“You’re right.”

Confusion. Anger. Suspicion. Silence.

Dorian spread his hands, swallowing, and threw on a wide-eyed look. “What can I say? Most all of you worked really hard. Most all of you is deserving. You feel I’ve skipped over you—you feel slighted. I get it. I’d feel that way too.”

He went along the crowd left-to-right, making eye contact with each person as he did. He saw their faces, saw the uncertainty in them, the angst bubbling under the surface. Some were outright pissed.

At this stage he could afford to burn a few bridges, but he was also no moron. The Tribe’s support was itself a resource. To gain it, he’d need to walk a tightrope.

“It’s unfair,” said Dorian, nodding, shifting his look to pained. “Some of you’ve trained years. None of you’ve got the treasures or pills I earned.” He paused on the word to let it sit. He’d massage their rage, but it was also a reminder that he was given nothing; subtle but important. He shook his head. “I…wish it didn’t need to be this way either.”

“Then turn it down,” snarled Kuruk, fists clenched, teeth clenched tighter.

Dorian bit his lip. “Um. If you were me, would you?”

“Tch!”

“I got an idea that’ll settle it for all of us,” he said with a small smile. “An idea that’ll make things fair.”

He looked to Tuketu for approval. “Master, if I may?”

Tuketu looked amused. “Go ahead,” he said. “State your proposal and I’ll consider it.”

“Anyone who has a grievance with me can take it up with me right here,” said Dorian simply. “If you feel what I have is unfairly earned—beat me, and it’s yours.”

“What?” said Kuruk with a frown.

“All my possessions. All I’ve earned in the past week. I’ll offer you all the same deal Master Tuketu offered to me.” He shrugged as he tapped his interspatial ring. “That’s fair, right?”

There was a stunned silence.

“Is it?” said Tuketu, hiding his mouth with a gloved hand. “You’ve gained quite some strength since our deal. Of our current crop of Chosen, perhaps three have a chance against you. Hardly fair.”

“I don’t think I was clear,” said Dorian. He swept the crowd with his gaze slowly. “I don’t mean one of you. I mean all those with a grievance. At once.”

A smattering of gasps. A pause. That caught Tuketu’s attention; he raised one eyebrow.

“Treasures or not, if all of you at once can’t beat me you can hardly have a claim to my spot—right?”

“Interesting.” Tuketu smirked. “I’ll allow it.”

He’d hardly finished before another voice rose.

“You unholy—“ Kuruk’s voice strangled at Tuketu’s sharp look. “Good! I will fight you. You get freak powers for a week and you think you are special?”

He snarled. “I know who you are. I have beaten you into dust a hundred times. What is one more?”

“Ha! Me too,” laughed a long-haired teen. He took Kuruk’s side and regarded Dorian with shrewd eyes. “This is rank arrogance. You can’t beat all of us. Your power’s gotten to your head.” Then he turned back to the rest of the Chosen; most still seemed hesitant.

“Well? Brothers, this is our chance!” He jabbed at Dorian’s ring. “Imagine the treasures he’s got—treasures we shoulda got!”

Dorian cocked his head and waited. The weren’t enough Chosen to form a true mob but he saw the mentality all the same; the dominos tipping, shifting from uncertainty to certainty, a hardening.

“I’ll fight,” rasped a hairy Chosen.

“Count me in.”

“I got a grievance too.”

“You’re a cheating whelp,” spat another. “I’ll set things right.”

Soon, three-quarters of all the Chosen had joined in. They made for an imposing bunch, all stacked together, arms folded. Some already brimmed with qi, bloodlust overflowing. Tension held the air still.

“Anyone else?” said Dorian softly.

After a beat, “Me,” said a shaky voice. And Muata, trembling, walked over. He didn’t meet Dorian’s eyes.

Tuketu clapped his hands. “A good crop! The rest of you, back off and we’ll begin.”

‘The rest of you’ turned out to be just two other Chosen and Kaya.

Kaya had three deep furrows across her brows. She looked like she wanted to say something, to protest. Mere days ago she certainly would’ve done it. Now she opened her mouth, then closed it and backed up, looking alarmed and concerned. But also curious.

Dorian bowed low to the group. “Please give me pointers,” he said, smiling without a hint of pretension.

His logic was simple. He needed to do two things. First—give them both an outlet for the tension and a way out. And second—to show that the difference between them was so vast that they should never dream of challenging him again. He needed to perceived like an avalanche: a natural phenomenon. So overwhelming and absolute that it was pointless to levy jealousy at it.

Dorian flexed his arms and cycled his qi in a warm-up, a preliminary gesture. We exist in different realms.

By now the rest of the Chosen had cleared all the way out. Tuketu raised his chin and lifted a hand high up. His voice rose higher: “Begin!”

Roaring battle-cries, the Chosen charged. It was one horde of them, and the attack that followed came in a bunch too—Rays, Tongues, Palms, a wall of qi with only the narrowest of spaces between. Kuruk led the bunch; the whole of him steamed with qi. He was like a charging bull, but twice as muscled and wielding fists of fire.

Dorian saw the wall, registered each blow, each shot, each man, held it in his mind, and slowly breathed out. His qi cycled in the familiar pattern of the [Cloud-treading Steps]. When he moved, he moved like the a warm summer breeze.

Four steps, zigzag, took him straight into the mouth of the firestorm. He contorted, spun, shifted, and kicked off, reveling in his feather-light body. He found the spaces where qi was not and filled them like water in a mold; heat grazed his skin, but that was all. The flash passed by in a half-second as he weaved and stepped through the eye of the storm, untouched.

If it shocked Kuruk his face, purple with rage, showed no indication. He roared gutturally and lunged, bearing the full heft of his body aloft like a human wrecking ball, grabbing for Dorian in one explosive thrust.

Dorian snagged his ankle with a rope, twisted out the way, and pulled in one fluid motion.

Kuruk fell like a pendulum with its string cut mid-swing; yelling in confusion, he bowled into a file of his compatriots, who fell in a mess of gawking limbs.

Dorian kept walking forth, calm as ever. Now eight strings of fire stuck out from his hands, strengthening, lengthening, smooth and bright as tongues of the sun. He bared his teeth back.

What followed was not a fight.

It was effortless; it looked like a dance. It was what a fight should never be: unbroken, pretty, fluid, as though it were choreographed. Dorian dodged strikes before they were thrown and each step shunted him left-to-right, back-and-forth, faster than all by far; he looked like a coursing river flowing around still boulders. They leapt, and yelled, and chucked their attacks and still he kept up the dance. His footwork was lighter than air.

Slow. So damned slow.

The battlefield was a maelstrom of light and sound and qi. Voices cried out, not his own: friendly fire. Nearly a dozen Chosen firing off full-strength shots was still a sight to behold. Fires erupted, died down, and erupted again, a fireworks show brought to ground-level. Techniques collided with each other; Palms met Tongues and blasted out in myriad directions.

A pity none of it landed.

Only after a minute of all-out strikes and two downed Chosen did the rest pause, panting heavily. The fires burned to nothing; they had nothing to catch onto. Dorian stood in the center of it all.

“D-demon,” gasped Kuruk. His face was washed with sweat.

The lull didn’t last for long. Once more they lunged and once more he dodged. It must feel like trying to grab onto a mirage, he imagined. It was a state that could only be reached because of the ludicrous skill gap. It was a demonstration, a beatdown without force. By this second wave, the wind had gone out of all of them. They were all hunched over, breathing with all their lungs.

“Are we done?” he sighed.

There was a new awe in some of them as they looked at him now. A strain of fear, a disbelief. It was morphing to uncertainty by the second.

Kuruk staggered up again. He shuddered like a malfunctioning machine. His qi was probably more than half-gone, but still he put up a brave front.

“Give it up,” said Dorian softly.

In response, Kuruk lunged. Dorian sighed once more.

He settled into the stance of a [Technique]. The Martial Arts were, at their essence, an art. Which brush should he choose? He settled on a Ray-and-Tongue combination.

Then he went to work on his canvas.

It was gentle. It was absolute. It was a mesmerizing display of qi. Beat-by-beat the strikes came: a lash of red, thrown like a whip, then binding onto a leg, immobilizing him for a full-on Ray before slinking away again; as he reared back, grabbing for his eyes, a Tongue tripped him back and a Ray checked him in the gut. It was like taking scissors to a marionette. Cuts opened up all along Kuruk’s body until he was more blood than skin, then more burns than blood.

At last Kuruk stood upright, a gash on his forehead so wide the seeping blood blocked off his sight. He didn’t seem to have the energy to brush it off anymore. He heaved long, hard breaths, his legs quivering like a newborn’s. Blood and sweat caked him like armor.

He fell like an old, tall tree: slowly, then all at once as his weight caught up to him. The sands did not admit a crash—only a thump. That was that.

The rest of the Chosen were frozen.

“Are we done?” Said Dorian sadly, shaking his head. His untouched, unmarked head.

It was like he’d cut the heart of the resistance right out of them. Each face was pale as bone. None of them had taken a punch, not externally. The punch hit deeper, harder, in places where light didn’t shine.

Muata fell to his knees, trembling.

“I give!” he heaved, his face scrunched like a fist. There were tears in his eyes.

To his left, the long-haired boy swallowed and bowed his head. “I… I give.”

The dominos fell the other way. Another surrendered. Then another. One by one the fear and the resignation took them, forced the words from their lips. At last only Dorian was standing.

But it was not over. One man still wasn’t done.

Kuruk was up on one knee. He’d cleared the blood from his eyes but he was still a fossilized wreck. The only thing he managed was to open his mouth and speak a word.

“DEMON!” He tried to get to his knees, fell over, and was reduced to hacking coughs once more. “It’s—unnatural—“ he croaked as he coughed blood.

To the side his father’s gaze was cold as ice. Tuketu hadn’t moved to step in once; Dorian’s estimation of him held true.

This accusation, at least, seemed to hold some weight in the crowd. So Dorian sighed again. “If I was demon-possessed, wouldn’t your father have done something? The Chief personally vetted me. Are you calling his judgment into question?”

Not even Kuruk had an answer to that. Or perhaps he did, but he couldn’t get it out through his shudders.

“Face it,” said Dorian. “You’ve lost.”

He looked at Kuruk, then at the rest of the Chosen. Most of their heads were still bowed in shame.

“I’m sorry this had to happen,” said Dorian again, almost mournfully.

But I’m not, of course. It needed to happen this way. I need to prove myself so far above you that the thought of resistance does not even enter your mind.

“We are all members of Rust Tribe. We fight with each other. In battle we defend each other’s backs. How can we fight the Beasts or the Ugoc while we can’t trust each other?”

The downed heads were looking up, slowly. “I offered today’s spar to try to put an end to our issues. You’ve had your shot at me. I hope this’ll be the end of it,” said Dorian. “I… don’t ask for your friendship. I only hope for your kinship as a fellow Tribesman.”

There was the stick. Now for the carrot…

First he walked up to Kuruk broken form and pulled out an Elixir of Minor Healing. With one hand he pressed it to the boy’s lips. “Drink,” he said.

When Kuruk spat it out with a groan, he shrugged and spilled it contents directly on Kuruk’s wounds. It was a waste of Elixir, true, but he covered the most major of the injuries in a few splashes.

“What are you doing?” growled Kuruk. He wiped the blood from his eyes and sat up, fuming.

“Elixir of Minor Healing,” said Dorian. “Think of it as… an apology, I guess. Or a peace offer. Whatever was between us before—I’ve forgotten it. After today, I’m over it. I don’t hate you, Kuruk. If we’re to be teammates in future… I hope you’ll come to think the same of me.”

He dropped the rest of the Elixir by Kuruk’s side. The boy stared at it, confounded, then turned his gaze to Dorian. But Dorian had moved on.

He walked over to the rest of the Chosen and tapped his Interspatial ring. A plethora of pills fell out. That got their attentions.

“Here are a batch of Qi-Boosting Pills, freshly made of a new potent formula. It’s my way of making amends.”

He held it aloft. A swathe of eyes latched onto them. “I hope today ends any bad blood between us. If you consider our grievance resolved, please accept it.”

Time Elapsed: 1 week, 1 day