The inevitable clash came twenty minutes after Nyla had last used her canvas, once they had put a considerable distance between them and the nearest of their pursuers. Nyla’s guard was raised to the highest heights, for just when it had seemed as if they were about to be surrounded, the groups ahead had abruptly pulled back in a uniform manner. This left her and the others with an open path of escape that seemed too tempting to turn away from, which was exactly what worried her. It didn’t make much sense for the enemy forces to pull back just moments before the inner layers of their encirclement were about to constrict around them.

“Stop!” The others didn’t hesitate to listen to her sudden exclamation, all of them glancing over to hear her reasoning. “It’s pretty obvious that they’re trying to lure us into a trap. If we keep heading in this direction then it’ll just be that much worse when we finally have to confront them.”

“Does it really matter?” said Ian. “We’ll be running into disciples no matter what way we go.”

“Where do you think we should head, then?”

Looking Lyra in the eye, Nyla pointed to the northeast. “They must’ve learned how my canvas works, so there’re probably a lot more disciples along the path back to Elmer than in any other direction. I think we should go that way.”

“We’ll still have to fight, then?” asked Esteban nervously. “Even if we keep going straight, won’t it be the same?”

Sean hefted his sword, rolling his shoulder in a stretching motion. “Seems like we’ll end up fighting no matter what we do. We’re just picking our poison.” His face was pale, his eyes wary as he stared ahead of them with angst.

The various groups of pursuers were quickly gaining on them, so Nyla took off in the direction that she had indicated and yelled over her shoulder. “Our priority right now is to get off this island. If we have to fight, it’s to break through and nothing more!”

Sure enough, forty auras appeared ahead of them, all at the first or second levels of Integration save for one that was at the peak of the same stage. As things were, the two groups would intersect in a minute or two.

“She’s right,” said Ian, who was running at the back of the group as rearguard. “Nyla, you and the girls focus on defense. Me and the guys will take the lead.”

“What am I supposed to do?” said his sister. “I can’t use arrayments like them.”

“Then join us at the front!”

They rearranged their positions so that Nyla, Alicia and Aine were now at the back of the group, with the others making up the front line. All of them had their halmite weapons in hand, at least all save for Nyla herself. In lieu of her weapon, she had drawn out an intermediate attack arrayment that Uncle Grey had taught her over the past several months, the only intermediate one that she was currently able to cast.

Swords and spears are fun and all, he had said during the introductory lesson to the new technique, but they’re a huge waste of energy, if you ask me. What you want to fire off are arrows—while still deadly, they cost a fraction of the spiritual energy.

Nyla had never used an intermediate arrayment in battle, but she would never forget the sight that she’d seen back in the glade when she had first successfully activated the technique. An entire section of forest had nearly been blown to shreds, the surviving trees peppered with holes in the midst of a graveyard of mulched wood. With that in mind, another hundred superior spirit stones appeared at her back only to quickly have all of their spiritual energy infused with her arrayment diagram.

Sensing more movement, she quickly spotted the most recent source of her anxiety. “There’s another group up ahead!”

Sean tightened his grip on his sword. “You mean apart from those forty?”

“There’s fifty more behind them.”

“Days like these make me miss football and beer…”

She ignored the man’s nervous mutterings, for she didn’t have any time to wonder after the meaning of his words. Dozens of little blue lights had lit up about a thousand paces ahead of them, one after the other as if a cloud of fireflies had just taken flight for the night.

“Can they hit us from that far? They can’t, right?”

As if in answer to Esteban’s question, a chain of momentary flashes spread along the thin line of disciples up ahead. Each of the opposing disciples had summoned at least ten swords of azure energy, hundreds of which were soon launched in their direction.

Seeing the uncertain glances that Alicia and Aine sent her way, Nyla immediately yelled, “Everyone, activate your movement skills!”

Since all of her friends had learned the same skill as her—what she had named the Swift Steps Technique—they were all able to double their maximum speeds without much effort. The illuminating bombardment sailed over their heads and crashed into the ground at their backs as they charged ahead with everything they had. The resultant gusts of wind helped to push them forward as they continued on through a backdrop of thunderous roars and heavy impacts without looking back.

As soon as they cleared the first barrage, Nyla activated her attack arrayment and directed it towards the centre of the oncoming group. She felt as if a literal weight had been lifted off of her shoulders as several thousand arrows of golden light appeared in the air above her and her friends, and almost instantaneously soared into the enemy ranks following a series of ruthless trajectories. That same instant, she stowed away the barrel of empty spirit stones that she’d been dragging along behind her in a cloud of projected inner essence, and watched on with expectant eyes as the golden volley collided with its targets.

A giant sheet of glassy energy was manifested to intercept her counterattack as all of the oncoming enemies skidded to a stop and threw their arms up to power a defensive arrayment that the elder in their company had suddenly conjured. The barrier that dozens of people were maintaining was shattered by her attack, though her arrayment was also dispelled after only harming a handful of disciples. As this was the first time that she’d actually used the technique in combat, Nyla had only poured twenty percent of the energy within one of her dantians into the attack, or about ten percent of her overall reserves, and then supplemented the rest with energy siphoned from spirit stones. Based upon the result of the volley that she’d just unleashed, she figured that even without relying on spirit stones she could achieve the same result if she emptied one of her dantians to power the technique.

What their enemies didn’t anticipate were the four barrels of gunpowder that Sean and Esteban had hurled as soon as they’d seen Nyla make her move. The explosions that followed killed or incapacitated most of the disciples within the group that was closest to them, corpses and injured bodies swallowed up by swelling clouds of rain-battered smoke. The back of the elder that had accompanied this bunch was visible as he fled with everything he had toward the other disciples that had been tailing his force, not even sparing a glance for what remained of what were presumably his students.

Nyla felt an odd rush of confidence and pride as she glanced at the surviving disciples in passing, all of them having dropped their weapons and shifted focus toward trying to save their injured companions. This was the first time that she had ever fought against other arrayment practitioners without relying on her martial prowess, and not only had she won the exchange, but she had done so against dozens of enemies that were older than her. She had never been particularly talented at anything, not until she had met Uncle Grey and begun to learn the ways of an arrayment practitioner. Her master had always praised her for having an extraordinary affinity with spiritual energy and arrayment design, and now that she had defeated dozens of other arrayment practitioners—disciples of an arrayment-based sect—in a relatively easy manner, she couldn’t help but feel a slight stirring of pride within her chest.