Now, he lost track of his surroundings as he watched in awe.
She fought an army. Two soldiers whipped their swords at her with blurring speed, one fell toward her at the end of a leaping strike, and two pushed at her with shields in one hand and spears in the other. Javelins rained down at her from soldiers in the distance. Stone hands reached up from the ground beneath her, snatching at her ankles.
All at the same time.
Yerin turned them all.
Invisible blades shredded the hands at her feet, churning the earth. Her Goldsign met one of the swords, her free hand the other, and her sword skewered the falling soldier and slammed him down like a hammer on the head of his comrade. He hadn’t seen her use her Striker technique at all, but silver slashes of sword-light struck the javelins from the air, and a pair of kicks caught two enemies on their shields and launched them through the air to shatter on pillars.
How long would it be before he could fight like that?
An attack he hadn’t seen slammed into his skull in a burst of pain and white light. His Bloodforged Iron body drained power, and he rolled to his feet in an instant, pulling the halfsilver dagger from his pocket.
He could feel the presence of the gray soldier even as it dipped behind a nearby column. He would feel its attack coming, but whether his reflexes could keep up was another matter.
And what he felt of the construct was even more interesting. In a way he couldn’t entirely articulate, the soldier felt…mindless. He sensed no life within it. It was simply a mass of madra, acting according to direction.
But not even the most complex construct ever designed could fight as a living creature without someone controlling it. At least, not as he understood constructs.
The soldier ducked out, avoided his slash with the halfsilver dagger, and struck him a heavy blow on the shoulder with the butt of its sword. His madra drained again to his Iron body, until even his pure core darkened.
The spiritual exhaustion was like a gaping hole inside him, leaving him limp and twitching on the floor. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but instead he kept them wide, watching for the next blow that would land on his helpless body.
Instead, the soldier withdrew. It joined the others in attacking Yerin.
He couldn’t see the fight except for an occasional flash of black or silver, but after a few minutes Yerin let out a pained shout and hit the ground with an audible thud.
The soldiers retreated, ignoring them both, and dissolved in the shadows of the stone forest. The script beneath them powered down.
Lindon spoke into the dirt. He didn’t have the strength to move, and he knew Yerin would hear him. “At least they didn’t kill us.”
Yerin groaned.
***
“In that case,” Eithan said, “I didn’t have to do much. I could have directed more of the soldiers to stop Lindon, but there was no need.”
“Maybe you should have sent more against Yerin,” Cassias said, wishing he had a dream tablet handy to record the memory while it was fresh. As a sword artist himself, he was left in awe at the level of skill and control she’d already displayed at the Lowgold stage. He bitterly regretted that he couldn’t meet her master.
“She could reach Highgold any day now, if she could let go of that death-grip she’s got on her Remnant,” Eithan said with a sigh. “She might out-rank you fairly soon.”
Cassias watched the girl in the tattered robe as she sprawled out on the dirt, each breath rough and heavy. “Considering what it’s costing us to run these Trials, I’d be disappointed if she didn’t at least take my place in the rankings.”
Eithan gently pushed him into the chair in front of the control array. “The course only runs while the sun is up. Tonight, you can go back to your family. If you’d like to retire early, then by all means…push them until they break.”
Cassias gave him a wry look, but his spiritual perception was already moving over the console. If he was going to run these Trials, he needed to know the controls like his own sword.
***
The crab meat tasted like ash and scorched oil. Yerin almost spat it out, but she’d choked down worse food out of necessity. She separated herself from the taste to chew and swallow out of pure discipline.
Lindon did spit it out, making a retching noise. “That…that cannot be food,” he said.
“It’s the fire that’s rotten,” Yerin said, ripping off another piece of vile meat with her teeth.
It had taken Lindon until well into the night to start the tiny campfire that now smoldered outside their caves. He’d used Blackflame madra to ignite the tinder, and now that power lingered; the aura wasn’t the healthy red-and-orange of a natural blaze, but was tinted with bloody scarlet and corrosive black. The flames gave off too little light, too much smoke, and a taste like burnt death.
But Yerin had experienced the consequences of eating raw meat in the wild. Even a corrupted flame like this one was better than nothing—there was no telling what sort of diseases or parasites these wild creatures carried.
Lindon popped another one of those red-veined black berries into his mouth, wincing as he chewed. Yerin had found them even less tolerable than the meat. They burned her tongue, leaving it unable to taste anything…although that might be an advantage, considering the crab.
She was sure the berries must be low-grade spirit-fruits that would burn away impurities in madra, but she didn’t have the energy to put up with a burned tongue on top of everything else.
Lindon set aside his cracked crab claw, staring into the flames. “I’m sure we weren’t meant to succeed on our first try,” he said.
Yerin’s grip tightened around her own segment of crab. The shell cracked. “You’d contend so, huh? You think a real enemy would be soft enough to give you a second shot?”
His eyes widened at her tone, but she wasn’t feeling charitable enough to apologize. It wasn’t fair to him, likely—he may not have grown up on the battlefield, but he’d faced plenty of real enemies just in the few months they’d known each other.
“We’d have some information about a real enemy,” he said reasonably. “That’s all we were doing—gathering information. We have to know how that construct works if we want to defeat it.”
She shoved another strip of revolting crab meat into her mouth, tossing the empty shell in the fire. “Not a construct,” she said, around the mouthful of food.
He leaned forward, interested. “A Remnant, then? Compelled by the script?”
“You’re Jade now. Did that feel like a Remnant to you?”
“That that exhausts the possibilities I’m aware of, though my experience pales next to yours. If it’s not a Remnant, and it’s not a construct…”
Yerin gulped water from a hollowed-out crab shell she’d filled at the waterfall earlier, trying to rinse the taste out of her mouth. She spat to one side of the fire. “It’s a Forger technique.”