The stair down to the third level was the oldest cut in the whole mine, and going down it felt like descending a throat. The timber went black and spongy underfoot, each plank giving a soft, rotten complaint beneath their weight.

The walls wept warm here instead of cold, beaded with a moisture that had no business being warm this deep in the rock. Far ahead a red glow breathed against the stone, swelling and fading like the underside of a banked fire. The forge. The dry, wrong heat Xuan had inked a question mark beside on his map, hours and what felt like a lifetime ago.

He already knew the shape of the room at the bottom. Mira had walked his eyes through it a few minutes back, riding the stolen sight of the man named Han Ying, so he came down the stair with the odd ease of a guest who has memorized the floor plan of a house he has never set foot in. He knew where the forge crouched against the far wall. He knew the rough headcount of bodies in the chamber. And he knew the thing prickling the back of his neck in spite of all that knowing, which was that a room seen through another man’s eyes is still a room packed with people who would gladly open him from collar to hip.

’How many are awake down there now?’ he asked, low in his skull.

[ Quite a few. ]

They came off the last step into the chamber, and the trap sprang the wrong way around.

Skyedge did not surprise the room. The room had been holding its breath for them. Blood Fang stood ranged across the gallery in a ragged half-ring, blades and spears already lifted, torch-fire crawling red down oiled steel. Not one drowsy sentry in the lot. Someone had read the night’s small wrongnesses and put the whole floor on its feet, and that someone, Xuan understood without needing the panel to tell him, stood at the head of them.

Han Ying.

The elder looked carved out of old rope and rough weather, grey climbing his temples, a long spear balanced easy across both palms. His eyes traveled the six intruders without heat or hurry, an old campaigner tallying a problem before he set about solving it.

Xuan’s people drew up on instinct, spines folding toward spines, steel sliding free of leather with no word spent on the order. His father did the opposite of recoil. Lin Zhen stepped a half pace clear of the group and let the patriarch’s weight ride his shoulders again, the bearing of a man easing back into a coat he had hung up two years ago and never thought to wear in a place like this.

Han Ying spoke first, in no rush at all.

"I’ll grant you, I didn’t look to find Skyedge this deep in my mine tonight. And at this hour, of all the rudeness."

"Your mine!?" Lin Zhen’s voice came out cold enough to crust the warm air. "This mine has been Skyedge Sword’s by right since long before your sect ever crawled up this valley to squat on it, old man. You hold no claim here."

Han Ying’s mouth went to a thin line. He drew a breath and lifted his chin to pitch the order back over his shoulder, the one word that would throw forty blades forward at once.

"Att—"

The word strangled and died in his throat.

Inside Xuan’s skull, Mira moved, and far below his own boots the centipede cinched tight against the marrow at the base of an old man’s neck. No light marked it. There was no stagger and no lurch, nothing in the elder’s eyes for a watching man to snag on.

From the outside, Han Ying did not shift by a hair. His Qi held exactly where it lived, dense and whole, the full pressure of a Foundation cultivator pouring off him as though nothing under heaven had laid a finger on his mind. His own disciples, close enough to touch him, sensed nothing out of place. Lin Zhen, weighing the man with a peer’s senses, sensed nothing either.

Only Xuan knew, and he let the grin come under the hood, where the dark kept it for him alone.

[ And the floor is mine. ] Mira, thoroughly pleased with herself. [ Keep your eyes on this one, Xuan. I’ve always wanted to take an old man’s spear out for a walk. ]

What came next, not one soul in that chamber had braced for, least of all the men who had stood at this elder’s side for fifty years.

He turned the spear on his own.

The shaft whirled around in a low, flat arc, and the head punched the nearest Blood Fang disciple beneath the ribs and out through the back before the boy’s face had finished rearranging into shock.

Blood sheeted the steel, and the steel drank. That was the ugly arithmetic of the weapon, and the reason Mira had wanted it. Blood Fang’s arts fed on blood, and this spear gorged on what it spilled, every kill soaking fresh red into the haft and coming away faster, heavier, hungrier than the stroke before it.

The chamber tore itself apart.

"Elder Han Ying!" One man lurched backward, sword half lifted against a master his arm would not let him cut. "What the fuck are you doing?!"

"He’s turned on us! Five decades shoulder to shoulder and he’s carving up his own, why, why would you—"

The spear took him through the open mouth and buried the question with him. Han Ying stepped over the body without a hitch in his rhythm, already pivoting to the next, a grey butcher wearing the face of a commander these men had trusted with their lives, scything through soldiers who kept dying half-defended because every instinct they owned swore this was impossible and bought them nothing but a slower end.

Across the chamber, Lin Zhen watched an enemy elder butcher his own ranks and had no key at all to why. Neither did Lin Kai, nor Wei, nor the two core disciples braced at their flanks. To every last one of them it was raw madness in a Blood Fang uniform, violence with no root and no reason a sane man could put a name to.

But they grasped the single sentence the night had handed them, the only one with any weight. The fight was on.

Lin Zhen’s blade rose. "On me. Whatever has its claws in that man, we spend it while it lasts. Take the ones along the wall and leave him the center to clear."

Take the ones along the wall and leave him the center to clear." 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Lin Kai broke right, his mother’s blade waking red in the forge-light. Wei pressed in tight at Xuan’s left, jaw locked, eyes blown wide at the butchery unspooling in front of him.

The two core disciples fanned out to cover the flanks, weight dropping low into their stances. Xuan slid Marrow Dragon free and let his grin cool into something businesslike, because a great deal of killing waited in the next few minutes, and he alone in that whole churning chamber knew that the deadliest blade on the floor already wore the enemy’s colors and danced to the voice living behind his eyes.

He moved forward into the madness, and the slaughter closed over all of them.