"Rain," the Crimson Vulture said gently.
The crown of feathers broke loose and fell across the bridge like a red curtain of knives.
Adam did not raise his Field. He did not have the Qi for it. He stayed on one knee with his sword’s point on the planks and let his Eyes of Divine Insight open as wide as they would go.
The mist had blinded them before. The Dominion had burned the mist away, and now, in the clean dark, he could see exactly what he’d glimpsed for half a heartbeat earlier.
Threads.
Every feather trailed a thin red thread behind it, and every thread ran back across the bridge to the same place: the center of Gao Mo’s chest, where his heart-blood beat. Ten thousand blades, and one leash.
’Got you,’ Adam thought.
He turned his sword and cut down the first dozen feathers. The next hundred he met with his bronze forearm. They rang off it like hail. But the one that came for his left shoulder, he let through.
It punched through his skin like a nail through wet paper.
Pain flared white. Blood ran hot down his arm, and for the first time in two months, something living had broken the bronze. The feather’s red tip came out of his back, pinning his shoulder to the air.
"Ah," Gao Mo sighed, delighted. "There it is."
Adam’s right hand closed around the feather’s shaft.
"Thank you," he said. "I needed a handhold."
He called the black flame.
Chaos-Devouring Fire poured out of his palm and into the feather, and from there it raced up the red thread, a lit fuse crossing the bridge in a heartbeat. Every feather in the sky took the flame. They did not burn. They were drunk, one after another, thousands of crimson blades devoured in a single breath of black silence.
Then the fuse reached the necklace at Gao Mo’s throat.
"What—" Gao Mo began.
The flame took him.
It did not burn his flesh. It drank his blood. It drained the Qi that bound the feathers to his heart, and the Crimson Vulture shrieked, a thin, ugly sound, as the mist he had been hiding behind peeled off him and went up in black smoke.
Adam stood. The hole in his shoulder pulsed. The fire, drinking, poured a river of stolen Qi back through the feather into his dantian, thin but real. It would be enough.
"You," Gao Mo rasped, his face gone gray. A dagger of hardened blood had appeared in his hand. "You wanted that wound. You let me hit you."
"I wanted a thread to pull." Adam drew the feather out of his shoulder and dropped it, burning, onto the planks. "You gave me ten thousand of them."
"You’ve nothing left!" The Vulture lunged, his dagger screaming with the last of his Qi. "You’ve no domain, no field, no—"
Adam raised his hand.
"Ten-Thousand Blade Dominion."
The world turned silver, but this time it was not a hundred feet. It was not even thirty. A tiny sphere of black-silver blades, no wider than a small room, snapped closed around the two of them.
Gao Mo stopped, mid-stride, as ten thousand points hung against his skin.
"A hundred feet costs me ten breaths," Adam said quietly. "A dozen feet costs almost nothing. You counted the number I let you see."
The Crimson Vulture looked at the swords. His eyes went wide.
"The valley," he whispered. "The ten breaths. You knew we were watching."
"I found your feather afterward," Adam said. "After that, all I had to do was let you keep the number."
He did not kill him.
He struck three times. The first blade severed the cord at Gao Mo’s neck. The second shattered his dantian, and the Crimson Vulture screamed as his Golden Core cracked like a cheap teacup. The third pinned his dagger arm to the bridge’s iron chain.
The Dominion vanished. The silver dust drifted down over the planks.
Gao Mo hung against the chain, gasping, his Qi gone. His eyes were wide and wet.
"Kill me," he said.
"No." Adam stood over him with his hand pressed against his bleeding shoulder, and he was breathing hard. "You’re going to walk into the Law Enforcement Hall and tell them who paid you."
"The Blood-Feather Sect will—"
"Then talk fast."
A light flickered at the far end of the bridge.
Then another. And another.
One by one, the lanterns came on, racing along the bridge from the Ghost-Sword side. The Law Enforcement array was waking exactly on schedule, an hour after it had been told to sleep. The old man had set his blind spot to the minute.
Adam looked at the lights, and then at the broken man on the chain, and a cold smile touched his lips.
"Right on time," he said.