The gulley bent north and narrowed until even the wind had to turn sideways to pass. Pines crowded the lip, their roots braided through the dirt like black ropes. The Bellkeeper set a palm to the slope and breathed once, steadying the bells at her wrist.
"Hunters ahead," she said.
"How many?"
"Enough."
He didn't need the ledger to confirm it. The air carried horse sweat, oil, the sour bite of old leather. Somewhere higher, metal tapped stone in a habit only drilled men had. The wolf king's shard warmed once, then cooled, as if the mountain's pulse had slipped out of sync with his.
"We cut left," the Bellkeeper said, "let them pass, circle back—"
"No." Qin Mo looked up the seam of rock. "We teach them to follow the wrong fire."
"Bait?"
"Bait."
Her mouth tipped, not quite a smile. "Dangerous."
"On both sides," he said, and climbed.
The path he chose was a fracture in the ridge, thin enough that shoulders brushed stone. The first ten paces were quiet; the next ten brought him level with the hunters' flank. Four men, two bows unstrung but ready, two with short spears used like walking staffs. Azure Flame's cut of robe, but dyed to vanish in winter scrub. Their handler was close. He could feel command in the way they placed their feet.
Qin Mo set his heel to the crack and drew on Flame Step until the seam sang. He didn't leap. He breathed heat into the rock, into the dry needles, into the thin skin of resin under the bark. Light did not bloom; it spread quiet, a bruise of warmth that promised blaze if someone so much as breathed wrong.
[Environmental setup: volatile ignition line prepared. Risk radius: 9.3 m.]
The Bellkeeper slipped into place below, her bells sleeping against her wrist. "On your mark," she mouthed.
He waited. One of the bowmen shifted. Leather creaked. Another tested his footing and swore under his breath at the ice hidden beneath the pine duff. Qin Mo let the impatience climb their spines.
Then he stood up where they could see him.
"Looking for me?" he called.
Four heads snapped his way. Hands went to string and spear both. Exactly as trained. The nearest hunter snapped a signal. Two moved to fix him; the other two began to circle for a pincer.
Qin Mo took one step back, just enough to show daylight through the gap behind him, and let a narrow lick of flame bleed from his sole into the prepared line.
The ridge lit.
Not a bonfire. A sheet. Resin flashed into a low wall of heat that ran like water along the bruise he'd laid in the needles. The hunters shouted and stumbled backward, pressed in by the ridge and the sudden, disciplined blaze that did not throw sparks, only radiant force. A spear point stabbed through the heat, seeking his thigh by guesswork.
He knocked it aside, twisted the haft, and used the pressure to throw the man into his partner. The second hunter tried to loose an arrow at breath-range. The air in front of Qin Mo shimmered; the fletching crisped and dropped. The shaft clattered to the stone.
"Shift left!" someone barked behind the wall of light. "Push him off the ridge!"
Qin Mo was already moving. He didn't wait to be pushed. He jumped sideways into the narrow run where the fire didn't reach and slid down gravel toward the circling pair. One raised his bow—too slow. Qin Mo cut low at the ankle, pivoted inside the man's fall, and used him as shield against the second's spear thrust. The point punched through leather and thudded into ribs. The man screamed, tried to pull away, and dragged the spear free by instinct.
Qin Mo let him.
He took the shaft mid-pull, reversed it, and drove the butt into the second hunter's throat. The man coughed a wet sound and dropped.
The wall of heat collapsed on his cue, spreading out into harmless warmth. The two penned at the top lunged through, faces flushed red. One came high, one low. He slid between them and clipped the kneecap of the higher with the sword's flat. The joint gave. The low man recovered fast, turned his failed sweep into a hook for Qin Mo's ankle.
Weight met weight. Qin Mo let his foot go—then planted toes and flared a thumb of Flame Step. Heat bucked the hook off his boot. His riposte took the man's forearm across the ulna. Bone cracked. The spear fell. The fight left the man's shoulders like breath.
"Where's your handler?" Qin Mo asked.
The one with the cracked ulna spat blood and no words. His eyes flicked left, involuntary. Qin Mo followed the look.
A figure stood back among the pines, just far enough that torchlight wouldn't touch him if there'd been a torch. He wore no robe cut he recognized—plain cloak, plain blades crossed at the back. But the stillness was Sect-bred. He'd been built in their halls, even if he'd dressed himself afterward.
"Step out," Qin Mo said.
The handler didn't. He turned, two fingers lifting in a signal that should have been too small to read at this distance. Men farther up the ridge moved on it anyway. Not hunters. A different cut of shape.
The Bellkeeper's bells gave one dry click.
"Swarm," she said from somewhere to his right, low enough that it was almost breath.
They came like a carpet unrolling down the slope—chitin and pale fungus and too many legs. The hunters who hadn't fallen held formation for two heartbeats, then broke under the sound. It wasn't loud screaming. It was the whispering scrape of a thousand hooked feet. It goaded the part of the mind that wanted open ground and fire and height.
"Back!" the handler snapped. "Form on—"
The Bellkeeper rang a long note that didn't seem to go anywhere and went everywhere at once. The first rank of the swarm flinched and tucked, legs folding tight. The second rank climbed over them and stalled at the edge of the tone, tasting the air with antennae carved like fine bone.
"Line them," Qin Mo said.
She gave him a look that meant he was assuming too much, then rang again in a pattern that set his molars on edge. The sound cut a shallow lane through the swarm. It held—not because the creatures feared the note, but because it asked them to stop. He could feel the suggestion in his own bones.
The handler tried to use the open lane. He stepped into it with three men tight on his heels.
Qin Mo denied it.
He laid a line of Frost Thread across a flat stone at the lane's mouth and drove heat into it from the other side. The line lifted, fine as hair and bright as old ice. The handler's lead foot found it. His weight went where weight should never go. He didn't fall. He shifted, saved the knee, and reached for his short blade without looking.
Professional. He'd keep the men alive if he could.
Qin Mo met him half a step inside the lane.
They exchanged three moves that mattered and four that didn't. The blade in the handler's hand was Sect-forged, short and meant for control. He tried to bind Qin Mo's edge and walk it out of line. Qin Mo let him think it would work, then reversed the bind with a twist that used the handler's own wrist as fulcrum. The short blade skated off and shaved bark. Qin Mo's follow-through should have taken a slice from the man's ribs.
It didn't.
Cold surged up from the lane, a narrow gust that smelled faintly of river stone. The handler's cloak cracked with frost where Qin Mo's steel would have cut.
An answer from the pines. Pale eyes. Scaled cloak. The frost man had returned to watch his culling.
"Decide," he said, voice carrying in a way voices shouldn't through churned air. "Fire or frost. You cannot run both without bleeding out through the middle."
"Shut him out," the Bellkeeper said between strikes of the bells. "If you listen, you'll pick the wrong winter."
The handler took the distraction and drew blood—a thin line at Qin Mo's left forearm, more insult than injury. Qin Mo bared his teeth at the sting and stepped inside where the short blade lost leverage. He hammered his hilt into the man's sternum. The breath whooped out of him. Qin Mo hooked his heel and dumped the handler into the half-frozen duff.
"Tell Elder Liang," Qin Mo said, low enough for only the handler to hear, "that I found his bells at the bottom of a crack. And they didn't answer."
He shifted the blade a fraction. The handler swallowed whatever reply he had and lifted his chin.
"Do it," the frost man said, amused. "Kill a messenger and bind yourself to a road you can't leave."
Qin Mo didn't. He cut the man's cloak to pin it under a root, broke the short blade across his knee, and stepped away.
"Go," he said. "Tell them I'm done running circles."
The handler stared at him like a man trying to see where the trick was. Then he crawled backward, eyes never leaving Qin Mo's face, and vanished into the pines. The three hunters who could still move peeled after him, stumbling, one clutching a forearm, one limping on a ruined knee.
The swarm tested the Bellkeeper's tone again, bodies quivering with the urge to move. She changed the pattern mid-breath, and the line bowed outward like a reed in wind.
"Not forever," she said through her teeth.
"I only need minutes," Qin Mo said.
"For what?"
He pointed with the tip of his blade. The resin wall he'd laid earlier had left a faint heat print up-slope, invisible until the wind shifted. Now it drew the swarm like a river cut through the forest floor. The creatures turned by degrees, following warmth into a gap between two boulders.
"Now," he said.
The Bellkeeper struck a counter-note. The swarm surged as the sound withdrew. They poured into the gap, a churning dark by the hundreds. Qin Mo dumped heat into the rock seam he'd primed, then dragged Frost Thread through the same crack, forcing the stone to change faster than stone wants to change.
It split.
Not a cave-in. A buckle. The boulders leaned a hand's width closer and kissed, pinching the gap into a stone jaw. The front of the swarm vanished under pressure. The middle hesitated. The back kept pushing.
The forest went very quiet.
Qin Mo let the gap hold, then released the heat so it wouldn't blow outward and take the pines with it. The Bellkeeper set her bells ringing again—not to command, but to soothe. The swarm at the edges stilled, uncertain, then slowly peeled away, choosing easier ground.
The frost man watched them in silence. When he finally spoke, it wasn't to Qin Mo.
"You feed both veins," he said to the Bellkeeper. "You always did like games that end with you at the center."
"Someone has to hold the line," she said.
"Lines break." He looked at Qin Mo. "The shard won't wait for you to feel wise. Feed it soon, or it will choose for you."
[Alignment decision window entering critical range. Shard stability: 67% → 62%.]
Qin Mo felt the drift—subtle, but real—the way a horse begins to favor one foot when a stone lives in the shoe. He could pour fire into the shard now and lock a path he understood. He could starve the fire and take frost's offered control. Or he could try to hang the blade between both and walk the edge until his feet bled.
The frost man turned to go. "When you've had enough of ringing toys, come where the mountain breathes cold," he said. "You'll hear your heart there."
He faded into mist with the ease of a man stepping off a map.
The Bellkeeper let the last tone die and lowered her hand. "We can't linger."
"Because they'll circle?" Qin Mo asked.
"Because you're ticking." She touched two fingers lightly to his chest. The shard answered, a dull heat, then an echoing chill. "Choose before dawn ends."
He looked east. The ridge there had softened from slate to pale ash. The first birds hadn't dared speak yet. Somewhere under the slope, a thin trickle found rock and began its day-long work of turning stone into sand.
"Not here," he said. "Too many eyes."
She nodded and moved. He followed, the two of them threading through the last of the mist until the pines opened on a shelf of black rock that watched a valley of broken grey. A dead tree stood at the shelf's edge, its branches reaching like ribs from a giant's chest.
"Here," she said. "No one rings louder than the wind."
He set the sword across his knees and the shard against his palm. Heat stirred in it, hopeful as a hound. Cold coiled under, patient and inevitable as dark water.
[Final prompt: Infuse Fire / Infuse Frost / Attempt Balance.]
The Bellkeeper stood with her back to him, watching the valley, bells quiet. She wasn't going to speak. She wasn't going to save him from the weight of picking.
Qin Mo drew one breath to the bottom and let it out.
He set his other hand over the shard.
The mountain held still to hear.