But she held on to that tiny, flickering hope for all she was worth.

On the slopes of the mountain above them, green light flared. Sacred artists in the uniforms of the Fallen Leaf School shoved at the wave of fleeing people. Trees and vines came to life, pushing them back, trapping them.

At least the school hadn’t started slaughtering the exiles, but it was the next best thing. Fallen Leaf had denied them shelter, leaving them to die.

Despair choked her, but it was nothing compared to the terror she felt when she turned back.

Heaven’s Glory was already upon them.

Four Jades had abandoned their meticulous march, dashing out ahead of their fellows to focus on Orthos.

The man at their vanguard was in his forties, with silver-winged hair and a stern expression. He gestured one arm that had been scarred and mangled, and a scripted sword flew at them with the speed of an arrow.

Orthos breathed black-and-red fire at it, but a pane of golden glass appeared in front of his Striker technique. The Forged Heaven’s Glory madra was destroyed, but it slowed the dragon’s breath enough to allow the sword to follow its course.

Kelsa was ready to launch the Fox Dream, her Ruler technique, when she realized the weapon had changed direction.

It was coming for her.

Her technique scattered, and she dove away, using the tree as cover.

The sword broke the trunk in a spray of splinters. It crashed through and rushed at her, and she raised her hands to try and knock it aside. She knew it would be futile.

Orthos arrived like a dark wind.

Red-and-black light surrounded him in a blaze of fire and destruction, and she had to lean back from the heat even as he intercepted the sword on his shell.

He moved his head to swat it aside, but the sword changed direction again.

It plunged directly into Orthos’ side.

He screamed in pain, letting out a rush of black dragon’s breath.

All his time in Sacred Valley, Orthos had held back from killing as much as possible. She had seen it. He didn’t want to make a habit out of killing the weak, he said. You couldn’t always avoid it in a fight, but when he could spare someone, he did.

This time, his dragon’s breath made a man vanish from the waist up.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Elder who controlled the sword. That one gestured with his scarred hand again, and his flying sword pulled back and looped around.

Orthos dodged to one side, but his movements were heavy and his spirit was almost empty. Kelsa knew the feeling. She gathered more madra to work them into a technique, and it was like trying to mold handfuls of soft mud.

She was exhausted.

And then the other two Jades joined the battle.

Golden walls of transparent Forged madra grew around them, and constructs drifted over their heads. A man with a jade Enforcer badge ran in, carrying a two-handed hammer.

It crashed down on Orthos’ shell, but it was only a glancing blow. Orthos’ returning blast of dragon’s breath was thin and insubstantial, and it splashed against a halfsilver-laced shield that the man raised.

Kelsa caught the Forger in a Fox Dream, and he staggered down the hill a few steps, but she couldn’t do anything about the Enforcer or the flying sword.

Orthos bled from even fresher wounds, and he was still moving with more agility than she thought should be possible from a turtle.

He spun, flipping around the sword, and lashed his tail against the hammer-wielding Enforcer in midair.

The instant he landed, Orthos said, “Yield.”

Neither men acknowledged him.

The third Jade, the woman Forger, shook off Kelsa’s Fox Dream and re-focused on her with a look of irritation. She glared up the hill, gathering power.

“We have reinforcements coming,” Orthos said again. “We will accept your surrender.”

The Elder with the scarred arm gestured, and the flying sword flew back to his hand. It gathered power, then shot toward Orthos with greater power than ever before.

Orthos stood his ground, the last of his Blackflame madra gathering in his jaws.

The sword stopped.

It took Kelsa a moment to realize that someone was holding it.

A stranger had appeared out of nowhere, a blur of motion that Kelsa had barely registered before he arrived, and he held the flying sword by the hilt in the grip of a pale right hand.

She didn’t recognize the huge man with the Remnant arm. He glared with eyes like Orthos’, and he was covered by a translucent blaze of black and red. She sensed fiery destruction from him on a level greater even than the turtle.

He had run up behind the sword. Overtaking it and seizing it in mid-flight.

The sword shivered in his grip, trying to escape, but his fingers might as well have been cast from steel.

The stranger’s red-and-black eyes stopped on Orthos before passing over her, and with the surge she felt from his spirit, she was sure he was about to kill her in rage.

He wore robes of black, white, and purple, and around his neck hung a shadesilk ribbon carrying a badge. Not a hammer, a shield, a scepter, or an arrow. One symbol in the old language was carved into that white metal.

Unsouled.

Suddenly, the image of this stranger congealed with the descriptions Orthos had given her. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

How could this be her little brother?

“Lindon?”

Lindon spun and hurled the sword back at the Heaven’s Glory Elder.

Flying swords were controlled by scripts. When activated by a specific wielder’s madra, their script guided wind aura that allowed the weapon to fly.

You could never use a flying sword against its owner. It was keyed to their spirit. Throwing it back at them would only free up their weapon.

Unless, it seemed, you threw it with overwhelming strength.

The sword blasted straight through the center of the Elder, leaving a bloody hole in his middle and a crater in the earth behind him.

The man looked down at himself. His jade badge was gone.

He collapsed in a heap.

The Enforcer landed a hit, his two-handed hammer crashing into the side of Lindon’s head. It had slightly less effect than a spoon tapping the side of a teacup.

A white hand closed around the neck of the Heaven’s Glory Enforcer.

Gold walls were already going up around the rest of the area, and Kelsa knew from experience that, when broken, those panes of Forged madra burned like live coals.

Lindon gripped the Enforcer by the neck, then looked down the hill at the Forger who was raising her own defense.

He threw the full-grown Jade in his hand at the Forger in an overhand pitch.

The man blasted through three layers of Forged Heaven’s Glory madra, and his clothes were burning with natural fire when he collided with the other Elder.

“Collided” was actually too polite a word. Together, they smashed against the bottom of the hill with a sickening crunch.

White light swelled into a bubble next to Kelsa, and she dodged backwards. She didn’t sense Heaven’s Glory madra from the light, but she knew it had to be an attack of theirs. Kelsa immediately wove her madra into Foxfire. She was draining her spirit dry, but she extended her perception to find the one who had cast the technique.

In the center of the white light, a girl appeared.

Shorter than Kelsa, she was compact, with flowing black hair interrupted by a streak of blood-red. Six arms of metallic crimson metal extended from her back, their ends sharpened and hammered flat like sword blades.