Marroo was a hundred yards above the street the first time the Venom Adept found him.

The crack of the first shot in the ambush reverberated from the towers that hedged the lanes of traffic Marroo wove through on his route to a section of the Iblanie territory known to be safe for as long as he’d been a courier. His spirit reacted before he’d even identified the sound, responding to instincts beaten into him by his father over a decade and a half of training. It convulsed, and he reached out as something heavy and fast shot towards him.

The lead ball annihilated itself against the wall of razors that manifested around Marroo’s bike. Breath trapped inside the shot expanded as its physical container fell to pieces then detonated against his spirit. The force contained in the infusion slammed Marroo into the seat of his bike and it slewed sideways in the air. Spinning Gyros misaligned and the bike dropped like a stone as Marroo grit his teeth andy kicked the pedals back into position.

A cab horn screamed at Marroo as he swerved through a column of traffic and nearly slammed into the oncoming traffic.

A second arquebus boomed and a second shot zipped past Marroo, this one buzzing violently with the Icon pressed into it.

Marroo ducked despite the missed shot, and spun the bike in a loop. He spotted smoke wafting from an open window high up one of the towers on his left from the discharge of one of the arquebuses and felt the snipers careening down stairs within, heavy boots on metal stairs, the stench of gunpowder, the spiritual signatures pressed into lead balls like beacons as they shoved new rounds down the throat of their weapons while they ran.

His brows creased as he righted his bike when he felt them running. They shouldn’t be running. He was just a courier. They shouldn’t be running from a courier, then again, they shouldn’t need two snipers for a courier, unless they knew…

A sunflare screamed from one of the buildings below. Most of the noise the beam weapon made came from the sudden howl of air being sucked through the weapon to cool it as liquid fire reached for Marroo’s veering airbike.

The fire splashed off of the barrier of knives spinning around Marroo to fall in a rain of fire towards the columns of moving traffic beneath him. Marroo nearly crashed into a second stream of airtraffic as he jerked away from the beam. He flipped as aircabs parted with a howl of more passing horns and he veered through a ribbon of moving familiars that blew apart in a cloud of glowing shapes before coalescing back into a coherent beam of light.

One of the snipers with an arquebus found a window and leveled the barrel of his beefy weapon to peer down the sites. The gun thundered and this time Marroo threw out his arm to meet the blade halfway with a projected blade of his own. The ball split around his cut and blew its compressed essence into the sky between him and the sniper. Marroo covered his eyes as the icon in the ball of lead lit up in a flash of light brighter than the core itself and he felt heat assail him as a second sunflare beam slashed at his spiritual barrier from the building directly beneath him.

Marroo screamed and kicked the bike’s controls into freefall.

For a moment up was down and down was up. He tumbled, just a bit to the left, and he kicked the whirling gyros into a new configuration halfway to the roof below him as the light of the failed sniper faded from the sky and he rocketed towards the man on the roof beneath him.

The ambusher on the roof lit up Marroo’s spirit with a third beam of fire as he dropped beneath and air freighter to roll towards him inside the cage of his bike, then tried for a fourth shot, but Sunflares were limited things and he must have hit its limit because he dropped it as Marroo’s bike hit the roof and Marroo flew out of the seat towards him.

Smoke burst in the air between them but the shot from the tiny arquebus he’d whipped from his chest holster went wide and dinged the lid of an air conditioning unit a few feet from Marroo’s right, then Marroo had a hand to the man’s throat and another pinning his free hand while the empty arquebus waved to keep the soldier from losing his balance over the building’s edge.

“What is this?” Marroo demanded.

The soldier looked like a twin to the red squad Athesh deployed after Marroo destroyed the sub-sect headquarters. Red tinted goggles covered eyes wide with shock and terror while a trench coat touched with some icon that made it shimmer to Marroo’s third eye fluttered in the air above the street forty yards below.

He shouldn’t have been scared, Marroo thought again, he shouldn’t have been scared before Marroo manifested his icon and they shouldn’t have had this many people to ambush a courier.

Marroo shook him. “What is this!”

The gunner across the street fired a beam that nicked Marroo’s aura and backlit him with fire. Marroo barely noticed, even as flames bit into the roof of the building behind him and he shook the stammering soldier again by his grip at the man’s throat.

“Tell me why you’re here!” He shouted over the roar of the flames. He could feel the second sniper repositioning as he dialed in the sites of his weapon. “Who were you waiting for!”

The soldier never had a chance to answer.

The arquebus in a tower above Marroo barked like thunder and Marroo failed to intercept the round before it slammed into the barrier of swords he’d erected around his aura.

Marroo cried out as the spirit in the round drove him into the roof like a hammer blow. He dropped the soldier onto the roof as he stumbled and the man threw himself forward to grab the rifle he’d dropped before Marroo dismounted his bike to grab him.

Marroo raised a hand towards him and they both shouted as the soldier depressed the trigger of his gun.

Fire blew around Marroo as the beam was caught in the tornado of sword blades dancing around him. The roof burned where fragments of the beam splattered and flames left from the previous beam roared at the increased heat. The soldier screamed as the exhaust ports of his rifle spat flames around him and his shimmering cloak ignited despite the icon pressed into the fabric. Marroo’s spirit ached with the heat caught in his aura, but something larger pressed against his spirit as his third eye expanded to look for the next source of danger and A corrupted sun rose from the South as something, someone, sprinted towards them across the city’s rooftops.

Someone whose spirit blazed with a bonfire far far more advanced than any mere cultivator. Someone whose equal in cultivation he’d known in only one man, and far too well.

Marroo clenched his fist as he stared up at the sky beyond the moving lanes of traffic and rising smoke churned by his swirling spirit.

He knew the aura of that sun, new it from his father’s final moments and from the bit of poison that lingered, still, within the blade his father poured his spirit into before the reliquary sealed it for all time. Knew it as certainly as he knew his own hands or blades that spun at the edges of his aura, for all that it tried to mask itself in the impressions that rose from trash and corruption that polluted the city’s streets.

A buzzing round slapped an electrical box to Marroo’s left and disintegrated the roof for a dozen feet around the impact while the soldier he’d dropped here to question screamed and batted at the flames he’d been engulfed in.

Marroo gave the soldier a final scathing look before he turned to leap from the building.

The flames roared behind him as he hit the street below and fled.