Chapter 120: Heaven-Splitting Sword Strike

A pause. Then, to my surprise, a low sound came out of the ram-skull helm, short and dry. It took me a moment to recognize it as a laugh.

"I do not remember it," he said. "You are amusing."

"Thanks."

I stood up. Every muscle protested. My left lung was doing about half its job. I set my feet, put both hands on the hilt, and drew every ounce of aura out of every corner of my body, from the bones, the marrow, the places I didn’t know I had. It poured up my arms and into the steel until the whole blade lit gold from hilt to tip, a thin bright line in the dark.

The sword screamed. It was a real sound, a high thin ringing, and cracks spread along the flat of the blade like frost on glass.

’Just hold’ I thought at it. ’Just once.’

Asmodeus raised his own sword. He was no longer toying with me. I could feel it in the way his stance settled, in the white light behind his helm, which had narrowed to two points.

"Come," he said.

I came.

I won’t say I was fast. The road and the dark and the whole slope fell away and there was only the shape of him, a black pillar at the end of a golden line. He swung. I felt the edge of his blade take a strip of skin off my cheek. I stepped inside it, through it, and brought my sword up and across in a single clean arc.

[Heaven-Splitting Sword Strike.]

A white line opened across the world. It started at my blade and ran forward, up the road, through Asmodeus, and past him, into the dark where his army stood. The sound arrived a second later, one deep, low note that I felt in my teeth and my feet and the center of my chest. The black iron sword in his hand snapped clean in half. His armor opened from the left hip to the right shoulder, a perfect straight line, and black blood fountained out of it in a sheet.

Then the line reached the mountain.

The north ridge split. A section of cliff the size of a house slid slowly off its face, hung there as if it couldn’t believe what had happened, and fell into the dark with a roar. Behind Asmodeus, ranks of his army simply stopped existing, torn across at the waist, and the silence that followed was the loudest I’ve ever heard.

My sword came apart in my hands. It went to dust, all of it, hilt and blade, a little rain of gold sparks that blew away on the wind.

I dropped to my knees.

I had nothing left. I couldn’t lift my arms. My vision had narrowed to a gray tunnel with one figure at the end of it, and I couldn’t tell if the figure was still standing.

He was. Asmodeus swayed in the road, holding the broken stump of his sword in one hand and the ruin of his chest in the other. His helm had cracked down the middle. One of the white lights had gone out. Black blood pooled around his boots and ran into the cracks, and for a long moment, neither of us moved.

"Well," he said. His voice was rough now, with something wet in it. "That is the first time in two hundred years."

"Sorry," I said. "Was that rude?"

"It was excellent." He coughed, and a thread of black ran down the inside of his helm. "You will not do it twice. I think you know that."

I did. I couldn’t have lifted a spoon.

"Then why aren’t you finishing it?" I said.

"Because I am not a fool." He let the broken sword fall and it rang off the stones. "My army is cut in two, and that valley has a Lord I have not yet measured. I will leave tonight, while I still have the legs for it." The remaining white light fixed on me. "You will not be this easy to find next time, boy. And I will not be this careless."

"Promise?"

Another dry laugh. "What you carry will call out to others, you know. Whether you wish it to or not."

"What do I carry?"

He didn’t answer. He turned and walked back into the dark, slowly, one hand pressed to his chest, and the dark closed behind him. The weight lifted. All along the slopes, people gasped and coughed and began, shakily, to stand.

The torches came back on one at a time. Along the far ridge, I could see the army retreating, ranks of silhouettes grinding away up the pass, dragging their wounded.

I tried to stand. My legs didn’t answer.

"Barry!"

Qing Yan reached me first. I saw her coming through the haze, her robes torn and her face streaked, and she dropped to her knees and caught me before I could fall on my face.

"I’ve got you," she said. She was crying. I don’t think she knew it. "I have you. Stop trying to move."

"I wasn’t."

"You were."

"Little bit."

She laughed, wetly, and pressed her forehead against mine. Her hands were shaking against my cheeks. Somewhere nearby I heard Captain Ru shouting orders, and Jiang Wei calling for healers, and underneath it all, something that took me a moment to place. It was the villagers, on the slopes and on the road, starting to cheer.

"You broke the mountain," Qing Yan whispered.

"Only a small one."

"You are a fool."

"Probably." I let my head rest against her shoulder. She smelled like smoke and sweat and, faintly, of the river. "Did I win?"

"You lived," she said fiercely. "That is enough."

I closed my eyes.

The last thing I noticed, before the gray tunnel closed up, was a figure standing at the edge of the crowd. He wasn’t cheering. He had a yellow paper talisman crumpled in one fist, and he was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read in the poor light. It wasn’t hatred, exactly. It was more like the look of a man doing sums. Then I was out.