The gate gave up the throat of the mine, and Xuan poured down it like water finding a fault in the rock.

Han Ying struck the first cluster a breath ahead of him, and the cramped stone turned the elder into something out of a slaughterhouse. The blood spear whirled in the narrow dark and opened a man from hip to hip, and the steel guzzled what spilled and came back quicker, the haft glazed and steaming. Two more buckled before the first had finished sagging. A Foundation cultivator loosed in a corridor built for handcarts was less a swordsman than a rockslide with a grudge, and the defenders nearest him simply stopped being whole.

Xuan let the old man plow the center and went to work on the margins. He fed the forms only enough Qi to bite, no more; this rabble did not merit the good reserves, and the tank he hoarded was promised to one thing waiting at the bottom of the shaft.

Cloud Step slung him sideways into a seam that had not existed a heartbeat earlier, the sole of his boot kissing stone and the stone handing him back open air on the far side of a man’s guard. The guard spun with a panicked overhand chop. Awakening Dragon answered it. He read the shoulder before it finished loading, ran Marrow Dragon up the rising diagonal the form lived on, batted the chop wide, and let the one motion carry into the body, splitting the man from hip to breastbone. The padded tunic parted, the meat beneath it parted, and the slick rope of his innards spilled loose over his own belt while his face was still making up its mind to be afraid.

’One.’ He was already gone.

Another came in with a spear, a real thrust, weight behind it. Coiling Dragon. He let Marrow Dragon carve a tight circle that caught the head inside it, wound the shaft off its line, and for the half breath the man hung there gaping he put the edge through the side of his neck. The head did not come off. It hinged, lolling onto the shoulder on a hank of muscle, the body taking three blind steps before the dirt remembered to claim it.

The corridor was screaming by now, the way places scream when forty men grasp at once that the night has come for them with nothing kind in its pockets. Good. Screaming men do not organize.

Two of them planted across his line, shoulder to shoulder, both braced to swing the same way, sure that two blades beat one. Twin Dragon Strike. He opened with a flat horizontal cut that the left one rushed to meet, and the instant his wrist finished the stroke it rolled over and threw the second the opposite way, faster than the first could be read.

The left man’s head spun off his neck and away, hair and all. The right caught the return across the gut and folded around it, clutching at a wound that had already let his stomach out into the firelight. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

[ Eleven. ] Mira, tallying in the back of his skull with obscene cheer. [ It’s a mess, but it’s a well-made mess. I respect the workmanship. ]

’Glad one of us is keeping score.’

They began to clump now, herd instinct, three and four backing into one another against the gallery wall as though closeness were armor. It only made them one target. Storm Dragon. He let the Qi pour and turned Marrow Dragon loose in the turbulent grey blur the form was named for, four cuts becoming five becoming six, each shallow alone and ruinous in sum. An arm leapt free of its owner with the sword still locked in the dead fingers.

A face came open from jaw to brow on a single diagonal and the man behind it dropped without a cry, blinded and unmade. A third was halved at the waist, the top of him sliding off the bottom in two unhurried beats, like a thing cut and left to notice it later. The wall wore a wide red fan when the form let go.

One broke and ran, sprinting up the tunnel toward the surface and the night and whatever ears waited out there. Not happening. Cloud Step shut the gap in one impossible stride, and Piercing Dragon left him on the point of it, a straight lance of motion that drove Marrow Dragon through the small of his back and out the front in a bright wet burst, pinning him mid-step before he crumpled around the steel. Nobody was climbing out of this hole to ring a bell.

Around him the harvest went on. Han Ying carved a red road up the gut of the tunnel, the spear so gorged it left smears of afterimage, an old face wearing nothing at all above a butcher’s work.

Lin Kai held the right with his mother’s blade, and there was no hesitation in him tonight, none of the husk that had rotted behind a door; he caught a man’s arm at the elbow on the downstroke, took it off at the joint, and ran him through the open mouth before the scream could climb out.

Wei held the left at a pinch in the rock, white and graceless and rooted, and Xuan caught the instant the boy took his first kill on his feet, a clumsy honest thrust through a charging man’s chest that he had to brace both hands to drag free. He lived. He held. That was the whole of the job.

The flood thinned to a trickle, the trickle to corpses, and the four of them pressed down to where the tunnel widened into a low working chamber.

One man waited there, where the rest had broken. He had not run. He stood with a heavy sabre in a stance someone had actually drilled into him, a thick-necked slab of a man wearing an overseer’s sash and an overseer’s swagger, and Mira lit him pale across Xuan’s sight.