Radeon counted them as he circled. Each man treading the freezing northern ground, each breath puffing pale into the air.

More than three hundred by his measure. Enough to matter. Enough to feed.

He kept wide, patient, letting them huddle tighter and tighter around their crude array as if closeness could make up for fear.

Then he began to topple trees. Trunks cracked and fell with slow, heavy certainty.

He laid them down closer to the formation, one after another, building a rough divide between the bandits and the bison.

The men sneered at first. A wall of wood was nothing to cultivators, nothing to men who believed the earth itself had taken their side.

Radeon kept moving the timber in. Closer. Closer.

A few tried to bolt through the widening gaps. They never made it.

Radeon's wooden body lashed out in clean, precise strikes, skewering runners with pristine execution.

He did not miss one. The rest saw that and chose to stay put, swallowing their panic.

That was when Radeon made his real move. He had already set the timbers burning.

The bandits helped without meaning to, hurling their qi to light the way.

Radeon wedged the burning logs against his branched body.

The flame touched the uprooted trees, still alive in a stubborn way, but they did not catch a proper flame.

They smoldered instead. Smoke rolled out thick and bitter, a choking gray mass that sank into the ring and refused to leave.

Coughs erupted. Men doubled over, hacking like old dogs. Eyes watered. Spittle flew. Their earth array held. Their lungs did not.

Radeon fed more blood pills to the bison. Its eyes, once merely bloodshot, deepened into obsidian crimson.

Flesh burned and rebuilt itself in the same breath.

Fat rendered into heat, heat into muscle, the brutal cycle of healing and ruin turning it into something that no longer remembered grass.

Radeon moved too fast for their eyes to track cleanly.

He slipped through the smoke and back out again.

Fay felt Radeon's qi run through her like a warm thread.

The smoke did not touch her. Her lungs stayed clean.

He wanted her to watch. He wanted her to see how he harvested those who dared covet what was his.

Radeon let a timer tick in his head. Three minutes. Qi could filter smoke. It could not conjure air where there was none.

The lack of oxygen would dull their thoughts. It would blunt their will. Fear would find a softer place to sink its teeth.

He piled more logs on the windward side. Flames climbed there, higher and hungrier, eating what little clean air remained.

The bandits shifted as one, a mass that tried to move together because moving alone meant dying.

Then the bison was above them.

Earth quaked. Snow shivered off branches.

The beast crashed into the circle, into the array itself.

For a heartbeat the bandits were too stunned to grasp that their enemy had invited himself into their array.

It was a massacre. The bison moved with speed that mocked cultivators and weight that mocked stone, bulldozing men into the ground like weeds.

The scent of blood only drove the beast deeper into frenzy. It roared. Shoved. Trampled.

The smoke grew thicker as bodies broke. The bandits could not muster their qi in any clean way.

They could barely breathe. They could only hear the screaming, high and ragged.

Within a quarter incense, there was only the bison's panting. And the grinding of its gnashing teeth.

Radeon siphoned the madness out of the creature like poison drawn from a wound.

He pricked it, bled it, and drained the part of the blood pill that turned hunger into rage.

The bison's eyes cleared by degrees. Its breath slowed. For a heartbeat it looked as if it had woken into a dream.

A dream where it had been invincible, peerless, unstoppable. Now did not know what to do with its own strength.

Radeon saw the stupor on the creature's face and slapped it with his bark.

The sound was sharp. The bison blinked hard and turned its head to Fay on its back, waiting, obedient in a way that felt almost human.

Fay brushed the beast's hair and said nothing. She knew Radeon would handle what had to be handled.

Her mind wandered as she held on and stared through the trees, silent, turning questions over in her palm like stones.

What was right. What was wrong. What was merely excessive.

Radeon nudged the bison toward another battlefield.

He did not dare go close himself. Not yet. What he needed was a view, distance enough to see the whole board.

He rose above Ashlime Crag, broken worse than before, and lifted his awareness across the snow and the shattered ridgelines until he found them.

Three men still battled for the Crystal of Misfortune. Even from afar, the fight looked wrong.

Radeon scanned the ground around them and saw bodies that had died in ways that made no sense.

One man lay skewered through the chest by a tree as if the forest itself had decided to murder.

Another had a crushed skull from a falling chunk of debris that should not have reached him.

A third clawed at his throat in his last moments, eyes bulging as he choked on his own spit.

Radeon pushed his sight farther, stretching it until the distance thinned.

The gilded core cultivators were no better off. One had blown a hand that had drawn a sword for a century.

Another's gloves hung in torn ruin despite being forged from fine ores.

The third wielded shadow and darkness, yet his art bled white and gray light like ash and moon beams.

Events piled up on the edge of impossibility.

Radeon did not covet a peerless body that could master a thousand martial arts.

He did not crave an energy sea that never bottomed out no matter how many spells were cast.

This was the power he wanted. Lady Luck's other mischievous little sister.

Misfortune.

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