“Scatter,” it was Iaray who shouted this command to the other sisters, decisive in the moment of crisis. “Get to our master.”

  They did so. Twelve women ran on footsteps formed of light itself across the hills. They passed scattered demons, fallen enemies and allies, and raced down to the plains. All plans suspended in the need to reach the one all of the sisters referred to, in their private thoughts, as mother. As they dodged and weaved, devastating techniques were launched from above. Other orthodox cultivators, less swift, succumbed to these as they fled in desperation.

  Starlight speed spared the twelve sisters, but few others were so lucky. Invigorated by consumption of the qi of their fallen foes, the surviving demonic leadership rained down fire, lightning, poison, and worse from on high. Those who sought to escape were swiftly cut down, their exhausted qi reserves insufficient to evade. A bare handful managed to last long enough to find temporary reprieves, but they remained surrounded by hungry demons.

  The Twelve Sisters, seeking out their master far from the center of the fighting, lost none of their number, but neither were they able to reach their goal. Even as they descended to the edge of the wide plain and its many meandering rivers near to where the surviving mortals and lesser cultivators fought a final holding action against the remaining components of the demon horde, a silent command brought them all to an immediate halt. No words conveyed this final request, nor did any wind carry it. Instead, the resonance of their linked daos vibrated upon the pulsations of stellar qi itself.

  They all knew, without any words exchanged, what must be done. A final duty had been charged to them, one last, ultimate, effort.

  They gathered into a half-circle. Itinay, as youngest of the twelve, took up the position on the northern end, opposite Iay, the eldest, to her south. Sword in hand, she used every moment that passed to draw in the ever-present stellar qi from above. A desperate and likely futile attempt to restore her reserves to something approaching combat readiness.

  Their master, their mother, had asked her disciples, her daughters, for time.

  They would provide it, no matter the cost.

  The battle in the skies had been far from a rout. Both sides had suffered terribly, been ground down almost to nothing. The leading demonic cultivators were reduced to a mere five, all in the seventh layer of the celestial ascendancy realm. Four of these victors were content to indulge their instincts by preying upon the surviving scattered elders of the Orthodox Alliance. Only one descended to pursue the wounded Orday.

  Only one was needed.

  Twelve stood in a loose semicircle, watching as the foe descended. All gathered there knew that enemy. His name rang out across the world, the vilest of curses. The last of the seven great betrayers, the only survivor among the twisted souls whose forbidden experimentation had birthed the demon plague and begun the war.

  The others who had joined in that hideous violation had long ago been cleansed. The Entwining Blight was the only one who remained. Master of the demon plague, he was the most powerful being in the world.

  He landed before them. His impact, impelled by the considerable weight of the heavy steel-plated armor he wore and the rotten, water-logged wood-like substance that comprised his immortal body, left a small crater beneath his feet and covered everyone in dust and grass shavings. Though partly concealed beneath an elegant silk battle robe, the withered vine-like hands and the twisting driftwood contours of an otherwise immovable face gave away the true nature of this embodiment of slow decay.

  Itinay thought he resembled a corpse left in the bottom of a bog for far too long, and fervently wished to return him there.

  For weapons, the demonic cultivator carried a short spear in each hand. No forge produced those crude-seeming spikes. They were carved out from the substance of his immortal body itself. A heinous violation of the dao, only possible to one whose every blow drained qi from his enemies.

  Such blows had been numerous of late.

  Qi, hideous and reeking of the foulness of demonic distortion, exuded off the traitor in waves. Far more than even an immortal body could properly contain. Enough that he was in danger of bursting through the boundary of his very soul and shattering his cultivation through qi overload.

  Already one of the rare few who had reached the seventh layer of the celestial ascendancy realm and stood on the cusp of the heavens, the reservoir he'd drained from his fallen foes – many of them matching his strength or at worst a single step below – ought to propel him across that barrier with but a thought.

  The tribulation of ascension was the Entwining Blight's for the asking. Cruel as his dao was, there would never be a more suitable moment to make the attempt, not in a million years. Yet, instead of seeking seclusion, of readying his mind for that greatest of all possible challenges, he stood before the sisters in boiling fury.

  “So it's true,” Itinay heard a voice interject across the silent tableau of that moment and realized, to her shock, that she had spoken aloud. “The theorists were right. The plague forbids ascension.”

  “Yes, damn you! Curse your blue eyes you wretched little star-blind worm!” The force of this bellowed accusation released so much excess qi it uprooted whole trees and tossed them dozens of meters through the air. “My will is stolen from me, I cannot bend my qi to form an immortal cocoon. The plague refuses to leave this world, this shell! It rejects the heavens.” He snarled out each word. Wooden jaws cracked and creaked, a brutal cacophony of distended language. “In my moment of triumph I am blocked forever. Damn you all!”

  “The great betrayer, betrayed by his own great work,” the sharp voice of Artemay, the hooded sister, gathered into wild laughter. She cackled madly, peels of bitter mirth that rose to the stars. Misery transformed through her gallows humor into bravado and the resolve of the sisterhood surged to brilliant heights. “Hilarious, if only the world were not the butt of the joke.”

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  “The world is done!” The Entwining Blight boomed, each word cracked the sky like thunder. Trees burst apart all around him, and the undergrowth caught fire only to be put out by the next vocal detonation. “If I cannot leave it behind, then I'll kill it instead. Perhaps that will teach the heavens their folly in denying me a place among their ranks.” Black eyes, orbs of unrelenting darkness, seemed to look upon the sisters for the first time. “Out of my way, little girls. I have unfinished business with your mother. Your fought well, cunning even. That's enough to earn a quick death. Drop your weapons and I will gift it to you.”

  Twelve immortal ladies laughed in his face. They had been given a sworn charge. The very idea that any of them would forsake it was ridiculous.

  Itinay's grip tightened about the hilt of her sword. They were, none of them, above the fourth layer of the celestial ascendancy realm, and that only Iay. Twelve on one could breach almost any gap, in ordinary times. On another day, if they'd fought together, they could have won.

  Not this day.

  Endless quantities of qi filled the Entwining Blight. Power radiated from his every pore, more than enough to render the normal rules of combat irrelevant. They could throw one hundred killing blows through his guard; that mass of qi would simply cancel them all.

  The demonic cultivator moved to spout some bitter epithet in response to their laughter, but his furious tirade was halted before it began.

  A bolt of lightning slammed down from high above. It impacted a short distance to the west. Thunder washed over them all.

  No ordinary lightning, not this. The night sky was perfectly clear, the stars shown bright to fill the empty black. A waning crescent moon hung witness in the distance.

  The bolt had not been the ordinary flash of blinding blue-white to mirror the shade of Itinay's eyes. This retina-staining discharged encompassed a far greater spectrum. Ten thousand colors and more, all the endless furies of heaven were cast down within that singular strike.

  Heavenly lightning, the wrath that descended to punish violations of the natural order. The phenomenon summoned in response to pursuit of dao beyond the limits of the physical, of humanity. It was a judgment with only one possible origin.

  Tribulation.

  And only one entity on this field of death and desolation dared attempt such a drastic act of defiance.

  Twelve sisters felt it, observed the first stroke of heaven's wrath as their mother dared to surmount the final step on the path of cultivation. To claim her dao for all eternity and with it a place in the heavens themselves. Behind the guard of her disciples, Orday sought to ascend.

  Everyone felt it. Most did nothing. The remaining orthodox cultivators were focused on immediate survival. The other demonic cultivators, recognizing through their instinctual link with the plague that they were viewed with disdain from above, chose to keep far away from this manifestation of heavenly wrath. Mortals and demons alike ignored these elevated powers as they struggled for immediate survival, clawing and stabbing in the muck.

  The Entwining Blight saw that bolt descend and roared out in absolute fury. “No! That piteous star-spawn will not claim that which is rightfully mine!” His wood-like body trembled, rage spurred every portion of his being to shake, a branch in the wind. “I will not let heaven spare her my wrath!”

  Propelled by anger, he raised a twisted wooden spear and moved to throw.

  Orday sat, wrapped in a cocoon of starlight, within a thicket of reeds beside a distant lake. She lay at the very edge of the horizon. Despite this distance, none had the least bit of doubt what would happen should the demonic cultivator's projectile be launched.

  Hideous qi gathered around the spearhead. A hundred killing constructs filled it, slaved to the twisted will of the monster who carried it. It's impact would pierce a great mountain; slay an entire forest.

  It could not be allowed. The twelve sisters knew this. They would not permit it.

  As one, they attacked.

  Iay, eldest among them, struck from the extreme left. Itinay, the youngest, thrust from the far right. For a single instant twelve blows fell in perfect synchronicity.

  They slammed into a barrier of impossibly dense plague qi. A wall of rusted oil solid as steel and deeper than any well. It laughed at these blows, specks before its infinity. Its champion would not be stopped, not in this moment, not at the perfect concentration of disease.

  Futility filled the air. It seeped into the dao itself. Then into immortal blood as the Entwining Blight counterattacked.

  The spear in his hand burst apart. Fragments of wood, propelled by his terrible, consuming, essence, raked the flesh of all those before him. The sisters struggled to stand, drained of strength and wracked with hideous pain transmitted by even the most superficial of scratches and pinpricks that barely penetrated through armor. Beneath their feet the ground turned black as this devastating outburst slaughtered every living thing within hundreds of meters, even the tiny minute forms that lived between the grains of soil.

  In agony, but unbowed, Itinay dropped to one knee, took a single breath to gather power within, and then threw herself forward. Her mother was depending on her.

  How could she ever falter.

  Blue steel hunted for life within the black-green monstrosity of rot and decay.

  Chaos reigned as her sisters joined in the fray. Behind them all, lightning struck again and again. Growing in ferocity with each blast, the intervals between the strikes collapsed down in tandem, until nearly nothing separated the blows. The bolts lit the night in technicolor wonder, until even immortal eyes saw nothing but blurs and stars.

  This overwhelming luminous deluge saved the sisters.

  Ten times Itinay attacked her demonic foe. Ten times her blade bounced away as it slammed against an impenetrable condensation of qi. Ten times she was cut in reply, until blue blood seeped from horrid gashes upon every limb.

  Yet she was not pierced through. Her heart and brain remained untouched, and channels of qi forged into welds holding soul, flesh, and mind as one in perfected immortal existence remained solid as ever. The injuries, though grievous, would heal, given time. Countless lethal blows the enemy might have launched were lost, stolen by the heaven-sent chaos that confounded the senses of the unstoppable demonic cultivator.

  He left the sisters bleeding and ravaged, but bereft of mortal wounds.

  Until his patience to endure confusion came to an end.

  A wave of utterly uncompromising power, all the energy stored within the reserves of a seventh layer cultivator of the celestial ascendancy realm channeled into a single omnidirectional burst, was let loose.

  It hurled the twelve to the ground, driven flat on their backs. Itinay felt a dozen bones break, and bruises sprouted across every speck of skin. Her qi reserves vanished, guttering out like a snuffed candle. All strength to even move deserted her.

  In that moment she was reduced to barely more than mortal existence, only the touch of the dao, perpetually part of her being for centuries, remained to remind her that she had not been slain. It took all the effort she could summon simply to turn her head and discover her sisters in identical states of helplessness. They had fought with all they possessed, only to be effortlessly beaten and left defenseless.

  “Enough!” The Entwining Blight raised his arms. Spikes sprouted from the limbs, grew to meters long in moments, detached, and launched into the air. They rose up, and then turned to rain down absolute death.

  Itinay saw her end upon the hundreds of spear points.

  Even as the demonic cultivator extended his qi to draw death back down, there was a sudden final interruption.

  Ten thousand bolts of lightning descended from the heavens in one stroke.

  Time stopped completely.