Chapter 33 – Fire in the Heart of the Sect
The first blast hadn't even stopped echoing before the Cloudsky Sword Sect moved.
Array lines carved into the arena's jade tiles flared from dull etching to blazing script. Barricade screens rose around the viewing tiers, and messenger talismans streaked like comets toward the peaks. Supply caches clicked open. Disciples—outer, inner, core—pivoted from spectators to defenders in a heartbeat, racing to pre-assigned posts drilled into them since initiation.
On the high dais, the Sect Leader stood. His aura settled over the arena like a mountain, steadying panicked hearts.
"Formations Three and Five—rotate inscriptions. Inner gate squads, to the eastern pavilions." His voice carried everywhere at once.
Prepared.
And yet—wrong.
A tremor rippled underfoot. The outer barrier—supposed to harden like crystal under attack—shivered… then thinned, light draining from it as if drunk by an unseen mouth.
The Sect Leader's eyes narrowed. "Outside hands," he said softly. "And—"
He felt it then: the signature of a sub-array woven inside the wall, keyed to Cloudsky's own strokes, twisting them sideways.
From within.
His gaze cut to the elders' seats. Qiu Wansheng's chair was empty.
The mountain in his aura sharpened. "All peaks: assume breach. Engage."
---
The Broken Finals
On the ring, Lin Xuan and Bai Liang stood amid drifting dust, the final bout all but forgotten as robed figures in red-black dropped from the sky, blades wailing with pitch-black talismans.
Two came at Lin Xuan from opposite sides, one low with twin daggers, one high with a curved sword whose edge hummed like a struck bell.
The Blackstorm Pike snapped up. Lin's first parry caught the curved blade and sent its force into the tiles through the haft's grounded array. The second strike never landed—his spear butt hammered the dagger-man's ribs, lightning blooming along the blow. The man spasmed, collapsed.
Bai Liang slid past Lin's shoulder, saber cutting a long crescent that turned a third attacker's thrust aside and opened his throat in the same motion. He didn't look back.
"Truce," Bai Liang said, eyes flint-hard.
Lin's mouth quirked. "As long as they stand."
They shifted naturally into each other's gaps—spear's reach and saber's bite—back to back as more demonic sect cultivators poured into the arena.
---
Senior Brother Wen
In the colonnade beyond the ring, Senior Brother Wen moved like ink flowing across silk. His sword drew straight lines through chaos; wherever the edge passed, a body fell, demonic talismans flickering out.
A masked enemy met him—cultivation equal, blade practice honed in darker halls. Their first clash shook dust from the rafters. The masked man's qi stank of cold iron and rotten flowers; Wen's was clean as winter air.
"You are not my first Cloudsky swordsman," the mask said.
Wen tilted his blade. "Then you should know how this ends."
They vanished in a storm of sparks down the corridor, blows ringing like temple bells.
---
Junior Sister Mu
Junior Sister Mu sprinted through the Alchemy Supply Pavilion as a squad of demonic adepts hit the far doors. Her hands moved faster than speech—one flick kindled furnace coals to life with a breath of flame intent, another scattered Ignis Pollen from an open crate into the air.
"Close your mouths," she barked at two terrified hall attendants. They obeyed without thinking.
A palm. A twist. The pollen flashed to white flame midair, blossoming along the pavilion ceiling in a rolling sheet that dropped screaming intruders to their knees.
A heavier presence stepped through the smoke—no robe insignia, no mask, but the weight of an elder. He walked through her fire as if through rain, his qi an oily darkness that made the herbs on the shelves wither.
Mu's jaw clenched. She slid a cauldron lid into her off-hand like a shield and pulled heat from every burning brazier at once. The room's temperature spiked; glass cracked on shelves like thin ice.
"Little alchemist," the man smiled. "Put away your toys."
She did not answer. The air around her bloomed into a sun.
---
Outer Disciples
At the south stair, a clutch of outer disciples—boys and girls who had been loud in the stands that morning—braced against a tide of lesser attackers. One of them, the same youth who had once sneered that Lin Xuan would fold in round two, planted his feet and met a charging brute head-on with a spear too long for him and hands that shook anyway.
"Hold!" he shouted to the line behind him, voice breaking and brave.
The brute's axe came down. The spear bent, then held. He bellowed—more fear than fury—and shoved back, and beside him a senior girl's dagger found the brute's armpit and slid home.
They didn't see themselves as heroes. They just didn't run.
---
The Sect Leader
Array masters unfolded formation flags in a blur beside the Sect Leader, sweat bright on their brows as scripts spun and locked. Rows of protective seals re-lit along the inner walls, this time isolated, refusing any handshake with the compromised outer ring.
"Sever the twins," the Sect Leader ordered. "House the battle under the inner veil."
A pair of captains knelt. "Yes, Sect Master."
The earth bucked.
Something slammed the inner veil from below. Not claws. Not a blade. A fist of coalesced blood-qi, driven through a shafted tunnel carved up from the mountain's roots.
A second strike followed it, not at the same point but at the harmonics—whoever was punching knew formation music.
The Sect Leader's eyes went colder than steel. "Who," he said, not really a question.
No one answered. They didn't need to.
---
Lin Xuan & Bai Liang
Back-to-back, they killed efficiently.
Lin's Aegis of Shifting Skies layered and relayered—a wind membrane shaving poison mists to harmless eddies, earth drinking blunt strikes, water smothering oil-fire talismans before they could cling.
"Left," Bai Liang snapped. Lin felt, then moved—space kinked at the spear's tip as Heavenstorm Lance skipped a handspan forward and found a throat trying to hide behind a comrade.
A more refined aura slid through the melee. Its owner smiled as he stepped onto the ring—a demonic sect protector by bearing if not by title. He flicked two fingers; a razor-thin thread of qi hissed toward Lin's eye like a needle.
Lin turned his head a hair; the thread nicked his cheekbone. His mantle drank the follow-up palm strike without tearing, but the shock stung his ribs.
"Take him," Bai Liang said.
"No," Lin answered, spear already moving. "Together."
They went.
---
Senior Brother Wen (again)
The masked foe adapted. Wen adapted faster.
Five exchanges in, the man's blade found Wen's sleeve. Seven in, Wen's found the man's shoulder and stayed there, held by muscle and decision. Ten in, Wen's stance changed—not Cloudsky's orthodox line but a broken rhythm he'd hated learning and kept anyway for days like this.
The eleventh stroke ended it. The mask skittered across the stones and came to rest in a patch of spilled lamplight. The face beneath was young. They always were.
Wen lowered his sword. "Next."
---
Junior Sister Mu (again)
The demonic elder's darkness pressed down, flattening heat, drowning flame in blank cold.
"Yield the hall," he said. "Run to your masters. Perhaps they'll save you."
Mu smiled like a knife. "I am a master here."
She snapped a Thunder-Fire Seal onto the cauldron and fed it every scrap of remaining coal.
The cauldron howled, jumped, and burst into a tornado of white flame that ate the elder's shadow. He raised a hand and the tornado stalled—but when he looked back at Mu, she was already in the air above him, her hand a bright brand. She stamped it onto his shoulder and detonated the mark.
He reeled, black blood spattering the tile. The shadow returned a blink later, angrier.
She didn't wait to admire the damage. She grabbed the two attendants by their collars and ran, her fire layering the hall behind her in a narrowing throat.
---
The Sect Leader (again)
"Seal the eastern node!" a formation master cried. "It's bleeding!"
Three more strikes hammered the inner veil in the space of a breath. The Sect Leader stepped forward, palm rising. A ring of force expanded from his hand, sank into the stone, and the mountain itself seemed to take a breath and settle.
The shock of the next blow still came—but its teeth were blunted.
He drew air. "Danfeng—your alchemists to triage. Heng—pull your duelists to the east breach. I will handle the root."
He looked once more at Qiu's empty chair, eyes unreadable. Then he blurred into motion and was gone, a streak cutting toward the heart of the sect's foundations.
High above, that same black bird circled lazily in a widening spiral. No one had time to notice.
---
Everywhere at Once
On the ring, Lin Xuan's spear left a curving trail of lightning as it met the demonic protector's blade-work. Bai Liang's saber chopped the man's footwork to pieces, forcing him to abandon elegance for survival.
In the colonnade, Senior Brother Wen stepped over a body and met the next wave.
In the burning pavilion, Mu smashed open a wall keg of spirit water and turned steam into a screen that bought them twenty heartbeats more life.
At the south stair, the outer disciples who had once laughed at Lin Xuan found that their hands shook less after the first kill, and less after the second.
And under the mountain, something with a fist of blood-qi hit the inner veil again, and again, in a patient rhythm that said it had all night.
The Cloudsky Sword Sect was very prepared.
The catastrophe came anyway.