Book 9: Chapter 53: A Purpose
Sen watched as Falling Leaf left the de-limbed corpse of the core cultivator in the copse of trees and ventured back out into the sect. Once she was gone, he walked over the corpse and glared down at it. He’d arrived just after she had, somehow, reappeared in his spiritual sense. It had taken swift action to conceal himself before she noticed he was there. She had an uncanny way of knowing when he was nearby even when he was hiding. His world had almost stopped when her presence in his spiritual sense had gone out.
He had seen that she was fleeing, but he had made himself leave it be. She had seemed to be moving under her own power. He knew that she didn’t want him to interfere in her battles unless absolutely necessary. At that moment, though, he’d been sure that he’d made a terrible, irreversible mistake. Some doomed bastard had tried to take advantage of his moment of horror and despair. The cultivator had launched four of those twisted blade techniques at him one after the other, clearly unaware of what he was about to provoke.
Sen had felt the techniques coming his way and his almost blind grief and rage had been given somewhere to go. He didn’t even really remember the details of what he’d done. There was a vague impression of crushing those techniques to the ground with… Sen couldn’t remember what he’d used to do that. He’d just done something. The next thing he remembered, his hand was wrapped around the other cultivator’s heart. That hand was sticking out of the man’s back. The man had worn an oddly surprised look in his last moment. Then, Sen was hurtling to the last place he’d felt Falling Leaf’s presence. He’d almost crashed through a building in utter shock when she reappeared. He’d hidden and wrapped himself in shadow before approaching. He listened to her last words to the other man.
“You should be grateful my human boy didn’t come. I’m only killing you. He would have hurt you in ways that there are no words for.”
She ended the man’s torment with a swift slash of her shadow claws and walked away. He gave her a little time to clear the immediate area before he walked over to the dead cultivator. As he stared into the man’s empty, lifeless eyes, he was torn between relief and fury. That she lived had swept away a mountain of grief that threatened to crush his soul. However, he’d seen where she had been injured. It was healed over, but also looked to have been serious. He desperately wanted to punish someone for that, but she’d done the job herself.
“She was right, you know,” he said to the corpse. “If she had died, your suffering would have been endless. You should thank the gods you’re beyond my reach.”
With an almost spasmodic burst of fire qi and wrath, Sen reduced the corpse to ashes. The action did little to quell the molten pit that writhed inside of him. He knew that Falling Leaf getting hurt here was always a possibility. Somewhere in the deepest, darkest depths of his heart, he even knew that she could die here. He’d known it, but he did not care. Coming here, setting the trap, and culling the majority of the sect had been an onerous duty to him. It was personal because it had threatened Ai, but it had still been something he didn’t really want to do. Now, though? Now, he wanted every single person stupid enough to wear the emblem of the Twisted Blade Sect to die.
It took every bit of self-control he could scrape together not to take Falling Leaf and Glimmer of Night outside the walls and level the entire compound with Heavens’ Rebuke. He was certain he could do it, too. He might not be able to accomplish it with one or two applications of the technique, but he could get it done. He had to remind himself, over and over again, that there were still qi-condensing cultivators inside the sect. He had promised himself that if they simply ran, he would let them go. He clung to that promise even as his heart told him to kill everyone and leave nothing but charred rubble behind him. He knew how easy it would be to ignore that promise, but he also knew that nothing lay down that path but regret. Even if he might not feel that regret today, tomorrow would come.
He forced himself to stay there until he was certain that he wasn’t going to unleash absolute annihilation at the first provocation. He consoled himself with the knowledge that while he might have promised to let some of them go, he hadn’t promised himself to let them all go. There were still people in this sect he could expend those feelings on. People who might even deserve it. Taking a steadying breath, Sen walked out of those trees with something he hadn’t had when he’d entered the sect. He had a purpose. It wasn’t especially noble, but there had never been anything noble about his goals. For all intents and purposes, this was sect politics at its most brutal.