Xie Jun wept.
"Lord Meng..."
Her voice trailed off as she looked at the body. The Devil Bee rider had simply sliced him in two with a massive saber, his skull bisected, the split running all the way down until it exited the body at one of his hips.
Thankfully the Devil Bees had mostly pulled back, their massive raid finished. The goal didn't seem to be to
take anything, just to ravage Saber Sect territory, destroying villages and towns, burning down cities where they could. No Nascents had come north since the Blood Mists had descended - in the south there seemed to be a minor détente on that front.
Still, they were losing. No... they had lost.
Nearly ten thousand Hong Xuan cultivators had set out, along with a large detachment from the Everburning Phoenixes - Elder Xinya's former personal Legion. Two and a half thousand cultivators, led by Xie Meng who had reached the very peak of Foundation Establishment. A large enough force, sent to support the Righteous Path. The desperate need of the Divine Sabers had seen them sent south, and that had been a disaster. She didn't know why they'd accepted the request to go south, only that it seemed important diplomatically.
The simple truth was that the war of manoeuvre they had been forced to fight had been tilted against them from the start.
Hong Xuan Yuan Gao had been the Core Formation Elder leading the combined force, and to say he had been arrogant had been an understatement. They had borne constant insults and refusals from the local Saber Sect Elders to supply them, and after one particularly insulting affair Yuan Gao had marched out to take the field. After a few major battles where they had crushed combined Devil Bee forces, he'd insisted on them marching south to relieve the city of Fa Yu, a city that fell three days before they arrived.
Yuan Gao had decided to storm it anyway - which was a fair decision, Xie Jung supposed. They had been too far from any allied forces, and the general refusal of the Saber Sect to turn over supplies or aid them meant they had few options. Nearly a quarter of the Hong Xuan cultivators died taking the invested city, and the arrays were ruined once they had. The mortal population had been almost entirely slaughtered, and so they sat in the burnt-out ruins of Fa Yu, fortifying it and using the local Qi flows to at least replenish themselves.
Xie Meng had taken her on as an aide, and she'd run messages between the two men for months. Yuan Gao had insisted they not retreat - they'd likely be cut to pieces and lose half their number before returning north.
Xie Meng had agreed, but she remembered what he'd said.
'Respectually, Elder Yuan, we'll be cut to pieces by the enemy either way. The only question is whether we retreat in good order and suffer being cut mostly to pieces, or retreat when we're forced to and be cut apart entirely."
Yuan Gao had disagreed, and so they'd stayed. For four years they'd held the burnt-out shell of Fa Yu, supplies running ever-lower, Spirit Stones more difficult than pills and herbs to acquire. She herself had managed to reach Foundation Establishment in those days, adding another Expert to the beleaguered ranks of the expeditionary force, not that it mattered. They'd lost very few cultivators in that time, to tell the truth, but their supplies ran ever-lower. Spirit Stones to keep the arrays running, pills for healing, herbs for replenishing blood, Gravebronze spears and shields breaking... it all added up.
When the Devil Bees had arrived in force it was entirely too late. Four Core Formation Elders, and nearly forty thousand cultivators besides. Outnumbered four to one, these were not terrible odds for the Clan in a fortified position.
It was then she had discovered the difference between the Hong Xuan Clan and the
Optimatoi.
The
Optimatoi didn't break.
Oh, the Hong Xuan had fought in good order - to their credit. But with Devil Bees buzzing around you, the array cracked and the constant screaming of human heads on the bees themselves in your ears, it was difficult to remain so. The Hong Xuan didn't
flee, but they became confused. Their tight-knit ranks fell apart, and as the defensive arrays collapsed, so did any semblance of unity.
Yuan Gao had challenged the Blood Path elders to a duel while ordering his army to retreat, offering himself as a possible sacrifice in order to buy the remainder of his army time.
In full view of the opposing armies, he slew two Blood Path elders, crippled a third, and wounded the fourth. It almost seemed as though he would do the impossible and win the battle himself, despite the loss of an arm and an eye - moments before being brought down by a pack of Foundation experts greedy for his blood and flesh.
The man was not a competent general, but she could see why he was placed in command.
They had fled after that, the Clan and Hong Xuan retreating together, harassed endlessly. They'd been forced to go west, unable to break the Devil Bee lines in the north. By the time they'd reached a defensible position, their numbers had fallen from twelve thousand to twelve hundred. Lord Meng had kept them in good order, executing a daring raid on an occupied Spirit Stone mine to replenish their supplies, and then fleeing a Core Formation enemy, breaking through an army five times his size to retreat into Antiquity Saber Valley.
Three years of siege in Antiquity Saber Valley, a place where disciples of the Seven Divine Saber Sect could go to commune with ancestrals Wills too weak to be contained within the main walls of their Sect - item-spirits and Wills combined into teachers for the less talented. These sabers would slash at those entering the valley without permission, but by forging disciple-tokens Lord Meng had managed to win entrance to the least part of the valley itself. The map the Saber Sect had given them indicated that they would be able to pass through the Valley to the north, escaping the Devil Bee encirclement. Of course, permission had never been granted. Jun didn't know if it was incompetence or malice, but either way, it wasn't Lord Meng's fault that their escape had failed.
There, they'd managed to hold for another three years. Constant attacks and raids, but nothing too serious. Almost nine hundred of them had remained before the last attack.
Six Core Formation Elders had tried to break into the Valley desperately, and before the slashing of the ancient sabers had driven them off once more, they'd killed nearly half of them. Slaughtering them like rats, faster and stronger than anything Xie Jung could've imagined. Only the sabers awakening once more had driven them off, and she doubted it'd be for long.
When she had stepped onto this path, she had thought Lord Meng the pinnacle of strength.
A single strike had carved him in half.
Now, she knew, you were always a mortal to someone. Always looked down on by someone.
The few cultivators who remained looked to her for leadership. She sat weeping by Lord Meng's body. She had confessed her feelings to him, only to find out he was... not interested in women. Which had been a humiliating moment, to say the least. He'd stayed a mentor to her though, guiding her with knowledge of how to face the Trials, helping her advance, and doing a thousand other things besides. They'd never been
friends - Lord Meng saw her as a duty to be fulfilled, but to her, he was the man who had taken her from nothing and given her everything.
Her mother had died over a century ago, but she had died knowing despite all the taunts spat at her, her daughter could not be looked down upon. Her sister had borne children, and they too had children and so on, and so it was Jun was a great-aunt twice over. To that branch of the family she was their pride, and every visit every thirty or forty years was looked on with the kind of eagerness she had met Lord Meng.
No, if she died here none of them would be ashamed.
Shaking off the tears, she stood.
"Hong Xuan!
Optimatoi!"
The Bull-Bellowing Art was useful, for it masked emotion in the voice and sounded out to so many around you. Project confidence when there was nothing left but waiting for death.
"They'll come again."
Jun shivered as she spoke.
"The Devil Bees have us trapped and ground down here, and they're going to come again. It might be hours, might be days."
She lowered her voice.
"Still. Fifty Foundation experts. Six hundred Qi Condensation disciples. All of us heirs of a proud, proud tradition. A century ago thirteen Qi Condensation juniors of the Clan - with a little Foundation Establishment aid - slew a Core Formation expert. A
Fifth Sea Expert. They had no expectation of living through that day, and neither do we. Our enemies are powerful, and no doubt they'll try and kill every last one of us."
She grinned, or at least forced her lips upwards and bared her teeth. Her eyes flickered to Lord Meng's corpse, but hopefully they couldn't see that.
"We're afraid, yes. But are the scions of the Hong Xuan Clan so easily broken? Is death a greater shame to you than dishonour? To my brothers and sisters of the
Imperial Optimatoi, are we broken by this? If all but one of us are killed tomorrow, I expect the last of you to throw yourself, screaming and defiant in the face of the last Blood Path cultivator you see. I can tell you now, death is a certainty. But like Elder Yuan Gao, do we die fleeing for our lives, or do we die magnificently?"
Her rictus of a grin grew wider, and tears streamed down her face.
"Gather any poisons you have, any items of note, anything you can think of. When they come again, they'll pay dearly for it."
It was not thirty minutes later that six Nascent Souls from the north flew south, butchering every last Devil Bee in their path. It seemed that the Righteous Path were done with their squabbles at long last.
Nascent Lord Scarletglyph herself landed, saw they were alive, and left a Strength Purity cultivator to lead them north. Even on her return to the Clan, Jun wasn't sure how to feel. Angry, that they hadn't come a little earlier? Grateful? She didn't know.
