“Go away! We’re not accepting visitors!”

The messenger jumped in surprise, he hadn’t expected to be rejected before he’d had a chance to even announce himself. Of course, that’s because Rika had seen him coming from the roof of her family dojo, then sensed his approach with her domain.

“Pardon me, miss, but I am here to deliver a message to the Takeda clan.”

She knew why he was here. The banner he carried was easily recognizable. That heartless bitch.

“I don’t care! Take it back to Lady Hayakawa and tell her to come here herself.”

The messenger looked around nervously.

“Erm, that’s uh...I really have to deliver this message, miss.”

Takeda Rika sighed in exasperation. She didn’t have time for this, and it was a distraction she didn’t need. Rika was already in the middle of sparring with Chiyo and her grandfather, and it was hard enough to focus on those without dealing with this idiot too. She carefully split her focus even further—a fourth was really pushing it, but it’s not like the third was taking up much effort just yelling at the poor Hayakawa messenger through the gate. Her doppelganger manifested right behind the man, and he practically jumped out of his skin when she snatched the missive out of his hand.

“There! You’ve delivered your message, now go away.”

“What? How did—? But you were—I mean, uh, I’m supposed to bring back a response.”

Rika rolled her eyes, tearing the delicately written letter to pieces right in front of him and scattering them across the ground. She put her hands on her hips and glared at the man.

“You tell your Lady Hayakawa that if she has anything to say to me, she can come say it to my face. Tell her that I haven’t forgotten.”

The man swallowed nervously and opened his mouth to respond, but before he could get a word out, Rika had already vanished, leaving him to scratch his head in confusion.

Her grandfather, Takeda Keiji, laughed as he ducked under a wide kick and swept her leg out from under her without actually moving his own.

“What’s the matter, my girl? You seem agitated. Is our visitor bothering you?”

Rika reached up to grab an invisible handhold in the air to stop herself from falling, twisting impossibly in the air to avoid a flurry of invisible blows as her grandfather stepped back to avoid her retaliation, his hands remaining behind his back.

“I’m fine!”

Her snarled response rang hollow even to her own ears. Of course she was agitated. That stupid, hard-headed, ice-cold, bitch had the nerve to—

Chiyo took advantage of Rika’s distraction to tackle one of Rika’s bodies to the ground, and her grandfather chose the same moment to step forward and hit her other body with a straight kick—an actual kick, not a telekinetic projection. Rika managed to out-wrestle her little sister, but the copy that had gone down to her grandfather was a lost cause. He was already following up with a series of strikes that would have killed her if she had actually been there.

Rika’s copy dissipated into nothing as she entered the training courtyard. Her sister desperately tapped on her other copy’s hand in surrender.

“Ow! Ow! Rika, you win! Lemme go!”

Rika let that one vanish as well, recovering some of the essence that she’d spent to create it.

“I think that’s enough for today, guys. I need some time to meditate and recover. Grandpa, was it really necessary to destroy that copy? It’s a lot harder for me to get the essence back when you do that.”

Her grandfather frowned.

“Rika, this new technique of yours is formidable, but it doesn’t make you invincible. Battle always carries a risk of death, and I think you’re beginning to lose sight of that. If it had been a real fight, and that had been your real body—that would have been it.”

Rika stomped her foot angrily.

“I know that! You really think that I don’t understand just how dangerous the world is!? After dad? After—”

Rika could feel the tears welling in her eyes. She turned away and tried not to think about the looks of concern in her family’s eyes. Her grandfather sighed.

“Of course you do. I’m sorry for suggesting otherwise. I only mean to say that you fight too recklessly. Your technique allows you to take greater risks, but it should be done in moderation. You’ve made great progress in creating and controlling multiple copies, but your focus—”

“I know already!”

Rika cut her grandfather off with a shout, wiping at her eyes. She wasn’t in the mood for his criticisms, no matter how right he was. Her grandfather sighed.

“It’s been almost a year, Rika. You need to move on.”

Rika whirled around on her grandpa, her anger briefly overcoming her grief.

“They’re not dead! They are still out there somewhere and that—she doesn’t even care! It was another Hayakawa messenger, you know. She wants me! Because she thinks that her first choices are dead, and I’m the next best thing. If Ishihara hadn’t run off to Goryeo, she’d probably be hounding after him as well.”

Her grandfather scratched his head awkwardly.

“Typically one should be honored to have a member of the shogunate so personally interested in them. Would it really kill you to respond to her?”

Rika scoffed irritably.

“She doesn’t care about me. I’m just a weapon to her—no, not even that. I’m more like a blacksmith—she wants me to create her weapons. After her family so shamelessly took advantage of Master Ienaga being stuck on the front line to—”

“Rika! Mind your tongue! The Ienaga clan submitted themselves to vassalization by the Hayakawas, as vassals of Ienaga, that makes us beholden to Hayakawa as well. Do not impugn their honor, even privately, am I understood?”

Rika gritted her teeth. She loved her grandpa but when he wasn’t goofing off or making an embarrassment of himself he could be so—single-minded. He didn’t know how to handle emotions, and Rika’s had been running particularly high recently. She could still remember the weeks after her father had died—her grandfather had thrown her into the most grueling training of her life because he had no idea how to handle grief.

“Fine! Whatever. I’m going to meditate. If another Hayakawa messenger shows up for me, tell them to fuck off.”

Her grandfather tried to tell her off for her language, but she was already gone. She’d never really been there. She was—as she had been the entire time—already in her room meditating, a thin sheen of sweat covering her body. Maintaining so many doppelgangers took a lot out of her, and she was constantly trying to expand her control, range, and power. She wasn’t afraid to admit that she wasn’t much better at handling emotions than her grandfather.

Over the last year since the descent of the gods, Rika had been focused entirely on training. She almost never left her room with her real body except on the rare occasions that she needed to eat. The mana around the dojo was fairly sparse compared to the academy, but even Rika had learned some of the more basic formations that aided mana flow, and there weren’t exactly a wealth of mages competing to tap the local leylines with their own formations. It was enough that she could alternate between meditating and training her body without having to rest much to wait for the mana in the air to replenish itself, but it still took her a long time to fully recover after losing a clone.

A few days later Rika was disturbed from one of her rare moments of rest by a knock on her door. She heard Chiyo’s voice calling her through the door, she sounded nervous.

“Rika, you have a visitor!”

Takeda Rika slowly rose from her futon, grumbling at having been woken up. Sleep was a rare treat for her these days, and it sucked having it disturbed.

“It better not be another one of those Hayakawa morons. I’ve already told them, if she wants to talk to me—”

“Then I should meet you in person, yes. I’ve received your response, Miss Takeda.”

Rika froze as Hayakawa Kaede walked into her room as if she owned the place. In a roundabout way, she kind of did. After the shock wore off, Rika just sat back down on her futon and scoffed.

“I should have known you’d pull something like this. What do you want, Hayakawa?”

Hayakawa glanced around the messy room with a frown, her nose wrinkling with disgust.

“Have you really been locked up in here doing closed-door training all year? Couldn’t you have at least taken a bath?”

Rika blushed, stammering in protest.

“I-I take baths! It just smells like that because I exercise in here! Did you just come here to insult me?”

Hayakawa shook her head.

“No, I came here because I need your help. I have an offer for you.”

“Tsk, well you can shove it up your—”

“I’m sorry, Rika.”

Rika paused, digging in her ear with a finger. She definitely hadn’t heard that right.

“Pardon me?”

Hayakawa sighed, and now that Rika paid closer attention she seemed...stressed. Dark circles under her eyes, strands of red hair falling loose from her ponytail, a less rigid posture than usual. She wasn’t disheveled—but to anyone who knew her, the fact that her appearance wasn’t immaculate was worrying. She approached and sat down on a mostly-clean cushion, meeting Rika’s gaze purposefully.

“I said I'm sorry. I apologize. I have had a year to reflect on my actions, and I realize that I’ve been—a poor friend. When Lee Jia and An Eui died—”

“They’re not dead!”

Hayakawa bit her lip, but tilted her head in concession.

“When they disappeared—I should not have been so quick to write them off. I was scared, and not just of the demons. I feared my own feelings. I worried that I might be emotionally compromised. Lee Jia and An Eui were my friends as well as yours—I was just too stubborn to admit it.”

Rika was stunned by the confession. She’d always assumed that Hayakawa Kaede really was the ice-queen that she presented herself as, and this was a side of her that Rika had never seen. It still wasn’t enough to forgive her, though.

“You left them for dead—refused to organize a search. Then, the moment that we were free of danger you had the gall to start recruiting replacements! All you cared about was getting your unified cultivators so that you could train your new army. Ishihara made the right move, running away to Goryeo.”

Hayakawa grimaced.

“I was...hasty in my decision. I tried to act as rationally as I could, but I failed to account for the feelings of others. I do at least stand by what I said about needing a new generation of soldiers. Qin is growing more aggressive, their new divine backers have emboldened them and Master Ienaga isn’t enough to hold them back anymore.”

Rika shook her head.

“I don’t care. I’m not training your soldiers, Hayakawa. Didn’t Jia already teach you everything you need, anyway?”

Hayakawa gave her a flat stare.

“Lee Jia certainly tried to teach us, yes.”

Rika couldn’t help but chuckle. She fondly recalled the time that Lee Jia and Eun-eun had tried to walk her through awakening her mana sense.

“Okay, fair enough. I’m still not doing it, though.”

“I know. That’s not why I’ve come to you. I—no, Yamato needs you. It has to be you. At this point even if we did have an army of unified cultivators in training, we wouldn’t survive long enough to make use of them. Qin is preparing for war—proper war, not the border skirmishes that Master Ienaga has been busy dealing with. We’re going to lose. The only way we survive is if we can establish an alliance with Goryeo.”

Rika frowned in confusion.

“What does this have to do with me?”

“I’ll be travelling there myself to treat with the Queen at the end of the year. I want you to come with me to assist with the talks.”

“I’m not a diplomat! Why the hell would you want me to—”

She cut herself off, her eyes growing wide with understanding.

“Oh, you bitch! You want me to try to get Eun-eun on our side! You just want to use me to use her!”

Hayakawa shook her head in denial.

“No! Your friendship with Seong Eunae is crucial, but it’s more than that. You weren’t just friends with Princess Seong, but Lee Jia, An Eui, and Hyeong Daesung as well. You were even on friendly terms with Kim Yongsun, who didn’t get along with anyone. Frankly, you might be the country’s foremost expert on Goryeon culture, and you seem to have a natural affinity for getting along with half-spirits.”

Rika buried her face in her hands. This was why people called their country barbaric or savage.

“That’s really sad, Hayakawa.”

Hayakawa let out an exasperated huff.

“I know, but the fact remains, you’re our best hope. Please? It would be a chance to meet your old friends again.”

Rika pinched the bridge of her nose. She couldn’t believe she was letting Hayakawa talk her into this. What would Yoshika do?

“Alright Hayakawa, I’ll hear you out. I’m not agreeing right away, but I’m willing to listen to what you have to offer in exchange.”

The look of relief on Hayakawa’s face seemed to almost wash away the subtle hints of distress that had been marring her features.

“Of course! Let’s talk.”