Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 177: Chapter 172: The Fracture

Location: Demon Realm Border Territories (Multiple Sites)

Time: Day 222 (Doha Actual)

Realm: Demon Realm

The canyon reeked of sun-baked stone and old blood—very old blood—the dried kind that’d been sitting in rock cracks for decades. Metallic. Rusty. Mixed with a sharp granite scent from stones that’d been heating under the afternoon sun for hours.

On either side, three hundred meters of sheer walls rose straight up. The path was narrow enough that one would need to fly single-file through the bottleneck, which was honestly stupid from a tactical perspective. One way in. One way out. Perfect ambush terrain.

Heihuo’s twenty-one bronze warriors moved through in standard formation—five-dragon wedge with their heir at center, protected. His amber-scaled body caught the light as he flew, flanked by two Peak Blazecrowned guards whose scales bore white scars from a thousand battles.

They were scanning for silver queen essence signatures.

Weren’t gonna find any.

Because the queen wasn’t here.

But fifteen green dragons were, and that was actually much worse for the bronze sect’s immediate health.

***

Captain Luwei crouched behind the western ridge, emerald scales pressed flat against sun-warmed stone. Watching. Twenty-one bronze dragons were passing beneath him, just like fish swimming into a fishing net they couldn’t see.

His team of green dragon veterans was spread along the ridge—in a formation that they’d drilled for ten thousand years until their bodies just knew the positions without thinking. Five groups consisting of three dragons each. Each group was positioned so they could cover each other, blanket most of the canyon floor.

Two Middle Apexblight team leaders. Three Entry. Ten Blazecrowned warriors ranging from Entry to High sub-tiers, every one handpicked.

A strong military force. More than enough to handle twenty-one bronze below if they caught them by surprise, hit the bronze dragons hard and fast before the bronze dragons could organize.

The intelligence that had received had been perfect. Maybe too perfect, but Luwei’d had been too focused on the prize to question the validity. Besides, the essence trails had hinted that Heihuo had found the silver queen. Nevermind the forged communications the green dragons had intercepted the day before. All the evidence pointed towards the bronze dragons mobilizing toward a specific target.

All pointing here. This canyon. This exact time.

All lies. Planted carefully by Ren’s operatives over the past three days.

What Luwei didn’t know—couldn’t know because Ren’s security had been flawless—was that just sixty kilometers east of the canyon, eighteen red dragons were preparing their own ambush against Elder Shanshe’s nine enforcers. The red dragons had been directed towards Elder Shanshe’s enforcers using similar fake intelligence.

Both attacks. Same moment. Timing that’d scream coordination.

Luwei raised one scaled claw. His team leaders tensed, essence gathering, techniques primed, killing intent focused sharply.

He dropped his claw.

Green dragons EXPLODED over the ridge.

***

It was Heihuo’s combat instincts that saved his life.

The ones he’d spent thousands of years honing through survival in a sect where weakness meant death and hesitation meant worse. His head snapped up maybe half a second before everything went to absolute hell, amber eyes widening as his essence-enhanced senses caught the spike of hostile intent above them.

Training kicked in. Overrode the shock. The confusion. The sick feeling in his gut that came from realizing you’d just been set up.

Almost instantly, he MOVED.

Wings beating hard as High Blazecrowned power erupted around him—superheating the air around him, the heat simmering over the desert sand.

”AMBUSH! FORMATION DELTA! NOW!”

Heihuo’s elite guard reacted with speed gained from nearly eight thousand years of drilling the same movements over and over again, until muscle memory took over. Two Peak Blazecrowned warriors—male with burnished copper scales, and a female whose amber hide bore white battle scars—materialized at his flanks in almost perfect sync.

Their energy barriers interlocking. The triple-layered barrier defense that could theoretically weather an Apexblight hit.

Theoretically.

Three High Blazecrowned veterans launched counter-attacks almost before they’d processed what was happening. Inferno techniques screaming through the air like meteors, the canyon lit up orange-red as superheated essence met stone and exploded in molten showers.

Bronze warriors scattered into pre-drilled four-dragon cells. Ten thousand years of doctrine beaten into them until they could execute the manoeuvre half-asleep. Each cell self-contained—capable of mutual defense and coordinated attack even separated from command.

But the green dragon had positioning and, more importantly, surprise on their side.

And in those first seconds of chaos, numerical advantage concentrated exactly where it’d hurt most.

Luwei’s Middle Apexblight offense team, three veterans with essence control from millennia of refinement—hit Heihuo’s elite guard with synchronized techniques that made reality BEND.

Verdant essence wrapped around the bronze dragon barriers like constrictor coils made of living vegetation. Probing at junctions. Stress points. Crushing inward with pressure that turned the stone walls around them to powder and sent cracks spider-webbing through solid rock that’d stood for ten thousand years.

One of Heihuo’s Peak Blazecrowned guards—the female veteran whose name was Huiying and who’d stood at his side for eight thousand years of loyalty and blood—felt her barrier crack.

Not good.

Not good at all.

She poured more essence into reinforcement, her Core burning hot as she channeled more power into the defensive matrix. But Verdant was patient where Inferno couldn’t be. The technique found microscopic weaknesses in her essence weave and exploited them.

Hair-thin fissure became a centimeter gap. The centimeter gap became a hand-span breach. Breach became—

A verdant made spear that punched through her shoulder.

Splop. Wet—Meaty—Sound. The kind of sound that made your teeth clench, even if you’d heard it a thousand times before.

The impact spun her sideways mid-air. Wings flaring to compensate as bronze-colored blood sprayed from the wound in an arterial arc. Dragon blood that hissed and steamed when it hit the stone floor three hundred meters below, which was actually kind of beautiful in a terrible way.

She roared.

Not in pain—Huiying’d been through worse—but in pure incandescent FURY that came from being wounded by what she now recognized as coordinated betrayal. Her Inferno essence detonated outward in an explosion of superheated air that vaporized the Verdant construct and forced her attacker back three full body-lengths.

But she was bleeding now.

Blood and essence were leaking from the gaping wound faster than her cultivation could seal it. In a long, drawn-out fight, she’d weaken, slow down. And then she would die.

The canyon became absolute chaos.

***

A bronze Entry Blazecrowned warrior—young dragon barely three thousand years old named Qiang, whose scales still held the brightness of relative youth—met a green High Blazecrowned veteran in a mid-air collision that sent shockwaves rippling through the canyon like thunder.

Qiang’s Inferno met the green’s Verdant in an explosion of superheated steam that scalded both their scales and sent them tumbling apart before they caught themselves and came back around for another pass.

Qiang was skilled. Really skilled for his age, actually.

He’d trained since he could first manifest his dragon form. Drilling techniques until his muscles remembered them better than his mind. He was proficient in twelve different Runeinfusion weaves and could maintain three of them simultaneously while dodging incoming attacks, which was impressive.

Unfortunately for Qiang, the opponent he was fighting was experienced.

Qiang’s veteran opponent had ten thousand years of experience and had fought in two Zartonesh Invasions under his belt. Knew exactly when to press his advantage, when to conserve his energy. Knew Qiang would burn hotter trying to compensate for the tier disadvantage between the two.

And burning hotter meant exhausting faster.

And exhaustion meant death.

Forty seconds in—respectable showing from Qiang, honestly—his techniques started showing microsecond delays from essence depletion, catching desperate expenditure.

His barrier flickered.

Just an instant. Tiniest fraction of a second.

And the green’s dragons Verdant made blade took him through the throat. Fast. Precise. Almost casual.

Qiang’s amber eyes went wide.

Shocked. Like he couldn’t quite believe that eight thousand years of potential future had just been erased in a single moment of weakness. Like this wasn’t how it was supposed to end. His Crucible Core destabilized as it tried desperately to seal the catastrophic wound—essence flooding the damaged channels in what would’ve been a futile attempt at emergency healing even if he’d had more time.

He didn’t have more time.

The blade had severed too many essence pathways. Recovery was impossible.

He dropped from the sky like a stone.

Dead before his body hit the canyon floor with a wet, final thud that nobody could hear over the roar of combat but that somehow felt loud anyway.

Heihuo saw Qiang fall and felt something cold and terrible settle in his gut like swallowed ice.

That was one of his juniors gone. He had five Entry-tier youngsters in this formation—dragons who were supposed to be getting experience, who were supposed to learn and grow and eventually become the next generation of bronze sect leadership.

If the greens picked them off systematically, this wouldn’t be a battle.

It’d be a massacre.

”SIGMA FORMATION!” His voice cut through the combat chaos. ”CONVERGE ON MY POSITION! NOW!”

With military precision, the bronze dragons obeyed instantly. Training overrode panic. Twenty warriors—nineteen now with Qiang dead—collapsed toward Heihuo’s position in movement so perfectly synchronized it looked almost choreographed.

They formed a defensive ring around Heihuo.

Peak and High Blazecrowned veterans formed the outer shell, where their stronger barriers could take the heaviest hits. Entry-tier juniors tucked safely within, where they’d be shielded from the worst of the assault.

It was a defensive configuration specifically designed to weather overwhelming force while preserving weaker members. Smart tactics. Standard bronze sect doctrine for situations where you were outnumbered or outmaneuvered.

Under normal circumstances, it would’ve worked beautifully.

But then, these weren’t normal circumstances.

Captain Luwei looked at the bronze sphere forming below him and smiled triumphantly.

His expression cold. Professional rather than cruel. The smile of someone who’d done the mathematics and knew exactly how this was about to end.

He’d seen this exact defensive formation seventeen different times across three Zartonesh Invasions. Knew all its strengths.

More importantly, knew all its weaknesses.

”All teams,” he called out. His voice carried easily despite the roar of combat filling the canyon. ”ARTIFACT STRIKE. Execute on my mark.”

Captain Luwei’s five team leaders included two Middle Apexblight veterans whose scales bore the ragged white scars, proof of their long service, and three Entry Apexblight warriors with the sharp focus of younger dragons still proving themselves—reached into their storage pouches.

They’d rehearsed this exact scenario multiple times. Knew exactly what they were pulling out.

Small crystalline devices that pulsed with wrongness. With light that hurt to look at directly. With power that made the air around them shimmer and crack like reality itself was protesting.

Aetherwing-made artifacts.

Each one cost the equivalent of a small kingdom’s annual revenue. One-time-use Sparkcasting amplifiers that could multiply a technique’s power by a factor of three through essence manipulation so advanced and esoteric that even the dragons using them didn’t fully understand the principles involved.

Using them was suicide in most combat situations.

The essence backlash from channeling that much power through a mortal Crucible Core could shatter your cultivation. Cripple your advancement permanently. Or if you were unlucky enough, kill you if the feedback was severe enough.

But against twenty-one bronze dragons packed into a tight defensive sphere where they couldn’t scatter or evade without breaking formation?

Mathematics said it was worth the cost.

”MARK”

All five team leaders activated their artifacts simultaneously.

The world went mad.

***

The air SCREAMED.

Not metaphorically. Actually screamed—high-pitched keen like reality itself was protesting a fundamental violation of natural law. Like someone was forcing the universe to do something it really, really didn’t want to do.

Verdant essence flooded the canyon in a wave that turned the entire atmosphere emerald-bright. So saturated with life-energy that the temperature dropped twenty degrees in the space of half a second as the technique drew heat from everything around it to fuel its impossible growth.

Then the vegetation erupted.

Trees. MASSIVE trees. Ancient oaks and ironwoods and species that’d been extinct since the Cataclysm reshaped the world a hundred thousand years ago. Growing from bare rock at speeds that violated every natural law anyone had ever documented.

Their trunks were thick as full-grown dragon bodies. Branches like spears stabbing upward toward a sky they’d never actually see. Roots that punched through solid stone like it was water and kept going, kept spreading, kept GROWING with relentless vegetative fury.

Vines followed in their wake.

Thick as a dragon’s forearm. Covered in thorns the length of fingers. They wrapped around the bronze defensive sphere with crushing force that made the barriers SHRIEK under strain—the sound of essence shields being compressed past their designed tolerance, like metal being bent until it screamed.

The sphere held.

For exactly three seconds.

Then the roots punched up through the canyon floor directly into the formation’s base. Stabbing upward with the force of siege weapons. One caught a bronze High Blazecrowned warrior through the chest—went IN through his belly scales and OUT through his spine in an eruption of blood and shattered bone and scale fragments that sparkled like broken glass in the emerald light.

He had just enough time to scream once.

Then his Crucible Core ruptured from the catastrophic trauma.

His death-scream triggered a sympathetic detonation as his damaged Core lost cohesion and released all its stored essence in a single uncontrolled burst. The explosion killed him instantly—probably a mercy given the alternative—and wounded two green dragons who’d been too close to the blast radius.

But more importantly, it SHATTERED the bronze defensive sphere’s structural integrity.

The bronze warriors scattered like startled birds as titanic vegetation tore through their carefully maintained formation like paper. Heihuo’s personal barrier held—High Blazecrowned power combined with desperate essence expenditure that’d leave him dangerously depleted later—but three of his junior warriors weren’t fast enough.

Weren’t strong enough.

Weren’t lucky enough.

The vines caught them mid-flight.

The first junior was an Entry Blazecrowned female barely two thousand years old. Heihuo didn’t even know her name, which made what happened next somehow worse.

She felt her ribs crack under the pressure.

Then break.

Then CAVE INWARD as the vine constricted with force measured in literal tons. She tried to scream, but her lungs were compressed too flat to draw breath. Tried to channel Inferno to burn through the restraint, but the pain shattered her concentration into jagged pieces that wouldn’t fit back together no matter how hard she tried.

Her vision went dark around the edges as oxygen deprivation started shutting down her brain. Her Crucible Core flickered weakly—trying to keep her alive through sheer essence, sustaining her body past the point where flesh and blood should’ve failed.

The vine CRUSHED her chest cavity completely.

She died drowning in her own blood. Eyes still wide with the shock of someone who’d thought they had millennia left to live and was just now realizing how wrong they’d been.

The second junior managed to manifest an Inferno blade—actual physical construct of solidified fire essence, which was actually impressive under the circumstances—and cut halfway through the vine binding his sword arm.

Then three more tendrils wrapped around the limb and PULLED in opposite directions.

His shoulder dislocated with a wet pop that he felt all the way down to his bones. Ligaments tore like overstressed rope. The Inferno blade flickered and died as agony shattered the precise concentration required to maintain it.

A third vine wrapped around his neck. Started squeezing.

Patient. Terrible. Inevitable.

He clawed at it desperately with his free hand. Scales tearing off. Essence burning through his reserves as he tried everything he knew to destroy or escape the restraint. But Verdant essence regenerated faster than Inferno could burn through it, which was just how the elements worked. Mathematics again.

His windpipe collapsed.

Eyes bulged as his brain screamed for oxygen it couldn’t get. Blackness closed in from all sides like curtains drawing shut—

He went limp.

Hanging in the vines’ grip like a broken puppet whose strings had been cut.

The third junior was smarter. Or maybe just more desperate.

She activated an emergency essence release technique—last-resort measure designed to buy escape time by literally burning years of cultivation as fuel. Her Crucible Core blazed white-hot as she dumped fifty years’ worth of painstakingly accumulated advancement into a single massive explosion.

The vine holding her VAPORIZED in an instant. Reduced to ash and scattered fragments.

She flew toward the canyon exit with wings beating frantically. Almost made it to freedom—was maybe ten meters from clear air—

The Verdant spear caught her between the wings.

Punched clean through her Crucible Core in a strike so precise it seemed almost surgical.

She had maybe five seconds to fully process that she was dead. That her Core’s catastrophic failure was going to cook her from the inside out. That fifty years of cultivation she’d just burned had bought her exactly nothing except a slightly different method of dying.

Then the essence feedback turned her internal organs to charred meat.

Her body dropped from the sky, trailing smoke. Already starting to char.

But the artifact strike cost the greens dearly, too.

The Entry Apexblight team leader who’d activated his device felt his Crucible Core CRACK.

Sound like breaking ice that he heard in his bones rather than his ears. Not a surface fracture that’d heal with time and care. Deep structural failure that went all the way through the Core’s essence matrix, compromising its fundamental integrity.

His cultivation started hemorrhaging power.

Like a severed artery bleeding essence instead of blood. He gasped and tried desperately to channel healing techniques to stabilize the damage, but he couldn’t because his Crucible Core was the SOURCE of his power, and the source was BROKEN and breaking more with every second that passed.

Ten thousand years of cultivation collapsed in real-time.

His power dropping from Entry Apexblight to Peak Blazecrowned as the Core’s structure failed. Peak Blazecrowned to High as cracks spread through the matrix like ice breaking on a frozen lake. High to Middle. Middle to Entry. Entry Blazecrowned to Peak Inferno-tempered—

He hit Inferno-tempered tier and finally stabilized.

His damaged Core barely maintaining cohesion at the lower power level. He fell unconscious from the shock and pain, dropping from the sky like a stone. His advancement was GONE. Shattered. It’d take him five thousand years minimum to rebuild what he’d lost in ten seconds, assuming he even survived long enough to try.

The Middle Apexblight team leader weathered the backlash better.

Stronger Core. More experience managing essence strain. Better prepared for what was coming because she’d done this once before in a different war.

But her hands were RUINED.

The skin was charred black where she’d channeled the artifact’s power through her physical body. Essence burns that went down to the bone and deeper—third-degree burns on flesh that wouldn’t properly heal for decades, even with the best physicians money could buy.

Flesh actively smoking as residual heat-cooked tissue. Blood boiling in the wounds with a sickening hissing sound that made even hardened warriors look away.

She screamed.

And kept fighting anyway.

Because Captain Luwei’s orders had been absolutely clear and because pain was temporary but mission failure was permanent and because she’d spent eight thousand years learning how to compartmentalize suffering and keep moving when every instinct screamed to curl up and die.

The third team leader—Entry Apexblight, younger and less experienced than the others—got relatively lucky.

His Core cracked under the strain but held together through sheer stubborn refusal to fail completely. He’d be cultivating crippled for centuries until the damage fully healed and he could advance normally again.

But he’d LIVE.

And he’d keep his tier.

And that was more than some of his teammates could say.

The fourth and fifth team leaders took varying degrees of damage. One lost his left eye when the essence backlash exploded a blood vessel with enough force to rupture the eyeball—just gone, empty socket weeping blood and vitreous fluid. Another’s lungs filled with blood from internal rupturing as the feedback tore through his meridians like razors.

But it was worth it.

Worth every broken body, shattered cultivation, and ruined hand.

Because the bronze defensive sphere was broken beyond any hope of repair. Six of their junior warriors were confirmed dead. And now the green dragons poured into the gaps in their formation with killing intent that smelled like ozone and burned vegetation and approaching death.

Heihuo saw his carefully maintained formation fragmenting in real-time.

Saw the green dragons pressing their advantage with the kind of professional ruthlessness that came from millennia of warfare. Saw the battle turning from coordinated defense into outright SLAUGHTER with him and his warriors as the prey.

Something cold and terrible settled in his chest. Heavy as swallowed ice. Sharp as broken glass.

This wasn’t random.

Wasn’t opportunistic.

This was PLANNED. Coordinated. Executed with precision that suggested someone had studied bronze sect tactics in detail and designed a perfect counter-strategy.

Like the green dragons had specific intelligence about their formations, capabilities, and weaknesses.

Like the Dragon Green sect had been preparing for this exact scenario.

His essence-enhanced senses caught something at the very edge of perception. So faint he almost missed it in the chaos of combat, but it was there if you knew where to look.

Familiar essence signature flickering like a distant candle.

Red sect.

Sixty kilometers due east.

Battle formations engaging with the sharp essence spikes that meant Sparkcasting techniques detonating in rapid succession. The distinctive pattern of coordinated assault rather than random skirmishing.

Against bronze forces.

At the exact same moment as this ambush.

The pieces fell into place in Heihuo’s mind with the terrible clarity of absolute certainty.

Red essence signature to the east. Green dragons attacking here. Both engaging bronze forces. At the SAME MOMENT. With the same professional coordination. With intelligence that suggested detailed preparation.

Understanding crashed through him like ice water flooding his veins.

Cold. Sharp. Absolutely undeniable.

Coordinated. Allied. Red and green working TOGETHER against bronze.

The tri-alliance was a LIE. Was a TRAP from the very START.

He threw back his head and ROARED.

Sound that carried fury and betrayal and the terrible realization that his grandfather had been absolutely RIGHT to distrust everyone. That paranoia wasn’t a character flaw when everyone really was plotting against you.

”BRONZE SECT!” His voice made the canyon walls shake with the force of High Blazecrowned power behind it. ”THE TRI-ALLIANCE IS BROKEN! RED AND GREEN HAVE ALLIED AGAINST US!”

His High Blazecrowned power erupted outward in a wave of superheated Inferno essence that VAPORIZED the vegetation binding his surviving warriors.

The temperature spiked two hundred degrees in half a second.

Stone began melting where the heat touched it—turning from solid to liquid to gas in stages that happened too fast for the eye to track. The air itself ignited with a soft whoompf as oxygen combusted in the sudden inferno.

The green dragons screamed and threw up defensive barriers against the heat—

”FIGHTING RETREAT! SOUTHEAST VECTOR! MOVE NOW!”

The bronze dragons disengaged with desperate efficiency. Years of training allowing them to execute complex maneuvers even while bleeding and terrified and processing betrayal that cut deeper than any physical wound.

Heihuo’s remaining elite guard formed a rearguard position. Buying precious seconds with their bodies while the wounded and the junior warriors fled toward the canyon exit as fast as wings could carry them.

One Peak Blazecrowned male—veteran named Guang who’d served Heihuo’s family loyally for six thousand years—stood alone against four green Entry Apexblight warriors.

He held them off for eight full seconds.

Using every technique he’d learned across two Zartonesh Invasions. Every trick. Every desperate gambit he’d ever seen work. Moving with the kind of economy that only came from millennia of practice, making every motion count because he knew—had always known—that one day he’d be in exactly this situation.

Outnumbered. Outmatched. Buying time with his life.

He managed to kill one of them.

Inferno lance through the eye that burned straight into the brain, cooking gray matter in an instant. Quick. Clean. The kind of kill you hoped for when your own death was seconds away.

Then the other three overwhelmed him.

A Verdant blade took him through the spine. Severing his essence channels. Paralyzing everything below the neck so that he couldn’t move, couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything except feel the pain and wait for the end.

He died screaming defiance at his killers.

Cursing them with his last breath in language so foul it’d make ancestors weep. Because if you were gonna die, you might as well die angry.

The High Blazecrowned female named Huiying—the one with the wounded shoulder, blood loss already making her vision tunnel and her movements slow—faced three green Blazecrowned warriors despite knowing she was outmatched and dying.

She lasted twelve seconds.

Which was actually impressive considering the blood loss and the pain and the fact that she was fighting on borrowed time that’d run out the moment that Verdant spear had punched through her shoulder.

She managed to take two of them with her.

Deliberately overloaded her Crucible Core in a final desperate technique that turned her body into a bomb. The kind of move you only used when you knew you weren’t walking away and wanted to make absolutely certain you took enemies with you.

The explosion vaporized all three dragons in a sphere of white-hot Inferno essence.

Left nothing but ash and the smell of burned meat and a crater in the canyon floor where they’d been standing.

Fifteen bronze warriors made it to the canyon exit.

Wings pumping frantically. Essence burning as they flew for their lives. Some of them wounded. Some of them terrified. All of them processing the betrayal and the deaths and the fact that they’d walked straight into a trap that’d killed six of their number in minutes.

Heihuo was the sixteenth.

Bringing up the rear to make sure no one got left behind. Because that’s what leaders did—you were the first into danger and the last out of it, and if anyone was gonna die covering the retreat, it was gonna be you.

Then the canyon entrance COLLAPSED ahead of them.

Stone and earth crashed down in a thunderous avalanche that sealed the exit like a tomb door slamming shut with terrible finality.

Heihuo spun in mid-air. Amber eyes wide with shock as he saw Captain Luwei hovering above the debris field. The green dragon’s hands were still glowing with residual power from the Terracore technique that’d brought an entire mountain down on their heads.

They were trapped.

Boxed in. No escape.

Which was actually worse than it sounded because now they couldn’t run, and the greens still outnumbered them, and everyone was exhausted and bleeding, and this was really, really not good.

”Surrender,” Captain Luwei called out.

His voice carried easily in the sudden quiet that followed the avalanche. Tone was professional rather than gloating. Tactical rather than cruel. Just a commander offering terms because that’s what you did when you had someone trapped.

”The bronze heir is worth more alive than dead. Lay down, and we’ll spare the survivors.”

Heihuo’s laugh was an ugly thing.

Broken glass grinding together. Poison dripping from fangs. The sound of someone who’d just watched six warriors die and was processing betrayal so deep it cut to the bone.

”You think I don’t SEE it?”

His voice was hoarse from screaming orders. Raw from breathing superheated air. But it carried anyway because fury had a way of projecting.

”Red sect engaging our forces sixty kilometers to the east. At the SAME MOMENT as your attack here. Coordinated timing. Professional execution. Intelligence suggesting you’d been preparing for days.”

He bared his teeth in an expression that had absolutely nothing to do with smiles and everything to do with the promise of murder.

”Green and red allied against bronze. My grandfather WARNED me about this. Said the tri-alliance was a political trap designed to isolate us. Said we couldn’t trust anyone.” His amber eyes blazed with High Blazecrowned power and terrible understanding. ”I didn’t listen to him. Thought he was being paranoid.”

His voice dropped to something quieter. More dangerous.

”He was RIGHT about everything.”

Captain Luwei’s emerald eyes flickered with something that looked almost like genuine confusion crossing his scarred features.

”What are you—”

”KILL THEM ALL!”

Heihuo’s roar cut him off. Voice cracking with fury that’d been building since the moment he’d realized they’d been set up.

”SHOW THESE OATH-BREAKING TRAITORS WHAT BRONZE SECT DOES TO BETRAYERS!”

The fifteen surviving bronze warriors threw themselves at the green forces with the kind of suicidal fury that came from knowing you were dead anyway, so you might as well take as many enemies with you as possible.

The battle became slaughter in its purest, most terrible form.