200. Death & the Black Sun, V (Patreon)

When the blast of light cleared, Wu Hao was left to blink rapidly to clear away the spots in his vision. The entire distance that he'd run had been covered in a single step. He could marvel at the abilities of the Sovereigns later, though.

First he took in the battlefield. He had seen warzones in previous lives, but he had never seen a true battle between Sovereigns before. He had wondered about it before, though. Would it look like a battle between other martial artists, or would there be no physical attacks involved? Had Sovereigns ascended so far they didn't even need weapons anymore?

Wu Hao had also wondered if maybe he could contribute anything to those battles. Master Shu was far stronger than him, yes, but he didn't make a show of being obviously superhuman. Physically, he seemed to be a man mostly in middle age, with a prim beard and an easily-annoyed demeanor. He didn't look like the other Sovereigns, who from appearance alone were clearly above and beyond normal ken.

What he saw now - well, it made it clear that Master Shu was every single bit of a superhuman force of nature as any other Sovereign would have been, and he was only looking at the aftershocks of their battle.

Black ink had been splattered across every surface, mingling deeply with the white snow - where any of the pristine snow still lingered, at least. Deep gouges had been torn into the cold earth in irregular shapes, as if enormous hands had scooped up chunks of the mountain's top like a child playing with mud or sand. There was no trace that Wu Hao could spot of them having gone anywhere, either. It was like they had simply been removed from the world entirely. That wasn't even mentioning the long furrows in the ground where one or both Sovereigns had torn physically through the earth while repositioning themselves.

Blasts of that black flame had left thin embers still scattered across the ground, pulling in light as they covered areas in deep shadow. What few trees they still stood were being lit as kindling, devoured until there was nothing left of them. Even as he watched, Wu Hao could see one of the pine trees being utterly consumed and starting to crack and fall down, due to the small black spark that had been burning at its roots.

Master Shu and Ke Jiaming were floating in the sky, trading blows faster than his eyes could track. He could see a thin flash - a crackle of two supreme forms of qi meeting in mid-air - and then they were attacking each other again in blurs of qi. Each blow made the sky shiver; each strike that actually hit sent one of them hurtling backwards. He couldn't even see their weapons move except as streaks of intense power.

Following up from a successful strike, swirls of white ink spread out across the sky. They took thousands of shapes, twisting and curling in mid-air to form arrays painted onto the empty sky that covered up the dull shine of the distant stars overhead, each different in form and function. Power poured into each, ripped out of the environmental qi, and gathered until Wu Hao could almost see a Milky Way taking shape.

Then the arrays fired, all at once, a relentless barrage that launched without sound. Thick qi gathered into the shape of staves and were fired like a thousand arrows, each of them targeting almost the same spots. They moved so fast that Wu Hao had barely managed to make out their shapes when they had already missed and instead were already thudding into the ground, a deep impact that made the entire mountain shake.

Weight, he thought numbly, and stared as each of the staves detonated into that un-space that Master Shu had wielded against the Sublime Poison Sovereign with loud, indescribable sounds. There was a scream as reality snapped, and then that same sound playing in reverse, leaving only normal space.

Ke Jiaming's retaliation was spear strokes of lethal beauty, each wreathed in that black flame that tore through both space and un-space and devoured both. He was glowing, but it wasn't a light he himself emitted - it was the little light that was still present being consistently sucked into his power.

Wu Hao stared at the devastation, spellbound. The destruction - the sheer amount of qi swirling around, hundreds if not thousands of times what he had at his fingertips...

"Halt!" Ke Taiqi boomed. "I say, halt!"

They didn't halt. There was a blast of cold flame that struck into a pocket of unspace and burned it into something that was neither space nor unspace but simply wasn't, but Master Shu had already prepared a counterstroke - white qi had spilled across one of the few untouched snowfields left and formed itself into an array, which erupted with a pillar of un-space that Ke Jiaming jerked his head away from. Some small part of his cloak of flame had been consumed.

"I said," Ke Taiqi roared, extending a large hand, "Halt!"

It was as if a sun had risen. Power poured out from Ke Taiqi, forming into two hands that gathered high up in the sky like resplendent statues of immense size. They came sweeping down around the two clashing Sovereigns, trying to catch them, but both of the men fighting dodged them easily enough.

Still, he had forced them to separate, and made it clear that he'd come. Wu Hao felt a little hope, despite everything. If he and Master Shu could simply convince Ke Taiqi that his brother was part of the Demonic Cult, which should be made easier now that Ke Jiaming was being made to openly reveal his black flames...

Ke Jiaming landed softly onto the ground, taking several steps backwards from the impact. He was breathing deeply, cloaked in an armor of living black flame. Wherever he went the light was distorted and quaking, as if his very presence carried a weight the world barely could support.

"Brother," he said, his eyes gleaming. "Good. You're here."

"What the hell is going on?" Ke Taiqi demanded.

"I was attacked, brother," Ke Jiaming said. "I have no idea why. Shu Renqing has made claims that are ludicrous in the extreme."

"You can't hide the truth," Wu Hao shouted. "You're not the Moonlight Sovereign at all! We know the truth!"

Ke Taiqi reacted as if slapped, his eyes wild as he was rocked by revelation after revelation, but Ke Jiaming didn't seem at all perturbed.

"Ah," Ke Jiaming said, as if seeing him for the first time. "I saw that you dealt with my disciples and Shuang. A shame; I'd invested quite a bit in them."

"What?" Ke Taiqi said. "Brother, what do you -"

"He killed them," Ke Jiaming said indifferently. "Lu Qingyu. He A'Bai. Yu Ying. And, of course, that bastard son of yours."

Ke Taiqi whirled around, his massive bulk very much more agile than he had looked. He was staring right at Wu Hao, his glare like the sun. Heat coiled around him like a thousand writhing serpents, his hair flashing with so much light that it looked like a halo was forming behind him. His eyes shone with unshed tears. There was no glassy stare, now. He was fully focused.

"You," he breathed. "You little -"

He lunged forward but before he could so much as touch a hair on Wu Hao, Master Shu appeared out of a pocket of unspace and blocked the grasping hand that had been intended to crush Wu Hao in its grip.

"Halt," Master Shu said, his staff pushing back against Ke Taiqi's grip. There was a small hitch in his breath. "Ke Taiqi. Listen to us."

"He killed my son!" Ke Taiqi howled, before he was pushed back. "That little bastard has to pay!"

In the space between pushing Ke Taiqi away entirely and his next leap, Master Shu tore un-space into existence in a screen that covered the most likely avenues of approach. Ke Taiqi smashed bodily against them and stopped, his breathing ragged with anger and pain like a wounded animal.

"Your brother is part of the Demon Cult," Master Shu said. "Please. See reason. Your brother is to blame for all this."

Ke Taiqi stared at Master Shu now, so surprised that his anger almost slipped away.

"Ask him," Master Shu said, his voice growing louder as he spoke. "Ask him, why he hid his black flames from you. Why there are places in the sect where only his disciples are allowed to tread. What sort of evils slumber beneath the surface."

And, somehow, that got Ke Taiqi to take a step back. He turned to his brother, who was studying the scene dispassionately. He was even somewhat amused.

Maybe it was that that made Ke Taiqi realize something, or maybe it was years of suspicion finally clicking together. Ke Taiqi was a Sovereign in his own right; he wasn't stupid. Maybe it was a flicker of rationality emerging from the haze of hate and pain and anger.

"Brother, what -" he asked, turning, but then he was interrupted.

"Shush," Ke Jiaming said. In a step so quick that Wu Hao didn't even see it, he was suddenly standing in front of Ke Taiqi, extending a hand.

The normal reaction would've been to dodge backwards, to block, to do anything, and Ke Taiqi should have been more than fast enough to do any or all of those - but instead his body suddenly went slack, in the face of the black flame that now occupied Ke Jiaming's hand. Wu Hao had the fleeting absurd thought that it was like seeing a sunflower turn towards the sun, though the colors were completely wrong.

Ke Taiqi's qi burst forth. His power was just as transcendent as the other two, or at least it ought to have been. Instead, there was something about it that had always rubbed Wu Hao wrong. For a man named the Glorious Sun, there had never been much glory inherent to the man's qi. Pride to the point of arrogance, yes, and happiness, certainly, but there had always been... slack.

A space there, left for a reason. Wu Hao thought back to one of Master Shu's principles: a gap leaves room to grow.

The black flame slotted into Ke Taiqi's core like it had always been meant to nestle there. Or, no - it wasn't his core. Wu Hao could see it now, the array that had been painted onto Ke Taiqi's body. He hadn't seen it before, but now that the black flame was running across the thick lines like a current, he could see it clearly. It covered every single part of his body, sparing not a single spot, particularly concentrated around his heart, his navel, and the entirety of his spine.

Power flooded through the array. An array that was painted onto a body, much like the animated dead Wu Hao had seen before but far more complex. An array that hadn't been visible until it had revealed itself. An array with the same angular, hooked lines that had characterized the shack.

For the first time this winter night, a chill ran across Wu Hao's spine.

Fuck, he thought.

"Master," he shouted. "Stop him!"

Master Shu moved quicker than Wu Hao could see, a staff in his hands stretching out with dollops and whirls of ink clinging to its length so that it formed a massive, grey stroke in the air, and tried to smash Ke Jiaming away before whatever this was could complete.

But he was too late. Ke Jiaming blocked the blow by forming the cloak of black fire into a shield, and before Master Shu could strike again, Ke Taiqi froze entirely.

Wu Hao had never seen anything like it, at least not on a man still living. His qi was chained within his body somehow, kept there and forced to run in specific patterns by that black flame qi. It formed a barrier that looked almost like an egg.

"What did you do?" Master Shu breathed, his weapon still locked against Ke Jiaming's.

"Mine is the black flame," Ke Jiaming said, his eyes meeting Master Shu's. "I shall take everything that the Sun is and make it mine, as it was always supposed to be."

He gave a little self-satisfied smirk. "Up to and including the sun itself."

Ke Taiqi gave an unwilling roar of pain. Light blasted from his every pore, struggling to escape, but the net of black fiery qi was bound so tight around him that it had no chance to escape.

"He's your own brother," Master Shu said, staring at Ke Jiaming, while keeping Ke Taiqi in his side vision. The anger in his qi was such that it spilled form his skin in angry streamers of ink, but all the same it was a frozen, rational anger. "Is nothing sacred to you?"

Ke Jiaming inclined his head. "Power is the only truth in this world. Why do you refuse to see that?"

Master Shu gripped his staff tight.

"Always the same words," he said. "Three hundred years almost, and the Demon Cult still hasn't changed a bit."

"Truths don't change simply because you do not like them," Ke Jiaming said. He stamped the ground with his spear. "There are no limits on martial artists other than those we place upon ourselves."

"Truths?" Master Shu said, smiling grimly. "I shall show you the truth, traitor. You'll have time to contemplate it in Hell."

"I think not," Ke Jiaming said, and clicked his fingers.

Flame erupted like a ring from Ke Taiqi's core and flung Master Shu away, though he'd gotten his staff up in a precise block just in time. Wu Hao hadn't quite been so lucky - he tried to duck or dodge, but he'd been caught by surprise, and he watched the swelling flame come nearer.

A raven made out of a single inkblot leapt from Wu Hao's chest, fully-formed, and threw itself into the fire, expanding rapidly to stain every single part that might have targeted Wu Hao. He felt the amulet of protection that he'd carried on his chest ever since Master Shu had given it to him heat up and then crack, fragments of it sliding against his skin before dissipating into dust.

Wu Hao shook his head and retreated further back. Whatever had gone on, they were too late. He watched the transformation of Ke Taiqi, resolving that if they were to die then at least he could study whatever this was. How else could he counter it in the future?

But in the moment that Master Shu had been distracted, he was suddenly flung into the sky as Ke Jiaming's spear flashed with power. Despite another hasty block, the black ink scattered as if water had been splashed on top of a landscape painting, and Master Shu went along with it, only managing to stop himself after several breaths of time. There was a large slash that had nearly struck his arm from his body, although black and white ink mingled to bind it back to Master Shu's body. In moments, he was whole again, though somehow diminished.

"Now, brother," Ke Jiaming said, his voice lingering even as he leapt back into the sky. "Kill the boy and join me. We have work to do."

Ke Taiqi, his eyes not just glassy but outright empty, turned to Wu Hao. Power burst from his every pore, lighting up the night. With one smooth motion, he pulled a beautiful longsword out of his spatial storage. Light sped through each of the countless arrays engraved onto the sword, until light bled out of the side of the sword when it could no longer be confined. It spilled before cohering into an aura that ran rampant, and with a flick of Ke Taiqi's wrist, the sword slashed out into the empty night air.

He left a burning scar there, which accelerated and ripped through the night. Wu Hao threw himself down as quickly as he could but even then he felt the sheer power burn through the air above his head and nearly blind him entirely.

There was no more sense that the Glorious Sun Sovereign's qi was muted in any way.

Right, he thought, scrabbling up to his feet. A Sovereign had been brainwashed, and now he was trying to kill Wu Hao. Maybe he wasn't using his full power, but if anything had become obvious tonight, it was that he might not need that full power anyway.

Maybe Wu Hao was going to get that second principle after all.