There was no way out of the cistern.

After he left the light of the hole in the ceiling Marroo walked for hours through the cramped streets of the underground slum while he tried to think of a way to escape. He looked at the hole from the top of the leaning towers that stood closest to it even though he knew he could never make the jump to despite the extra power his cultivation lent him. He found the wall of the cistern and stared at pipes that breathed just like the ones he’d followed with his father when they came here and followed one of the drainage ditches at the center of a trash filled street until he could squat and stare down into the inky blackness of a well that drained the cistern when it rained.

He stared into the well for a long time, lost himself to it, the endless darkness… until someone dropped a hand on his shoulder.

Marroo broke the man’s hold on sheer reflex, then realized there were others with him. He leapt across the entire six foot span of the hole in front of him and ran into the tangled city. He didn’t look back and didn’t draw his sword even when a man shouted and tried to block his way. Marroo leapt to the rooves of a nearby hovel and sprinted away.

He stayed on the rooftops after that. He wandered, without really seeing the world around him, while he tried to figure out what to do. His stomach rumbled at the stink of garbage and the fumes that wafted from vents and chimneys built into the homes he crossed above.

He found a stall selling rancid smelling fried dough and thought of stealing from it. Other little shadows darted amidst the narrow alleyways that converged on the cart or lurked on the roof opposite Marroo as children his own age watched the cart.

Marroo tried to imagine living here, forever, as they had, and he shivered. Eventually he turned to look for the only escape he could think of. His father said the old man didn’t have long to live. If true, then maybe he wouldn’t have to kill him.

Marroo heard laughter as he approached the old man’s hovel. The laughter of the underground was different from the kind of laughter he heard in sight of the Core, tinged, as it was, with a sort of hysteria who laugh in order to acknowledge that there was nothing really here to laugh about, but this laughter differed even more. This laugh possessed a note of danger that made Marroo think of monsters in the night, not under a bed or in a closet, but looming over you and making plans for the ways it would flay you and serve your organs.

He stopped and listened as others joined in, like predators circling some prey in the street below. He heard a meaty thump and a weak voice beg for mercy before a ragged cough overcame it.

Marroo froze as laughter answered the request, followed by a second meaty thump.

Before he knew what he was doing Marroo found himself on the floor of the cistern, hidden from the old man’s usual hovel by a narrow alleyway as his breath tangled in his chest.

He stopped himself when his hand found the grip of his father’s sword. What was he doing? If the man died he could go home. If they killed him… if it was him.

The breath locked in the sword stirred against Marroo’s palm.

“Watch this.”

Marroo squeezed his eyes shut as something struck the victim and he howled in pain.

The men laughed.

Marroo opened his eyes to find himself suddenly beyond the bend in the narrow street. Half a dozen shadows stood around the old man’s crumpled form, all of them far bigger than Marroo. One of them kicked the beggar in the side as their laughter echoed from the walls of the alleyway.

“Stop!”

The word jerked from Marroo as he watched the kick land. Before he could blink, one of the shadows held a pistol in its hand, pointed in Marroo’s direction.

“What’s it to you?” The shadow asked. It twitched the pistol lazily. “Move on, before we decide to add you to the menu.”

Marroo took a half step backwards at the menacing tone but froze when the old man let out a tormented cough and moaned something inarticulate. When he froze, the man with the pistol abruptly stepped towards Marroo. “But say, ain’t you awful young to be out here all alone? I don’t hear your gang anywhere on the rooves either. Where’s your pals hey?”

Marroo shuffled backwards.

“Don’t. You. Move.” The shadow ordered him.

Marroo stopped, and the shadow paced to within a couple of feet of him, pistol glinting in the cistern’s perpetual twilight.

Two silver eyes regarded him from the shadow’s face. “What do you think Ostropal? You hear this kids gang anywhere?”

“He’s alone.” A voice said behind Marroo.

Marroo whipped around to see a man emerge from the shadows of the alley Marroo dropped into from the roof.

“Just him.” Ostropol said. “Shirt looks new. Don’t think he’s from around here.”

A steel drum clattered as the one of the shadows jumped it to get behind Marroo on the main street and the others moved to cut off Marroo’s routes of escape. He put his hand on his sword.

“What have you got there boyo?” The man with the pistol asked. “Is that a…” his eyes widened as he caught sight of the sword hilt, “Say, say! A sword? Or is it just a toy knife? I’ll bet it’s a toy ain’t it.”

The pistol, which he’d held lazily in Marroo’s direction, straightened as he pulled his eyes away from Marroo’s hip. “Now I’ll tell you how it’s going to go.” The humor was gone. Now. It made one of the other men in the group giggle behind Marroo as he pulled something from the trash heaps around them.

“That sword is coming with us, you hear? So, you want what’s good for you, you’ll drop it right there and then strip off them nice new clothes you got too and lay em on the ground next to it. Maybe, we let you go without bustin out your teeth and selling you to the sisters after that. You make one move to do otherwise, and I’ll put a hole through your liver makes dying seem the next best thing to dying quickly.”

Shadows moved towards Marroo and he glanced around at the six other men that stood around him. They towered over him. Titans in the dark.

“You ain’t got no other options.” The man with the pistol said, “So don’t take more’n a second thinking about it. I ain’t gonna give you no count to get there.”

Marroo looked at the nearby rooftop, then at the pistol in the leader’s hand.

“Don’t shoot him in the face.” One of the others said. “I know a man who’ll pay good money for his teeth, especially unbroken ones.”

Silver eyes, as hard and sharp as steel, met Marroo’s above the gleaming pistol barrel.

“Nice and easy.” The shadow told him. “No nee-“

The sword flew from its scabbard. Breath churned in Marroo’s chest and hurtled down his channels as he whipped the sword forward in an arch, then projected his spirit into the weapon’s edge.

Marroo could not project blades with his spirit, as his father could. Until he’d opened his externalis meridians he couldn’t even project his breath beyond his body. Since doing so he’d been able to strike targets up to three feet away and even channel his spirit into the practice swords he used with his father, but never more.

Normally a projection simply amplified the effect of the movement he projected it with. Projected as he grabbed something and it would never be able to leave your grip, project as you struck, and the force would be multiplied. The effect grew with each opened meridian until it was no longer even necessary for a cultivator to move in order to impact the world around them with their spirit.

Projections, his father told him once, could be thought of as manifestations of a cultivator’s will, but that changed when breath was projected into an item, as the item itself imprinted its purpose, its will, if an item could be said to have a will, as his father claimed, upon the projection until the projection echoed with its own design.

A whip struck. A shield blocked. A hammer shaped. The weaker the cultivator, or the weaker the weapon’s connection to it’s “icon” the weaker the effect. When he swung, Marroo only hoped to knock the man in front of him aside so he would miss his shot, but his sword was the weapon of an Adept, a man who’d stamped his life in the mold of the Icon of the Sword until his soul was as sharp as any blade.

The air rippled as Marroo’s spirit transformed along the edge of the sword. It shot out in a half moonbeam strike so fine that it was invisible in the cavern twilight.

The man in front of him simply fell apart. His top half gurgled as it parted at the chest from his legs. His hand spasmed and the air split in a beam of golden fire that screamed past Marroo’s shoulder to cut a glowing line in one of the hovels along the street, narrowly missing the shadow that lunged for Marroo from behind.

Marroo moved on instinct as hands seized at his arm. “Feather Strikes”, his father called the Kata, because the blade whipped in little arcs close to the body. The man behind him screamed as his hand was severed at the wrist and he staggered away as the other shadows converged.

For a moment everything was flashing steel and dancing limbs. Marroo reacted, numbly, to each of his opponent’s strikes, with katas drilled into him since he was a child. He kept waiting for them to turn and run, but they threw themselves at him instead and he let his sword move for him.

A fist flew for his face and he impaled it at the elbow before he kicked its owner in the knee. He knocked aside a steel bar swung in his direction, once, twice, a third time. Marroo narrowly stopped himself from following through with a kata that would have ripped out his throat. He blocked a fourth time and slid his sword down the bar to sever the man’s fingers but instead of fleeing, the man bellowed in rage and pain as he scopped up the bar with his good hand to lurch back into the fight.

A man who must have seen the way Marroo took care of their leader threw a brick at Marroo’s head that he barely dodged before he ducked beneath the arms of another man who tried to grab him.

Marroo felt his body move as he transitioned seamlessly between his third cycle of steps and the one his father called “talking with fools”. He dodged a second missile. Chopped off the hand of the man with the metal bar, then flicked a projection down the length of his sword at the man throwing bricks. Body parts splattered as they fell. Warmth splattered him and Marroo felt his soul shake at the touch, even as he broke the hold of a man who grabbed his wrist and drove the blade through his forehead at the eye.

The sword shouldn’t have gone through, he thought as he stood with the body impaled on his blade. It should have, pushed him, the way it pushed the other children at the tournament. It should have knocked him back.

He wanted to pull the sword away, but felt himself frozen by fear of what would happen when he did.

Splashing footsteps carried someone away at a sprint, but Marroo didn’t even look up, he just stared at the empty shadow of the man stuck on the end of his father’s sword and shivered until his sword arm gave out and the body slid down its length to the cistern floor.

Someone coughed, and Marroo pulled himself together enough to stumble towards the old man still curled on his pallet.

The sword clattered as Marroo dropped it next to him to kneel beside the old man. Even in the dark, he could see the blood pooling from a wound in the old man’s side. He could hear it, thanks to his cultivation, as bubbling in his chest as he coughed.

The old man whimpered and pulled away when Marroo touched him. “Please.” He coughed hoarsely into the crook of his arm. “No more. Please.”

Marroo looked for something he could give the beggar but there was nothing. He hadn’t eaten, himself, in several days, and the only water around trickled through a filthy dike.

He looked at the sword. Thought of his father’s mercy.

“Please.” The old man whispered again.

Marroo knelt and reached for the old man’s hands. The beggar jerked away, but when no pain followed, old bony fingers wrapped themselves tight around Marroo’s, as though they were the most important thing in the world while the old man began to weep.

“I’m sorry.” Marroo said. He looked up at the ceiling and the beam of core light that fell swirled with dust in the center of the cistern.

“It hurts.” The beggar rasped. “It hurts so much.”

Marroo squeezed his hand to tell the old man it would be alright and the old man squeezed back even harder. Marroo thought of the men he’d just killed and closed his eyes while memories of blood welled up in his mind.

“It doesn’t matter.” He said, and remembered his father’s edict as he planted the agony stone in his hand.

“The pain doesn’t matter.”

“Please.” The old man said again, as the grip on Marroo’s hands weakened. “Don’t go. I don’t want-“ he coughed, “don’t want, to be alone.”

Marroo held his hand, and remained by his side until the end.