The last thing Nathan Cole felt in his own body was heat.
Not the heat of the explosion — that came a half-second later, a wall of pressure that turned sound into something he felt in his teeth instead of heard. The heat before it was just the truck's engine block against his shoulder as he threw himself over the girl, the two younger operators already down, already gone, and he had exactly enough time to think not her, not this one before the world came apart.
Then cold.
Not metaphorical. Real, wet, teeth-aching cold, snow against his cheek, and a body that was not his own screaming at him from every joint.
He opened eyes that weren't his and looked at a sky that wasn't his, grey and low and foreign, and the first thing his training did — because eleven years of training doesn't stop just because you apparently died — was run a system check.
Breathing: shallow, labored. Ribs: at least three cracked, maybe more. Left arm: numb, bad sign. Face: swollen, one eye won't open. Blood loss: significant. Ground: packed snow, mountain terrain, elevation. Threat: unknown, assume hostile.
He tried to sit up and made it exactly four inches before his body reminded him, in language too clear to argue with, that it had been beaten nearly to death very recently.
"—still breathing. Barely. Leave him, he's finished, he's not worth the mercy stroke."
The voice was young, male, dripping with a specific kind of contempt Nathan recognized from every country he'd ever worked in — the contempt of someone who has never once been afraid for his life and cannot imagine what it does to a person.
He turned his head — that much he could manage — and found the source. A young man, maybe eighteen, in grey robes trimmed with pale blue, sword still drawn, standing over him with the loose, satisfied posture of someone who'd already decided the fight was over. Behind him, three others in matching robes, and behind them, a crowd of maybe forty kneeling, terrified young people in plain clothes, watching.
Candidates, something in the borrowed body's fading memory supplied, faint as a radio signal through static. This is the entrance trial. I failed the entrance trial. I'm going to die at the base of Skyreach Peak and no one will remember my name.
Nathan Cole had exactly one operating principle that had survived eleven years of war intact: you do not stop moving until you are actually dead.
He was not actually dead.
"Get up," the swordsman said, not to him — to the crowd. "Watch this. This is what happens when Frostreed trash thinks it can test into a real sect. Han Muyang couldn't even last one exchange. Pathetic."
Han Muyang. His name. Not his name. The name of the body he was wearing like a coat two sizes wrong.
He didn't have qi. He didn't have a sword. He didn't have a working left arm. What he had was roughly two hundred pounds of borrowed, broken teenage muscle, a mountain slope with a six-foot drop three feet to his right, and one working eye that had just watched the swordsman's stance shift his weight fully onto his front leg as he turned to grandstand for the crowd.
Overcommitted. Blind side. Now.
Nathan drove his good hand into the snow, got one knee under himself, and used the last honest strength in Han Muyang's body to throw himself sideways — not at the swordsman, away from him, off the ledge, into the drop the kid hadn't accounted for because why would he, the fight was already won.
He hit a snowbank six feet down hard enough to black out the world for a second, rolled, and came up against a boulder with his ears ringing and his cracked ribs screaming loud enough to drown out thought.
Above him, he heard the swordsman swear — genuine, startled, not performance anymore — and the scrape of boots finding the edge.
Good, Nathan thought, distantly, through the pain. Angry is stupid. Let him be angry.
He had maybe four seconds before the swordsman found a way down. He used one of them to look at his own hand — Han Muyang's hand, thin-fingered, unscarred, a hand that had never held anything heavier than a writing brush — and made a decision that had nothing to do with martial arts and everything to do with eleven years of close-quarters doctrine: the fight is never actually about the weapon. It's about what your opponent doesn't expect you to still be able to do.
He grabbed a fist-sized rock.
"Where'd he go—" The swordsman dropped into the gully, sword low, eyes scanning the wrong side of the boulder.
Nathan came off the ground with everything Han Muyang's ruined body had left and put the rock into the side of the boy's skull with the flat, economical violence of a man who has done this exact motion — target, weight transfer, follow-through — more times than he could count, just never with a rock, and never against someone who genuinely believed nothing could touch him.
The swordsman went down like his strings were cut.
Nathan did not stand over him and gloat. He did not check if he was dead. He took the boy's sword — heavier than it looked, badly balanced for anyone but its owner, still better than a rock — and he turned to face the ledge above, because three more of them were already coming, and somewhere above that, forty terrified strangers were watching to see what "Frostreed trash" did next.
His ribs were on fire. His left arm still wasn't answering. He had no qi, no technique, no idea what a "meridian" even was in any sense that mattered here.
What he had was a body still breathing and a very old certainty, forged in places whose names he would never be allowed to say out loud again even if anyone here could understand them: you don't need to win the war standing at the bottom of the mountain. You just need to still be standing when the sun comes up.
He set his stance — wrong, by every rule this world's martial arts would later teach him, and exactly right by the only rules he actually knew — and waited for the next one to come down into the gully after him.
"Come on, then," he said, in Han Muyang's voice, and did not recognize how calm it sounded. "I'm still here."