As a warrior of E’mei, Mingyu walked the True Path of the Jade Heart, and she was trained in the Willow Leaf Sword Form. Raksha was very familiar with it, having been on the receiving end of that Sword Form several times already.

This wasn’t one of those times, however. In a display of unexpected professionalism, Mingyu whirled and thrust with her straight blade, its tip and edge describing arcs akin to the shape of a willow leaf as she tore the shadowy tentacles asunder.

Her skin suffused by the faint green radiance of her aegis’s energy field, she took up position in front of Raksha, her sword held high in one hand and the other thrust forward. The index and middle fingers of her free hand were extended, with the others folded back. It was a classical duelist’s posture, something E’mei, perhaps the second largest and most prestigious martial Order closely after Wu Dang, was most famous for.

It wasn’t, however, the most effective approach to take against a swarming cloud of tentacles. More of the shadowy appendages surged in. Mingyu snarled and cut at them, but several snaked past her flashing blade and fastened themselves around her wrist, waist, and lead ankle.

She gasped, but before the tentacles could begin to pull her apart, Raksha sliced them off of her with the wide, sweeping cuts of the Raging Claw Blade Form. The severed tentacles flinched from Steelbreaker’s touch, wreathed as it was in the Conflagration’s aegis.

Sadea moaned faintly from behind, having been unceremoniously tossed onto a wooden pallet covered in discarded wrapping paper.

“I didn’t need your help!” Mingyu snarled. The sidelong glance Raksha spared her told him otherwise. Her aegis had been breached by the creature’s touch, and she’d suffered hairline, or worse, fractures in her wrist and ankle. If Raksha had hesitated at all, she would have lost her limbs.

“Cover the left flank. Defend the gun line,” he told her, not trusting her to watch his back as he advanced on the thing—likely, no, certainly a demon— pouring out from the dimensional rift. After all, Mingyu had a penchant, at least in his mind, for stabbing spines. He’d only seen her stab one, so perhaps he was being somewhat prejudicial in his regard for her, but as common sense dictated, better to be safe than sorry.

“You don’t command me!” she protested.

“Mingyu! Cover the left flank and make sure Decima and Quintus’s position doesn’t get overrun!” Avitus’s voice, evidently augmented by some implant or the other, rang out over the clamor of battle.

Mingyu seethed, but she obeyed her warleader, limping into position with her sword held too heavily in her hand. Raksha shook his head. Was her aegis weaker since he’d seen her last? Had she been neglecting her cultivation drills?

Now was not the time for such considerations. He fended off another cluster of tentacles. The demon had already emerged halfway through the rift. It was a shadowy blob covered in human eyes, and it was no longer whispering, but screaming.

HATE YOU. TEAR YOUR EYES OUT. EAT THEM. MAKE THEM MINE. HATE YOU. TEAR YOUR EYES OUT. EAT THEM. MAKE THEM MINE.

“Casimir! Why is this happening?” he heard Avitus demand.

“Their passage through the Shadow Tunnel somehow destabilized its ethereal integrity and tore it wide open,” the sorcerer replied. “I don’t know how they did that. Did they try dragging some kind of psychic-nullifier through the Shadow Tunnel?”

Raksha winced. Like Sadea said, his aegis was almost certainly the reason why they were now being attacked by a demon. There was no point worrying about that now. He severed a trio of tentacles and tried to advance, but more swarmed into his path, probing at the web of steel he wove with his blade and pushing him back.

“The psychic dampeners we installed are at their limit!” Casimir shouted. “If this continues, they’ll overload, and every Household sorcerer will detect us!”

“That’s not acceptable,” Rini snapped. “We must maintain our cover for now. Resolve this, Avitus, quickly!”

“Yes, Great Lady,” Avitus replied. “You heard her, Stammerers! Earn your pay! Light this monster up!”

“But bullets aren’t doing much to it, boss,” a mercenary with a scatter-gun complained.

“Goddamn it,” Avitus growled. Raksha looked over his shoulder. The warleader had slung his rifle and was now holding a glowing, rune-carved handaxe in his fist. “Xiao Yao! Tear it to shreds!”

“Understood,” the martial scientist replied. Wreathed in his aegis, he charged, weaving through the demon’s swarming grasp and advancing past Rakhsa. His footwork was erratic and unpredictable, rendering his figure an indistinct blur that Raksha had difficulty following, even with the full might of the Conflagration honing his senses.

Xiao Yao wasn’t any swifter than he himself was, Raksha realized. In fact, he could easily outpace the mercenary, given how much stronger his aegis was. But Xiao Yao was employing a martial Form that focused on evasiveness and fleetness-of-foot, his movements too bewildering for even the demon to comprehend.

“Hey, Destroyer’s apprentice!” Xiao Yao called over his shoulder. “Witness my martial science! I want to hear your thoughts on it!”

Before Raksha could reply, Xiao Yao swept out several pipe bombs from his long, flowing coat. Their fuses had already been lit. He hurled them into the midst of the demon’s tentacles and blurred away.

He streaked back to stand beside Raksha as the explosives ripped into the cluster of shadows and grinned up at him. “Well? What do you think?”

“You call throwing bombs around martial science?”

“Hey, as long as it works.” Xiao Yao shrugged.

“Doesn’t look like it did,” Raksha retorted. As the nitric smoke cleared, it became obvious that the demon’s tentacles and body were unharmed, Xiao Yao’s explosives having done little more than stagger it slightly.

“Oof,” he said. “But at least my Lightness Form was impressive, right? It’s called the Chaos Spiral.”

Raksha had to give him a grudging nod. Lightness Forms revolved entirely around footwork and bodily maneuvers. They were rare, as he’d learned from his Master, since most martial scientists preferred to incorporate such elements into their weapon or unarmed Forms instead of focusing specifically on them. In fact, Xiao Yao was the first martial scientist Raksha had met who practiced a Lightness Form, and if anything else, he’d proved that its evasiveness was beyond the grasp of even a foe as formidable as the demon.

“I was afraid it was going to come down to this,” Avitus grunted, as he came up alongside Raksha. His warriors were still pouring gunfire into the demon, keeping it at bay but not doing any discernible damage. “Hand-to-hand’s often the only way to take demons on. Something about it being a ritualistic, primeval method of murder as opposed to shooting someone with a gun.”

“Fine by me.” Raksha raised Steelbreaker and assumed a two-handed grip on its hilt. “I do most of my killing up close.”

“Yeah, see, that’s not my forte. That’s why I hired Mingyu as my close combat specialist. But she’s gone and gotten herself hurt.” Avitus sighed and adjusted his grip on his axe. “So if you don’t mind taking point, I’ll follow up behind you, and let’s see if we can sort this mess out. Otherwise, our mission’s going to end before it’s even begun.”

Raksha frowned at the prospect of having a mercenary armed with an enchanted axe at his back. He shook his head. “No. Pull your warriors back. I’ll handle this by myself.”

“You’re too stupid to even put your pants on the right way by yourself, dummy,” Sadea chimed in, shoving Avitus aside. The burly war leader gave way, a bemused look on his face.

“Glad you could join us,” Raksha said. “Enjoyed your little nap?”

“I dreamed of a host of rich, handsome men doing everything I wanted them to. It was magnificent. Then I wake up to this.” Sadea growled. The head of her staff flared with blue lightning. “Pisses me off so much I want to kill something.”

Raksha nodded at the demon. Its body had now oozed from the rift in its entirety, and it was shrieking its demented chant so loudly the permacrete floor was vibrating.

HATE YOU. TEAR YOUR EYES OUT. EAT THEM. MAKE THEM MINE. HATE YOU. TEAR YOUR EYES OUT. EAT THEM. MAKE THEM MINE.

“Start with that demon,” he said, “or whatever the hell it is. I’m beginning to think that it’s not like the thing we fought in the mortuary.”

“That’s a planar haunter, not a real demon. That’s why it’s got its own corporeal body, but it’s covered in an ectoplasmic film secreted from its pores, which repulses most physical attacks.” Sadea glanced at Avitus’s axe. “Not even enchanted weapons will work, since they rely on a physical object to deliver their sorcerous effects.”

“So how do we kill it?” Raksha asked.

“I could just disintegrate it with a massive bolt of lightning, but doing that’s going to overload all the dampeners I can feel plastered everywhere in this building. I’m going to take a wild leap and guess that’s not what Leona’s flunkies want to happen.” Sadea frowned. “If I get closer, I can…”

Raksha met her gaze and nodded. Without another word, he advanced on the haunter, picking up speed with each step. Sadea followed in his wake. She hopped onto his back just as he broke out into a full sprint.

Tendrils of the sorceress’s cobalt lightning filled the edge of his vision as he charged into the midst of swarming shadowy tentacles and the multi-eyed mass behind them. The haunter’s appendages streaked out, slicing through the air. It glared at him with a thousand hate-filled eyes, all different in shape, size, and hue.

Raksha kicked off the permacrete and threw himself into a headlong dive. He spun as he flew, bringing Steelbreaker’s blade into a spiraling, corkscrew arc with the tip angled at the planar haunter. As Sadea poured electricity down the length of his sword, Raksha pulsed the Conflagration’s grip on Steelbreaker in rapid succession, so that its length was sheathed in his aegis one moment and bare the next.

Blades of lightning spun from Steelbreaker, forming a whirling cone of energy that sliced apart every shadowy tentacle it touched and opened huge, gaping wounds in the haunter’s main body. The creature shrieked in agony. It reared back as Raksha closed within striking distance and split its amorphous mass apart, revealing a gigantic maw with blunt, yellow teeth.

Sadea pulled their bodies out of corporeality and into their lightning aspects just as the haunter snapped its jaws shut on them. Their very forms, now crackling electricity instead of flesh and blood, tore the haunter apart from within, shredding its inky flesh and spilling its unnatural viscera.

A throbbing, globular object loomed into sight. Raksha thrust his blade out. As it sank a foot deep into the veined, grotesque organ, Sadea let their bodies fall back into corporeality, and Raksha burned the Conflagration at its highest intensity.

The haunter’s heart burst apart, as did the rest of its massive body. Chunks of its scorched flesh and viscera cascaded down around them in a charred, stinking shower.

Sadea thrust her staff past Raksha’s shoulder. A bolt of lightning streaked from its tip into the dimensional rift on the wall. It sizzled out of existence.

Raksha swept Steelbreaker down a heartbeat later, carving a smoking furrow into the bare permacrete.

“That last strike was quite unnecessary,” Sadea commented. “But eh, I’ll allow it.”