Twenty-Two
 
Diur and Kon stepped outside of the room a moment later, the Ulmna girl having shed silent tears as she bowed over her grandfather’s corpse. She took his fallen blade and belted it around her waist and left as Alice looked at the corpse with a grim expression. They pretended they didn’t hear the noises that came afterwards or Alice’s grisly, blood stained hand.
“We can go back to the shelter for tonight, but I want to start moving toward the survivors. You said this was a plateau?” Alice said as they left the pagoda and started across the corpse strewn hills. Kon fell behind the two women, both of them in better shape and a higher level of cultivation than he was.
“A few hundred kilometers before you reach the cliff that leads down. The problem is that there’s several peak D-Grade rifts around the heart of the forest. We’d have to skirt all the way around them, adding hundreds of kilometers to the journey. Unless you have a way of defeating them?” Diur asked as they broke into a jog. Alice grimaced and shook her head.
Kon had to restrain himself from asking Diur what her cultivation level was. He remembered Alice’s rebuke. He assumed that Alice was stronger as she took the lead, but stronger than him.
“Could be an E-Grade?” She moved fluidly over the landscape, her stride never breaking whether they were scaling hills or leaping over fallen logs. Kon struggled to keep up, breathing heavily through his mouth as they raced back to their camp.
“Kon, we’re going to have to accelerate your training a bit. I wanted to let your fragments to settle a bit and to work on your physical strength and stamina, but we’re going to push,” Alice called over her shoulder.
“Sounds…good,” Kon gasped between breaths.
“He’s your apprentice? I thought human Knights didn’t train like that?” Diur asked. Alice gave her a quick look and then shrugged.
“It’s new. Normally you’re correct, we don’t do the one-on-one that most cultivators practice. We take a cadre of squires once they pass their academy tests and form their first network. Kon and me met when our ship went down,” Alice began and then quickly described the events that led to their shipwreck.
“He had no formal training?” Diur asked incredulously, looking back at Kon with wide eyes. Kon gave her a thumbs up, to bereft of oxygen to form words.
“Just started breaking him in. He’s a scrappy bastard though, don’t let his appearance fool you,” Alice said, smug pride in her voice.
“He cleared a F-Grade rift by himself,” Alice continued after a moment. Diur stumbled and almost fell, catching herself at the last moment. The look of incredulity was immense as Diur fell raced ahead to catch back up with Alice.
“Truly?”
“I mean, there was extenuating circumstances. Someone else had already killed the guardian and occupied the rift to use the anchor as a cultivation source,” Alice explained. Kon looked up sharply at that. She hadn’t told him that the bronze warriors weren’t monsters.
“Ahhh, the natives of the planet. They have no cities here on the plateau, but rather stay lower and by the sea. They have basic metallurgy and minor talent with cultivation.”
“Holy shit, I killed all those people.” Kon stopped in his tracks and threw up. Alice stopped to look at him strangely, Kon managing to glare at her even as he reeled under the implication. A look of understanding overcame the Knight and she grimaced.
“He didn’t know they weren’t rift beasts,” Alice said to Diur.
“You hadn’t told him?”
“I thought he would have realized it when they weren’t mindless, slobbering, beasts. I mean, rift creatures only gain that level of intelligence at C-Grade. That’s on me. I’m starting to realize I might not be the best at being a mentor,” Alice said. She didn’t apologize or offer him comforting words. She just waited for him to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand and then they were off again.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
It was a much quieter run now.
They got back to the shelter right before the rain started to come down again. Sheets of battering silver that sent the heavy metal leaves crashing to the ground. Streaks of violent lightning flashed across the dark sky and washed the world in incandescent light for brief moments. Alice sighed and flopped down, trickles of water already starting to leak from the canopy of trees that formed their roof.
“It sounds like your training is cruel, but effective,” Diur said as she sidled up next to him. The narrow bladed sword was off her waist and in one hand now, her grip on the scabbard loose as she crouched next to him. Kon had sat down on the far side of the camp, leaning against a piece of bone, as he tried to recover from the run.
“She’s…Alice.” Kon shrugged as he couldn’t find the right words to explain his mentor. The anger in his gut at her deception, whether intentional or not, wanted to lash out at her. She was the only reason he was alive though. It was Alice’s knowledge and strength that had kept him breathing and was letting him form his own base of power.
“Every master has their own peculiarities. One of the masters at our clan will only train his students with the blade under the light of a new moon.”
“Probably doesn’t get a lot of training done that way,” Kon muttered with a laugh. Diur chuckled herself.
“Honestly, the planet has seven moons, almost always one is a new moon. It was just a strangeness he has. Had.”
“He was at the base?” Kon asked as he caught her changing the tense at the last moment.
“Yes. He was the latest batch of the masters to arrive. They rotate out with classes, to ensure that our students have an unbroken chain of training. Each of the masters has several pupils until it is time to apprentice. Then an Elder will take a single student and train them.”
“What about those that don’t get picked?” Kon asked. There couldn’t be that many elders afterall.
“They try to join a sect. There’s plenty of martial sects in the confederacy that aren’t as stringent as our clan. Most will return in a few decades to continue their duties to the clan.”
“Clan and sect aren’t the same?”
“No. They overlap, but aren’t the same.”
“Diur, keep watch. I’ll go and get dinner. We leave first thing in the morning,” Alice said before she blurred out of the shelter and into the pouring rain. The two of them rested next to each other for a few minutes, both wrangling their own emotions. Kon took quick peaks at the girl out the corner of his eye, but she seemed fine. Her face was blank of any emotion as she sat on her heels, staring ahead and across the shelter.
“Did you always want to be a cultivator?” Kon asked, desperate to break the silence. Diur looked over at him and cocked her head to the side.
“When born into a clan like mine, there is not want to be or hope to be. You are one.”
“Everyone is?”
“Well…everyone with the ability to be one. The others who don’t have the ability to cultivate help the clan in other ways. The testing is done early though, before we can walk. Our path is well trod, whether we can cultivate or not.”
“Huh. Yeah I joined cause the Knights offer regular meals,” Kon said.
“You are not guaranteed food? As a basic right?” She sounded shocked and horrified all at once.
“Maybe on the bigger ships or colonies. But I was born on a small colony, barely any food to begin with and you had to work hard to get it. Rifts overran it and then we were on cramped refugee ships and there was even less food. So, I joined up.”
“Humans are well known to us. They have been hired multiple times to clear up piracy on the edge of the confederacy space. I did not know they were so cutthroat as to allow starvation amongst their own populace.” Diur shook her head in disapproval.
Kon just shrugged. It was the way of the galaxy. At least his little slice of it. They sat there in a now awkward silence until Alice came dragging a dead E-Grade beast back. She had already split its chest and extracted the core which she tossed into the bag in the corner. Diur eyes followed the small orb as it flew across the cavern and then they became as round as saucers as she realized what the heaped up bag was.
“Have you harvested the entire forest?!” She yelled as she rose to her feet in outrage.
“What? No. Just a few rifts here and there. Didn’t realize it was a game preserve for you clan, just trying to survive. Can you eat this or will it poison you?” Alice hefted up the four foot long, fuzzy beast she had killed.
“I can eat it,” Diur said. She wanted to say more, but the reality of her situation kept her from speaking aloud as she slowly sank back on her heels. Alice lit a fire with her fragment and Diur sucked in a breath.
“Human magic,” she whispered under her breath.
“Alice told me we cultivate differently than you do. You couldn't do something like that with your abilities?” Kon asked, his curiosity insatiable.
“Not like that. We have techniques that could allow us to do something similar, but not with a snap of the fingers. We have tried to figure out how you humans use the runes, but no one has been able to replicate it. We can use the runes to power magic, but not to cultivate.”
That was news to Kon. he looked over to where Alice had butchered the animal and was making skewers to cook over the open flame. The way she had said it was that humans were the only ones who could use runes. Or was that just her poor teaching rearing its head, yet again?
“There’s people who can use runes? Full runes or fragments?” Kon asked. Diur narrowed her eyes at him.
“What do you mean, full runes?”
“Kon. Please keep your mouth shut before I have to kill the girl,” Alice said coldly from the side of the fire. She stood there, loose limbed and with a flat expression. Her axe was only inches from her fingers and Diur stiffened as she looked between the two of them.The moment stretched out before Alice sighed and shook her head.
“Dinner’s ready.”