Sangno forced qi into his leg and into the channels that had betrayed him. It felt like trying to dam a river with bare hands.

Pain cramped his face until his features twisted ugly. He clutched the pewter crystal to his chest.

Curses spilled from him, thick and useless.

Below and behind, two figures closed the distance without haste.

Old man Jorge lifted his straw hat a finger's width, just enough to see, just enough to judge.

The dark robed man, Liam, showed his palm for a heartbeat.

He dragged two fingers across it in a clean, half-cut gesture, asking for cooperation.

Jorge answered with a slow nod. They both wanted the treasure. They both wanted Sangno.

Neither was fool enough to start a three way standoff. Cut one throat first. Split the corpse after.

Jorge moved first. His jagged sword gathered color as it rose. Ash, clay, and coal, as if he had scraped a mountain face into the edge.

When he swung, the air itself seemed to bow away. Sangno threw his arms up, specialized bracers crossing before his face.

The impact rang through the night and down his bones, a hard sound that made his teeth ache.

Liam did not wait for the next swing. He vanished from where he had been, a blink of black in the moonlight.

Sangno felt him before he saw him, a pressure at his back, a cold that did not belong to winter.

Daggers came in a storm, hundreds of them, formed from darkness that drank the forest flame's glow.

Sangno snarled and expanded a qi field around himself. A huge bear shaped visage flared on his back and held him tight.

Blades and knives battered at him. His field trembled at the edge as his bear arts tanked the impact.

From the ground, his right hand man finally arrived, breath steaming, eyes fixed upward.

He had reached the peak of the cornerstone long ago. He had been ready to break through at any moment.

He raised his hand to act. A pebble took him between the brows. It came so fast it made no warning sound.

One blink he was there, reaching. The next his head snapped back and his body folded, as if the string holding him upright had been cut.

Meanwhile, Radeon watched the fight above with a cold, practical eye.

'The crystal's effect was potent. Too potent.'

He weighed their martial arts the way a butcher weighed cuts of meat.

Which one could take a hit and stay standing.

Which one could flee with the crystal if the air turned against him.

Which one would live long enough to matter.

He was just about to step in when the night tore sideways.

A bison burst from the tree line and charged straight for them, hooves pounding like drums on frozen earth, head down, horns set to gore.

It was no wild beast. The line of its fury was too clean. Someone had it on a leash from afar, tugging it with qi like a cruel hand on a rope.

Radeon shoved power through Fay's legs and made her leap. The ground where she had been exploded under the bison's weight.

Trees toppled from the impact, thick bushes snapping like kindling. Frost and bark sprayed into the air.

'Cornerstone Setting spirit beast. Fay really is lucky.'

The bison wheeled back with shocking speed for something that large.

It started snorting steam, scraping the ground with one hoof as it gathered itself for another charge.

Behind a scatter of juniper shrubs, three men from Fay's side huddled low.

Their bodies could resist the cold. Fear cut through that and made them shake anyway.

They had blades, they had cultivation, but neither mattered when their minds were halfway gone.

All they wanted was to sprint off the battlefield and out of their own skin.

The bison lowered its head and came again, snow and ash spitting from its hooves.

Radeon did not waste breath on courage.

"Disappear," Fay murmured.

Then the bison's shadow swallowed her. The cloaks ability took her like a swallowed breath.

One moment she was there, the next her outline was gone, her visage erased from the firelit night.

Fay's insistence paid off. She had almost never used the cloak, but now she could, in times like this.

Radeon moved in his own way. He became an unassuming branch among other unassuming things on the ground.

He rolled into the bison's path, low and slight, choosing the line the charge would take.

When the beast thundered past, Radeon wedged himself against the massive hooves.

Fay's absence was noticed at once. A horn sounded, short and sharp.

The bison veered away, obedience snapping it from murder to recall, and it galloped toward its handler.

A middle aged man waited among the trees where the fire had not yet reached.

He laid a hand on the bison's fur, patting and soothing, then ran his palm along its leg, checking for injury.

His attention stayed on the beast. He did not look down.

Under the man's boots Radeon slid on, hidden by churned snow and the thick fall of a winter coat.

Nothing tugged at the eye. Nothing scraped loud enough to earn suspicion.

Radeon stayed close to the warmth of the man's body, crawling up the back seam like a patient worm.

The bison nudged its handler, snorting as if it smelled something wrong.

The man frowned and reached behind himself. His gloved hand patted cloth and found only cloth.

He twisted to look, scanning the trees, then the firelit dark. Nothing. No one.

Radeon struck. He punctured the ear clean through, a neat tunnel bored in flesh and cartilage.

No blood spilled. Heat sealed the wound as it opened. The man did not fall.

He only went still, a fraction stiffer than before, like a puppet whose strings had gone taut.

Radeon climbed into the man's mind.

Memory unspooled in dull, honest images. A farmer first, hands cracked from frost and work.

Then a hermit on a lonely path, offering a technique like a beggar offering bread.

It was not a butcher's art. It asked for diligence, not malice. It built a bond between man and beast, patience braided into qi.

'Safe enough,' Radeon thought.

He rifled the manual inside the man's skull, reading it as if turning pages that were made of breath and habit.

The method demanded cultivation. It even demanded consistency.

Radeon pushed his voice through qi, thin as thread, straight to Fay. He had a way to bypass qi.

"Take the bison. You can do it. You do not need cultivation for this."

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