In the doorway of the lead carriage, Lin Xuan had not yet stepped down.

[ Xuan. Concentrate. ]

Mira’s voice arrived with the precision of a knife that had been waiting for the right cut. The panel opened in front of his attention without ceremony.

═══════════════════════════════

[ EXPRESS MISSION ]

[ "Survive the Ambush" ]

[ Conditions: ]

[ ▸ Survive. ]

[ Rewards: ]

[ ▸ +5,000 Origin Points ]

═══════════════════════════════

He blinked once at the brevity of the brief.

’I had not planned on dying. I will take that as a vote of confidence from management.’

[ Move, Xuan. The first wave is loosening on the rim. ]

He stepped down. Boots into wet stone. Plain Steel up.

—————————————————————

Cao Yan’s whistle came up from somewhere under his collar — one note, high, military. The signal.

The whole pass moved.

Lin Zhen’s long sword finished its arc up to guard, Qi pouring off the blade in a violet-blue draft that bent the rain three paces around him. Cao Yan crossed the wet rock in a plum-violet streak, and the first blow of fifteen years arrived between them with the noise of two locomotives that had been waiting on the same set of rails.

Elder Ren did not wait. He drove into the three Mei-elders directly — Bao first, because Bao was the spine of their formation and Ren had decided that a three-against-one stayed a three-against-one only if the one let it.

Madam Mei lifted the sword she had been carrying inside her robe for as long as Lin Xuan had been on this continent. The blade was a silvered, finely worked thing, expensive, almost ornamental — except for the way her hand wrapped around its grip. The hand was not the hand of a woman who had been given a sword. It was the hand of a woman who had been carrying the sword in her palm more often than she had ever admitted in public.

Twelve paces between her and Lin Xuan.

He crossed them in six.

Above the road, the forty Blood Fang disciples loosened their first volley and came down the slope in three coordinated wedges. The fifteen Skyedge guards compressed into formation around the carriages — halberds at guard, attention sweeping the rim, the textbook defensive shell of a unit that had been drilled by Elder Ren himself for years and was finally being asked to use the drill. The numerical disparity was brutal. The training disparity was less brutal than the numbers admitted.

The first crash of steel filled the cumbre.

—————————————————————

Lin Zhen and Cao Yan measured each other across three exchanges. Para. Counter. Half-step. Neither of them showed anything. The first crosses had been measurement. The second round would be intent.

Ren turned inside the triangle Bao and Shan and Wu were trying to set around him. He took a thin cut along the left side of his neck from Shan’s blade. He did not retreat. He drove forward into Bao instead. The cut bled into the collar of his robe and the rain diluted it before it could reach the chest.

Lin Xuan and Madam Mei met blades for the first time. Plain Steel against the fine silver. The contact rang truer than it had any right to. Mei knew how to stop a sword — knew it the way a woman knew it after twenty years of practice she had not advertised to her own husband. The first cross between them spoke a sentence neither of them said aloud — you are not the boy I let everyone believe you were / you are not the wife my father ever knew he had brought into our house.

She made a small irritated sound through her nose. Tsk. A stain found on a robe she had been certain was unspotted. It was the first emotion she had let out in public in many caps, and it had taken Lin Xuan’s blade to draw it out of her.

Four Skyedge guards fell in the first minute. Han Liang — the boy Wei had been quietly admiring in the training yard, the one who had been one form away from completing the third stage of Azure Cloud, the one who would have managed the form in another two seasons — took a Blood Fang blade through the side while holding the line at the wheel of Lian’s carriage. He went down into the mud. He did not get up. The rain found the cut faster than his own hand did.

Inside the lead carriage, Lian heard the sound of a body hitting the wood of the wheel. She did not open the door. She tightened her grip on the kitchen knife in her sleeve a fraction. Wei kept his attention pinned to the door from inside the cab. He did not see Han Liang fall. He did not know that one of the names on the list of disciples he had been planning to surprise after their return to Skyedge had, in the space of one breath, stopped existing.

—————————————————————

In the centre of the road, Lin Kai stayed where his knees had put him.

The Blood Fang passed around him. The Skyedge passed around him. A Blood Fang skirmisher inside arm’s reach of his shoulder gave him one short glance — confirmed Madam Mei’s son in the head — and moved on. A Skyedge guard hurrying to plug a gap in the defensive shell did the same on the other side. Lin Kai had become a piece of furniture the battle had agreed to walk around.

The heirloom blade lay in the mud beside him.

He watched his father bring the long sword down in an arc against Cao Yan that bent the rain. He watched his mother turn her wrist in a counter against Plain Steel that he had not known her hand could perform. He watched Han Liang’s face in the mud — a face he had known since they were both seven — and his throat did not produce a sound to mourn it.

’One of them is going to die.’

The thought arrived in his head in the voice his mother had used to put him to sleep when he was four.

Above the pass, the rain went on falling on a road that had finally stopped pretending it was a road.

Below, four blades were already in the air.

And in the centre of all of it, on his knees in the mud, the only son of Madam Mei had still not chosen.