War was one spark from breaking out.
The Yaoqing fleet made no attempt at concealment.
Their forces already outnumbered the abominations of Abundance several times over, and skulking about would only have looked ridiculous.
War drums rolled, banners snapped in the wind, and the flags of the Xianzhou rippled overhead like drifting cloud.
It’s on!
The Sword Champion’s figure was impossible to mistake.
She charged at the very front, silver-white sword light tearing the battlefield open.
With every swing, abominations went down like cut wheat.
It hardly looked like combat at all.
It looked like a harvest, one-sided from the start.
Jingliu followed close behind her master, her long sword like hoarfrost.
Wherever that cold light passed, the abominations froze mid-motion, then shattered into fragments.
Master and disciple fought shoulder to shoulder, and the force of them lit up the entire Cloud Knight army.
The morale of the Cloud Knights surged at the sight.
They raised their weapons, and their shouts rose deafening:
“We, the Cloud Knights—”
One man lifted his weapon first, his roar cutting through the chaos and clamor of the field.
Then a thousand voices joined into one, so loud the sky itself seemed to tremble:
“—swear to be as veiling clouds that blot the heavens, and shield the Xianzhou!”
The Cloud Knights advanced in magnificent order.
The abominations of Abundance were nothing but a disorganized rabble, and the battlefield became a slaughter that ran almost entirely one way.
Victory looked like something they could simply reach out and take.
Felutina watched it all without a trace of delight on her face.
Instead, her fingers began moving through the signs of a divination.
The reading still came back ill-omened.
That much was certain.
The result had not changed since before the first blow was struck.
No matter how many times she ran the calculation, the answer came out identical.
What did that mean?
It meant this lopsided slaughter in front of her was not the real battle at all.
Felutina knit her slender brows.
The Sword Champion plus a full Cloud Knight army.
That combination was enough to crush the overwhelming majority of enemies.
Yet the divination still read ill.
Which meant something out there could break this fearsome host — something that even the Sword Champion and Jingliu could not answer.
What was it?
She turned it over, digging through her memory for a thread to pull.
A strange sensation welled up in her without warning.
“Ngh…”
Felutina’s body went rigid.
The feeling was bizarre, as though something had taken root inside her and begun to sprout, like a seed waking in spring soil, straining upward with everything it had.
She knit her brows and glanced toward the horizon on instinct.
Her pupils shrank to points.
The ground ahead was shaking violently.
Countless plants burst up through the earth and grew like madness.
The vines swelled and spread fast enough to follow with the naked eye, and in the space of a blink they stood taller than a man.
The Cloud Knight charge was severed where it stood.
A voice rang out, one she could not place as male or female.
It was not loud, yet it arrived in her mind with perfect clarity:
“All living things are hemmed within flesh and bone, caged as prisoners, and endure three torments.
The torment of the living, who suffer their own limits.
The torment of the aged, who suffer what must surely come.
The torment of the sick, who suffer their nearness to death.”
“…That sounds familiar.”
Felutina rapped her own head, trying to shake her thoughts clear, and she remembered where she had heard those words soon enough.
…It was Shuhu.
In the game’s text, this was exactly what Shuhu had said while debating doctrine with Yaoshi, the Aeon of Abundance.
So this was the big one, waiting here all along.
No wonder.
She had been asking herself how a force with the Sword Champion and an entire Cloud Knight army could possibly be defeated.
Already some of the Cloud Knight soldiers could not endure it, dropping to their knees with their heads clutched in their hands.
Golden vines erupted from inside their bodies, running them through, tearing ribs apart, breaking out from beneath the skin and unfurling into grotesque flowers.
The woman in military dress glanced back over her shoulder.
Her gaze swept across the soldiers being eaten away by the power of Abundance, across all those terrified faces.
“Every Cloud Knight still able to move, listen.
Withdraw.
Go to the General for reinforcements.”
Her voice carried no hesitation.
She only drew a deep breath, tightened her grip on her sword, and charged alone into that wildly spreading sea of green.
The woman in military dress had foreseen the hour of her own death, and she had accepted it.
She would go to meet that Emanator of Abundance alone, to buy her comrades a chance to live.
Jingliu wanted to follow in her master’s steps, but out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of her fellow soldiers.
Golden vines running riot inside a living body — that image was far too familiar to her.
Fear rose up through her.
Her steps stopped.
The hand on her sword shook faintly.
The old images came flooding in like a tide and swallowed her whole.
Stand up.
She told herself so, and a faint chill spilled out around her, a thin layer of frost settling over her crimson eyes.
Then a hand patted her shoulder, light and easy.
“Go back and rest.”
The white-haired girl walked past Jingliu, striding off in the direction the woman in military dress had vanished.
“…Sis.”
Jingliu murmured it, and her voice held a fragility it had not carried in a very long time.
Felutina’s steps finally paused.
She turned her head and gave Jingliu a brilliant smile.
“Don’t worry.
Leave it all to your Sis.”
…
“Thus birth, age, sickness and pain are what we call the possession of death.
And from the possession of death comes the root of all suffering.”
Shuhu’s voice kept sounding in her head, the words boring in, trying to take root in her consciousness.
Felutina raised her sword and hacked apart the weeds that stood taller than she did, glancing left and right as she went.
Brave words earlier, but she had very little confidence to back them.
Shuhu was an Emanator of Abundance, after all.
With no Xianzhou General stepping in, did she really have any way to handle a thing like that?
“Getting cold feet after coming this far would be pretty embarrassing.”
Felutina slapped her own cheeks to drive off the wavering, drew a deep breath, and cut down the last clump of growth.
What lay beyond made her scalp crawl.
A monstrous tree stood at the center of the battlefield, countless branches waving like a thousand arms.
Every branch was covered in twisted faces, and those faces contorted in agony, screaming without sound.
And the woman in military dress was fighting for her life amid hundreds of those lashing arms.
Her sword light was as sharp as ever, but against an assault that blotted out the sky she was being worn down.
The branches came from every angle, endless, as if they could never all be cut away.
The instant Felutina came into view, the woman in military dress glanced back on reflex.
That single instant of distraction was all Shuhu needed.
A branch caught her and sent her flying.
The vines surged after her, sharpening into countless spikes that shot toward the woman in military dress—
A silver-white sword light swept across the air with a rushing hiss and sheared every one of them apart.
Felutina stood between her and the tree, long sword held level, a trace of a smile still at the corner of her mouth.
“Master, you go on ahead.
Leave the rest to me.”
Not a moment spared to mourn the Sword Champion’s defeat — arriving on the battlefield right behind her is Felutina!