"'You—'"
Sabrina's claws hit something that wasn't flesh and weren't stopped by it either — passed through the woman's presence the way claws pass through smoke, finding nothing solid, finding nothing to damage, finding only the continued, unperturbed attention of someone who had not been threatened by claws in a very long time.
Her cultivation 'screamed.'
Not metaphorically — the qi in her meridians actually resonated at a frequency that projected outward, a high, sustained note that the mountain picked up and amplified until the palace windows cracked again.
"'ARRGGHHHH—!!'"
The pull was everything.
She had felt cultivation drain before — from wounds, from overextension, from giving too much in too short a time — but this was 'different', this was not giving and not losing, this was being 'taken from', the way you take a lantern's flame.
Her skin went cold.
She looked at her hands.
The color was going out of them.
