Unintended Cultivator

Book 3: Chapter 18: Passing Judgment

It seemed that no one was expecting the offensive formation or the ruinous, charred remains of the first person to find it, which was lucky for Sen. The second or two it took him to engage his brain with the idea that it was time to fight were seconds he might not have otherwise gotten without that shock of the sudden death. Of course, the reactions of his body and his subconscious had been forged in the fires of Master Feng’s training. He was up and moving even while his mind tried to take in everything that was happening. Sen had had a long time to think up contingencies for this exact scenario, and he’d used his time well. By the time his brain finally caught up, he was dumping beast cores he long ago separated out into a sacrificial formation that had only one purpose. To make the lethal offensive formation even more lethal.

While the lightning and fire formation might work one or two more times using environmental qi, the fight would probably be over long before it ran out of qi from those beast cores. Two more people tried to breach the formation. One was reduced to fine ash and the other was left a writhing, screaming mass of blackened flesh. With that formation as ready as he could make it, Sen dumped a separate pile of beast cores into another sacrificial formation. He let it start feeding energy to the larger formation, the one he’d set up while Lifen and Lo Meifeng were occupied with their own concerns, but he didn’t trigger it yet. That task complete, Sen started processing what he’d seen around them. There were at least eight people out there that he could see, which almost certainly meant that there were more hidden out there behind formations of their own or just using the forest as cover.

Sen had summoned a spear and started cycling lighting qi without even realizing it. Still, it was handy. Even as he started a separate cycling pattern for wind, he launched a bolt of lightning at one of the nearby attackers. It seemed they’d thought they were safe because they didn’t even raise a defense as the bolt drove into their eye and did what lightning does best, it went looking for ground. The man’s entire body locked up even as the mystical lightning literally and figurately burned its way through his body. By the time the man collapsed into a smoking pile, Sen was already sweeping his spear in an arc and launching three wind blades. One took off someone’s hand and disrupted their own qi technique, which must have been powerful based on the eruption of blood from their mouth and ears. The second blade buried itself in someone’s stomach and, at a hasty last-second instruction from Sen, exploded. The third blade was batted aside by a woman who seemed to have air qi as her main qi type. Sen was a little disappointed, but he knew that it wasn’t realistic to expect every shot to land.

Knowing he’d been standing in one place for too long, Sen leapt from where he’d been near the edge of the formation and landed next to Lifen. She was staring in horror at the carnage outside the formation. It seemed that Lo Meifeng had been busy as well. She had a bow in one hand and Sen could see one corpse on the ground and another person trying to pull himself away. Lo Meifeng paused for half a heartbeat, the fletching at her ear, before the arrow punched through the man and pinned him to the ground. Sen heard an unholy shriek as the formation consumed some technique that someone had thrown at them. Lo Meifeng looked to where it had happened, then looked at Sen with new respect in her eyes.

“You set it up to do that?”

“Yeah. I thought it might be handy. How many, do you think?”

“My initial count was ten. But I’m not feeling especially lucky today. How about you?”

Sen shook his head. “No. I’m not feeling very lucky at all. Which means there are probably twenty more out there we can’t see, including someone who can break that formation. Fire and lightning are good against most things. That’s why I picked them. But watch out for earth techniques. Those will probably pass through just fine.”

“Any thoughts on how they found us? Your obscuring formations are top shelf. I know from personal experience.”

Sen shrugged. “No idea. Hell, I’m not even sure these people came from the demonic cultivators. They could just be a bandit gang.”

Lo Meifeng shook her head and loosed another arrow that set off some wailing screams. “Too many cultivators. No, these are our demonic pals.”

Sen glanced at Lifen. She had her hand over her mouth, and she was still staring out at the bodies. Sen grabbed her arm and forcibly turned her to look at him.

“Lifen,” he shouted from mere inches away, even as he lobbed a fireball at someone he only felt approaching in his blind spot.

The girl blinked a few times, then jerked free, turned, and vomited. Sen felt a brief pang of sympathy for her, but that was about all he could allow himself or her. Before she’d even had a chance to wipe her mouth, Sen snaked an arm around her waist and jumped back. A sharpened spike of rock as big around as Sen’s forearm shot up from the ground where Lifen had just been bent over. She screamed as they flew back from the spike, only to have it cut off when they landed harder than Sen would have preferred. He gave her a moment to straighten up. Then he looked at her pale face. Sen knew right then that she wasn’t ready. He hadn’t had enough time with her yet, not that he would have had enough even if he’d started on the day they met. He withdrew a pair of daggers that he’d lifted from one of the Soaring Skies sect members he’d been forced to kill and pressed the hilts into her hands. Her hands closed reflexively at the unfamiliar pressure. She looked down at the blades.

“I don’t know how-,” she started, but Sen cut her off.

“Stab and slash. Always keep one close to your body. Only use them if you absolutely have to. Otherwise, just try to stick close.”

Even while he was talking to her, Sen was sweeping the area with his spiritual sense. No point in being subtle and hamstringing himself now. The enemy knew where they were, so he needed to leverage every advantage. Cycling water qi, he used it to seize the boiling water he’d been planning to use to make dinner and sent it shooting out into the woods beyond where he could see to where he’d sensed a body. Then, using lessons he’d mastered during all those weeks on the ship, he turned that ball of boiling water into sharpened whips of boiling water. The scream that echoes out of the wood from that attack was enough to bring everything to a halt for a few moments. It hadn’t been pain or anguish. It had been the deepest kind of unspeakable agony. Sen considered that for a moment, and then let it slip away. He didn’t have time for compassion or second thoughts here. These people had come to kill them or capture them and then kill them slowly. They got what they got, as far as Sen was concerned.

Even as part of him was dispassionately analyzing the situation, another part of him was getting angrier and angrier. These people had hounded them, hunted them. Now, Sen realized, they were an immediate danger, but they were also in reach. These weren’t faceless, identity-less names on a list. These weren’t bodies in the forest that Lo Meifeng had gotten on what had surely been a dark and terrible day for those poor, dead bastards. These were living, breathing enemies that Sen could see, could touch, could kill. That deadly anger inside of Sen crystallized into something different, something with edges so fine that it could peel away the layers of reality itself. If they want to call me Judgment’s Gale, then so be it. I will judge them all.

Sen had been paying enough attention that he knew his killing intent was something to be reckoned with. At the very least, it was stronger than it probably had any right to be, but he’d never really dared to unleash it at full strength on anyone since he’d left the mountain. The few times he had used it had been jarring, to say the least. Yet, for the first time, there was an entire group of people for whom Sen had no lenience in his soul. It might well be the best or even only opportunity he might ever have to let go of that restraint and see what his killing intent could really do. Sen took a step away from Lo Meifeng and Lifen to ensure they didn’t accidentally get caught up in what he was about to do. Lo Meifeng seemed to intuit that Sen was about to do something drastic.

“What are you doing, Sen?” she demanded.

“Passing judgment,” he said.

Then, he unleashed the full, awful weight of that killing intent. It crashed down on the forest around them like a tidal wave, and it offered about as much mercy. Where before there had been intermittent yells or groans, now, there was only screaming. It was terrified, abject screaming that went on and on and on. Sen didn’t let up, not even for a moment. Unlike his qi reserves, his killing intent didn’t run out. He kept that merciless pressure crushing their enemies until the screaming stopped. All of it. Only then did he withdraw that killing intent back, only he didn’t pin it down inside him. He pushed it into the spearhead. This had all been too easy. He returned to cycling lightning, preparing himself for what he hoped would be the last technique used in this fight. He could feel Lifen and Lo Meifeng staring at him.

“Sen,” whispered Lifen.

“It’s not over,” said Sen.

“Impressive, boy,” said a smooth, rich voice from the forest.

A slim man who looked like he might be thirty stepped out of the shadows and paced casually up to the offensive formation. He stopped just short of activating it. He regarded the three of them with cool, gray eyes. There was no emotion in those eyes. Nothing that anyone might mistake for human empathy. If it had ever been there, time, or experience, or the demand of demonic cultivation had burned it all out of the man. Sen gritted his teeth as felt the corruption all but oozing from the man’s pores. The man seemed to dismiss Lifen out of hand, which was actually a relief to Sen. The more the man focused on him and Lo Meifeng the better. The man spent almost half a minute studying Lo Meifeng before he spoke to her.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

“Me? I’m just a humble babysitter.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t be trite, woman. You’re not in a good bargaining position.”

Sen could almost see Lo Meifeng’s anger around her like an aura. “Why would I give information to the enemy?”

“Who says we’re enemies?” asked the man with a smile. “We don’t need to be.”

“All the murderous assassins seem to suggest otherwise.”

“They’re not for you. They’re not even for the whore. They’re just for him. Let me have him, and the two of you can go.”

“Hmmm, tempting, except I’m not an idiot. You’re going to try to kill us all no matter what I do, so I might as well make it as hard as possible for you. Besides. No matter how terrible you think you’ll make my death, I promise you this. It will be nothing, nothing at all, compared to what Fate’s Razor would do to me if I let you have him.”

“What?” demanded the man.

“Oh, come on,” said Lo Meifeng. “You didn’t think he warranted protection as good as me on his own merits, did you? You lot have picked a fight you cannot win. That boy you’re so eager to kill is Feng Ming’s sole disciple. So, go ahead. You might be able to take us all. Of course, then you get to spend the rest of forever wondering when Feng Ming will find you. And you know that he will find you. That’s assuming that The Living Spear or Alchemy’s Handmaiden don’t find you first. Our boy here was a popular student among the demigods.”

“You lie.”

The man tried to make it sound like he meant it, but he’d gone so pale that he looked like a corpse.

“I don’t,” said Lo Meifeng, feigning an air of nonchalance. “And, to top it all off, you’re demonic cultivators. Kho Jaw-Long has barely come down off his mountain for most of a century, but for demonic cultivators, I bet he’s sharpening his spears right now. Hell, given how bored nascent soul cultivators usually are, I bet they threw a damn party when they found out about you lot. Not just a demonic cultivator, but a whole cabal. They’re going to invent a whole new sport out of scraping your filth from the world. If I was you, I’d already be running.”

The demonic cultivator glared at Lo Meifeng like he wanted to cut her into tiny pieces. He transferred that glare to Sen, only to flinch at whatever he saw in Sen’s eyes. Sen wished he knew, so he could store that look up for future use.

“This isn’t over. And if you think I can’t make your death worse than that old man, you’ve got a poor imagination.”

The man turned as though he meant to leave, but Sen wondered why the man had even bothered with the theatrics. That corrupted thing masquerading as a person had no intention of leaving until they were all dead. As soon as Sen sensed the man’s qi shift, the second the demonic cultivator started to turn back toward them, Sen activated the other formation with a flicker of his own qi. The formation that had been slowly building up power unleashed its full fury in one fell burst. There was very nearly an explosion of metal qi and a small forest of metal spikes shot up out of the ground in a perfect circle around the offensive formation. The demonic cultivator had expected something and taken precautions, but there had been too many spikes and he’d been impaled in half a dozen places. Sen didn’t wait around to see if the demonic cultivator had some trick up his sleeve. He lowered his spear toward the man and let lightning qi flow into the spearhead until it clicked together with his killing intent.

“Heavens’ Rebuke,” whispered Sen.