Seishen Daji launched the two Striker attacks with all the force of his spirit, blasting two streams of bright, crackling madra as though he meant to blow up the entire tower.

At the same time, a great force slammed into the back of his head.

He landed face-first in the ground. There was heat nearby, like someone had lit a fire, and panic seized him.

How had Lindon hit him in the back?

He scrambled to his feet, preparing a defensive technique, only to see Meira—in full armor—pressing her fists together before Lindon.

Meira. Meira had hit him.

He ignited his swords, ready in his fury to turn them on her…and then he saw the deep groove burned into the ground in front of him. A bar of black dragon’s breath had passed inches in front of his face.

“I apologize,” Meira said quietly. “Please let him go.”

Lindon watched them both for a second or two. “I expected you to be the one coming for my head.”

Daji couldn’t see her expression, but she dipped her head deeper. “We are not all idiots blinded by revenge.”

Daji bristled at that, but then Lindon stepped from the doorway. Blackflame raged through him, and the spiritual pressure stopped Daji in his tracks.

When he’d tried to ambush Lindon before, he had sensed only his pure madra. His black dragon madra was far, far more frightening.

It felt like a flame with an endless hunger that would burn without stopping.

Daji’s fear was like a bucket of cold water over his anger, and Lindon wasn’t even looking at him.

“Gratitude,” the Blackflame said to Meira. “Please keep him restrained. If he attacks me again, I will have no choice.”

“I’ll keep him on a tight leash,” Meira promised, and under other circumstances Daji would have resented that.

“If you would allow us to deal with our pursuers, we will leave you alone,” Meira continued. “We have dragons coming in.”

“Not anymore,” Lindon said. He had already begun hiking back up the hill.

Sure enough, the sensation of the dragons was growing more distant in Daji’s perception. He didn’t understand it. Other enemies had unveiled themselves nearby, even Overlords, but none approached.

Lindon spoke over his shoulder. “Those dragons were in the tournament.”

Then he waved behind him, and Daji realized for the first time that a vortex of fire and destruction madra had gathered over the tower. He hadn’t sensed it before because it was still within the effect of the sense-dampening script, but he also hadn’t seen it as they approached. Lindon had begun the Ruler technique while speaking with them.

A column of dark, spinning fire consumed the tower.

When it dissipated, Daji saw that only the walls had been destroyed by the Ruler technique. The interior of the tower was intact, including the pile of enemies. He’d left their bodies in one piece.

Daji ran his perception over them and realized they were all still alive…but barely. He didn’t even know if you could call that living. They felt like husks.

Lindon hopped onto a green Thousand-Mile Cloud and flew away. Daji started to follow, but Meira held out a hand.

“He took our points,” Daji muttered, but only once Lindon was out of earshot. “And he made some deal with the dragons so they wouldn’t attack him.”

Meira pulled off her helmet specifically so she could glare at him with withering fury. “How did you survive to Underlord? How do you survive getting out of bed every morning? If you were the smallest fraction of the man your brother was, your father wouldn’t have to cry himself to sleep every night.”

Her anger built with every word, and Daji’s pain gave birth to a sudden ugly rage. He swung his sword, striking blindly. There was no plan behind it, and no Enforcement, just anger.

The end of her scythe was unlit, making it a staff, and she swept his feet out from under him before he could react. He caught himself on his palms, flipping in the air and beginning to cycle his madra.

He was in the right. Meira was a coward. She had given up on avenging Kiro, but he hadn’t. He was strong.

“Someone carry him back,” Meira ordered, and then her staff clipped him on the chin.

It wasn’t the first hit that did it, but somewhere in the ensuing rain of blows, he lost consciousness.

Mirror images of Yerin surrounded her, each showing different perspectives of her taken from her own memories.

She saw herself across the table from Lindon at the Sundown Pavilion, and her face looked unfamiliar to her as she was animated and laughing.

She watched as she knelt in the snow as a girl, shivering and covered in cuts, wanting to give up but terrified that if she did so she would be left alone again.

Yerin saw her own look of serenity from the outside as she opened her eyes facing Calan Archer, calmly crushing all his techniques at once.

She focused on her own connection to the aura around her. I am the next Sage of the Endless Sword, she said in her mind.

The aura remained calm.

I am the champion of the Uncrowned King tournament.

No change.

I am about to gouge out my own eyes.

That one produced a change, but not in the aura. It finally made her frustrated enough to stand up, breaking the boundary field in which Charity had trapped her.

Northstrider’s pocket world looked like Ghostwater in miniature. She knelt on the sand surrounded by stalks of drifting seaweed as high as trees, and they were covered by a dome of aura that held back an ocean’s worth of water.

But Lindon had described the water around him as utterly dark and swimming with creatures, while this was bright blue and clear. There were no monsters here that Yerin had found.

The entire space was only as big as what Yerin would call a large house. It was divided roughly into quarters: the sandy area where she was now, a forest of blades that was thick with sword aura, a cave containing two wells of glowing water, and a fenced-off living area.

She walked away from the boundary field Charity had set up, heading over to the cave.

Lindon had mentioned three wells, but there was no life well here. Not that she needed one anyway; since she’d eaten the Heart-Piercer Fruit, her lifeline had become thicker by the day.

Having almost died of a severed lifeline once before, she felt that as a breath of fresh air.

She dipped a bowl into one sink-sized well, the one that shone purple. This water refreshed her like a night’s sleep, sharpening her focus.

She didn’t need it so much since she’d absorbed the thought construct from the Eight-Man Empire, and as an Underlady she could go without sleep longer than before, so as a result she’d slept an average of maybe one hour a day since she’d gotten here.

Charity insisted she sleep a little. Apparently, no matter how effective an elixir was, there was no total substitute for true rest.

When she felt awake again, she dipped into the blue well. Her veins were cleansed, her core replenished, her spirit refreshed…

But she still wasn’t quite at the peak of Underlord.

Even so, Charity and Min Shuei had both directed her to spend an hour or two a day hunting down her Overlord revelation. Any insight she could glean would make it easier once she really needed it.

She finished off the bowl of spirit well water while ignoring the battle thundering behind her.

The Winter Sage was using no techniques, only raw strength and sword skill, and the Blood Shadow was under the same restrictions.