His attention was drawn by a deadlier threat: a flash of red from the left, far away from both the cycling man and the dragon-woman.
He recognized that color. He recognized that sensation in his spirit, a shivering impression of a thousand corpses drowning in a crimson sea.
A young woman stepped up, Blood Shadow covering her like a cloak. Her hair fell into her eyes, shrouding her expression, but blood madra trickled away from her feet, steadily spreading across the sand. She didn't bother to veil her spirit, so she blazed like a bloody torch to Lindon's perception. She was Truegold, without a doubt, and a strong one at that. She gave Lindon the same impression as Renfei or Bai Rou, and she looked to be at least ten years younger.
The Redmoon woman made three, but there was a fourth presence nearby.
He cast out his perception and immediately noticed a tiny hut to his right. It looked like it had been slapped together from mud and bundles of dried grass, though he could see neither of those materials anywhere around him.
Another young man, about Lindon’s age, pulled himself out of the hut’s doorway like a corpse crawling from a grave. His eyes were bloodshot and half-lidded, his gray cloak stained and dirty. Two emerald horns rose from his forehead, pointing up.
Lindon accidentally brushed the man’s spirit with his spiritual perception, and he hurriedly pulled it back. The man seemed not to notice, but his aura felt as strong and steady as the roots of a mountain.
He took in the situation with the look of a man who would rather be anywhere else. Though he had done nothing that Lindon could tell, the golden-scaled woman stopped in her tracks, looking nervously in his direction. The girl from Redmoon Hall watched them all.
“Who are you?” the horned man asked the Skysworn, wearily.
Renfei was muttering under her breath. “Bai Rou, do not follow. I repeat, maintain your position and call for reinforcements. Multiple enemies. We will try to disengage.” When the man addressed her, she drew up straight and consciously drew her hand away from her weapon. The black cloud over her head rolled and rumbled.
“We are the Skysworn of the Blackflame Empire,” Renfei announced. “We are responding to reports of a disturbance around this facility after the passage of the Bleeding Phoenix.”
Her voice was smooth and practiced, but her tension infected Lindon. He withdrew Blackflame, changing his breathing pattern and pulling power from his pure core. Blackflame would serve him better in combat, but in a fight between Truegolds, could he even make a difference? Anonymity would serve him better.
The man's perception moved over their group, slow and careless. He dismissed Lindon in a blink, but his spirit lay heavy on Orthos and Renfei. “Who is backing you? The Winter Sage?”
Orthos snarled, smoke and red light rising from his shell. “We need not answer to you.”
The stranger stared at Orthos with absolute disinterest, as though replying was too much effort. Based on Lindon's feeling of the horned man's spirit, his confidence was entirely justified.
A woman's voice piped up over his, airy and amused. “When you're done, leave me their trinkets,” the golden dragon-girl said. “It's so exciting to see a pack just bulging with who-knows-what treasures. And I like the look of that armor.”
The green-horned man sighed. “Not every fight needs to be to the death, dragon. What could they possibly have on them?”
“They shouldn't be here,” came an eerie whisper from the Redmoon Hall girl. The liquid form of her Blood Shadow had almost reached the base of the portal. “They are not bound by the rules. Who can know who sent them?”
“We are here on behalf of the Blackflame Empire,” Renfei said loudly, “under the protection of the Akura family.” She shot a glance to the man cycling on the boulder. “If we have disturbed the honorable representative of Redmoon Hall, we apologize and will withdraw.”
“Back,” she said under her breath to Lindon. “Back through the portal.”
Lindon turned immediately, but a tendril of blood raised itself from the ground and poised in front of him like a snake coiling to strike.
“Hold, Lowgold,” the young woman commanded. “We wait for instructions.”
“No need to bother your Sage with this,” the golden dragon said. She was approaching by then, strolling closer to the portal, though Lindon noticed she gave the cycling man's boulder a wide berth. “Strip them and send their bodies to the ocean. What is that behind your back, Skysworn?”
For the first time, Lindon realized that Renfei was gripping the Eye of the Deep behind her back in her left hand. Her fist tightened around the gem, but she still edged backwards.
“I salute the honored representative of the Desert Monarch and King of all Dragons, and I assure you, if we are allowed to return to our empire, we will send you a greeting-gift that far outstrips any of our meager belongings. Furthermore—”
The world went silent as the young man on the boulder opened his eyes. Like Mercy's, they shimmered like a deep amethyst.
Shadow flashed out from the seated man as though it had been unleashed, dimming all light. His right hand drifted up, then down, like a painter leisurely adding a stroke to canvas.
“Silence,” he said, as his hand lowered.
In a blink, so that Lindon thought he'd imagined it, a thin line of shadow flickered down, passing through the middle of Renfei's body from the top of her head down.
The Akura representative closed his eyes.
Renfei fell apart.
Her armor was still untouched, but her body collapsed in a pile of blood. Lindon stared, too stunned to be horrified, and before he could avert his eyes, the Blood Shadow covered Renfei's corpse.
An instant later, a towering giant of black clouds slid out of the Shadow with an explosion of force that sent both Lindon and Orthos tumbling away from the portal. The Remnant punched two fists of dark fog together with explosions that cracked like thunder, launching itself forward.
The golden dragon-girl met it with a tinkling laugh, sending a wrist-thick river of golden liquid punching through the spirit, but Lindon didn't have time to watch. The Blood Shadow was re-forming, gathering itself up to engulf him.
A massive boulder plunged from above, slamming into the sand, cutting off the Blood Shadow and shielding Lindon.
The green-horned man stood staring at a hole next to him, where that boulder had once rested. He gave no sign that he had even moved, his dirty cloak hanging dead from his shoulders.
“He is not your opponent, Yan Shoumei,” he said wearily.
“But you are,” she said, gathering her Blood Shadow around her and dashing forward.”
The young man walked to the other side of another boulder, kicking it lightly. A green ring flashed as his foot made contact, and the boulder shot forward as though launched from a catapult.
Whether by design or coincidence, it landed inches from the first boulder, between Lindon and the portal.
Lindon ducked behind the stones, leaning around them to look at the place where Renfei had fallen. He was choked by a complex mess of emotions when he saw her half a face—relief that she was gone, regret that he couldn’t bring her body back to her family, and fear now that she wasn’t around to protect him. Though he’d never trusted her, at least she’d been on his side.
But he wasn’t looking for her body. He was looking for a way out.