Immortal Paladin

I am Da Wei, except I am not. I am Da Wei’s Asura Soul, the shard of him that desired combat, pain, victory, defeat, and challenge. Where the rest of him schemed, loved, mourned, or dreamed. I lived only for the clash of steel, the scream of the broken, the glory of battle, and the ecstasy of ruin. I was no shadow, no whisper. I was truth sharpened to a single edge: fight, or be nothing.

“Calm down,” whispered Alice to me. “This is not your fight alone.”

Oh, her bloodthirst, and how much I’d love to claim it for myself.

“Give in to me,” I said, softly enticing her predatory instincts. “You know you want it.”

Blood. It sang in every beat of Alice’s veins, and through her, it echoed in me. I was no separate thing, no distant voice gnawing at her restraint… I was the pulse of her ferocity, the rhythm of her violence, and the heat in her hunger. She thought she carried me, but in truth, I carried her. I was the clarity she tried to deny, the purity of a predator stripped of hesitation, stripped of doubt.

The Spiral above clawed at our existence, gnashing its teeth against our presence, yet its bite dulled to nothing in my awareness. Suppression was an insult; the stars themselves bent like reeds before the tide of our will. I felt the chains of mystical law trying to bind us, and I laughed. What was law to hunger? What was fate to fury? Every link of suppression cracked beneath the truth of what we were: a ruin walking.

I urged her forward, and her muscles obeyed without thought. Soulsunderer twitched in her hand, eager, its whispers aligning with mine. We shared the same creed: consume, destroy, and feed. Together, we were not bound to the rules of the universe. We were aberration incarnate.

“Destroy her,” cried Tiang Meng. “We must not let her shake our resolve.”

Lu Wang’s hand carved through the air, fingers knotting into a harsh seal. The ground convulsed, spikes of jagged earth thrusting upward to pierce and cage me. Alice inhaled sharply, but I drowned her hesitation with my laughter, lending her my might. Though the Spiral barred us from spellcraft, it could not smother what I was: an Asura!

Soulsunderer trembled with eagerness, and Alice swung with my intent guiding her.

“Flash Parry.” 

A single cut, a line of inevitability drawn in shadow. The spikes collapsed into dust and gravel, impotent before the arc of our strike.

Bai Rong appeared behind us, his hands a blur of seals. “Yin Celestial Prison!” he declared, voice laced with venomous authority. The air warped, symbols igniting in pale flame to form a spectral cage.

I pressed further into Alice, saturating her every nerve, and snarled a single word into our shared being: Speed. Divine Speed exploded through her veins, our body dissolving into motion too fast for his prison to ensnare. In the next heartbeat, we stood behind him.

Soulsunderer lashed down, trailing whispers of annihilation, yet the body before us unraveled into strips of paper dolls that fluttered to the ground. A decoy. Bai Rong’s laughter echoed faintly as he reformed in the distance. “You’ll have to do better.”

Lu Wang stepped forward, pulling from his pocket dimension a great staff carved with runes that throbbed like veins of molten ore. He swung with both hands, a force meant to shatter mountains. Alice’s arms rose instinctively, but I was already there, pushing her further, lending Divine Might to her vampiric strength. When Soulsunderer met the staff, the clash rang like a bell of doom, the shockwave splitting the earth beneath us.

The ground cracked, and from its wound burst Xun Li. His sword glimmered with a pilgrim’s sorrow, his voice a whisper carried on steel. “Pilgrimage of the Sword: First Path.” A flash of brilliance, clean and merciless, darted for our throat.

“Marvelously done,” cried my being. “I want this.”

I overrode her faltering will, seizing her body like it had always been mine. My lips curled into a smile she would never make, my joy rising as steel kissed shadow. Soulsunderer rose in my hand, our hand, to meet the strike.

In that instant, Alice ceased to resist. She was no longer host and I no longer passenger. I immersed! I became! I took over!

And at last, I was whole.

“Hollow Point: War Smite.”

Soulsunderer crashed down against Xun Li’s incoming steel, and the force of it detonated through the air as his sword flew out of his grip, a comet of light that skittered over the courtyard and embedded itself in a broken column. Xun Li’s eyes widened, then narrowed into a mask of disbelief. In their minds, that moment should have been impossible.

If my progenitor had been here, the Spiral would have chewed him to ribbons.

The Diminution Spiral favored the world’s weight and law; it gnawed at spirit bodies, stripped them to pre-existence, and set them adrift in a universe they could not touch. I could tell that much just by looking at it with Divine Sense.

I raised my dainty left hand, the tip of my index finger a pale spear in the moonlight, and pointed at the fallen patriarch. “Hollow Line.”

Lu Wang flinched, his brows drawing together. He gestured, and the air obeyed him like a loyal beast: gravity stuttered, then reversed its oath around Xun Li. The swordsman tumbled, dodging an invisible slashing force that rended the earth where his feet had been. Soil and stone yawned open like the maw of some sleeping thing.

I fed Alice a portion of what I was feeling, a shove of intent, and the pure, horrifying joy of momentum. “Hollow Point: Divine Smite,” I breathed, and in that single phrase, I collapsed space a little further. I was gone and then I was there: Divine Speed had unraveled the distance between myself and the old woman maintaining the Diminution Spell.

Tian Meng’s blade met me as I exploded into her fron,t and the collision knocked the wind from her. She staggered, old strength cracking like lacquered wood under pressure. I pressed forward to test her mettle. 

“Flash Step.”

The Diminution Spiral tried to tear the divine remnants from my being, to peel the spark of my power away like a child unwrapping a candy. For an instant my form felt attenuated, edges dulled to ash. But Alice’s blood pulsed through the channels I had claimed. Her vampiric demi-god vigor was a furnace; when I poured my will into that furnace it flared back and burned through the Spiral’s teeth. Martial arts and divine arts braided into one violent instrument of destruction.

“Hollow Point: Searing Smite.”

Tian Meng parried my Searing Smite and pushed me back desperately.

Beneath our feet the earth convulsed and swallowed Tian Meng as Xun Li launched himself with pure sword aura, an honest, unadorned hunger for throat and blood. I parried once, twice, and a third time. Each clash sang to me: his art was rigid, honed, sharp in the way of those who’d spent decades cutting away indulgence. He stood at the realm of Supreme Master in terms of Martial Arts, which was rare here in the Hollowed World.

It was a pity, since I’d love to see him break through with Martial Ascension. I’d love to fight a Martial Saint one day.

Tian Meng reappeared a breath away, by Lu Wang’s side. Lu Wang had assumed the posture of a guardian, staff ready, eyes hard as river-worn stone. “You’d better do it now, Rong! She’s getting stronger!”

It was true. With every breath of resistance, the Spiral sputtered against us. My resistance to their spells swelled like a tide. The more I leaned on the meat-hunger inside Alice, the more her blood became a talisman against their formation array. If this continued, I might well ignore the Spiral entirely and just enjoy the moment.

Bai Rong levitated into the air as he appeared from nowhere. He drew a circle of light that made the night blink. “Exorcism Circle of Divine Brilliance,” intoned Bai Rong, and the words rang like bells in a temple long forgotten. “Restrain this beast at once!”

Silver light erupted from his sigils and braided itself into chains. The world seemed to reel as those chains dove toward me. They did not clatter; they simply were: a lattice of cold, brilliant metal that collapsed over skin and shadow, over will and hunger. The silver threads tightened with the inevitability of a noose.

Pain was a scientific thing when it came through the bindings of exorcism. It was not pretty; it was methodical, and an algebra of hurt. Alice cried, her voice spilling into the courtyard like acid rain.

“Kyaaaaaaagh~!”

My limbs jerked under the constraint. Soulsunderer dipped and hummed, frustrated like a caged animal. The chains bit deeper, and the courtyard filled with the sound of someone trying to contain the sea. I gathered what remained of my strength to assert myself and break free, but the silver held.

I sighed. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I had wanted to keep fighting, and for it to never end. My veins still thrummed with battle-hunger, yet the silver chains clung, and Alice’s body strained under their bite. She whimpered inside me, struggling, complaining, and I could not help but feel her thrash against my presence.

“Hah~! I couldn’t be bothered anymore… So boring…”

Across from me, nailed like some grotesque relic, Nongmin hung on his cross.

Bai Rong landed lightly upon the stone, his robes fluttering as he conferred with the others. “What do you think?” he asked, tone dry but edged with calculation.

Xun Li’s aura bristled like a sharpened blade, his sword qi coiling in layers around him. His answer came with disdain: “I think the Heavenly Temple is holding something back.” The way he said it was no mere observation. It was an accusation hurled at Tian Meng.

Tian Meng’s glare was sharp enough to cut. “Don’t you dare direct that tone at me, boy… You know the history of my clan…”

Lu Wang tapped his staff against the ground. “But I must say, it was a close call… You guaranteed us that your Spiral would work.”

“It would have,” Tian Meng snapped back, defensive fire filling her voice, “if it had been Da Wei who came here, and not… whatever this wench was.” Her finger jabbed toward Alice’s trembling frame, wrapped in silver chains that hissed against her skin.

Bai Rong folded his arms, his mouth twisting into something between a smirk and a sneer. “We should just give up the woman to Jia Sen and be done with it. Our bargain with the Heavenly Temple was simple: aid us in deposing the Emperor, in exchange for helping them capture Da Wei. So far, we’ve done nothing but bend over backward to help them chase shadows. But at some point, the Emperor must fall. And this woman…” His eyes gleamed as he studied Alice. “I believe her name is Aili Si. Da Wei’s woman. A far better bait than the Emperor. Deliver her to Jia Sen, and we fulfill our due.”

Alice writhed at that, her soul crying out with fury and despair. And in the midst of that turmoil, I heard my progenitor’s whisper. His tone was not sharp, not commanding, but steady and certain. “Return her autonomy.”

I did as he asked. My hold slackened, my will eased, and the body once again belonged to Alice. My hunger receded, coiling like a serpent in shadow, watching, waiting.

And then Nongmin laughed. Too abrupt and sharp, spilling across the courtyard like oil on water. “Pfft… hahahahahahaha!” His chest convulsed with the mirth of revelation, his voice cracked but certain. “It worked,” he said cryptically. “Oh, man, that almost scared the shit out of me…”

The bandages wrapped over his ruined eyes slipped free, charred and bloodstained, and beneath them burned not sockets, not emptiness, but a pair of bright golden eyes. The light that spilled from them was not cruel, nor cold… It was something else. The way he looked down upon the clan heads was unlike his usual scornful gaze. There was pity there. Pity, and a dangerous spark of mischief.

“Tell me,” Nongmin said, his voice carrying like a riddle through the night. “Who never complains about taxes, rent, or inflation?”

The clan heads exchanged confused glances, their arrogance giving way to bafflement. None of them dared answer.

Nongmin’s wounds sealed shut, flesh knitting, blood drying into dust. The wood of the cross beneath him groaned, then burned, fire erupting in a sudden blaze that consumed the bindings meant to hold him.

And as the flames licked skyward, I felt the pulse of my progenitor inside Nongmin, his presence twining with that cryptic riddle as Nongmin whispered the answer.

“The dead.”

It wasn’t funny.