70. Breaking Point (Patreon)

“What did he say, child?” To stand in the presence of a peak-Profound Realm master like Patriarch Yalta would’ve wobbled the knees of most Vigor fighters. Dorian bore the pressure with a grimace.

“He threatened me,” said Dorian, feigning a cringe. “He said this was a message to the rest of the Desert that today was only the beginning. He said the Ugoc send their regards.”

“Impudent!” yelled a man from behind. From his lavish gray robe he looked to be a clan leader; it’d been torn all over in the battle. He clutched a bloodied stump of an arm. “Ambushing us like that—in our territory, in a time of celebration, no less! Have they no honor?!”

“None.” Narong spat the word. He was cut in so many places his skin barely stitched him together. Two pale yellow eyes sharpened. “They’ve shown their hand. They’ve done what they wanted.”

He swept his eyes coldly over the battlefield, which had gone deathly quiet. The geyser was receding back into the ground. A small whirlpool grew over the surface and bodies were sucked in, dragged beneath the surface, limp, as though they were swirling down a drain straight to hells. There was more blood than water. Red was the color of the day, soaking all.

If Dorian was generous, half of the Festivalgoers survived. A quarter of the fighters did, if that. They’d crippled the Tribes in a stroke; the young talents, the competitors, had been decimated. Now, in the aftermath, no-one quite knew what to do. Tribal leaders glanced to one another, restless, as what remained of their straggling tribesmen banded back together behind them. Zhang had perished, and with him went any Oases instruction. The Festival was headless.

“They can’t get away with this,” growled a bearded, grizzled Elder. “We must strike back!”

“Not us.” The voice came from an Elder of the Zhaopai clan, who clutched his Matriarch’s mangled body in his arms. “

More voices joined the fray. “What’s there to do? You saw them—he flew on the back of a Frost Dragon!”

“How did he infiltrate us this deeply?!”

“What shall we do? Where shall we go? Our warriors have been decimated, our stores crushed!”

The voices piled up, stumbling over each other. It seemed everyone, elder to Tribesman, had their own anxieties to add to the mix. Dorian saw a herd of frightened faces.

“My husband’s bleeding out! Help! Oh saints, please! An elixir—please, anyone!”

“What was that beast? How’d they find us? Were they all controlled by that one man?!”

A few shouts in particular caught Dorian’s attention.

“What about the Tournament? Zhang’s dead! Will it still go on?”

“It shouldn’t—not now! Our Young Master’s been crippled! It’s unfair!”

A high, shrill voice. “The Tournament? How can you think of such drivel in a time line this?! We’re finished! The Ugoc will kill us all! We must flee to the South, to the marshlands—“

Then a booming voice cut through the rest. “A-attention!”

The man who spoke it looked scarcely more than a boy, fresh out of adolescence. He was in the Vigor Realm, but he wore the cloak of a Tournament Official, though it was hardly recognizable under a veneer of blood. Behind him stood a small circle of the other Officials. “G-greetings. My name is Ari,” he said. His voice wobbled. His hands fidgeted. “I am under-secretary to Minister Zhang. Err. I was, at least. Before…” He gulped. “I am the ranking official. Now, that is.”

He was rapidly wearing thin the shred of respect his rank afforded him. The crowd seethed like a panicked, anguished animal; he was not the man to calm it. Still he spoke, even as his face paled by the word. He looked vaguely traumatized. “I—and the rest of the officials—return to Azcan t-today,” he warbled. “We will speak to the Oasis Chief and deliver his instructions on scry-ing glass shortly. That is all. Thank you.”

Nodding stiffly, he retreated back to the comfort of his circle of Officials.

The tribesmen looked unsure of what to do. Most started regroup; tribal leadership started discussions in fierce tones. A few splintered off at the edges of the crowd, going their separate ways. The Officials, nodding to each other, set off to the North. This was the start of the end of the Festival, Dorian supposed. A limp dissolution.   What about him? He doubted there were any pieces left to pick up. He couldn’t find Rust Tribe leadership after a cursory scan of the crowd. Maybe they’d all perished. Shrugging, he picked his way back to camp, which was little more than a wasteland of odd trinkets and torn-up tents. Shards of unidentifiable matter littered the grounds.

Soon he stood at the center of the Rust quarters, scanning the tents around him. Strange. Where had all the people gone? Surely they weren’t all crushed?

Then there was a rustling from the tent in front of him. And the one behind him. And the ones to the left, and to the right, thin Tribesmen crawling out like termites out of woodwork, coughing and scrambling.

“Io!” a few voices cried. “Chosen Io!”

Dorian smiled. Inwardly he was running a mental calculus. This was all that was left to him? The ambush might speed up his plans. Now Rust Tribe was little more than a hodgepodge of weaklings; it offered him almost nothing. He’d take what he could, what was his, and defect. It was time for a new chapter in this run.

Speaking of what was his—where was Kaya? He whirled around. In all the chaos she’d escaped his mind. Was she still hidden away, stuffed under some barrier somewhere?

Then Chief Rust and Tuketu stepped out from behind the collapsed remains of the Rust Tribe command tent. Both looked harder than Dorian had ever seen them. Tuketu, who usually had a gentle glint of good humor in his eyes, was grave.   Chief Rust, meanwhile, was murderous. His face was barren, twisted, fuming red. His eyes were wild. Naked hostility radiated from him; his aura and bloodline flared out in full. Dorian hadn’t thought the man was capable of half this much emotion.

Then Dorian remembered the battle. Rust’s cry for him to aid the Hunters, and his son… and Dorian’s refusal. Ah, drat. Here we go.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the round form of Hu sneaking away in the distance. The alchemist gave Dorian an apologetic grimace, shook his head, turned, and kept scurrying.

Then an armada of broken men which made up Rust Tribe’s Hunters fanned out behind him. Among them was Kuruk, an eye poked out, a deep gash up his side. One of the Hunters carried a girl trussed up in thick ropes. Kaya. Dorian tensed. She was out cold, sporting a constellation of fresh purple welts on her temple.

“YOU!” roared the Chief, his eyes bloodshot.

“This has been a bit of a tiring day,” sighed Dorian. It was true. He was tired of putting up pretenses. “I, for one, would just like a good night’s sleep. Let’s settle this tomorrow, eh?”

“You don’t seem to comprehend what is happening.” Tuketu crossed his arms; his eyes flashed. The men around him spread out, encircling Dorian. “You’ve betrayed the clan, Io. There is no sin worse than that.”

“Vordor plucked out my eye,” growled Kuruk, fists clenched so tight his knuckles strained against his skin. His face bulged red. “Where were you, traitor?”

“My son is dead,” breathed Rust. His fists were clenched so tight Dorian could make out the angry violet veins straining against his arms. “Because of you!”

“Must this happen?” Dorian felt a headache coming on. “Look. Can’t we—“

“Our terms are simple.” Tuketu stepped forward. “Surrender, or Kaya dies.”

Dorian blinked at him. Then he started to giggle.

“You don’t think I’ll do it?” Tuketu’s hand lit up with blinding-white qi. He brought a ridged palm to the base of her throat, frowning severely. “The choice is yours.” It only prompted more laughter. Tuketu stared at him, disbelieving.

Then Dorian’s own bloodline soared out in an instant and a new darkness, oppressive and stifling, tinged the air. A spreading shadow. It was greater than ever now that he’d reached mid-Vigor. The Hunters flinched as one as the weight of bore down on their shoulders; he saw a few stagger. Even the Chief’s bloodline was repressed beneath it. Rust froze, eyes bulging.

“You see me,” Dorian drawled, “and you see a boy. Io Rust. Raised as a feckless weakling. Little more than a tool, yours to use as you please all these years. You think sure, he’s gotten some power now—but really, at the bottom of it, he’s still the same boy; he’s simply got his hands on a bigger cudgel. He’s no true threat. So you ambush me, and you think I’ll crumble.”

He turned slowly, eyeing each one of them, and saw the new hesitation on their faces. All except Kuruk. He wore all his hatred of Dorian on his face, fresh as war-paint.

“I don’t blame you.” Dorian shrugged lazily. “It’s reasonable. How much can a person change in just three weeks?”

“What sort of game do you think you’re playing?” snapped Tuketu.

“There’s no game,” said Dorian, and he made sure each of them saw the truth in his face. “I’m not Io Rust. Try killing her. Try killing me. Or not.”

He finished his sweep of the men before him before settling back on Rust and Tuketu. “I’ve seen the place where dead souls go. Trust me—it’s not pleasant.”

Then something snapped in Kuruk. He bull-charged Dorian with a feral roar, a cloud of sand kicking up at his heels. He crossed the distance between them in a blink, meaty fists swinging to take Dorian’s head clean off.

It was the work of the fraction of a second to snare his legs in a Yama’s Chain. Another looped around his arms. A third, thicker than the rest, choked him around the neck. Effortless.

Then Dorian twisted. Kuruk didn’t even have the chance to scream. One moment he was ruddy with life, inflamed by it. The next there was a heart-stopping crunch and his head was twisted one way, his torso another, his legs a third. A Vigor warrior, gone just like that. It was over so fast, and so violently, that it hit the Rust Tribesmen the way thunder strikes after lightning.

There was a deep, foreboding silence as they processed what they saw. Rust stared, slack-jawed. Whatever vestige of control he’d kept on his emotions left him. He looked at Dorian with naked disbelief, and for the first time uncertainty slipped into his expression. Dorian could read his thoughts plain off his face; Rust knew Dorian had made progress, but this? To his right, Tuketu was frozen solid by uncomprehending shock. Seeing his son like this—a body one moment, a corpse the next—visibly broke something in him. By the blankness in his eyes, his mind had fizzled out.

Then Tuketu face started to shift; horror and rage crept in, twisting his features to a gnarled, monstrous mess.

“Back down,” said Dorian wearily, “None of you have a clue what you’re dealing with.”

“KILL HIM!” screamed Tuketu, and Dorian sighed once more.

***

Kaya wasn’t hurt too bad. She’d recover in due time. Dorian finished his check-up in a few minutes. Then he hoisted her onto his arms and eyed the sunset, which made a bloody-orange battlefield of the dusk sky, an ethereal mirror of the sands below. It was time to leave.

A hand tugged at the hem of his trousers. It was a woman, middle-aged, cradling a child. “Where will we go?” she whispered. “Save us, Io Rust!” And she looked to him, and Dorian could see that she saw a person he was not.

“That name—Rust—is dead,” he said. “Scatter. Seek refuge in other Tribes. You are creatures of the desert. You’ll survive.”

Gently, he removed her hand. He thought about cutting it off at the wrist, but for whatever reason he was feeling a strange, uncharacteristic tenderness. He stood at the end of something; he felt an upwelling of a strange emotion in his chest. Something bittersweet. He let it wash over him.

“I’m no tribesman of yours any longer.”

With Kaya in tow, he stepped over the withered corpse of Rust, stepped over the cracked face of Tuketu, whose tongue still lolled out in shock. He palmed his Tournament token in his hand, felt its cool, reassuring weight, and let it fade into his Interspatial Ring. Then he took a slow, deep breath, and walked toward the setting sun. The Oasis awaits.