Two hours later they were sitting around the fire, clean, bruised and eating fish.
Hunter had caught the fish with his shadow, which had reached into the shallows and simply taken them, and he was trying very hard not to think about the implications.
“Master,” Lex said at last, “what happens now?”
Hunter looked at the three of them, still learning not to break their bowls, alive, and his.
“Now we train,” he said.
“Then we work out our next move, because Clearwater will attract attention: other bandits, cultivators, maybe worse.”
“What’s worse than cultivators?” Xuan asked.
Hunter thought about the heat at the edge of his sense at sunrise, and how it had gone out.
“You don’t want to know.”
[LUNA] SPEAKING OF WHICH.
CHECK THE SOUTH SHORE
[LUNA] YOUR SENSE HAS BEEN FLAGGING IT FOR TEN MINUTES.
YOU DIDN’T NOTICE, DID YOU
He reached for the patch of silence past the deer, which he’d decided was nothing.
It wasn’t silent any more.
Someone had stopped hiding.
It came around the lake toward him, neither fast nor slow, and it was the heat from this morning, the bonfire at his back, only now it was a mile away and closing, and compressed into something so dense that his own cultivation was a candle held up to it.
Is that what I think it is?
[LUNA] YES
He put his bowl down carefully.
“Core Formation,” he said aloud.
“Heading straight for us.”
The three of them froze.
“How long have we got?” Tao whispered.
“A few minutes.
And no, Xuan, we can’t run,” he added, because Xuan was already on his feet.
Lex’s hand went to his knife.
“Then do we fight, Master?”
Hunter laughed, and it came out wrong.
“We’d be dead in seconds.” He made himself sit up straight.
“When she gets here, I talk.
Nobody speaks unless she speaks to you, nobody moves suddenly, and for the love of everything, nobody accidentally punch her.”
Then she walked out of the trees.
She was tall, in white robes stitched with blue that glowed faintly with qi, her long black hair held up with jade.
She was beautiful the way a glacier is, something you admired from a distance while you still could.
Her eyes took inventory of the camp in one pass: three terrified new cultivators, a cart of someone else’s pots, the rusty sword beside him.
[LUNA] CORE FORMATION.
PEAK
[LUNA] HALF A STEP FROM NASCENT SOUL
[LUNA] HUNTER, SHE COULD SNEEZE AND KILL YOU
Noted, he thought, as her gaze stopped on him.
“You,” she said, in a voice that was cultured and completely without warmth.
“You’re the one they call the Demon of Clearwater.”
It was the first time he’d heard it, and it landed like a name tag somebody had stapled to him.
In all his years of adjusting claims, nobody had called him anything worse than sir, with respect.
He couldn’t beat her or outrun her, and begging would only tell her what she wanted to know.
So he did what he’d done every day of his old life, and acted as though he’d been expecting the call.
“That’s me,” he said, and was amazed how level it came out.
“And you are?”
One eyebrow lifted a fraction.
“Liu Xue, core disciple of Cold Lantern Peak.
I’ve come about the Demon of Clearwater.”
She stepped closer, and the grass in front of her boots whitened with frost, and behind him he felt three hearts go into a gallop.
“A guard was killed at the gate,” she said, “with a single blow.
The ford says you danced over his body.”
“I didn’t dance.” It was out of him before he could stop it, and it came out raw.
She watched him say it and didn’t blink.
“But you killed him.”
He could have said accident.
He could have said he stepped in front of me.
He could hear, somewhere in his skull, the small cold voice that still thought poor training.
“Yes,” he said. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
Something moved behind her eyes and was gone.
“And then you took their spirit stone.
The one they kept against a bad winter.” Her hand came to rest on the hilt at her waist.
“You threatened fifty people, took everything they had, and left them to find their own way to spring.
So tell me, Demon of Clearwater, why shouldn’t I execute you where you stand?”
“Master,” Xuan breathed behind him, very small, “is she going to—”
“Quiet, Xuan.”
Hunter looked at her hand on the hilt, then at Tao, Xuan and Lex, gray and shaking.
He had no good answer.
She had most of the facts right.
He picked up the rusty sword anyway.
You didn’t get to choose what came down the road at you.
You only got to choose how you stood when it arrived.
Her blade slid an inch out of its sheath, and blue light came off it so bright it hurt to look at.
“I’m waiting, demon.”
[SYSTEM] MISSION ISSUED: M-0044 “FIRST BOSS BATTLE”
OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE 5 MINUTES VS LIU XUE (CORE FORMATION, PEAK) / S_RANK
REWARD: ???
PENALTY: DEATH (OBVIOUSLY)
ACCEPT?
(Y/N)
[LUNA] FIVE MINUTES?!
THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE
He read it again: survive five minutes.
Not win, and not fight.
Just still be breathing when the clock ran out.
A terrible, stupid idea turned over in his head, and his face started to do something he hadn’t told it to.
[LUNA] WHATEVER YOU’RE THINKING, DON’T
He chose Y, and somewhere behind his eyes a timer began to count.
Then he looked up at Liu Xue, and smiled at her with a great deal m