“The strategist’s dead—!”

“Ah—!”

“Who— who loosed that hidden bolt?”

“Who cares? Run! Run!” Panic scattered like leaves in a storm.

Seeing Medith storm in like a cutting gale, the Mountain Bandits’ knees went soft. Without their strategist and Nessos to steady them, their lines broke like ice. Discipline vanished. They crumbled in a breath.

“Kill! Leave no ground to these ghouls and shades!” Medith spurred ahead like a white arrow, carving a wind-blade that ripped through the bandits like a river of glass.

...

“Damn.” Nessos watched the field with a heart gone to ash. Every scheme lay spent, no last hand to play. “Medith... Medith...” He whispered her name like a prayer lost in fog.

A perfect ambush ruined by a girl of seventeen. The strategist dead. The four captains dead. Most of his men would feed the soil here.

“Even if I die, I’m dragging you two down with me!” He whirled, blasting the ground so it cracked like dried earth. His lion-fist gauntlets roared and hammered at Sais like thunderheads.

Sais didn’t meet it head-on. She slipped aside on a ripple of silk, leaving a ghost-trail, and skimmed away like a swallow.

Three thunderclaps boomed from the sky—boom, boom, boom. “Thud!” Three Sprites in green armor flashed before Nessos, their ornaments a mirror of Sais’s, like twin leaves from the same branch.

“Another three of her personal guard?!” Despair pooled like ink in Nessos’s chest. Their plan never meant to clash head-on. Three guards were trouble; Sais’s legend was worse, a storm he’d studied.

“Damn...” His will to fight drained like ebbing tide. Four of the personal guard all out, plus an elder who matched him stroke for stroke. Change came like lightning. “Medith...” Behind his mask, a tiger fang in his mouth cracked under his bite. The lion heads on his fists keened, a low animal grief.

“Kill him!” Sais’s killing intent spilled like hoarfrost. She lunged with the elder and the three guards like hawks stooping. “Warp—!” Nessos’s lion fists shivered, warping the air like heat over stone.

“Aaaargh—!” He smashed the empty air. The lion heads bared cold fangs and bit down on the sky itself, like beasts clamping iron. Sais jolted, her slender leg kicked off with a snap, and she flung herself dozens of meters like a willow whip.

As she flew, she drew a blade of black light, the arc slicing toward Nessos like a raven feather. The guards and the elder slid aside like shadows and fired their own ranged arts, a storm of thorns.

“Oblivion Rift...” Nessos breathed two words like a grave wind. “Void—!” The earth took a brutal punch. The whole field bucked, and everyone slammed flat like wheat under hail.

Crack— the land split a deep seam like a scar across a cheek. Boom— the ground dropped, baring a wide black abyss like a mouth. Collapse raced fast as wildfire. In moments it reached Sais and the others; they jolted, then blinked clear of the rift like startled deer.

Nessos seized the moment. He hurled himself backward and hammered the barrier like a storm against glass. Cracks spidered under his blows, a web of frost on a window. The tremor and the anomaly faded in seconds like a dream at dawn. Yet within fifty meters of his strikes, everything became a bottomless chasm, a throat that swallowed sound. Hundreds of fighting Mountain Bandits and Sprites fell in and never sent back an echo.

“It’s over!” Bandits stared at the abyss ahead and the hissing arrows and Sprites behind, like prey trapped between fire and cliff. Hope died. Their lines unraveled. The Sprites switched to harvest mode like reapers in red fields.

“You’re out of tricks, aren’t you? Die, Maoshan brat! [Bamboo-Shadow Sword]!” Euticles whipped his bamboo blade, strikes hissing like wind through a grove. Sais drove her guards in like a green tide.

Nessos ignored them. He poured everything into one strike and crashed the barrier like a falling star. Crack-snap— a gap burst open. He shot through and out.

He saw bandit crews scattered like broken leaves. He saw Medith, one rider trailing dust like comet-tail. He saw a pit jammed with bone and meat, and in it a silver bead like a cold moon.

He ran for the pit with all he had, meaning to trigger the bead, to bloom a white sun that would turn every pursuer to dust like moths in flame...

That was the plan.

“Medith, you win. But this continent isn’t as simple as you think. We’re all trapped in a cage, and I only chased a way out.” His breath smoldered like charcoal.

“You, me, we’re both pieces on a board. One day, when you reach the world’s edge, you’ll understand...” Nessos stopped running. He stood and raised his gaze to the silver moon like a pilgrim to a shrine. Yearning lit his tiger’s eyes like twin lamps.

“Beyond the endless turning of that light-wheel, is there a world for us? Taliya...”

And then, from behind, the blade of death swung like a winter scythe.

...

Medith saw a lion-faced mask whirl high in the air like a falling star, and she loosed a roar that shook the sky. “The Mountain Bandit chief, Nessos, is dead— The bandits have no fight left— Cut them all down— Leave none—!”

“Wooooooo—!” The Sprites’ morale peaked like a cresting wave. Their blades fell with twelve-tenths force, and their arrows pinned bandits to trees like moths to bark.

“Ah... run— run!” The bandits broke like a dam, each man fleeing the hell-wood, never expecting a city raid to become this.

“Forced March: Skystrider—!” Medith’s long hair streamed like riverweed. One draw-cut flung a green wind-net that surged ahead like a stormfront. It blanketed a hundred meters like a meadow of knives, then cinched tight and mulched trees and fleeing bandits into chunks like chaff.

Even Sprites drunk on bloodshed flinched at the carnage, their killing edge washing away like tide. Many gagged and vomited, stomachs turning like overturned boats.

Medith’s face and white robes were dyed scarlet, a snow egret painted in blood. She looked like a demon risen from smoke. She turned her gaze on the Sprites, and those who met her once-clear green eyes stepped back, as if a god had looked through them.

Those were eyes without feeling, a deity’s chill over the mortal world, like frost on spring buds.

All creation were ants; she alone was the world. That was the message they read in her gaze, like runes in lightning.

“The war’s in its final act. All forces, hear me! Cut down every Mountain Bandit! Eradicate every rebel! Our will endures forever, and may the world know no killing—!”

“Yes—!” Fear iced their backs, but they obeyed. They fanned out and hunted the scattering bandits like wolves in snow.

Tonight marked the birth of a nightmare for the Mountain Bandits. The few who slipped the net carried it like a thorn to the grave. They never forgot that day’s carnage, nor those eyes from hell, cold as the moon.