Unintended Cultivator

Falling Leaf slumped against a wall, having evaded her pursuer for at least a few moments. She peeled her hand away from the wound in her side and sucked in a breath at the pain. She had been careless. That carelessness had led to the wound she gently poked at with her fingers. Part of her knew that such mistakes could happen to anyone, be they ghost panther, human, or old monster. She’d just been too confident in her own skills. Too certain that the threats in this place would be manageable. She had to suppress an annoyed sigh. Sen would never let her come along to fight after this. She just knew it. He fretted over her safety. It was trying at times, but she didn’t really mind. It left her with a certain warm glow to know that he valued her life so highly. Even so, she was a ghost panther. She had been fighting since long, long before he had been born. While he might be the stronger today, it didn’t mean she couldn’t still fight. Getting injured, however, would give him all the reason he needed to justify those fears.

Pressing her hand against her side again, she slipped along the side of the building, suppressing her presence the way she had learned from Sen. She couldn’t vanish from the world the way he did, but she could make herself seem much smaller and weaker than she was. She didn’t know if that would fool the cultivator hunting her for long, but she didn’t need that long. As she moved, she summoned one of the countless healing elixirs Sen had given her and drank it. She’d rarely had need of one, but he gave her more every time he thought she might be doing something the tiniest bit dangerous. That meant she had dozens of the things in her storage ring. She had to pause for a moment and squeeze her eyes shut as the terrible healing power of that elixir tore through her like liquid fire. Falling Leaf had watched Sen drink even more potent versions of these elixirs by twos and threes without flinching. She marveled sometimes at his seemingly limitless ability to endure suffering.

When the worst of the pain passed, she started moving again and mentally complained that the night had started out so well. After Sen had told them things they already knew, again, she had moved into the sect. She had wanted to punish all of the cultivators here but this was Sen’s fight. He had said to spare the weak ones. That didn’t seem entirely fair to her. If the plan had gone the way it was supposed to, he had killed hundreds of them already. What were a few dozen more? Of course, she knew why. Her human boy had a soft heart at times. He had no doubt wrongly decided that he’d killed enough of them already. Foolhardy, she thought. If we kill them all now, none of them can seek retribution later. But she also knew that once he’d truly decided about something, there was no means to change his mind. She supposed that kind of single-minded determination was necessary for human cultivators. At least the ones who progressed as fast as Sen did. Which, she supposed, mostly meant that it was necessary for him.

Still, he had decided. She might disagree with him, but she didn’t see any need to make him angry by killing them all anyway. That wasn’t to say she hadn’t thought about it. She had, but he would know. She could feel his spiritual sense covering the entire sect. She had suspected that he was keeping track of her, no doubt planning to abandon everything and come to her aid at the first sign of trouble. That had made her a little angry, but she realized that it also let him find everyone in the sect. She had actually been pleased when he hadn’t appeared the very second she’d made her mistake. Perhaps he realized that she didn’t need help. Well… She thought she didn’t need help at the moment.

That elixir had mostly closed her wound already. If she hadn’t seen them work and merely heard someone describe them, she’d have assumed they were lying. Of course, there was all that pain to deal with. It seemed like a perfectly acceptable bargain at the moment, but she thought she might want something that worked a little slower and didn’t hurt so much in less drastic circumstances. The important part was that, assuming she could keep out of the way of that other cultivator for a few more minutes, she could finish that fight on her own. She would have been tempted to go inside of a building, but she couldn’t be sure which ones were still filled with poison. If she’d still been in the area with the outer disciples, she might have risked it. Sen had said outright that he’d made those poisons to kill qi-condensing cultivators and formation foundation cultivators. She was confident that she could have endured that, especially with one of those elixirs raging through her body.

Except, she didn’t know exactly where she was. Her escape from that cultivator had been a mad scramble. She hadn’t been paying that much attention to where she was going, save that it had been away. The buildings she was taking shelter by could be the ones for the outer disciples, but they could also be the ones for the inner sect members and core cultivators. If she stepped into the wrong building there, the poisons made for those cultivators would kill her. Her human boy’s alchemy was nothing if not potent. She pulled her hand away from the wound again. There was fresh skin over it, so at least she wasn’t bleeding any more. Not bleeding from injuries was always better than bleeding from them in her experience. That didn’t mean she was healed, though. She could feel that she was still hurt inside.

She crouched in the darkness to give herself a moment to rest and to listen. She resisted the urge to chastise herself again. It wouldn’t solve anything now. It didn’t stop her from thinking about it. She had been telling some of the weak ones to leave after she’d culled the foundation formation ones from the group. They felt weak to her too, but Sen had said they needed to die. So, they died, but she had spared the weakest ones. She hadn’t been very enthusiastic about telling them to go, much preferring that they attack her. If they did that, Sen wouldn’t be angry at her for killing them. She didn’t like it when he was angry with her. It felt wrong. Not that he got angry with her very often, but she was pretty sure that he would get angry with her if she just started killing off the weakest ones.

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That was when she’d made her mistake. She’d been paying too much attention to the weak cultivators running away from her and not enough attention to her surroundings. She’d only noticed the core cultivator a bare heartbeat before they’d launched their attack. That sliver of awareness had let her twist out of the way. Mostly out of the way. She didn’t know what the attack had been. She’d never seen it before. Something to do with metal. It had carved that vicious wound in her side, ripping through skin and muscle alike. If she’d been even a tiny bit slower, it likely would have ended with her insides spilling out onto the ground.

When she’d been a ghost panther in the wilds, all of her fighting had been close. Only the most powerful spirit beasts had attacks that worked at a distance. After she made her transformation, she’d intended to keep fighting that way. The Caihong had flatly refused to accept that possibility.

“Unless it’s a duel, most cultivators won’t wait for you to get close,” said the Caihong in her calm voice. “You need at least one attack that works at range. If nothing else, it can buy you time.”

Falling Leaf had resisted. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t how she fought. But the Caihong had been relentless about it. When she’d finally given in to the demands of the powerful cultivator, it had been frustration and more frustration. She hadn’t been able to do anything. Some of it was pure inexperience, but it had eventually become clear that she needed to relearn how she used qi. It had taken years. At first, she had hated the Caihong for insisting on those constant exercises in failure. After she’d seen more of the world and how cultivators fought, she finally understood how true it was. Cultivators routinely killed at distances that she simply couldn’t cover fast enough.

After that cultivator had opened her side up, she had felt a surge of gratitude for the Caihong. Falling Leaf had lashed out with the one technique she had that worked at range. It wasn’t very original, but she didn’t think that mattered much. It worked. It worked particularly well in the dark. Five claws of shadow had materialized out of the night and raked the other cultivator’s face. They had managed to put up some kind of defense, but Falling Leaf had seen the blood fly and heard the scream of agony. Then, she’d sprinted into the darkness, doing her best to hold that wound closed. The other cultivator had tried to give chase, but even in her clumsy human body, the night was Falling Leaf’s friend. She darted between buildings. Thrown rocks into the distance to make loud confusing noises. Eventually, she’d managed to leave the other cultivator behind. She just didn’t think it would last.

Crouching in the dark, she couldn’t help but wish that she had her old body again. No cultivator would be able to sneak up on her then. Not with her nose catching every scent and her ears catching every noise. She knew her senses were still sharper than most of the cultivators and humans she knew, but they were not what they had been. Even so, she strained them to catch any hint that the other cultivator was near. She considered using her other trick but this wasn’t the right situation for that. There was too much she didn’t know. When she was as confident as she could be, she made a dash for the wooded area that seemed to separate the areas of the sect. There was a surge of qi nearby, and she dove into the trees. The cultivator’s technique missed her by inches.

Once she was in the trees, though, Falling Leaf felt better. Well, she felt more at ease. That dive had made her side feel like the wound was fresh. She’d probably ripped apart most of the healing with that move. Even so, she was in the trees now. It wasn’t the wilds. That would have been ideal for this fight. Still, it was trees and undergrowth and things that she had spent her entire life learning how to navigate. She soundlessly dropped back farther, using the trunks as cover. She heard the sound of the other cultivator crashing through the undergrowth.

“You stupid bitch,” snarled the man. “I’m going to cut your damn legs off and nail you to the walls of this sect.”

Falling Leaf blinked at that threat and looked down at her legs. It seemed like a strange thing to say to her. It took her a moment to realize that the man was trying to frighten her. What a pointless thing that was. She had stood in the presence of the Caihong, the Feng, and the Kho. If she could overcome the fear of them, she could overcome the fear of anything. Now that they were both in the trees, though, she knew that she couldn’t overcome him with speed and ferocity the way she wanted to. Not with her side hurt the way it was. But she knew where he was now. Of course, he knew where she was as well with his spiritual sense. She would have to use her other trick. The one that she hadn’t told Sen about yet because the madwoman had said it would make a fine joke. Falling Leaf wasn’t sure about that. She didn’t really understand human humor very well, but she liked the idea of playing a joke on Sen.

She felt the other cultivator’s qi swell and stepped through a shadow into the other place. She didn’t know why it had taken Sen so long to do this. It was easy. The place was strange and oddly bright at times, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out what the shapes on this side meant on the other side. Maybe it was a deficit in his human boy mind. She decided she couldn’t be too hard on him for that. He couldn’t be good at everything. Stepping back out of a shadow, Falling Leaf’s hands slashed down with her shadow claws extended. The cultivator started screaming as his arms fell to the ground, having been severed at the shoulder. She thought about ending it immediately, but he had said something about cutting off her legs. She shrugged. That seemed like a fitting enough punishment. So, she removed those limbs as well. She crouched down next to the armless, legless, screaming cultivator.

“You should be grateful my human boy didn’t come,” she observed. “I’m only killing you. He would have hurt you in ways that there are no words for.”n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om