Chapter 49: Dojo Scouting

The main gate was closed. The training ground on the east side of the compound was empty. No sect members sparring, no cultivation sessions, nothing that suggested the compound was operating at normal capacity.

“Reduced personnel,” Seradhiel said. “The sect has pulled resources. Either they sent people after you when you fled Crestfall or they are consolidating for a reason I cannot determine from this distance.”

“Either way fewer guards,” Kael said. He looked at the compound wall. At the northwest corner where the two guard pairs crossed paths at the furthest points of their routes. “There’s a gap. Northwest corner. When both pairs are at the ends of their routes the courtyard goes unobservable for roughly ninety seconds.” He watched the rotation complete once more to confirm the timing. “Every twenty minutes approximately.”

“You certainly employ underhanded tactics this is beneath the right path of a cultivator ,” Seradhiel said.

“I employ effective ones,” Kael said.

“They are the same thing in your case,” she said. “I am not certain how I feel about that.”

“You feel fine about it,” Kael said. “You just won’t say so, besides survival comes first before anything .”

She didn’t respond to that.

Which was its own kind of answer.

“That’s how I go in,” he said.

He moved toward the northwest corner.

Found a position in the treeline with a sightline through the gap between the compound wall and the nearest outbuilding. A narrow view. But enough.

He waited for the rotation to create the gap.

It came at the seventeen minute mark.

He looked through.

The courtyard was exactly as he’d seen it the day he walked in and made the deal . Same packed earth, same main hall entrance, same outbuildings along the far wall.

Different in one way.

In the center of the courtyard, where there had been open ground before, there was now a post. Roughly two meters tall. Driven into the packed earth with the deliberateness of something installed rather than incidental. The ground around its base had been disturbed packed earth broken up and then resettled, the marks of recent activity that hadn’t been cleaned up.

He looked at the post.

At the marks around its base.

He knew what those marks were before Seradhiel said anything. He’d seen similar marks in three different countries across two continents and they looked the same in every context regardless of the specific method.

Execution ground.

“Kael,” Seradhiel said.

“I see it,” he said.

His voice was completely level.

The rotation closed the gap. The guards came back around. He pulled back from the treeline and sat against a tree trunk and looked at the forest floor between his feet.

‘Don’t act until you’ve seen everything,’ he thought. His own words from the notebook last night. Her instruction through his pen.

He breathed.

‘Find Mira’s position first,’ he thought. ‘Then decide.’

He looked at the compound wall.

At the northwest gap that would come back around in twenty minutes.

At the ring on his left hand where the suppressed channel was still compressed and uncomfortable and running at less than it had been for the past three days.

“She might be alive,” Seradhiel said. “I can feel a Bronze Realm signature inside the compound. Stationary. South wall of the main courtyard.”

Kael exhaled slowly.

Alive.

Everything else. The post, the marks, what those marks meant about what had happened while he was at Crestfall learning Bronze Realm cultivation and fighting Remnants on a mountain slope everything else he would deal with.

After he had eyes on her.

After he knew exactly what he was walking into.

He looked at the gap in the compound wall.

Counted the minutes.

Waited.

The third time the rotation created the gap he was positioned differently . Closer to the wall, the treeline at his back, the angle changed enough that the sightline through the gap now covered the south wall of the courtyard rather than the center.

He looked through.

Mira was sitting against the south wall with her knees drawn up and her head down. Hands unbound . They weren’t restraining her physically, which told him they’d determined she wasn’t going anywhere. Her hunter’s gear was the same as the day she’d been taken, three weeks worn in a dojo courtyard.

She was alive.

She was not okay.

Even at this distance, even through a narrow gap in a compound wall, the particular quality of someone who had been through something that used all the available feeling was visible in how she was sitting. Not injured her posture wasn’t pain, it was the posture of someone who had run out of things to hold onto and had stopped pretending they hadn’t.

He looked at her for the full duration of the gap.

Then the rotation closed it.

He pulled back from the wall.

Stood in the forest with the morning light coming through the canopy in columns and the compound sounds carrying through the trees and the ring on his finger where Seradhiel had been suppressing the channel for forty minutes without complaint.

“You can release the suppression,” he said.

The pressure around his finger eased. The channel opened back to full capacity. The warmth returned at its maximum sustainable level, the full passive draw, the post-seal clarity running through everything. ℴ

He looked at the compound wall.

At the post in the center of the courtyard that he could no longer see but could no longer unsee.

‘Don’t be reckless,’ he thought. ‘She told you. Write it down, she said, not for the notebook, for yourself.’

He wasn’t going to be reckless.

But he was going in.

Tonight. When the rotation created the northwest gap and the compound was at its quietest and whatever reduced personnel the sect was running with had been standing watches long enough to be tired.

He found a position in the treeline that was sheltered and had a sightline to the compound wall and sat down with his back against a tree and his new sword across his knees.

He had hours to wait.

He used them the way he used everything quietly, without comment, filing what he knew against what he needed to know and finding the plan in the gap between them.

“The notebook,” Seradhiel said, after a while.

“Tonight,” he said. “After the aftermath.”

“After,” she said.

One word. The way she said it told him she understood exactly what after meant in this context and was choosing not to say anything that would make the waiting harder.

He sat in the forest and waited.

The post stood in the courtyard thirty meters away behind a wall he hadn’t gone over yet.

He would go over it tonight.

Your gift is the motivation for my creation. Give me more motivation!