Sen was disheartened to discover that news of the prince’s visit to him, as well as Sen’s identity as a kind of folk hero and sect bogeyman, had spread through the city like wildfire. He supposed it had been predictable but it didn’t make him happy. It had drawn attention down on him that was, in turns, frustrating and anger-inducing. Messengers had started arriving within hours from what Sen assumed were minor political houses trying to edge some kind of advantage. He grudgingly accepted the messages but did not read or respond to any of them. There was no point until he could get some insights from the prince about which houses were actually important and which were not. Those continuous interruptions in his day were simply frustrating.

The reaction of the local sects to his presence had ignited his anger. He had felt the arrival of several cultivators who positioned themselves nearby and, between them, took to examining the inn with their qi and spiritual sense almost continuously. It was a constant distraction and annoyance. Sen might have tried to ignore it, but Falling Leaf had been feeling cooped up. Sen understood that feeling. After so much time spent out on the road, the city was stifling. She had gone for a walk. Under normal circumstances, Sen wouldn’t have worried about her. In the foreign environment of the capital, he kept an eye on her from a distance with his own spiritual sense. That was how he knew almost the instant that things started to go wrong. He felt qi flare from half a dozen cultivators who closed on her fast.

Sen didn’t bother with trying to navigate through the inn. He launched himself out of his open window, cycling wind qi to help him manage the rotation of his midair somersault, planted a foot on the wall of the next building, and launched himself upwards with his qinggong technique. He was hurtling over rooftops, even as he felt the fight happening. Falling Leaf hadn’t been caught too off-guard, because he felt her distinctive qi flare several times. Then, the life of one of the people who was attacking her blinked out of Sen’s spiritual sense. On the one hand, Sen was thrilled. On the other, he knew he needed to hurry. With one of her attackers dead, the rest were likely to escalate things to a lethal level. He pushed himself harder, shattering roof tiles and, at one point, buckling a wall between buildings. Sen could feel the other cultivators hurling techniques at Falling Leaf and desperate concern exploded into incandescent rage. Sen didn’t know who they were and did not care. They had attacked Falling Leaf. It would be the final, fatal mistake of their lives. Sen planted his foot one last time and launched himself into the sky.

As he flew through the air, Sen summoned the heaven chasing spear from his storage ring and cycled lightning. He pressed that lightning into the spearhead until it blazed like a miniature sun. As he cleared the building, he felt the life of another attacker wink out of his senses. He took in the scene in a glance. Falling Leaf was bleeding from dozens of shallow cuts and half a dozen deeper ones. One of her wrists was locked into a shackle, but she’d buried her teeth in the throat of the person trying to shackle her and torn it out. Then, Sen descended on them like the hammer of a god. The spearhead dropped through the skull of one of the attackers and passed cleanly into her chest before the lightning detonated inside them. The cultivator’s body was shredded and flew in every direction. Sen felt the hot spray of blood across his face, but it was just a fact that his mind casually noted before dismissing it for more important tasks. The last three attackers stared at Sen with a mixture of terror and horror. The closest attacker, a muscular man, recovered first.

“You’re dare! You’re courting-,” was as far as he got.

A razor-edged spike of stone shot up from the ground, punched into the man’s groin, drove up through his chest, and exploded from the top of his skull in a shower of blood and brain. The last two, both core formation cultivators that were at least theoretically of a higher in-stage cultivation level than Sen, started launching their attacks. Sen had felt himself pass beyond the rage state and into that place of total, emotionless focus. He had enough time to identify the woman on the left as a fire cultivator, and the man on the right as a metal cultivator. Sen dismissed the man for the moment, knowing from experience and discussions with Lo Meifeng that metal cultivators struggled with ranged attacks.

Instead, he focused his attention on the woman. She tried launching wind blades at him. Sen had felt her cycling wind qi and momentarily devoted the entirety of his channels to wind qi as well, burning liquid qi to fuel his own strength. He felt it when her techniques were ready to coalesce. He reached out with his own wind qi and ruthlessly crushed the techniques at very nearly the moment they formed. The backlash from having half a dozen techniques broken almost simultaneously sent the woman into convulsions but that didn’t last long. Sen switched to cycling shadow and metal, driving them together with the force of his will. A web of metal-fused shadow strings burst from every shadow in the surrounding area and wrapped around her. Then, Sen pulled. Those strings cut through the woman, leaving nothing but a ragged pile of bloody meat that most people would have struggled to identify as having ever been human.

Sen didn’t know if the metal cultivator had felt the last of his companions die, or if he’d simply heard the sickly, wet plopping noises that the falling pieces of her body made when they hit the ground. But he’d arrested his charge at Sen and was just staring at that bloody pile. Sen dismissed the spear back into his storage ring and drew his jian. He cycled metal qi and reinforced the blade. There was no reason to risk potential damage to the edge when he could avoid it altogether. The metal cultivator turned to face Sen. The man’s face was ghostly pale and fear radiated off him, but so did anger.

“I have questions for you,” said Sen. “You will answer them.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” demanded the terrified man.

“No. Every time you don’t answer, I’m going to cut a piece off of you. Who sent you?”

The metal cultivator didn’t say anything, just lifted his dao and raced toward Sen. For all his fear, the man didn’t let it dampen the skills that had been drilled into him through what had clearly been countless hours of training. Unfortunately for that man, Sen had trained with far better and more dangerous people. Even more unfortunately for that man, anything resembling compassion had fled from Sen’s heart when he saw Falling Leaf bleeding with someone trying to chain her. Sen sent more liquid qi coursing through his channels and let it seep out into his body, boosting the already enhanced strength of his body cultivation-transformed muscles. When the metal cultivator came in for a slashing attack, Sen’s jian flicked out to parry the blow with all of that strength behind it. The dao shot out of the man’s hand to the sound of snapping bones and buried itself in a wall. The metal cultivator didn’t scream, but he jerked his injured hand back to cradle it. Sen felt nothing as his jian flicked out and severed one of the man’s ears. The metal cultivator did scream that time. Sen waited until the wailing cultivator managed to stifle his agony before speaking again.

“Who do you represent?”

The man stared murder at Sen but said nothing. The jian blurred through the air faster than sight and removed the thumb from the man’s sword hand. Sen regarded the man with a cool, indifferent face.

“I’m going to take a foot next,” said Sen, letting a little of his killing intent free.

The combination of pain, Sen’s killing intent, and the cold reality that he was about to lose a foot broke the man.

“The Steel Gryphon sect.”

“Why did you try to take my friend?”

“Leverage. We wanted leverage over you.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know,” said the man.

Sen contemplated taking the man’s foot. It must have shown on his face because the man lifted his uninjured hand in a pleading gesture.

“I swear I don’t know!” the man screamed.

“Who sent you to do this?”

“Elder Tang,” said the man, bowing his head in shame. “Tang Ehuang.”

Falling Leaf came over to stand next to Sen. He looked at her, saw the shackle still on her wrist, and a bit of the rage bled back through. He drove his metal qi into the shackle and felt the crude suppression formation in it trying to block him. It took him less than a second to shred the formation. The shackle bent away from her wrist with a shriek and dropped to the ground. Falling Leaf let out a gasp of relief before she fixed her eyes on the metal cultivator. The man tried to stumble backward, only to realize he was in a fist of hardened air.

“Do you want him?” Sen asked, ignoring the burgeoning dread on the metal cultivator’s face.

Falling Leaf never took her eyes off the man when she answered. “Yes.”

Sen released the air qi he’d held the man with, and Falling Leaf pounced. Sen swiftly erected a kind of air shield in the immediate area so the man’s screaming wouldn’t carry to everyone in the nearby area. That screaming went on for a long, long time. When Falling Leaf was finally done venting her rage, Sen gave what was left of the metal cultivator a considering look. Then, he dismissed the man from his mind. Sen hadn’t wanted conflict with the local sects, but he wasn’t about to let them take Falling Leaf to prove it.

“Come on,” he said. “We both need to get cleaned up, and I need to take a look at those wounds.”

“They tried to cage me,” she said, the fury still hot in her voice.

“I know.”

“We should kill them all.”

“We did,” said Sen.

“Their entire pride.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Why?” demanded Falling Leaf.

“Because that would take a war. They have an army. We don’t. Plus, it would put all of these mortals in harm’s way. The people here don’t deserve to die because they got in the crossfire of a cultivator war. More importantly, I don’t want you to die fighting that war.”

Falling Leaf took a steadying breath, winced, and then nodded. “This is wisdom.”

“That being said, if they try something this stupid again, I will bring them a war.”