Darro roared and slammed his breath into the sword as he flicked it at the man that stood in front of him. Veshtu was fast, an open extremis meridian did that for a person, but his hand was only halfway to the pistol strapped across his chest before the men behind him fired.

The balls from their too large bores met the cut in reality traveling out from Darro’s sword two thirds of the distance across the space between Darro and Veshtu and shattered, the voids at their hearts spilling out into clouds of utter darkness pricked by drifting sparks of light.

A wall of shadow formed in front of Veshtu, just in time for Darro to dive into it as he leapt after his cut, spiritual blades whirling around him as he poured breath through the external meridians that gave him his aura.

Infinite black met him as he fell through the cloud of darkness. The ground beneath Darro seemed to fade as he ran, the noise of the pumps, of the distant night, and the mercenaries beyond the cloud all fell away. He felt the icon that had lived within him since his ascension to adepthood shiver as the sparks within the void resolved themselves as distant points of light, points so distant that he should have been incapable of seeing them, so distant that they should have been beyond any conceivable reality, beyond possibility itself. Cold hit him as he passed through the cloud and the cold drank in the breath he’d surrounded himself with, sucked away the blades that spun around him and the strength within his limbs, stripped him of all the powers of his cultivation until he knew, again, what it meant to be no more than mortal, and to be afraid.

Then he was through and the noise of the world returned.

Gunfire met him as he stumbled out of the shadow. Fire and smoke and the boom of arquebuses from every angle of the engagement. Grenades filled by the shadow shot towards him, but Darro’s spirit rushed to flood his meridians with breath and he shouted as he flicked his sword out, caught one grenade in an arch of projected breath, then another, and clouds of darkness blossomed within the night.

Veshtu yanked his pistol from its holster across his chest and pointed it at Darro. The shot should have been aimed at Darro’s feet but instead Darro just jerked his head and the grenade sailed harmlessly past his shoulder while Darro’s sword whipped out to cut another salvo of the exotic weapons from the air. He leapt for Veshtu, but Veshtu’s had breath of his own and he used it to power himself away in a leap that took him through one of the clouds of darkness that now obscured the battleground somewhere into the ranks of mercenaries at his back, and more shot rained in through the darkness.

The black fog did not drift the way normal fog should have. It billowed as it expanded from each grenade and billowed on unseen winds, but the cuts of unfocused breath Darro tried to use to push them back simply passed into the clouds without effect, and the thump and whistle of grenades passing through them failed to disturb their surface. Someone lobbed a grenade into the mess that smoked and burst in a cloud of descending flame as a spiritual sword cut it from the air. The rain of fire dissipated as it met the sphere of churning razor’s around Darro but he heard someone beyond the cloud of darkness obscuring his third eye let go with something that coughed and seemed to bellow as it spat out a sheet of flame that swept through the void as though it wasn’t even there.

Darro met the blaze, let it wash over him and around him while his manifested icon split the flames. Then he leapt, and there was no more range for the mercenaries to use their guns.

The Hammer School was a professional organization. They were one of the few mercenary groups considered the equal of any adept in a fight. They’d fought hard to win that reputation and Darro’d heard they charged to match it, practically bankrupting the organizations that hired them, but making sure that they, and not their enemies, were the last one standing after any conflict. It was also one they clearly believed because they didn’t flinch when Darro landed amongst them in a storm of breath, and blood, and flying steel. They were cultivators, every one of them, each armed with weapons impressed by their founder’s icon and the relics of a thousand years of wars looted from old armories and the treasuries of conquered sects. They threw themselves at him, and Darro did his best to cut them down.

They should have run.

A mercenary with a pistol in one hand and a hammer in the other flung himself at Darro behind a projection swept from the hammer’s head. The force of the Icon should have blown Darro’s body apart, but it met the storm of razor’s manifested around Darro’s aura and shattered against them. The cut that should have separated the mercenary’s shoulders from his torso in turn broke against armor that shimmered beneath the mercenaries coat and he was thrown backwards into the mercenaries charging forward to support him instead.

More projected breath buffeted the razors that whirled around Darro as he threw himself after the man. He knocked aside the hammer as it swung to rip off his leg, then buried the tip of his sword in the mercenaries skull before he had to whip it out to parry a second hammer swung to break the storm of razors whirling around him. His aura warped under the impact of breath projected from weapons and hands by the men around him, but that close together, spiritual powers barely mattered, only speed, savagery, and the point of the blade.

A man whose trenchcoat billowed as it shed Darro’s razor’s like rainwater punched through the aura to strike at Darro with a sword that smoked from an Icon Darro didn’t have time to recognize. It belched unreal fire as they traded blows but the flames blew away in Darro’s churning aura, burning in his meridians the way Veshtu’s training stone had burned them. The man behind it was fast, experienced, fully cultivated, but he wasn’t an adept of the weapon he carried and the coat that protected him from Darro’s spirit did nothing to stop the sword that punched into his gut. Someone without his comrade’s protection tried to leap at Darro as he severed his spine only to die in a haze of blood as Darro’s aura ripped him apart.

More men died. Each of them fought as though they would be the one to take Darro down, each brought some unique combination of weapons, often touched by the hammer icon, but sometimes not, sometimes armored, and sometimes striking from a distance, and Darro killed them all. A man fired a pistol at him with four barrels, unleashing all four of them in a series of bangs that hammered Darro’s spirit with the breath infused balls. The first two broke against the storm of razors, crashed into them like sledgehammers with enough force to strain his meridians as he fought against the breath. The third smacked into the blade of his sword with a clash like lightning then Darro’s breath shot out of his aura at the man, undercutting the fourth ball that missed Darro all together as the gunner folded over the line of blood that appeared across his waist.

Breath ran through Darro’s sword like water. Men who weren’t cut fell or tumbled backwards, some used projections of their own through weapons touched with icons they hadn’t touched themselves and smashed the projections aside. Others leapt them, slid under them, dodged to come at him in a rush. A familiar with the spiritual weight to shatter a mountain got caught in the backlash of breath pouring from the combatants as it darted towards Darro and it dissipated in a haze of light. The breath caught within detonated as it did so, flattening mercenaries in a circle fifty yards across.

A man at the opposite side of the gap leveled a dragon tube at Darro as he slaughtered the fallen men and it let go with a roar and a second sheet of fire before another flying cut projected from Darro’s sword removed his leg at the gauntlet and he fell screaming as he burned. More void grenades went off, more weapons discharged, more mercenaries charged him. One of them hit Darro hard enough to crack his ribs and send him flying out of the fight, but he landed on his feet and only one man had time to fire a sunflare at him before his two bleeding halves slumped at Darro’s feet and Darro went for the rest.

When they were dead, Darro found Veshtu in the tunnels. He’d fled from the fight, but it didn’t matter. Darro found him, just as he’d found a hundred others fleeing from the sect’s he’d slaughtered at Veshtu’s command.

He cut Veshtu’s hamstrings from twenty yards away and the man fell with a cry into the chemical tained water runing down the long drain.

“It was an accident.” He said when Darro flipped him over. “Darro, I swear, it was an accident. Please.” Darro had found his son’s wooden sword on the battlefield when he was searching for Veshtu’s corpse, and he pressed the tip into Veshtu’s shoulder with enough of the sword icon pressed into it to run it through and in to the cement beneath him. “Please.” Veshtu growled through grit teeth.

Darro didn’t ask any questions, he released the sword to stand over Veshtu as his old friend shook with pain. “My son.” Darro said when the shaking had slowed. His voice rasped from his exposure to the void, like a rusty sword being drawn from its sheath, as painful as if he’d actually drawn one from his throat instead.

“We didn’t mean to kill him.” Veshtu said. “It was all a mistake. They were supposed to kill your guards, grab that girl of yours and your boys and come back to the tunnels while you were dealing with the false coup, but they botched it up.” Tears ran from the dead man’s eyes. “Four hundred thousand Drachma and they botched it up. Killed everyone they saw, lit your house on fire. It was a mistake, Darro. Just a mistake.”

Darro said nothing as his hand clenched his sword hard enough that the weapon should have broken or bent with the power surging through him. “You took him.” Darro said. “Where?”

“Sent him below.” Veshtu replied, he reached up and clenched the wooden sword in his shoulder but didn’t try to move it. He grimaced, and looked up at Darro. “This was all a mistake.” He said. “No one was supposed to get hurt. You can’t kill me, for making a mistake…”

“He was my son.”

Other memories were wrapped up with Veshtu’s death. Memories of the boy he’d been when they crawled through the tunnels together. Memories of raids made on caravans for bags of rice, and dropping stones down bottomless pits to press their heads together as they listened for the splash. Of his friend looking back as they crawled together through the tunnels to avenge their friend and putting his finger to his lips for silence as the other boys laughed in a tunnel just below.

He thought of him as he cut through the sect they’d made together.

The sect still had its defenders. Men waited at locked doors along narrow tunnels that led into the larger cavern that served as their headquarters. They’d been mustered in readiness for when Darro turned against the Iblanie instead of fighting through the legendary mercenaries and their adept killing weapons. They would have been deadly in the tunnels, where Darro lacked the space to maneuver around the black breath-consuming clouds, but the defenders left in the tunnels didn’t have them. They had sunflares, and arquebuses, swords, and grenades. Weapons he’d learned to counter in a hundred battles as their sect ascended to take this cavern, and which did nothing to stop Darro from smearing the men that wielded them across the walls like red paint, or blasting their parts across the cavern as carrion for the rats to eat.

His son lay on a table in one of the offices of the old Dawood headquarters when he finally found him. Whoever had laid him there hadn’t bothered to arrange him, just dropped him facedown like a sack of rice and disappeared. They hadn’t even bothered to clear the papers from underneath his body and they clung to Eido as Darro turned his son over to look down at the cold face and the holes peppering the right side of his body.

Darro stared at those holes for a long, long time, before he turned to the boy’s face.

When he finally saw the boy, saw his son, and the boy he was, and now could never be, he pulled the bloody wooden sword from his belt and wiped it clean on his own robes before he tucked it gently into the boy’s belt. He let his hand rest on his son’s cheek before he lifted him gently in his arms. “Come with me.” He rasped as he cradled him against his neck. “Your mother will want to say goodbye.”

Then he carried his son back through the death and the smoke of the sect he’d destroyed to retrieve him.

It was a long walk back to the surface.