flinched. The smile never faded. No strike broke through the perfectly presented guard.

  Surprise, a true revelation to reach the Fuming Shade for the first time in many, many years, blossomed inside his mind. He was stronger. He was faster. He could project more qi and had more to draw upon. Nor was his mastery of his weapon, as was inevitable in one who reached such heights of cultivation, in any way lacking.

  But he could not seize any advantage.

  This woman, though a layer weaker, held mastery of her technique vastly in excess of his own. She was a true genius of the spear.

  Yet this was not the only reason for his failure to breakthrough. As the exchange stretched out from dozens of passes to scores and then to hundreds, he came to recognize something else. The basis of her technique, her weapon art, was fundamentally superior to his own.

  That, he knew, should not be. He was a master of the Winged Bill Method, an ancient technique developed and refined during the old world and inherited from an immortal master. He knew the records, and had proved it personally during the war. This was a first-rank technique. A marginally advantageous opposition was possible, but this fundamental superiority should not exist.

  Amazingly, the same thing was true of her movement technique. Her silent, shifting style was immeasurably swift, fast as lightning itself. It left him no way to take advantage of his greater base speed, no opening through which to unleash an attack of true power that the superiority of his cultivation would make impossible to resist.

  With a shock so deep that it nearly caused him to lose his grip on his weapon, the Fuming Shade realized that if this woman had been able to match his cultivation she would have lethally skewered him inside of a dozen moves.

  Even as he came to recognize this, the ashen ruin of his face assembled its flakes and shards into a rictus grin. He was not in the fifth layer, but the sixth. His reserves of endurance swamped those of this woman, and for all her miraculous precision and technique superiority, she had never managed to reach past the defensive. Gradually, her armor acquired ever more smoldering patches while his remained untouched. Slowly, her qi reserves dwindled. His remained steady.

  Seven hundred rounds, he determined as he slammed his war pick down yet again. That was how long it would take for the inevitability he calculated to play out. Nor did he fear that any outsider might interrupt his slow, grinding victory. The unleashed storm of burning light and swirling ash that swirled around them would utterly slaughter any below the soul forging realm who dared to approach. Any below the spirit tempering realm seriously risked blindness simply by looking at the fight. The great wall, though over a kilometer behind the platform they were slowly shredding, was beginning to give way from nothing but the shockwaves.

  This destruction pleased the Fuming Shade. He would take down his foe and cause a breach at the same time. Then he would march through carrying his enemy's head mounted on the spike of his war pick.

  His foe must know this as well, but she did not despair. Her reaction was entirely the opposite. Her smile grew ever broader as the fight continued and their exchanged prolonged, acquired ever more layers. A true child of battle, she immersed herself in the dao of conflict with joyous abandon, skill rising to greater heights even as her immortal body drained out its reserves down to near nothing. It seemed entirely likely that even when the last blow fell it would strike through a skull upon the edge of ecstasy.

  Infuriating.

  “You will die well,” he hissed out the words, venting such frustration as the battle allowed even as he reached for the least scrap of advantage. “Tell me your technique. I will remember the name when this is finished.”

  “You will remember?” The orange-haired spearwoman, amazingly, laughed in his face as she knocked aside the pick for the sixth hundredth time. “Akiray, wielding the Nine Spheres Arsenal, does not end this duel in death this day.”

  Hidden behind his mask, the Fuming Shade awakened to sudden, trembling, fear.

  He knew that name. He knew that technique of nine integrated weapon styles fashioned into one peerless combat form. And he knew the name of the one who developed it. In so doing, he recognized exactly why he fought from a stance of inferiority.

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  His technique had been devised by an immortal in the seventh layer of the celestial ascendancy realm. His opponent's was the design of one who'd surpassed that barrier and become a true divinity.

  Orday. The Celestial Mother. The Fifth Sage.

  This was her hidden land, born from the end of the demon war.

  Recalling that truth, unlocking that knowledge, dropped upon him a mountain of overwhelming doom.

  He stepped back and tapped the hidden communication talisman. A desperate message dispatched to the others. The connection, the truth, had made everything clear, all assumptions reversed.

  “Retreat! We are deceived! Trapped!”

  This maneuver cost him. A scoring glance slammed against his left breast. The spearhead drew a long and jagged scar across the pristine metal there. It marked the first strike to pierce his guard in nearly a millennium.

  Even as he moved to disengage it was already too late.

  To his left Black Howl had reached the wall, brawling across the ramparts in battle with the weaker immortal and a group of spirit tempering realm elders who sought to juggle blows between them.

  To the right Scoria Scorn, ever cautious, was hurling long ranged attacks that battered down her soul forging realm opponents one by one.

  Far behind them, the horde had advanced. All of the demons had moved up past a seemingly innocuous point in the Killing Fields. They passed over a small, buried door stuck in the ground. The tide of demonic qi they carried with them moved past, allowing the clear essence of Mother's Gift to assert itself again.

  Beneath that hidden gate, Qing Liao, locked and darkness and buffeted by the horrors of the plague for four straight days, recognized that opening. The clear qi betrayed a signal precious signal.

  The sky beyond was free of demonic cultivators.

  Though his mind was fogged and he struggled to form coherent thoughts beneath the crushing presence of the horde above, the mission had been inscribed clearly into his mind.

  And all he had to do was pull a string.

  One little tug, and the signal passed down the underground pipeline to reach a point buried at the base of Itinay's northernmost tower. The grand elder, concealed there beneath a truly impressive set of overlapping concealment arrays, watched as it pulled back the striker on a tiny bell.

  With a single motion she launched out from beneath her qi-dampening blankets, drew her sword, and shouted a command so loud that all within the Killing Fields could hear it. One word only from the frozen throat.

  “Counterattack!”

  At this signal hundreds of cultivators snapped into motion. Gongs rang out, and the slavering rage of tens of thousands of demons was suddenly quiet.

  The Fuming Shade heard that call even as he dodged away from a perfect spear thrust backed by a smile that had shifted from exultant to predatory. Concealment collapsed. Qi signatures burst into being along the wall, a flood of power like nothing he'd sensed since the great battles of the demon war. The number of immortals defending this realm swelled from two to eight at a stroke.

  From the moment he felt this he knew his death had come.

  Had he charged, thrown himself forward in a suicidal assault upon Akiray's spear, he might have driven the defenders back for a moment, forced them to shift strategy and overwhelm him with additional forces. Such a move offered the chance, the barest sliver of opportunity, for Scoria Scorn, who turned and ran at full speed following his very first word of warning, to fight free before the ring closed about them all.

  The Fuming Shade knew this well. He also knew that if even one of them managed to escape they would bring Bloody Roam at the head of such overwhelming force that this hidden land and the legacy of the goddess would be utterly erased.

  He made no attempt to do so.

  Instead, he turned about and ran. What value was vengeance? The triumph of a plague that could not even reason? To preserve his own life, that was all the demonic cultivator valued in extremis.

  Even as he turned, before he took a single step, he was forced to defend. Akiray stepped forth against his guard, and her lightspeed movement technique easily suppressed his own inferior motive capabilities. This held him back long enough for two women to come over the wall and dash down to join their sister in an enveloping triangle. One was a dancing flame with a bow baring sunlight barbs in her hand. The other was a green-white formulation of caustic rain turning a jade halberd through her fingers with the swiftness of a striking snake.

  “Nine Spheres Arsenal Bow Arts,” the perfectly pitched voice of Uzat carried forth above demon screams and clashing blades as she drew back her bow. “Fifth Form: Shattering Comet!”

  The arrow flashed out at blinding speed. It struck not at the Fuming Shade, not even attempting to hit him. The target, instead, was the ground before his feet. With incredible force the arrow penetrated, fletchings disappearing into the hole it dug upon impact.

  Then the ground exploded.

  Ten million stone shards, razor sharp and locking in killing expression of a merciless dao dreaming up heaven's wrath, burst forth. They filled the air with a wall of screaming spikes, sparks cascaded away as they slammed? together and produced further iterating danger.

  Unable to dodge that icy and metallic cascade, the Fuming Shade could only halt and sweep his war pick forth in a wash intended to clear a path.

  The back hook of a halberd, blue-green and carved in the shape of a lightning bolt, grabbed his weapon before he could make this move. Neay stood to the demonic cultivator's left, face grim with righteous hatred. “End,” she proclaimed. Her voice delivered the reaper's scythe.

  She was only in the fourth layer, and the dancing archer only the second. Individually, each could be overcome, and easily at that, but numbers changed the dynamic absolutely. A twist of the pick, full strength exerted, and the Fuming Shade tore his weapon free in a stroke that drew blood from the pale green cultivator even through the protection of her cloudvine-shaped armor.

  In the same moment an arrow of burning light slammed through the back of his knee.

  A spearhead pierced his back, its force sufficient to penetrate his gilded armor and shatter every protective talisman he possessed.

  Desperately, he turned and caught it in his right hand.

  The ashen limb disintegrated and reformed in an instant, preventing the devastating damage of Akiray's perfectly executed twist of her spearhead that followed. Despite this creative invocation of the properties of his immortal body, he was still frozen in place for a critical moment, and the weapons of his foes were never idle.

  A second arrow claimed his other knee. The halberd crashed down, seeking to sever his grip from his war pick. Rather than loose everything below the left wrist he was forced to sacrifice the precious weapon, dropping it to the ground.

  Desperate, the Fuming Shade took a terrible step. He disintegrated entirely, his body crumbling to the incoherent core at the center of his ash and dust conception of existence. He sought to blow away completely, flakes upon the wind, but though he might hide his body, the shadows of his qi were not so easily concealed.

  “Nine Spheres Arsenal Halberd Arts,” Neay's halberd rose up behind him, colder than any ice he'd ever known. “Fifth Form: Anticyclonic Storm!”

  A whirlwind formed of channeled qi leaped out from between the blades of the long weapon, stronger and colder than anything the atmosphere of Earth could ever form or sustain. A storm crafted of howling winds the size of entire worlds and pressures equal to that of ocean bottoms. It shredded the ash down to base particles, leaving nothing but drifting gas and ice fragments behind of the cultivator that had once been the Fuming Shade. Thirty-four centuries of life shattered before this one overwhelmingly ferocious phenomenon.

  In the same moment Akiray stabbed outward, blasting pure stellar qi into the storm, a white hot barb of cleansing force that scourged not the body, but the spirit. It ripped apart the soul of their enemy, erasing all echoes of qi and ensuring his final end. There would be no preservation in gemstones, no return through the capture of another cultivator's body.

  A single cracking groan marked the last sign of one who had nearly reached the zenith of existence within the bounds of their world. An ignominious end indeed, but far from the first inflicted by the Twelve Sisters within their Killing Fields.

  Nor, the three grand elders hoped desperately as they extended their senses to battles waged by their sisters, the last to come this day.