Kaido grunts as her feet leave the ground and she feels metal and glass shatter against her back. She feels her blade reverberate against her forearm and shoulder, vibrating her bones in tandem as her weapon guards her against the strike.

  Righting herself midair, the cultivator crashes into the side of a pile of garbage then looks back at the foreman’s office where she’d been launched from.

  Staring back through the twisted metal and shards of glass is her foe, another cultivator, wearing finely embroidered orange robes that shimmer in the dim light. Around his fists are twin bands of gleaming bronze that spark as he slams them together and flares his intent, a crude mixture of unfiltered emotions, composed primarily of arrogance and bloodlust, tinged with avarice and desperately covering over the barest flicker of fear.

  Kaido lightly hops to the top of her pile of garbage and adjusts her grip on her blade as she carefully martials her intent to flare it in return, a simple message of unquestioning conviction and strength.

  “Disciple of the Bronze-Banded Fist Sect, stand down.” She shouts across the space, knowing from the look in his eyes that this is pointless but follows protocol regardless. “I speak with the full might of the Silver Firmament Sect behind me, and any obstruction to my task or insult to my person is the same as one to the whole of my–”

  “Typical.” Her opponent laughs. “Just like a Silver to try and get out of this with words.”

  His mocking jeer causes a previously unseen crowd to laugh alongside him, and as the cultivator hops out of the office and to the ground with an echoing thud he’s followed by nine others of lesser strength.

  Kaido says nothing, merely crouching down before launching herself off of the scrap pile, hearing it collapse behind her as she arcs across the space and crashes onto the rubberized mat opposite them and gets into a bladeform best suited for multiple opponents.

  “Trators.” She hisses, her words causing a flash of rage to break across the leader’s face.

  “Traitor!?” He roars. “Try justice! Try revolution! Rising up against a weak despot! You’re grown fat and lazy, bleeding us dry in a glut of stolen power, draining all of us like a poison!”

  …

  Poison?

  There is silence, for a moment all Kaido can hear is her own breathing and her core writhing violently as rage strains against the bounds of her control.

  Poison!?

  “You’ll die slowly.” She hisses, crouching down in preparation to strike as the dead man bashes his brass knuckles together again.

  “Bring it!”

  She leaps, bringing down her blade in a diagonal slash, only for the attack to be blocked by the man quite literally punching the blade away.

  He counters with the other arm, but Kaido’s blade is already there and she twirls around the brute with a flare of her robes. However, before she punish the overextension she feels a flare of killing intent from behind.

  Before she can consciously realize what she’s doing her blade slashes through a bullet fired by one of the weaker cultivators.

  The brute is winding up another attack at her from the side, four of the weaker cultivators are slowly raising their guns as the remainder are charging in with their own brass knuckles.

  Her core burns like a furnace, her blade humming with the same resonance as if it were an extension of her body.

  She ducks, slipping past the brute’s fist while her blade slashes through the air, deflecting two bullets as that same slash forces the brute to leap away from her lest he lose a leg.

  Continuing the motion, she turns her duck into a twirling lunge toward one of the weaker cultivators as his eyes widen in shock.

  “NonoNo!–glk!” He’s cut off as her blade slides cleanly though the neck and before he’s had the chance to hit the floor Kaido is forced to deflect two more gunshots.

  But dealing with the weaklings leaves her open to the brute, and she can do nothing but absorb the strike as his metal clad fist slams into her jaw. The force sends her tumbling through the air, but she turns the momentum to her advantage and lands on her feet, sliding to a stop and using the distance to change her blade form.

  She misread the nature of her foes, they don't fight like a series of individual enemies, they’re coordinating.

  The cultivator tightens her grip, then forcibly loosens it to be perfect once more.

  That won't happen again.

  Blocking two more gunshots, Kaido keeps distance between herself and the brute and attacks each of the distracting weaklings in turn, but every time she gets to the killing blow the brute gets in range.

  She changes tactics, and once more switches her blade form.

  Attack the keystone, knock out the brute and the formation of weaklings falls apart.

  She leaps in, charging though the crowd, but by the time she’s in range with the brute she’s completely surrounded by allies, individually not a threat but just dangerous that ignoring them will only give openings to the true opponent.

  The brute’s fist slides a hairs breadth in front of her nose, but in the process of dodging she feels the painful stinging sensation of a bullet hitting her in the ribs, followed by the significantly more painful feeling of one of the weaklings hitting her in the elbow, knocking her blade out of alignment.

  She pulls in her guard, answering with a slash that cuts across the top of her opponent’s knuckles but leaves her open to the brute again.

  This is bad, just as fast as she’s learning them they’re learning her. Already the trick that allowed her to cut down one of their number has been compensated.

  She weaves, enduring a hail of gunfire, each shot weakening muscle and bone the slightest bit more, creating openings and weakness for others to take advantage of.

  This strategy isn't working either, and she’s quickly exhausting the tricks that have allowed her to hold her own for now.

  Another attack, a coordinated strike from every direction, sealing every avenue from her except–

  Kaido leaps directly upward, sword cutting though the chasing bullets with mechanical precision.

  This is a suboptimal position, she’s guaranteed to get hit no matter what she does here.

  She can't beat them as a unit, thus she needs to separate them.

  But how to do it…

  Her eyes flick over to the darkened piles of garbage.

  And a plan forms.

  She intentionally moves suboptimally as she reaches the apex of her leap, allowing a bullet to get past her guard and strike her in the eye where one had been aiming this entire time, pretending to flinch backward in pain and surprise as the metal heats and deforms against the skin of her eyelid.

  They need to think this was unintentional, that they have the upper hand, otherwise they’ll realize that starting where they are and guarding the entrances is the correct decision.

  She lands in a crouch on top of the brutes head, gaining some small satisfaction as he roars in anger, then braces for the followup.

  This is going to hurt–

  Kaido doesn't have to fake the grunt of pain as the brute’s blow crashes into her ribs with a sickly cracking noise and she allows herself to fall limp and tumble like a broken toy through the air. The speed she was launched at has her crash clean through one pile of trash and embed a body length into another.

  The impact has the metal collapse around her for a few seconds, and it takes a few more seconds for her to find her breath again.

  Then, for just a moment, there's a complete and still silence, the cultivator simply breathing as she listens for the words she hopes to hear.

  Until finally, she does.

  “Ha-ha! I knew she wasn't as strong as the elders said!” The brute laughs over the cheers of his contemporaries. “Let's finish this bleached weakling and claim our bounty!”

  Kaido wipes blood and spit from the side of her mouth and smiles. The vindication of her plan working just as intended almost matches the pain of her broken ribs.

  But, broken ribs or no, she needs to move.

  Dragging herself out of the crater she made in the garbage pile, Kaido hisses in pain, then hops down into the dark to where she presumes solid ground is.

  She’s proven incorrect, as she finds herself suddenly waist deep in some kind of sludge.The scent burning her lungs and making her gag.

  But then the burning gets stronger, not just in her lungs, but on her skin and penetrating deeper, into her muscles, bones, nerves, and–

  Into her Qi network!

  Kaido leaps out of the substance and channels an astounding amount of power into burning the poison qi from her body, enemies forgotten as she cycles though her network over and over, searching for even the smallest aspect of that hated, impossible substance.

  Impossible because the last of the poison sects are dead, inhabited by her master and the others of the elders council when they conquered this station.

  They purged every member of every one of those hated sects, destroying all but the bare minimum of their corruptive work then containing the last of it within the deepest chambers of the archive to teach future disciples how to identify and combat poison Qi.

  The thought that even a shadow of a poison sect might remain?

  Kaido casts her senses out, realizing only now that she’s looking for it, the subtle markers of a latent poison’s touch all around her.

  This entire place is saturated in poison Qi!

  This can't be an accident, for such an unfathomable mass of anathema to exist and be hidden for so long means intention. This much Qi means years of effort, even with the unnatural methods of poison cultivation and its corruptive consumption that empowers its practitioners so quickly.

  Then her senses pick up on something else, so subtle and faint she would have missed it any other time. Immediately the cultivator disregards everything else, channels power into her legs, and pushes her injured body as fast as possible toward that bare blip of energy.

  It’s a soul, barely elevated above a mortal and almost invisible against the background of this Qi dense place. Having not even completed the Qi condensation stage, it sits alone at the bottom of an adjacent pile of garbage.

  A soul that is obscured partially because it has taken the poison into itself.

  A poison cultivator!

  _____

  _-__-_

  –––––

  Lian tries to breathe quietly as she scrambles over piles of scrap to get to the exit as quickly and as quietly as possible. All the while she’s listening for the echoing clash of metal and cries of pain to start again, that silent ambiguity only pushes her to be both faster and quieter.

  All the while some small part of her, the part not consumed by animalistic panic, is desperately wondering why?

  Why are there cultivators here!? Why are they fighting?

  Are they here every night?

  The scrapper shakes her head at the ridiculous idea, clutching her starmap closer to her chest.

  No, she’d definitely have seen some kind of damage and scrapyard never looks that different whenever she comes back the next day, so this must be a unique occurrence,

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  But why did it have to be tonight!?

  Her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of something crashing through the metal in the scrapyard with reckless abandon, presumably whoever was sent flying hard enough to be sent through several tons of rusted metal is alive and moving around again.

  She can't decide whether it’s good or bad that they can still move after taking a hit like tha–

  A small pile of scrap in the valley between two larger mounds flashes with a perfectly straight line of pure silver light and explodes.

  “You!” A female voice roars. “Putrescent!”

  It’s pure instinct has Lian duck beneath a flash of silver that flies above her head, followed by a deafening crash from behind.

  It’s bad!

  Before she can even think, Lian is already running, blindly rushing through the dark as she realizes she doesn't have her flashlight anymore, stumbling over the uneven terrain in a desperate need to get away!

  Very very bad!

  She can hear more crashing from behind, the familiar sound of a collapse, presumably caused by the speed of the cultivator that collided with it.

  Faster!

  Weaving through the metal half by memory, it’s only the fact that she’s worked in this place six and a half days a week for the past month and a half that saved her from certain death, something warming her of where she is even through the blind panic.

  She ducks to the left, avoiding the area that burns everything not made of metal and rusts everything that is, but to do so she’s forced to slow down and she can feel the silver cultivator from behind.

  She can feel exactly how much that monster wants to kill her, the blinding and loyal certainty holding firm beneath raw hate for everything she is and everything she represents. That intent presses down on her soul like a mountain, and only grows stronger as the power in the air flares like a predator crouching down to leap–

  But then that pressure falters as a messier flare of intent appears in time with another crash of collapsing steel.

  “There you are!” A male voice laughs. “Thought you could hide from me!?”

  Run.

  Lian feels her lungs burn and she can't tell whether it’s an airborne toxin or her own inborn weakness as she throws herself at every obstacle, scrambling to get anywhere that’s further away from danger.

  She just needs to get away.

  Run!

  That’s all that matters.

  Run!

  She can figure out everything else after, but right now she needs to get awa–

  Behind!

  There’s not even enough time to blink between the instinctual alarm before a silver blur slams into a pile of scrap next to her.

  Then, there’s a fraction of a moment of perfect stillness as Lian and the monster stare at each other under the dim light of the quarter power floodlights.

  A silver robed cultivator, her garment blackened, worn, and stained from the sludge of the yard.

  It’s almost like she’s frozen in time, landed in a crouch at a near vertical angle from her leap, a long sword in hand and a braid of brown hair coiling out behind her head in the air like a length of rope.

  Sun-yellow eyes crackle with barely restrained power as they stare into her own with untempered vitriol, and in that instant Lian knows she is dead.

  But then the eternity passes, and those hateful eyes turn away, her sword rising into a guard as she intercepts the punch of a mountain of a man in familiar orange robes leaping into the melee with a roar of frustration.

  “Coward! Stand and die!” He shouts, appearing to either not notice or care about Lian as she changes directions once again. As she gets closer to the counter where there are more areas with cleared walkways through the scrap her pace increases and the sound of combat grows quieter.

  But no matter how exhausted she gets, or how loudly her heartbeat thuds in her ears, she can't stop hearing the sound of the battle, waiting for any indication that it’s getting closer.

  Only once does it grow any louder, the cashing sound the scrapper has quickly come to understand means the cultivators are leaping across the piles of metal approaching so quickly she’s certain she has seconds before they catch up.

  But an instant later there’s the sound of another scrap mound collapse and those sounds cease.

  Lian doesn't remember what path she took to get out, only that she stumbles on the step to the rubberized area around the front desk, almost collapsing for the hundredth time as she sprints past the desk and toward the door she’d left open.

  Slamming into the buzzer to unlock the door into the clerk hallway with her whole body, she similarly barrels through the doors and out into the narrow hall beyond.

  With this milestone achieved, Lian almost faceplants into a wall as her body gives out in response to what she’d demanded it to do. The smallest sensation of safety with the door between her and the monster allowing small parts of her mind and body to function somewhat normally

  Sliding her back down the wall until she’s lying on the floor, the scrapper pants for breath, then alternates between trying to breathe and violently coughing up more black tar.

  Every part of her mind and body that isn't in pain feels as if there’s a swarm of bees within it.

  That tiny sense of relief poking through the avalanche of adrenaline and fear for getting to this point allows some small part of the scrapper’s mind to recognize that somehow she’d kept hold of the starmap in her mad scramble to escape.

  …Escape.

  The scrapper spits out another glop of tar and hisses as she realizes it feels like she pulled something in one ankle.

  She’s not safe here, she’s not sure why that woman was trying to kill her, but that’s it. She’s got what she needs, the second she confirms this thing works she’s gone.

  Lian overrides muscles that attempt to refuse her commands and pushes herself up to a kneel, staggering to her feet after one failed attempt, then slowly forces once foot in front of the other to get back home.

  She’s almost out of here, just a few more hours.

  Just a bit more.

  _____

  _-__-_

  –––––

  “H– AGH!” One of the weaker melee cultivators cuts himself off with a drawn out scream as Kaido stutters her slash just enough to make the inferior combatant overextend his block and thus lose his right hand.

  That pain, and the removal of one of his meridians, disrupts his cultivation enough that his poor discipline allows whatever body reinforcement technique he was using to drop, and he’s riddled with bullets from one of his sectmates as she leaps out of the way.

  Her plan didn't work as intended, but to an extent it did do what she wanted it to.

  They spread out chasing her.

  Rebounding off of a pile of trash, she easily blocks the stream of bullets coming from her enemy’s gun with her blade before bisecting him from shoulder to hip before she even touches the ground.

  But it’s meaningless.

  Kaido feels a flare of sloppy intent and weaves around the brute’s strike before leaping past him toward the last of his weaker contemporaries.

  Meaningless because she let the true threat get away!

  Landing, her strike is blocked by the weaker cultivator’s pure defensive form, as is her second, and her third.

  This defence is formidable, well above what a cultivator just past foundation establishment is expected to be capable of.

  Skill to skill, this will take some time to break.

  Or…

  Kaido ducks a swipe then raises her forward leg and kicks.

  The orange clad cultivator is sent flying a short distance into a pool of shimmering liquid, before the entire area is lit with a violent green light as everything that comes in contact with it instantly catches fire.

  The sight has both Kaido and the brute hesitate in surprise as the burning man releases a single pained scream then stops moving.

  But that hesitation doesn't last long, and almost immediately she’s forced to dodge the brute charging her again.

  “Stand! Still!” He roars and, surprising her with his speed, turns about and fires off another punch that scrapes painfully across the side of her head, barely dodged.

  As Kaido is forced to step back to reform her guard, she can see the two of the still living injured ones laying on the ground and watching the fight as they clutch their injuries.

  Of the initial ten it’s now just the brute who’s prepared to fight.

  Staring across at him, lit by eerie green flames, Kaido carefully controls her breathing and masks any outward sign that they did any damage even as her right arm struggles to even grip her sword.

  Because they did damage her. Broken ribs, damaged shoulder, torn muscles, torn tendons, exhaustion.

  The brute looks almost as fresh as when this fight started.

  He knows this too, so he’s charging at her the instant he’s able to make sure she doesn't have a chance to breathe.

  She blocks, redirecting the momentum, but now she’s been weakened enough that even blocked attacks pose a threat all on their own.

  She steps back, attempting to counter but there’s not an opening she can exploit with her current state.

  Another attack, another block, another backstep.

  Her back is fast approaching the flammable liquid.

  Again, backstep.

  She’s running out of space, and in her current state she’s capable of leaping away perhaps a single digit number of times more. Running till she exhausts herself isn't a viable strategy.

  Again, backstep, and she feels the back of her heel touch air.

  She’s out of space, she needs to jump away or–

  Then she spots it.

  The brute is excessive with his follow through, the classic error of someone more interested in the aesthetic of their attacks than their utility.

  He covers for it well enough she can't capitalize conventionally, but it’s a weakness.

  From there victory is merely a matter of her own skill in execution.

  She steps to the side as the brute winds up for another punch, sheathing her blade and entering a slight crouch.

  Breathe.

  He steps forward once again and the world seems to slow.

  Breathe.

  She exhales slowly in this eternal moment, thudding heartbeat coming to a stop and the beacon of Qi in her chest humming a harmonic with her weapon.

  He throws the punch, and even this unfathomably fast movement appears slow and lethargic.

  She deepens her crouch at the last possible moment and the attack flies less than a hair above the top of her head.

  He puts too much weight on his forward leg.

  Her blade leaves its sheath in a flash of silver.

  And time resumes.

  The brute staggers as the floor of trash beneath him shines with a line of silver and slides away toward the shimmering liquid, small fires starting as just the metal comes in contact. His overextension means there’s nothing he can do but bellow in rage as the momentum of his attack sends him falling in as well.

  Kaido leaps back with her weapon at the ready for when he jumps out. No matter the fire, it will only be able to damage a cultivator of his strength, but with any luck the injury and pain will offer enough of an advantage for her… to…

  Her thought trails off as he screams, thrashing in the flaming liquid as he struggles and fails to escape. It only takes a few more seconds before those screams fall to silence as well, leaving only the sound of flame and a bright green pillar of fire.

  …What?

  Kaido carefully approaches the pool of liquid, looking for the trick.

  But there is no trick, and with her mind no longer consumed with combat she can sense why.

  The green baelfire before her is saturated in poison Qi, the liquid is almost more Qi than matter at this point, with even such short contact she can see the corpse of the brute already beginning to dissolve into a kind of burning black sludge.

  Looking back at the still living injured enemy cultivators, Kaido shivers as she realizes that they’re already dead as well. Even the injured ones that should have been able to survive for hours or days longer, every energy in their body being drawn into the toxic Qi that surrounds her and consumed to empower the corruption further.

  She steps back, looking into her own Qi network to ensure that no such corruption is infecting her, breathing a sigh of relief as she sees nothing.

  Turning her attention to her blood and filth covered blade, Kaido struggles to find a clean section of her robes to wipe it on, eventually settling for something approximating clean on her shoulder before sheathing her weapon.

  Following the confirmation that the most important aspects of herself are undamaged, she allows herself to feel the pain of her still part mortal body, assessing exactly how much she can demand of it further before incapable.

  The cultivator can already feel herself healing, subconsciously directing her body's energies to best use.

  Good.

  Because she’s not done.

  She turns and starts hobbling toward the exit as fast as possible while her leg heals.

  Her attackers are dead, and she’s more than adept enough at Qi sensing now that she’s concentrating on it to know that there are only two living souls close enough to have seen the results, herself, and the poison cultivator.

  Kaido can feel bile pooling in her throat at the idea that even a rebellious sect might associate with poison cultivators, but the thought must be considered.

  Passing through this mountainous glut of poison Qi the thought of such an abhorrent thing hiding from the eye of her sect by stealing the name of one of her own elders is the most profound of insults she could imagine.

  She must capture that abhorrent practitioner, to learn where and how they hid and stop her from warning them. If she fails, not only will they not know where they're hiding now, but soon they’ll be scattered to the void again and it will be her failure that results in a catastrophic blow to the face of her home.

  At the thought, Kaido sees an imagined vision so clear it might as well be a memory. Of her kneeling before her master telling him she failed, that her failure undermined the greatest victory of their order and she is responsible.

  Kaido clenches her fist as her walk steadies and speeds to a jog.

  No.

  She won't fail.

  She must delay the alarm, capture the only remaining confirmed link to a poison sect, and report all of this to her master as quickly as possible.

  The cultivator feels a tendon pop back into place and her run turns into a series of bounding leaps that fly over obstacles and distance alike toward where she’d last seen the poison cultivator, casting her senses out in an attempt to find the faintest trail of Qi even moral souls leave behind everywhere they go.

  That cultivator was barely above a mortal, she couldn't have gotten far.

  She can fix this, she can honor her sect and master.

  She can gain prestige to herself by strangling a brewing rebellion and place herself among the highest of the honored by defeating a poison cultivator, or perhaps an entire sect, something only the elders can claim.

  She just needs to be faster than a mortal, that’s all she needs to do and she can maintain the face of her sect.

  She won't fail.

  She can't fail.