Master Ienaga was the first to react. Before the scorpion had even finished its strike, she was already on the move. While she was too late to save the white-robed leader from the sudden ambush, her haste managed to rescue one of his fellows from the snake-woman, who had launched forward like a coiled spring, revealing her serpentine lower half.

Her fangs struck only air as Ienaga pulled the would-be victim out of the way. The remaining three white-robed cultivators hadn’t been as distracted as the other two, and immediately fell back into defensive formations as the bird-man threw off his cloak.

All three of the assailants stood revealed. The bird-man had powerful wings instead of arms, and legs that ended in razor sharp talons. The snake-woman had a humanoid upper body with four arms and a snake’s coiling body from her waist down.

The third—the one who had opened the hostilities—was the least human of them all. Its attack had shredded its robe, revealing six pale arachnid legs supporting a vaguely humanoid torso and two arms that ended in jagged pincers. The head of the creature was not human at all—what Yoshika had mistaken for a mask was its actual face. A smooth white featureless mask of chitin that hinged open to reveal an inner maw and mandibles.

Yoshika dropped her illusions and put everything she had into Absolute Awareness. Revealing themselves was a small problem compared to the threat of three intelligent xiantian fighters.

Even with her subjective time slowed to a crawl, Ienaga and the three fiends were all incredibly fast. The bird-man was taking wing while the other two attempted to find openings in Ienaga’s defense and move around to her flanks.

The fact that they were ignoring the others and focusing on Ienaga meant that they had already identified her as the main threat. They weren’t just intelligent, they were smart. Yoshika had never dealt with or even met fiends before, and she didn’t know what to expect. With how quickly they were moving, she didn’t have much time to think—she had to go with her instincts.

“Rika and Eunae with us! Misun and Ja Yun protect the rest! Move!”

Her order snapped her friends out of their shock and they quickly began to follow her command. Misun had already been preparing her defensive spells, and thankfully didn’t complain about Yoshika ordering her around—though she was sure to do it later.

Expanding her domain as much as she was able, Yoshika tried to watch the entire battlefield at once to determine where she could do the most. The bird flew over them to focus his attention on Misun, and Yoshika had to trust that the mages would be able to handle defense of the non-combatants. The snake was keeping Ienaga locked down, surprisingly able to match her speed such that neither of them was able to get the upper hand on the other.

That left only the scorpion. It was focused on Ienaga, looking for openings and presumably forcing her to fight more defensively than she would in a proper one-on-one fight. There was her target, then.

Yoshika had learned her lesson about underestimating xiantian opponents, but if enough of them could distract the scorpion long enough to shift the balance of Ienaga’s duel, it might give them the upper hand.

“Focus on the scorpion! Eunae, put a wall between it and Ienaga! Rika, give us a small army of expendable Euis. You lot—!”

Eunae and Rika rushed to comply while Yoshika hid Eui’s real body among the duplicates advancing on the scorpion and approached the white-robed cultivators with Jia. One of them—an older looking man with streaks of gray in his hair and beard—regarded her with suspicion.

“Who are you?! More beasts?”

Yoshika gritted her teeth. As much as it irked her, this wasn’t the time to correct him.

“We’re friends—those aren’t beastkin, they’re fiends. Actual beasts that have ascended—you should consider them on par with xiantian martial artists.”

“There’s no such thing as—”

Yoshika didn’t let him finish.

“Don’t fucking argue with me, help us fight! We need to distract that scorpion. We’re outmatched right now, but if we keep it off of the red-armored woman long enough, we might be able to turn it around.”

The man grimaced at her.

“What is a woman going to—”

Yoshika resisted the urge to bodily hurl the idiot into the fray and instead just slapped him.

“She already saved your ass once! Now are you going to help or not?!”

He blinked at her in shock, holding a hand to his face and glancing toward Ienaga’s ongoing duel with the snake woman before hardening his expression and nodding curtly.

“Fine. Men, our target is the scorpion, form up on me and support the foreigners!”

Good enough for her—Yoshika left them to their own devices and returned her attention to the battle at hand. Ienaga was still locked in a duel with the snake-woman while Misun held off the bird-man’s dive-bomb attacks.

The fight with the scorpion was going poorly. Yoshika couldn’t get close to it with Eui, and it wasn’t fooled by Rika’s illusory duplicates. Instead, it had become a fight to protect Eunae and her wall—a fight they were rapidly losing.

Rika had already lost two of her more permanent simulacra, and it was only her aggression that had kept the scorpion from doing worse. Its tail was fast, flashing outwards to strike at anyone who was caught flat-footed for even a moment. Its skittering movements kept it out of the way of any reprisals, and anything that did get close had to face its deadly pincers.

The four white-robed cultivators formed up around the gray-haired leader and created a heavy barrier around themselves before slowly advancing on the scorpion. As they did, cracks began to form around the stone at its feet, Gravity essence pushing down on it with the weight of a mountain.

The scorpion barely slowed down. Worse—their magic was starting to weigh down on everyone else, too—making it even harder for Yoshika to get her trump card in place.

“Your technique isn’t working! Do something else!”

The gray-haired leader scowled.

“None can withstand the full weight of the Austere Mountain! We will not be commanded by some foreign beastkin!”

Yoshika shook her head and growled. Fine then—she’d just have to work around them.

“Eunae, can you try to hit it with Soulfire? Rika, I know you’ve already lost a lot but we need a huge distraction right now.”

The two of them both nodded, and Eunae gathered a pale green fireball above her tails as Rika sent the last of her clones charging forward. Yoshika focused as much of her attention on Eui’s body as she could spare. Everything would have to be timed perfectly.

Yoshika’s ability to fight at a distance was limited, especially against a xiantian foe. While she might have gotten close with Jia’s Lightning God Transformation, she held no illusions about how well she’d fare against an opponent that could threaten Ienaga. Eui, however, had enough destructive power to give even xiantian fighters pause.

When she’d faced the Magma elemental, it had been Eui’s attacks that created the openings they needed to penetrate its defenses. The scorpion was much faster than the elemental had been, but if she could just get Eui close enough...

There was only one way she could think of, and she’d only have one chance. Within her soul, Yoshika focused as much Void essence as she could muster into reducing Eui’s weight to almost nothing—her training with Hayakawa and Narae paying off as she shrugged off the oppressive weight of the Austere Mountain’s technique.

Next, she used the Claws of Heaven and the Fist of Earth to focus Lightning ki into Eui’s body. It was an imperfect substitute, but combined with her near-weightlessness, Yoshika would hopefully be able to cross the distance between her and the scorpion in an instant. All she needed was the right opportunity.

“Now!”

Eunae didn’t need further prompting. She threw her fireball at the scorpion, expanding it as widely as possible to force it to dodge out of the way. At the same time, Rika’s duplicates fearlessly lunged forward to intercept it. One of them was instantly destroyed by the scorpion’s tail, but the last one grabbed the tail and tried to hold it in place—heedless of the approaching fireball that would strike directly at Rika’s soul through the clone.

The scorpion didn’t even hesitate. With a pincer, it chopped off its own tail and flung itself towards the group of Austere Mountain cultivators. Before it could strike, they doubled down on their technique, forcing it to the ground before it could complete its leap and finally creating the opening that Yoshika was looking for.

With a crack of thunder, Eui appeared before the scorpion fiend and tapped into the essence of destruction that formed her body. Red-black energy exploded all around her, but though she almost never used it, Yoshika had been practicing this technique relentlessly for nearly three years straight.

The fifth form of Eui’s signature technique—The Six Arms of Asura. An indiscriminate blast of raw destruction that had once rendered an entire dueling arena to dust. A technique so fearsome that every would-be master of the Six Arms had died using it—consumed by their own essence.

Every one except Eui. The narrow pass was the perfect environment for her technique. The blast was wide enough to stretch from one side to the other, and there was nowhere for the scorpion fiend to go to avoid it. Nowhere for the Austere Mountain cultivators, either.

Yoshika was no monster, though—this was exactly what she’d been practicing for. With a monumental force of will, she extended her aura to encompass her allies within the blast and hardened it against her own technique. The chaotic force of destruction couldn’t be directed or contained—at least, not yet—but Yoshika could at least extend the zone of protection a little bit beyond just herself.

When the dust settled, there was nothing left of the scorpion-fiend. Only Eui and the shocked cultivators remained at the center of a dusty crater.

Silence fell over the battlefield. At some point during the fight, the bird fiend had abandoned its fruitless assault on Misun’s defenses and tried to back up his snake friend. They paused in their duel, Ienaga breathing heavily and bleeding from several fresh wounds.

The bird alighted on the ground, his beady eyes focused intently on Eui. He blinked twice, then threw his hands up just in time to halt Ienaga’s incoming strike.

“Yield! We yield!”

Ienaga paused, but didn’t let her guard down. The snake made no motion to capitalize on her opening. The bird fiend looked around.

“Oh, that worked! That’s a human thing, right? You can’t kill us if we surrender?”

The leader of the Austere Mountain group scowled.

“That remains to be seen, monster! Why should we extend any such courtesy after you shamelessly attacked us from behind?!”

The bird shrugged.

“The one who did that just got turned into dust. I don’t want to be dust. Would you? No. So I surrender. She does too, right?”

The snake woman didn’t respond, except to slowly uncoil her body and raise her hands to mimic his gesture.

“Yeah, see? She surrenders. We’re your prisoners now, so don’t dust us, please.”

Yoshika wasn’t inclined to argue. There was still nothing genuine in the bird fiend’s words, and she fully expected him to try to betray them or at least flee at the first opportunity, but apparently her technique had left an impression.

That was good, because it had also completely exhausted her. She’d nearly forgotten just how much the Fifth Arm took out of her. She couldn’t fight any longer even if she wanted to.

Ienaga moved until she was no longer flanked by the two fiends, putting herself between them and the others before finally lowering her blade and standing up straight.

“Very well. We accept your surrender. Submit yourselves to binding and questioning immediately.”

The bird fiend blinked, ruffling his multicolored feathers and cocking his head.

“Oh. I didn’t think that would work. I can’t actually do that, goodbye!”

With a powerful flap of his wings, the bird fiend launched himself into the air at mind-boggling speed. Unfortunately for him, Ienaga was ready for it, and as fast as he was, her sword was faster.

Sacred Art: Soul Severing Strike.

Yoshika once more felt the divine essence of the technique deep in her soul as Ienaga’s slash instantly split the fiend in two and carved an enormous furrow into the side of the mountain behind him.

The snake tried to flee as well, only for a magic circle to light up beneath her—the same binding spell that Misun had once used on Jia. The Seong princess smiled smugly as she emerged from the group she’d been protecting.

“Nice try, but we’re absolutely not letting you go without some answers. How did a group of fiends get this far inland without—”

The fiend didn’t wait for Misun to finish. With her upper pair of arms, she stabbed herself in the chest and tore it open before pulling out her own core and shattering it. Nobody could do anything but watch in shock as she dropped unceremoniously to the ground and died.