The bedroom melted around Thakur as he waited for the Sword Adept to spring the trap beneath him. His aura fumed around him in his spiritual vision and wallpaper peeled from the walls in slow curling tongues as the glue corrupted underneath it. The bed springs sagged and popped beneath him as they rusted and bits of the ceiling paneling dripped and crumbled to the floor around him.

The lead ball in his hand would hold no more of his spirit without beginning to crumble or corrupting the gunpowder in the arquebus. He checked the pistol over as he stuffed the ball into the last of its four barrels and made sure that the rust from his spirit’s influence on it hadn’t gummed up any of its working pieces. Made sure the small red hot wires still glowed in their hammers, then settled the quad barrel across his lap and focused his spirit on the handle of the door in front of him.

The decay of the room around him slowed as his breath contracted into the handle. Brown spots of corrosion bloomed on the handle, turned black, spread, while the flow of blood from his eyes stopped. He pulled a disintegrating handkerchief from a threadbare pocket and wiped at the stain on his cheeks while he pushed away his own spirit and settled in to wait.

He knew when the sword adept arrived. He felt him with his third eye, had always felt him, like a clot of broken glass that was also, somehow, a beacon larger than any tower in the city, felt the hurricane of knives look in his direction, then heard the screams.

The guards beneath Thakur had orders to flee when the adept arrived, but they never had that chance. The adept didn’t even bother using the front door, just plowed through one of the walls. Thakur clutched his pistol as the house shook. Sunflares snapped beneath him and Arquebuses boomed. A grenade went off blowing holes in the floor in one corner of Thakur’s room. Men screamed, through it all. Insult, orders, agony. Their voices mingled until they sounded like a single the gibbered in terror as it’s many mouths were silenced.

The last of the guards to die died messily. He’d carried a bugle arquebus, if Thakur was any judge by the sound. It boomed as the adept found him, and the building trembled as shot from the muzzle tore through wall and support structures alike. He didn’t scream when the adept finished him. His shout of defiance turned to a gurgling wail that went on and on.

Thakur closed his eyes while sweat slicked his hands and he felt the adept prowl through the house. He didn’t feel like a man to Thakur’s spiritual vision. He felt like a knife.

The stairs groaned as the knife followed the path of corruption Thakur had laid in his path. Just like the first time, Thakur thought as he felt him moving down the hall towards his room through puddles of corruption left like breadcrumbs on the floor. Other doors opened as the adept cleared them and the soldier gurgled and thrashed beneath them. The footsteps grew closer and Thakur opened his eyes to focus on the handle he’d imbued with so much of his spirit. It was black and shriveled, bits of it sifting to the floor as it dissolved. Thakur moved his spirit, focused it on the wall to one side of the door which began to blacken and steam while he pointed his pistol towards the door.

The footsteps stopped outside.

Thakur’s pistol barked. It spat flame and smoke as he unloaded the first barrel into the door. The adept grunted on the other side as a splintered hole appeared in the door. The spirit beyond the door spasmed and the door blew to fragments, and then, Thakur stared into silver eyes that might have been a mirror of his own only a few years before. Before they became bloodshot from his own breath.

Thakur blew, not with his chest, but with his soul. His aura flooded the room and the sword adept stumbled back as the ceiling crumbled into a rain of dust and the peeling wallpaper shriveled before it could even begin to peel. He swept a cut at Thakur that died halfway through the sea of corruption that surrounded him and Thakur emptied the second barrel of his arquebus at him. He watched the bullet shatter on the storm of blades that pushed back against the poison pouring from Thakur. Splinters flew from the doormantle and the house groaned under the combined assault of both sharpened breath and the corruption of Thakur’s spirit. His third shot met the same end as the second, but through the smoke Thakur spotted the blood running from a wound across the adept’s side.

Thakur didn’t stay.

He threw himself from his seat just as a hardened spike of spiritual blades rammed through his wall of poison to cut a long gash in the bed he’d sat on and the wall and floor beneath. A window stood open at one side of the room and Thakur dove through it onto the balcony beyond. The window and the wall behind him exploded as blades chased him but Thakur hurled himself skyward with all the power of a full cultivator, and all the grace of someone new to his powers.

His legs burned as he channeled his spirit through his own flesh. He slammed into the side of the tenement building across the street instead of on top of it and almost knocked the wind from his own chest. He caught himself by a bundle of cables just in time and yanked to throw himself the rest of the way to the roof as the sword adept leapt after him.

Thakur met him with a surge of venom and the last bullet from his arquebus, then he was running across the city’s lower buildings while the burning in his limbs sank deeper and deeper and the sword adept fell further and further behind.

It had been easier in the dregs, in the before, if more dangerous.

“The path to victory,” he’d remembered his father saying, “lay in preparing the battleground before hand.”

He’d said it when he showed Thakur the process they used to prepare water for purification. He’d been fond of such analogies, making himself out to be a soldier when he was, in fact, no more than an exalted technician responsible for cleaning up the waste of a city larger than his own.

“You cannot remove poisons from the water while there are still strongholds drifting in it,” he’d said when he showed Thakur the sludge of stinking particulates pumped out of the Seventh Pit into the same waste disposal hole that the Eighth Pit’s poisons were dumped into. Put another way, Thakur thought as he made his preparations for the gunpowder adept while the pumps cycled like thunder at the start of a new day, if you want to poison someone, you’ve got to get them swimming in it first.

The pipes that moved the sludge from the Seventh to the dump ran like a highway through a large empty section of the cistern that served as the Eight Pit Sect’s home. The pipes were old, original to the maze of tunnels that predated anyone living in them. They snaked up from the lower level through branching pipeways sealed off by the Eight Pit’s sect when they needed them to transport hazardous fluids.

No one seemed to know what the pipes were originally intended for, any of them. Drainage was the typical adage, but Thakur knew what drainage pipes looked like, and nothing in the darkness of the dregs looked like it was intended for simple drainage. There were places he recognized, in his few trips between the levels of the eight pits, as pneumatic valves, and where his father had pointed out the ancient marks of machinery long absented from their place amidst the tangle of subterranean tunnels and pipes, machinery that might, according to him have served as mechanical valves when the tunnels were in use according to their original function.

The Eight Pits Sect had modified most of the pipes they used for moving water. They’d sealed off branching tunnels and added on long tubes of reinforced terra cotta or cement trenches in the lower levels, to control the flow of runoff the sect made their living cleaning.

Three such pipes shot from the wall well above Thakur’s lake and ran in a short loop to the dump pit through a corner of the city that hadn’t existed when the pipes were new. The sludge pipes had a pump at one end, deep deep below, and another amidst the tangled workings of the underground maze, but they depended as much upon the hydraulic pressure of all that liquid moving downslope on the last leg of its journey to keep the flow of sludge from stalling. During dry seasons of the above, when water came from only a few pipes, even that wasn’t always enough.

Three water towers stood along the length of the pipes for such occasions. Truthfully they were designed to serve the sect’s drinking water needs, but when the sewage stalled they could also be used to flush the pipes and get the sewage moving again. The pipes were designed to run water only one way, aggressively designed to do so. The sect had deep seated fears of contamination, even among those members who had little to do with the purification process, but any pipe that ran water in one direction could be… broken… to run sludge in its opposite, with the right kinds of hydraulic pressure.

Over the course of a cylce, Thakur did just that to the smallest of the water towers. It stood in what was once a slum district of the city, fenced off and usually patrolled at least once a cycle by the sect’s peace keepers and once every ten cycles by Thakur to make sure it was still in working order. When Thakur jammed the valves meant to keep sludge from moving up the pipes into the fifty thousand gallon tank of the tower those slums were gone, reduced to a shattered ruin of smoking embers and heat warped sheet metal that stood like a buffer between the tower and what remained of the city.

He put on the oilskins his father had left him before he opened the valve that would flush the tower into the burning slum. He stood in the flow, up to his knees, but protected by the dry-suit, until the water ran black with the sludge of the seventh pit. He let that run too, probably for far too long, before he closed the valve and clambered up the ladder to the top of the tower. He watched the liquid soak into the hardened mud of this part of the cistern’s floor.

When it shone from puddles for a hundred yards around, he sent the deep red familiar he’d been given by Anand across the smoldering city and waited. An hour later a ground transport appeared at the edges of the slum, running dark as it made its approach.

The transport would have been silent, if it weren’t for its tracks. The tracks screamed as they churned through the rubble of the slums and that squeal grew only louder as it began to kick up the sludge around the tower. Thakur waded through the mud to the Vehicle and found three men inside, one at the wheel, another poking from the roof with a massive sunflare rifle at his shoulder, and a third at the back with a hand over his mouth and nose as he gazed in horror at the wasteland around him.

“What died here?” The man asked as Thakur waded through the inch deep mud to the tracked car.

“An entire city.” Thakur replied. “Did you bring the explosives?”

The man in the back nodded and thumped a couple of crates stacked on one side of the interior. “Got em here,” he said, “been moving em around constantly, be glad to get rid of em. I’m glad you warned us not to get out. That muck smells like I’d never get it out of my shoes.”

Thakur’s laugh was a bit too loud and wavered in the wasteland. “I hope not.” He replied. He put a shaking hand on one of the crates and pulled. “We should hurry.”