Gyuvin jumped up from the ground where the explosion had thrown him, his heart beating fast with excitement. So the willows had been the ones supporting the spiritual suppression array. Relief overcame him; with everyone’s spiritual power restored, the infernal rift would be dealt with in no time. The training camp was, after all, just a gathering of the top youth cultivators of their generation. He’d trained with them for months now. At full strength, supported by the strongest senior cultivators of the five greatest sects in the cultivation world, they were indeed a force to be reckoned with. As he sped through the corridors and re-entered the main courtyard, he was heartened to know that he was right.
The destruction of the suppression array had turned the tide against the demonic invasion. Zhanghao and Ricky emerged from the little alcove they’d been cornered into earlier, Yujin, Jiwoong and Gunwook right behind them.
“Xuanhua!” Zhanghao called, abandoning his jinghu temporarily for a deadlier weapon, and his chain whip materialized in his hand, glowing blue, its links glinting with deadly power. “Ghost Blade!”
He swung the chain whip out in front of him and the whip sliced through the air faster than the eye could follow, turning translucent and ghosting harmlessly through the body of every cultivator it passed by, but savagely tearing through and disintegrating every demonic being in its path. This was Zhanghao’s holy weapon’s special technique, the equivalent of Yuexi’s Rain, and clearly equally as powerful; Xuanhua’s Ghost Blade had cleared the field in a single move. Its mechanics were fascinating, Gyuvin thought, and insanely practical. Weapons like Xuanhua were often inconvenient to wield in close combat battle because of how easy it was to hit someone unintentionally, but a killing technique like Ghost Blade sidestepped that concern entirely.
The barrier above them flickered just then, wavering and wearing through in some places. The Mushan Temple monks couldn’t possibly hold the barrier forever; it’d already been almost a half hour since it was first put up. Screeching, crazed winged demons poured in through the weak spots, filling the temporary calm once again with chaos.
All around him, Gyuvin watched holy weapons light up, Yuexi’s gold aura shining bright, Jiwoong’s Xingci a resplendent silver, Yujin’s Xuehui a steady sky blue. The seniors stepped in too just then, their own weapons summoned to their hand; Han Seungho and Lee Eunyoung’s identical longbows lighting up in bright crimson, Jung Aerin’s jade-green spirit pet dragon coiling around her feet, her shining green longsword between its deadly teeth.
“Everyone with a holy weapon, direct your heavenly power towards the eye of the infernal rift,” the head monk commanded, landing soundlessly on the ground. “We need as much firepower as possible to seal the rift before it gets too wide. Aim now!”
Gyuvin lifted Yuexi, its jade-lined blade gleaming in the reflection of the red sky. In unison, the holy weapons around lit up in a myriad of colors, greens and reds and purples and blues, and pure heavenly power beamed from every direction at once, soaring straight into the eye of the infernal rift. Almost immediately, Gyuvin could see the edges of the rift begin to seal up.
The cultivators without holy weapons were busy cleaning up the last wave of demons that had escaped from the rift. Gyuvin could hear the sharp whistle of Shanqing’s blade behind him, the heavy, pungent smell of demonic ash permeating the air with every breath he took.
“I’ve got your back,” Minwoo said quietly, his back pressed to Gyuvin’s. “Are you okay?”
Gyuvin tried to focus everything he had on directing as much power towards sealing the rift as possible. “I’m fine, hyung! Something’s different today. I feel different…”
“Different how?”
“I don’t know,” he gritted out. The rift was almost completely sealed now, like stitches of thread weaving two pieces of fabric together. They were just seconds away from clearing it entirely. “Like I’m stronger than I usually am…”
Gyuvin gave one final burst and the rift closed, the bloodred sky over the Peak fading back into morning blue, and he collapsed to his knees, his chest heaving from trying to make up for the breath he wasn’t taking in fast enough, blood bubbling from his throat, spattering onto the ground as he coughed.
There was a hand on his back almost immediately, rubbing gentle, soothing motions into his shoulder blades, and Gyuvin looked up into warm, amber eyes mired with an expression of worry.
“Are you okay?” Ricky’s voice was so tender that Gyuvin felt tears come to his eyes, though he tried his best to blink them away. “You exerted a lot of spiritual power. I’ve never seen you use anything close to that amount, not even when we were losing fights.”
Gyuvin laughed, wiping the blood off his mouth with the cuff of his golden sleeve. “I’m okay,” he answered, his throat a little dry. “Thanks for making it sound like I don’t try during our fights…”
“That’s not what I…”
He’d recovered sufficiently to be able to focus on his surroundings just then. “Ricky, you’re-“
“I know.” Ricky brought his hand up to his face, almost out of instinct at this point, backing away from Gyuvin just a little. Something had happened to him again. His face was pale and drawn, and blood was trickling not just from his nose this time, but from his mouth, too. When he looked back up, Gyuvin got another shock; blood was beading from his amber eyes like tears, dripping faster the more he tried to blink them away.
He reached out to keep Ricky steady, but the other boy backed away from him immediately, holding a hand out. “Stay away from me,” he said softly, falling onto his knees as blood continued to run down his face. “Don’t come any closer, I mean it.”
Gyuvin stayed back obediently, though it took almost everything he had not to be by Ricky’s side. What was happening to Ricky? Aside from that one incident from the first day they’d trained together, he’d never reacted like this to anything ever again. What kind of damage had Ricky taken during the siege that made him bleed from his eyes?
Another set of white and blue robes came into Gyuvin’s peripheral vision just then, and some relief came to him. Yookyung, Moonrise Palace’s healer. Yookyung scooped Ricky’s body up from the ground easily, carrying him in his arms, and turned to head for the infirmary, not acknowledging Gyuvin in the slightest.
Well, Gyuvin thought, it was nice to see at least some things hadn’t changed. But as he took his attention off Yookyung’s figure receding down the breezeway, the full extent of the damage became immediately clear. The crisp air on the Peak was tinged with the heavy, metallic scent of blood and smoke. The clean, wood-paneled floors of the breezeway were soaked through in dark red. The dust and ash of demon remains blanketed the grass in gray, and limp bodies lay still in every direction they could see, their robes covered with so much blood that Gyuvin wouldn’t even be able to tell which sect’s colors they were wearing if not for the fellow cultivators from their sect kneeling over their bodies.
They’d sealed the rift, but at what cost? They had defeated the infernal invasion, but they had suffered such heavy casualties in the process that it was impossible for anyone to feel any triumph in their victory.
The seniors gathered in a corner of the courtyard to talk to the Mushan Temple monks, and Gyuvin just sat down where he was, leaning against a pillar, exhaustion settling over him like nothing he’d ever known.
He remembered just then, the only one of his friends he hadn’t seen throughout the duration of the entire siege. Where was Hanbin? Minwoo had said he wasn’t in their shared detention quarters when he awoke. That meant that for some reason Hanbin, too, had went against orders and left their detention quarters somewhere during the night.
The blurry scene from his memory came to mind again, Hanbin’s body in the dim moonlight, his blood soaking into the ground. Had it just been a horrible, horrible nightmare, or had some part of that strange vision been real?
He dragged himself back onto his feet, trudging down the breezeway towards the gates of the grounds. He had no recollection of anything that happened after the stabbing pain in his head, but it didn’t seem like whoever the killer was would have come back to move his body somewhere else. If that memory he’d had wasn’t a dream and was in fact a memory, then Hanbin’s body would still be there.
He passed through the gates, searching the forest line for the spot he vaguely remembered being in last night. As he neared, something caught his eye, a splash of color amidst the browns and greens of nature, and his heart sank to his feet, half from exhaustion, half from the feeling of too much emotion overwhelming him at once.
Hanbin’s body lay, golden robes saturated with blood, still and silent on the forest floor.Â
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