As they came closer and closer to the battlefield, Wu Hao could almost feel his nerves tying themselves into knots.

  Relax, he told himself. If you die, it's not the end of the world.

  It didn't actually help much. He still didn't know how he'd actually died the last time he'd come to the battlefield. His steps got heavier and his breathing broke from its regular rhythm, to the point where 732 gave him a side glance.

  "Calm down," he said, voice quiet. "Don't feel. Otherwise you'll be marked as defective."

  Wu Hao gave the other boy a glance, then nodded and took some effort to regulate his breathing in the required pattern.

  The thing was, regardless of whether he hoped for it or dreaded it instead, time kept ticking on mercilessly. The moment was always going to arrive. The group streamed to a stop at the top of a small hill, watching two enormous groups of people fight down below.

  It was chaos. The distant screams of the dying, cries of triumph and of grief in equal measure. Wu Hao's eyes could make out some individuals on each of the sides that were clearly powerful, but others were indistinct and impossible to place. Each side seemed, at this point, to be equally numerous, but that might have been nothing more than a feeling.

  Why was one group running forward like it was a matter of life and death, while another group next to them from the same side was retreating as quickly as they could in a disorganized chaos? Who were any of these people?

  He could see an entire company's worth of people launch themselves down a slope to wade into the melee, their leader hoisting a longsword high into the air and roaring something indistinct, smashing into a group of red-clad others like a hammer smashing into an anvil and then getting just as mired down as everyone else.

  And all around the battlefield were the dying and the dead. Corpses lay scattered, some having clearly died without even knowing how or why, and others having been massacred to a man.

  Qi hung over the battlefield like a thick smog, thousands of different scents intermingling into a thick soup until the only scents left were death and despair. He saw one man sprint forward, weapon swirling like a mist around him in an indistinct steel blur as he cut down five others in a single stroke without even slowing his steps. He saw giant clouds of something impossible to put a name to, gathering up above one of the hills, with tendrils flickering out every so often in a way that he could call almost hungry.

  And at the very center, the Sovereigns battled a single man. At least he thought it was a man. It was impossible to tell, with how quickly they were all moving. All he saw was a mind-boggling amount of fire-attuned qi being expended in a single blow - or maybe a series of blows? - that seemed to have had absolutely no effect, which was then followed up with another series of blows from his opponent. Even from this distance his nose picked out the vague scent of plums.

  Blurs tore through the air and he could only recognize them for hidden weapons the moment they were caught in a single black-gloved hand. Half were thrown to the ground, another half was redirected into an army unit sprinting onto the battlefield and slaughtered them like flies.

  That was the Heavenly Demon. It had to be. No one else could do what that man had just done.

  Wu Hao tried to look at the Heavenly Demon directly but the moment he did, the sheer amount of qi he was seeing hit him like a sledgehammer to the brain and he stumbled back, mind spinning.

  His head spun. He had seen this last time too, but last time he hadn't bothered trying to understand any of it. This time, he did try - and failed. He could read nothing in any of it, couldn't decipher who was winning or even who was specifically fighting who.

  "721," 726 snapped next to him. "Focus!"

  "Yes," he mumbled, then repeated: "Yes, Brother. My apologies."

  Then they moved on.

  They laid themselves in a gully, with eleven of the deathsworn in total. Upon arriving at the battlefield, they had further split up into smaller groups from their original thirty. All of Wu Hao's original squad was there, and some other squad. Their Brother, 759, had deferred to 726 after a quick consultation.

  He turned again, this time staring at the hill.

  It had been fortified. Up above a series of stakes marked a wall of sorts behind which he saw shapes flash and move around. None of them stopped to look back down at the gully - though, in all honesty, it was more accurate to call it a latrine. Their black clothes dripped with unidentifiable muck, though none of them registered. Wu Hao had laid together with them for minutes now, finding himself wishing for the first time to have his old imperturbability back.

  He'd still have stank, but at least he wouldn't have noticed then. Now it felt like he wasn't just going to die but was actively humiliating himself first.

  "We will take the hill," 726 said, voice cold. "Kill whoever is in your way. You have heard Father's orders."

  Wu Hao nodded, together with the others, despite feeling the urge to back out. That urge was getting stronger and stronger, like a constant nagging in the back of his mind.

  He tried to banish it, but it kept popping up again. Racking his brain, he tried to figure out why he was feeling so worried.

  Other groups were fighting and dying a far enough distance from them, so that wasn't it. The enemies up on the hill had still not seemed to notice them, so that wasn't it, either.

  So why was his heart beating so fast? Why was something screaming at him? Why couldn't he remember actually beginning the charge up the hill?

  "Gather your qi," 726 instructed. "In ten breaths' time, we will charge and slaughter the enemy to a man."

  "No," an unknown voice said within their midst. "I don't think you will."

  Wu Hao spun around, and he wasn't the only one. He could almost see the expression of surprise that crossed 726's face, and then a monstrous wave of qi slammed into all of them that pushed them back and forced them into the open. The qi smelled like a rotting corpse and Wu Hao gagged; he had to force his eyes open again so that he wasn't blindly panicking, despite instinctually squeezing them shut.

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  And even in that instant where he'd been choking on the thick, vile scent of the qi that overpowered even the stink of the muck clinging to him, he had missed the stranger's initial blows.

  The stranger fought with only a simple weapon - a dagger that didn't have any ornamentation except three cruel barbs at its tip. It looked like it was made of good-quality steel. It flashed in the morning sun with each strike, in a pattern that might have been beautiful if it hadn't been absurdly deadly and effective.

  With each flash, another deathsworn died. 726, as the one who had been speaking, must have been identified as the chief target of their group, because he lay dead on the ground, throat torn open in the initial swipe, sinking back into the muck that was to become his grave.

  Several others had jumped without hesitating at the stranger, but he simply danced forwards with his dagger held loosely and cut them like chaff before they could even summon up their qi or use it. 732 died as a thin silver blur flashed past his chest, which moments later erupted with a spray of bright red blood. 759 threw himself forward with a wordless howl and died a second later as the dagger buried itself into his eye.

  As 759's corpse began to fall forward, the stranger took a dancing step back, then knelt abruptly as 723 pounced from behind him, arms wide open to engulf him in a flying bear tackle that sent him sailing over the stranger's head. The dagger flickered up, blurred into a single point that tore through 723's belly, and then the stranger sprang up by using his hands to push his legs up and out of the hands of another deathsworn whose number Wu Hao didn't even know.

  The stranger landed easily and lightly onto his feet again and spun his dagger idly while the deathsworn survivors began to gather themselves after the initial assault. Already, they had been reduced to six.

  "Go!" someone barked, and Wu Hao was surprised to realize that was him. He sprung forward, cocking his fist back in the simple punch they'd all been taught to use, and ran at the stranger.

  The others were a beat slower, which worked out in Wu Hao's favour. While the stranger danced over the mud like it was a palace floor, Wu Hao's boot came stuck in the mud and he fell forward before he could get close, and the other deathsworn pounced, using his falling body to push themselves forward, hands or legs extended in flying punches or kicks.

  "White Demon Art," the stranger said, utterly and infuriatingly calm. "Threading Marrow."

  And then the dagger sketched wire-thin lines between each of them, so much qi poured into the attack that each movement left shadows behind in Wu Hao's sight. Where the lines passed, lives were reaped with absurd ease. The four of them that had attacked died immediately, dozens of cuts tearing through each of their vital points and their limbs like a puppeteer stringing ropes through his creations.

  Wu Hao had survived only because he had fallen below where the dagger had aimed. Even then it was a literal close shave - he could feel a barrage of cuts open up on his head and the arms he had thrown up to protect himself instinctively, and he felt warm blood begin to seep as he raised himself up to his feet again.

  The stranger whirred to an abrupt stop, and when he did the hurricane of death went quiet equally abruptly. Four dead deathsworn fell into the muck, never even having touched him.

  "That's rather sneaky," the stranger said suddenly in a disapproving tone. "The lord does not approve of trickery, especially not used against his disciples."

  And, without even glancing backwards, his arm blurred and 723, who had gripped the stranger's ankle from behind despite his guts hanging out, finally died, too, with a giant hole in the middle of his face as the stranger's dagger punctured his skull like it was tofu.

  There was a long moment of silence, which Wu Hao broke by backpedalling backwards.

  "Oh," the stranger said, glancing up at him. "A deathsworn who hesitates to die? How rare."

  The stranger smiled. With his blood-stained clothing, his thin lips, and his glaring red eyes, it felt like the smile of an asura. The mark of a red eye on his clothing, where it wasn't hidden by the bloodstains or the gore, marked him as one of the Demon Cultists.

  He looked maybe a few years older than Wu Hao, though he had to be at least a second-grade martial artist to massacre them all that easily. Was this how Wu Hao had died?

  His breath caught, and then he gathered up his spine and brought himself into a battle-ready stance. Two fists up, feet at hip width, shoulders squared, he stared the stranger in his terrifying red eyes. The two parts of him agreed - whether it was Father's order or not, in order for him to survive here today, this man would have to die.

  "Today must be my lucky day," the cultist said. He had a strange, lilting way of speaking where each of his final syllables rose in tone. It made each sentence sound like a question, or maybe a song. "May the lord be pleased with the sacrifice of your meager souls."

  And then he attacked. Wu Hao threw himself backwards, but all that meant was that the stranger's dagger cut a long, angry line through his left arm, and Wu Hao felt the pain scream into his mind immediately as his arm flopped uselessly with its tendons cut straight through.

  His foot hit something behind him - he managed a quick look and saw that it was 732's corpse - and then the dagger flashed again and his head flew into the air without the rest of his body following behind.

  And then he knew nothing more.