Nyla recognized the attack as the martial skill that the city lord of Greenwall had used against the disciple of the Bloodhand Sect that attacked them on their way to Ferguson. Only, the strength of the strike was much fiercer.

A handful of the Integration-staged cultivators below had moved in to unleash a pincer attack on the group, even as Nyla continued to block all of the arrows that came their way. Only half of them made it to the rooftop, as Ian had appeared behind them like a persistent shadow and cut each person in two with precise yet savage strikes. He couldn’t make an immediate return, however, because dozens of warriors within the crowd had charged him with intense battle cries.

Her brother is incredible.

Lyra wielded her borrowed great sword against one of the five people that Ian hadn’t killed, a menacing smile replacing the impressed one she’d worn just moments earlier. Though the man caught her blade with his own, the force behind the strike sent him flying to the ground below with a blast of outward wind. She immediately spun around to avoid attacks from two of the others, ducked another slash and sent a sideways kick into a strong boy around her age, who flew in the same direction as the other man that was now hesitant to jump back into the fight.

“You two have some familiar faces!”

As Lyra leapt down into the crowd, Nolan killed three people without budging an inch. His strange needles appeared from within his spatial bag in an instant and quickly buried themselves deep into critical spots of their bodies.

At this point all of the women and children had dispersed into the surrounding alleyways, though some were grabbed at the arms and hair and forced to remain behind.

No one attacked me?

She quickly saw through how Nolan was operating the needles as he summoned them to rotate above his head in a circle of bloodstained metal.

“I don’t know which one’s yours, so just take all three.”

Her spatial bag approached from where it had hovered since Griff had died. She absentmindedly accepted it along with two more. “Thank you.”

Why haven’t I thought of that?

She glanced at all of the arrows that had accumulated in front of the building that they stood upon, the defensive mass of energy still holding out against the weakening barrage from those bandits farthest from Ian and Lyra. What she was about to attempt would use up all of her remaining spiritual energy, though nothing would happen to her with Nolan at her side. She closed her eyes and withdrew the range of her perceptions so that they only encompased the immediate area, specifically the people within her line of sight, along with the arrows that littered the ground.

Eight hundred and ninety arrows, nine hundred and fifty people… Targeting all of them wasn’t something she could pull off, especially if she wanted to avoid hitting any of the women and children.

With an exertion of focus and will, the shield of spiritual energy thinned out so that it could only absorb a few dozen more arrows. Simultaneously, all of the arrows below shot up at the same time, and straightened out with the tips all pointed at different angles. The instant they settled in the air, they shot out at a large area where no non-combatants were present. A hundred and nine auras disappeared within the following seconds, with many others wavering in strength. Farther away, two flashes of golden light appeared in succession that killed seven people followed by another nine. At the same time, Lyra managed to kill the boy and the older cultivator that she’d chased after, the last Integration-staged bandits within the town.

“Jesus, Nyla. How do you have so much spiritual energy?”

The six hundred or so people that remained fled in all directions, with nobody else targeting the members of their group.

“I have two dantians.” She smiled, proud that she had found a new way to use her spiritual sense and energy. “I actually used up all of my energy though. Can I have another cup of water? Mine hardly works like it used to.”

Nolan looked a bit guilty for a moment, though the surprise still remained on his face. “Here’s five barrels.”

She pried the lid off of one of the containers with a finger, and drank directly from the top. Once she’d filled her stomach, she straightened up and wiped her mouth before looking Nolan deep in the eyes.

“What happened in Hauss? What did Uncle Grey do to you?”

“Hold on.” He turned back to the open space and yelled at Ian and Lyra, who were chasing down fleeing bandits and taking them out with well-timed attacks. “You guys don’t need to keep killing them, you know!”

Ian stopped attacking for a moment. “You think they’ll change their ways if we let them go? Taking them out will save a lot of people.” He darted into an alleyway, life signals disappearing sporadically, yet consistently.

Nolan looked conflicted. “What do you think?”

“They killed a lot of people when our caravan was attacked. With how many women are in this city, there’s no way that that was the first time.”

"Wait, so all of the women here...?" he muttered. “Honestly, I’m getting tired of killing people.”

“There’ll always be fighting. We can’t help that.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I’ll probably be doing it until the day I die. Just wish I didn’t have to. Ah, you good to go? Much as I hate saying it, if these guys are that horrible then we should probably join in.”

“When I’ve had some more water.” Once her cup was empty, they tracked down the more powerful members of the community and got to work.

By the time that they stopped killing bandits, the town was almost completely rid of their presence. Most had fled into the barren landscape that surrounded the settlement, many in the company of their families. Not all relationships within these walls were unwilling, which Nyla saw many times when wives or children rushed to defend their fathers from her blade. She didn’t understand it. How could they side with people that caused them so much sadness and pain? She allowed these men to leave with their families, since she felt no justification in taking their lives.

Once they’d purged the city of those in power, they had the remaining townspeople gather in the main plaza where Ian and the others had first showed up. With nowhere to go, the majority of them decided to remain in the town now that the worst criminals had been expelled from the community. Alicia and the girls decided to accompany Nyla and the others on their way to North Island, where they planned to find work in the thriving merchant kingdom in the hopes of building new lives together.

With nothing else anchoring them to the desolate township, they set off northward to finish the final leg of their journey to Frostport.

While she’d heard that the northern wilderness was a dangerous place, the only things that they encountered throughout the rest of the day were whistling winds and dust devils. She found it odd that they were the only signs of life for leagues around, and eventually shared her speculations with Nolan.

“Is that a bad thing?” he asked. “In my book, fewer monsters means less problems.”

“I suppose so. It’s just that, back in the Dragon’s Tail this only happened whenever a powerful demonic beast was nearby.”

“No, I hear you. It’s just that we don’t really have a choice. It’s not like we can just teleport to Frostport.”

She thought about the ornate painting that she’d obtained from the Vespasian tomb. The farthest she’d travelled with it was perhaps a third of a league, though the experiment had cost her so much energy that she wouldn’t attempt another unless she was in a safe location. Nolan had helped her and Lyra retrieve their belongings, and she was glad to see that Griff hadn’t had the sense to see the painting for what it really was.

“Ah, right.” She withdrew a secondary spatial bag from her primary one and handed it over. “These are for you.”

“Whoa, seriously? Where did you get all of these?”

“A Vespasian tomb.”

She’d handed him the empty spirit stones that she’d found in that place. To anyone else, they were useless, but to the person that enjoyed ownership of the Divine Spirit Fountain they were practically as good as if they were fully charged.

“No way. Where was this?”

She let out an uneasy laugh as she recalled the giant ants and spiders that filled the Dreadstone Pass, along with the deadly salamanders that had cornered her, Lyra, and Rane, in the tomb’s central area. “Nowhere you’d want to go.”

They stopped to rest a few hours after midnight, soon huddled around a stifled fire that sat within a small fireplace that Nolan had created with a construction arrayment. He’d also produced a few more sets of green robes, which he imbued with various spiritual arrayments before he gave one to Lyra and then one to her.

When asked why he’d done so, he said, “They’re your uniforms.”

She wondered when he’d become such an adept arrayment practitioner. “Uniforms? For what?”

“For our sect.”

Her mouth almost dropped. “You joined a sect?”

“Nope, we created one. I know you’re thinking something like ‘why would he do that?’ Well, hear me out.”

It turned out that Sean and Esteban, the two that had tossed barrels of gunpowder at Griff’s men, were Otherworlders just like Nolan. He’d met them in the same community where he’d met Ian, and had been sure to free them in the aftermath of a neighbouring community’s invasion. He also taught them the Ancestral Body Technique, and brought them along on his journey to reunite with her.

“So, you want to create a place where people from your world can live in peace?”

“Relative peace, anyway. And thanks to everything that went down with the Towering Eaves clan, I’ve got a nice piece of land where I can get the ball rolling once we finish up with our business in the north.” A green robe landed in front of him in a crumpled mess of fabric.

“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve had enough of the Varai clan and the Three-River Valley.”

All heads turned to Lyra, who lay on her back with her hands pillowed beneath her head.