NOVEL NEXT Chapter Twenty-Four: Sect Reactions
An assassin studied the street where the listed address of the Charm and Fable was, taking a slow, deep breath and cycling his chi. Reports had indicated that the proprietors of this small establishment were the ones to evacuate citizens after the Dreki duel and had fought against the demons, and were doubtless linked to this case.
That was why they had sent him. He was a second layer perpetual core, powerful enough to throw out techniques that the sect's handful of junior cultivators who had made the journey could never hope to match, even if he was still on the lowest rung of the sect's elders. His cultivation alone would probably have been enough to kill some wizard and destiny wielder reputed to be roughly fifth circle and silver marked respectively.
But it wasn't all that he was. While he wasn't possessed of the Yaksha bloodline many of his sectmates held, he did have a powerful white serpent bloodline, which had fused perfectly with his poisoned cultivation to form a secondary foundation. Together, they made him more than powerful enough to take on these shop owners, even if they were more powerful than the average mortals.
His matriarch was confident that the wizardly one knew exactly who and where the Traitor Wyrm's spawn could be found. According to her, he had employed the Dreki child, and had likely heard some from him. On top of that, both of their presences at the arena and familiarity with wizardry meant the same tricks that had fooled her would not work so well on them. If he managed to extract the information, he should earn enough status within the sect to afford the sablevenom pills that would help him form the third layer of his perpetual core.
Right up until now, he'd thought it was all but guaranteed. It was a business, with a publicly available address. He could simply wait outside for it to be empty of all but the proprietors, then break in, subdue them, and interrogate them.
Instead, the building where the Charm and Fable was supposed to be was entirely empty. The lot was nothing more than grown over weeds, with some stones that might have once been a foundation to a home that had burnt down half a century ago. It was oddly incongruous with the rest of this city, with its stuffed buildings and many skyscrapers, and looking at the lot set the assassin's nerves on edge.
Something about it was dangerous. He simply couldn't identify what could hurt him. But the mere fact that there was seemingly no building in a place that had a public address leading here sent shivers down his spine. It almost reminded him of–
"Decent instincts there, friend," a voice, speaking with an accent entirely different from the locals, and not one that the assassin recognized, said from right behind him. The assassin's hair stood on end, and he turned around at a speed that an unawakened mortal wouldn't have even been able to see.
The man who had spoken was taller than him, muscular, and had a sword of what looked like cheap farmer's iron at his hip. A trio of marks glowed on his forearm in silver light – the man had the destiny of the farmer, but had earned the marks of song and sword.
The assassin sneered, though internally he was a touch relieved. The man must have used the minor sound magic offered by the song mark to sneak up on him, but he wouldn't be a threat. The mark of the sword showed that he had some combat power, yes, but his primary destiny was that of the farmer, and no mere farmer could hope to stand up to him.
He spun his chi into the 'dancing among serpents mean you get bit' technique, thrusting it at the chest of the man who'd spoken, and channeling his power into the blow to form a specific poison that made people suggestable. All he would need to do was scratch this man, and he'd have all the information he needed.
The man caught his elbow with a relaxed motion, moving so fast that, even as powerful as the assassin was, he couldn't see the motion as anything more than a blur. The air seemed to sing around him as he moved, and the strange destiny user emitted a burst of power that wiped away his technique. The assassin's spiritual senses couldn't even trace the depth of the technique, it was so complex.
The assassin leapt into a flurry of a half dozen attacks, burning his chi and bloodline – not that there was a difference anymore – to empower every blow, but the man battered the attacks aside with dismissive ease.
"You might want to rethink your strategy, friend," the man said.
Hah! He spoke. His farmer stamina must be running low. The assassin drew knives from his sect robes and threw them at the man, coating them with more of his poison, and finally he forced the man to act. The strange man drew his blade, and a single note rang in the air. Both the blades exploded into shrapnel, and the man moved with that absurd speed again.
This time, Charm caught the assassin by the neck, and the assassin's eyes widened as it finally sunk in.
"You're not a silver marked," the assassin whispered.
"Mithril," the dark skinned farmer agreed. The assassin reached inside, desperately reaching for his own core. There was one technique he could use, a life-shattering technique that would end his much extended lifespan, cutting short what should have been two centuries. But it would kill this monster with him.
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The assassin detonated his own core, creating a massive explosion of toxic chi. As the power faded from the explosion Charm let out a sigh and shook his head.
"What a waste of a person's life."
—
Elder Tywyll lifted her tea to her lips and took a long, slow sip of the poisoned cup. The poison they'd placed within her tea leaves was a nice and subtle one, and she could appreciate that. It really did look remarkably like the minor dust that was picked up on leaves as they gradually broke and decayed with age, only the faintest hints of a silvery sheen that were too delicate for an untrained eye to pick up on giving away the truth of the poison.
It smelled like tea as well, not that any life enforcement practitioner would have made that mistake. Druids and cultivators both gained remarkably enhanced senses, despite their markedly different approaches to wielding the power of life energy. Any poison meant for them to use had to smell correct.
Even the taste was right. There was a tiny bit of artificial floralness, but not so much that someone who wasn't intimately familiar with the tea would have picked up on it. Even if they had, they'd be more likely to think they'd not perfectly rinsed out the cup the last time they'd washed it, not poison, so subtle was the taste.
Frankly, if it weren't for the fact that the magic was attempting to temporarily bend Tywyll to the will of the cultivator, then it would have probably impressed her. She might have even considered offering someone a job, if they managed to lace her drink with a poison like this.
Unfortunately, this was not a job application.
The cultivator – some seventh stage perpetual core child with a shadow demon bloodline – dropped from the ceiling, where she thought she'd been hidden within the shadows. Yin shadow chi coiled around her hands, building into a binding technique that was compatible with the poison. Spears of shadow erupted from the girl's hands, and Elder Tywyll raised her own claw-like hands.
She caught the shadows, twisting them into a ball. It looked like a bunch of writhing serpents that had their tails tied together, and as she raised it to her mouth, she took a bite of the shadowy magic. Then another, and another, until there was nothing left of the technique.
The girl who had attacked her wasn't idle, though, unleashing her shadow techniques, commanded by a vast sea of perpetual core chi. The skill and level of power the girl had was quite impressive for someone who couldn't have finished her second century of life yet, and again, if it hadn't been an attempt to ensnare her, Elder Tywyll might have considered offering the girl a job.
As it was, Elder Tywyll seized control of the shadows and shattered the girl's command over them. The girl stumbled back as if she had been physically struck, and her breathing started to come more rapidly.
"How?! The poison…"
Elder Tywyll started to laugh then. It was a dry, crackling thing, like the best leaves in autumn being crunched underfoot, like nails running along a chalkboard, and like old leather tearing in half after being untreated for a hundred years.
"My dear girl, I am an arch-hag. Trying to hurt me, kill me, control me, or even cause a speck of discomfort to me with a concoction of alchemy is like trying to make a shadow cultivator such as yourself afraid of the dark."
The girl's eyes widened as she realized her horrible mistake, and Elder Tywyll's grin grew wider.
"And of course, you abandoned the Divine King. If he was attempting to control me, I would capture you and then be forced to deal with legal channels going back and forth and attempting to prove he had ordered it. The little worm would doubtless slither out of any real responsibility. But you have no protection."
She tapped one of her long, boney fingers against the rim of her cup, and shadows began to surge in the room, reaching out to envelop the poor assassin who didn't know what she'd gotten herself into. The girl reached to detonate her own core, but Elder Tywyll flicked her fingers, casting a mind-snaring spell very close to what the poison would have done to her.
"How about we get started…"
As the girl's emotions started to scream notes of fear, Elder Tywyll's smile grew even wider.
—
The matriarch of the splinter sect took long, slow breaths to calm herself. For all that her mission of finding the spawn, killing her, and then killing the entire rest of the Shé family had sounded simple, it was going horribly.
First, the Dreki boy was found to know nothing about the Traitor Wyrm through the use of an incredibly expensive artifact. So she'd resorted to casting the net wider. She knew she had caught a scent of the Traitor Wyrm during the battle, so she began to reach out, looking at the weakest and least connected participants in the fight – Shé Rui, the faerie professor, and finally the Charm and Fable's owners. Only for the strange man, Charm, to kill one of her core formation members. Admittedly, he had been the weakest of them, but she still only had eight of them.
Then, as if that weren't enough, the Divine King had ordered her to disrupt the diplomatic relations between Hydref and Cendel, only for her second strongest core formation member to get captured in the middle of attempting to take command of the Elder that Hydref had sent.
Then after the rumors had started swirling, she'd had another sect member to find the Dreki, and in the fight he'd managed to take a sample of Shé Yushin's blood. When that confirmed she was not the traitor, merely a wizard and a neophyte poison cultivator with a serpentine bloodline, her best lead had been destroyed.
Now she was down to six core formation warriors, one of whom was missing an arm and a leg from the fight with Shé Rui, and another who had lost a portion of her sanity after encountering that professor. And she was left with little clue of how she'd be able to accomplish either of her missions.
She needed something that could draw the Traitor Wyrm out of hiding. Something big, like a mass demon attack on the school.
But how did one manage to orchestrate an event like that? And furthermore, how could she do it without the Erudite using his petty witchery to simply crush them? She was confident she could hold him off, but beating him was another thing entirely – she was still only the first stage of nascent immortal, after all, while he had been at the peak of wizardry for years.
She sighed, picked up a pen, and started to draft yet another plan.