Book 10: Chapter 11: Multiple Ends
Sen flew over the forest at a speed that would have seemed reckless if he’d brought anyone else with him. He hadn’t. He very specifically and intentionally hadn’t. He’d left Falling Leaf to “guard” the last four survivors with a glowering Master Feng as backup. Sen had briefly explained the situation, as well as the assassination attempt on Falling Leaf, to his increasingly stone-faced master.
“I wouldn’t want these four to get any ideas if at all possible,” Sen had told Master Feng.
The look that Master Feng directed at those trembling survivors had been something truly terrible.
“I’m sure they’ll behave,” said the elder cultivator in a voice carved from glacial ice.
Satisfied that no unfortunate incidents were in the near future, Sen had set off in search of what remained of those spirit beasts who hadn’t been willing to come to terms with him. If they had simply left, or stayed out of the fight, he’d have been willing to largely ignore them. They were going to be irrelevant in the larger course of the war, so he didn’t need to do anything about them. Not that he would have put them entirely out of mind. He’d have set a watch on them to ensure they didn’t decide a nice sneak attack was a great idea if the war looked like it was going to go against humanity. Beyond that, though, he simply didn’t care about them. At least, he hadn’t cared about them.
The second he found out what they intended to do with Falling Leaf, all of that changed. Sen could only guess at what the beast king might have done with her. His imagination, however, was more than happy to conjure one nightmare-inducing image after the next. She would have been made an example to keep the rest of the spirit beasts in line. This is what happens when you side with the humans. Of that much, Sen was sure. Given her advancement and the healing it allowed for, the making an example process was one that could have been dragged out for a very, very long time. It was thoughts like that which transformed the small band of indecisive spirit beasts from possible unreliable allies into enemies. And Sen could not tolerate enemies this close to his town.
More importantly, he needed to send a message that would leave every spirit beast trembling. He needed them to understand that targeting the ones he loved was to invite a level and kind of retribution that no one wanted to dare. In other times, he might have chosen a less extreme option. At the very least, he might only have targeted the leadership of those sad, uncertain spirit beasts. With humanity already on the back foot and pushed into a defensive posture, it wouldn’t take much for whatever hope remained to crumble under the pressure. He could hear the hope dwindling in the messages that kept flooding in, and the constant pleas for assistance of any kind. Sen knew all too well how fragile a thing hope was when you were under pressure. He’d lived in the shadow of that kind of hopelessness for years as a child. It took something jarring to shake that sense of sense of doom. Such as a cultivator deciding that a street rat would become his disciple. Anything less than that just wouldn’t get the job done.
Humanity needed something equally jarring to shake off the miasma of defeat that was swiftly taking root. They needed something they could cling to until the cultivators and mortals got organized. They needed a victory, and they needed it to be decisive. He hadn’t planned to provide that light in the darkness for them. He didn’t want that much attention, but this threatened to be a long war. He expected this minor contribution would have long since faded from memory before everything was said and done. He could do this one thing, and then drop out of view again to focus on protecting what was his. That sending this message could accomplish both ends with one move was just a convenience that Sen was ready to take advantage of.
As he closed in on the area where he’d been told the rest of the spirit beasts had congregated, he felt them appear in his spiritual sense. There were more than he’d expected. By his rough estimate, there were anywhere from a hundred to hundred and fifty of them. It was hard to be sure because they were almost all trying to flee directly away from him. He wasn’t sure why they were bothering. Unless one of the handful who had chosen to stand their ground against him got very, very lucky, the end of this particular day would prove a foregone conclusion. Sen supposed some other cultivator might have waited for those challengers to rise up to meet him in the sky, or maybe they would have descended to engage in honorable combat.