It was responding to her anger, which had burned out of her control. She went into most fights cold—battle required focus, as her master had hammered into her, and she rarely had a problem with that. But these sniveling rats had attacked Lindon while he was advancing, showing that they had less honor than a crazed Remnant. Advancing to Copper, no less, which was something like attacking a sleeping baby. If she hadn't deflected that spike of Forged madra in time, she'd be alone now.
She’d walked her Path alone before. She’d shaken with fever in a cave, too weak to boil roots for soup. She’d slept in a dusty mausoleum for three days as a Remnant crouched outside, knowing that no one would save her. She’d marched through the ashes of a place that had once been her home, heading nowhere.
Her master always talked about solitude as though it was some great treasure, some tool that aided in focus and training. That was a pile of rot. He was the strongest sacred artist she’d ever met, but some things he just didn’t understand.
She reached into a pocket of her robe, resting fingers on a disk of heavy gold. They wore badges in Sacred Valley, and her master had commissioned it for her in line with local customs, but she had no reason to wear it out here. No reason to keep it, either, except that her master had left it for her.
Yerin wasn't overly attached to Wei Shi Lindon; she'd only known him for a few days, and part of her still expected him to be playing some sort of twisty trick on her. She'd spent no small amount of time wondering if she should kill him and remove the danger.
But having Lindon around gave her someone to talk to, someone to help her with her bandages, someone to help keep the bloody memories and the acid-edged grief at bay. Plus, he kept a bunch of convenient odds and ends in that pack of his. And he was under her protection—like a helpless baby squirrel she’d adopted in the woods.
These cowards, whoever they were, had tried to leave her alone again. Unforgivable.
She knelt at the foot of a tree, watching Lindon stumble around next to the fire. She’d deflected the first attack aimed at him, but their ambushers hadn’t tried a second. That meant they were creeping around, looking for a better angle. For an edge.
She didn't know how many of them there were—more than one, she was certain, or they wouldn't have attacked at all—but they would be trying to wrap her up in a circle.
So one of them would be walking around the wall-sized boulders that functioned as a windbreak for Yerin's camp. She gave them a slow count of a hundred, giving them plenty of time to move. The whole time, she kept her breath measured and her madra in a ready grip; if they launched another attack at Lindon, she'd deflect it with sword resonance. But no attack came.
At the count of ninety-nine, she felt something in her spirit: a brief whisper of corrosive, oily presence right where she'd expected it. Behind the largest boulder.
Madra flooded her legs as she kicked off, reaching the boulder in a blink. Her master's sword, a straight-edged plane of Forged white madra, hummed eagerly in her grip. Her guest hissed and twisted around her waist, sensing blood.
The woman behind the boulder looked even worse than Yerin had after weeks in the wilderness. She was only a few hungry days away from being a skeleton, her dark hair muddy and matted. A leather necklace of teeth hung down over dirty hide clothes that looked a size too big for her, like she'd dressed herself by robbing corpses. Her eyes widened as she saw Yerin, and she brought a shortbow up and pulled the string.
As the woman’s arm straightened, she revealed a monster of green light clinging to her arm—some cross between a snake and a centipede, a tiny Remnant parasite sunk into the woman’s limb. A Goldsign. So she was Lowgold, just like Yerin. No more easy battles, now that she’d left Sacred Valley behind.
A Forged green arrow materialized on the string even as the woman pulled it back, but the battle was over as soon as Yerin had drawn her sword.
Sword aura gathered around basically anything with an edge, so in her spiritual sight, Yerin’s blade shone with a silver halo. She cycled madra according to the Flowing Sword technique, Enforcing the weapon like it was part of her own body.
A low hum, so deep that it was felt rather than heard, passed through the metal. Vital aura responded to the resonance, clustering around the weapon, so the silver glow grew brighter and brighter.
The blade of Yerin’s master passed through bow and woman both, its madra infinitely sharp and cold, like a blade chipped from a glacier. The dirty woman's jaw dropped to her chest as she saw her bow break, and she had a second to look up like a startled rabbit. Then she recognized the pool of blood seeping from her stomach, and one hand reached up in disbelief.
Yerin snatched the green arrow from the air as it fell from the broken bow, jamming it into the woman's arm as she ran past. She’d bet her soul against a rat’s tail that the woman used venomous madra. Those Paths always had ways to resist their own poison, but added to the blood loss and stomach wound...she'd die, but not so soon that Yerin had to deal with her Remnant.
She released the Flowing Sword technique, and the silver glow of the sword aura dimmed.
While the woman shrieked like a dying horse, Yerin passed like a flitting shadow from boulder to trees. The scream should beat her allies out of the bush, maybe make them stutter for a second—
Another fur-wrapped shadow unfolded from the underbrush, driving an awl straight at Yerin's chest. Before her eyes caught up, her spirit had already flared a warning, and she took the impact on the flat of her sword.
An awl was nothing better than a heavy nail set into a grip. It was meant to be driven with the full force of an Enforcement specialist to pierce armor—and, she’d suspect, to pump her full of poison.
Yerin was a skilled Enforcer, but this man had all the leverage and a better position. He'd struck a solid blow while she was running, turning momentum against her. It was a good hit.
But she had the better weapon.
Her white blade took the impact without a scratch, but the force pushed her back like the kick of an ox. She cycled her madra to her limbs, twisting in midair and landing on her feet.
For the first time, she got a clear look at her enemy. He’d done his best impression of a ragged bear, with his oily hair and beard, his hooded fur coat, and the musky stench that she smelled from ten feet away. Not a master of stealth, this one.
He held the awl in one hand, and in the other carried an axe that seemed to be half steel and half Forged madra. Its edge gleamed with a venomous green, just like the other woman's arrow, and veins of the same green penetrated the weapon's metal like a tree's roots through soil. He, too, had the same Goldsign: the centipede-snake creature bound to him, like a tiny green Remnant attached to his arm.
She gripped her sword in both hands and locked eyes with him, while he grimaced at her with black-and-yellow teeth.
She was wounded, blood trickling around her eyes and her body burning from a dozen reopened cuts. Bad as her wounds looked, her spirit was in even worse shape—every minute scrapping with this bear meant another day before she was back to peak form.
Quick fight’s a good fight.
When the dying woman's scream tore the air again, Yerin swept her weapon down in an arc. She channeled madra into the Rippling Sword technique, and sword-madra blasted forward in a crescent, like a ripple of razor-thin glass.