The screams were coming from the east.
Calid had been walking south, which had seemed like the sensible direction, being as it was the direction that contained the fewest explosions, the least fire, and the lowest concentration of people who wanted to collect his head as a decorative accent piece. South was a direction with a future and was a direction that said "reasonable choices are made here."
The screams were not coming from the south.
The east screams were young screams, too.
That was the thing about screams, after five centuries of teaching, you developed an ear for them the way a sommelier developed a palate for wine. There were the screams of adults who understood what was happening to them, which carried a particular weight of comprehension that made them heavy and final.
And there were the screams of the young, which were worse, because they contained surprise.
An outrage at the discovery that the world could do this. That it would.
Calid stopped walking south.
He stood in the dark between two ancient pines and listened, and the Qi in the air carried the sounds to him with a fidelity that was, frankly, unwelcome. Steel on steel and a girl's voice shouting something about formation positions. A boy's voice cracking on a word that might have been run. The low, wet laughter of someone enjoying their work.
He could keep walking.
The thought arrived fully formed and entirely reasonable.
He was in a broken body with a shattered core, no allies, no resources, and a working relationship with the local energy that could be generously described as 'first date with a nun.' The fires were spreading and the demonic cultivators were everywhere. The Patriarch was dead, the sect was ash, and the smart move, the survivable move, was to put as much distance as possible between himself and every single person in this forest who had opinions about Elder Shao Wen's continued existence.
He could walk away.
He had the skills for it.
Modified veil matrices, ambient Qi suppression, a lifetime of knowing when to leave a room. He could vanish into whatever geography lay beyond this forest and spend his remaining years, however many this damaged body had left, studying the local energy in peaceful academic isolation. Write papers and develop theories.
Perhaps find a cat to blame things on.
The girl's voice sounded again. Closer now, or carried better by the wind. "Someone! Save us! We need an Elder!"
Calid closed his eyes.
The thing about dedicating your life to teaching was that it ruined you for self-preservation.
Five hundred and seventy-four years of watching young people walk into his lecture halls with their terrible posture and their worse study habits and their absolute, unshakeable conviction that they were immortal, it did something to you. It carved channels in your soul deeper than any mana reservoir, and those channels all ran in the same direction.
Toward the screaming, always toward the screaming.
He had built the Academy from nothing. Centuries years of political manoeuvring, fundraising, and one very memorable fistfight with a bursar. He had filled it with students who became colleagues who became friends who became, in some cases, the most important people in his life, and he had buried the ones who didn't make it and kept teaching the ones who did because that was the job.
That was the only job that had ever mattered to him.
And now, in a forest that smelled of pine and burning woods, in a body that wasn't his, wearing the robes of a man who had apparently felt exactly the same way about his own students–
How could he look away?
Calid Asigoth turned east.
His legs protested and chest protested louder. The shattered core fragments ground against each other with every step, sending bright lines of pain through his torso that made his vision pulse white at the edges. He ignored all of it with the ease of long practice, because pain was just the body's way of filing complaints, and Calid Asigoth had never in his life read a complaint form.
He moved through the trees as quickly as the borrowed body would allow and followed the sounds of fighting toward a clearing where the canopy thinned and the firelight from the north painted everything in shades of amber and blood.
Calid found them in a shallow depression between a cluster of fallen trunks, the kind of natural bowl that might have been pleasant for a picnic under different circumstances.
These were not picnic circumstances.
There were nine of them. Children, really, though the oldest might have been nineteen or twenty. They wore white robes in various states of ruin, the same white as his own, marked with the same emblem that Shao Wen's memories identified as the White Clover Flame Sect's crest. Several were bleeding with two were being held upright by their companions. One, a girl with a jaw set so tight the tendons in her neck stood out, had positioned herself at the front of the group with a sword that was visibly too heavy for her and a stance that said she knew it.
Surrounding them, arranged in the loose, confident semicircle of predators who had cornered something small and were in no particular hurry, were the demonic cultivators.
Calid counted twelve.
All Qi Condensation stage, if the energy signatures he was learning to read meant what he thought they meant. Low-level, by any reasonable standard, foot soldiers. The kind of cultivators who got sent to mop up survivors and loot corpses, because they weren't trusted with anything more complex.
They were currently laughing.
Calid felt his blood boil.
One of them, a broad man with a scar that ran across his left eyebrow and continued down his cheek as though his face had been used to test the sharpness of something and had failed, was talking. He was explaining, in considerable detail and with evident relish, what was going to happen next. The explanation involved the words 'trophy' and 'slowly' and several other words that Calid filed under 'reasons this man should stop talking.'
The girl with the sword shifted her weight. Her arms were trembling, not from fear, or at least not only from fear, but from the simple reality of holding a weapon that was too heavy for too long. The boy beside her, younger, with blood running from a cut above his ear, had his hands raised in what Calid's borrowed memories identified as a basic Qi technique stance. His fingers were shaking and the Qi around his hands flickered.
They were going to fight twelve demonic cultivators with a too-heavy sword and a Qi technique that couldn't hold its shape, and they were going to die, and they knew it, but they were going to do it anyway because the ones behind them couldn't run.
Calid stepped out of the tree line.
He did it the way you step into a lecture hall when you're seven minutes late and refuse to acknowledge it. Spine straight, hands visible, and pace unhurried. The robes helped, even torn and filthy, they carried the authority of someone who had been dressed by an institution and expected to represent it.
The reaction was immediate and, from Calid's perspective, deeply inconvenient.
The girl with the sword saw him first. Her eyes went wide, and the careful mask of determination she'd been wearing cracked down the middle. "E-Elder Wen!"
Every student head turned.
The effect rippled through them, recognition, then shock, then something worse.
Something that looked like hope collapsing under its own weight.
Because they knew.
Shao Wen's memories told him they knew, they had seen it happen. They had watched the demonic commander drive his fist into Elder Wen's chest and felt the shockwave when his core shattered. They had seen him fall and some of them had screamed. Others had cried, and all were filled with grief and sorrow.
Just as he felt it flood his senses when the Patriarch had died just minutes ago.
And now here he was, standing at the edge of a clearing, and every single one of them understood exactly what that meant.
The boy with the bleeding ear moved first.
He stepped forward, putting himself between Calid and the demonic cultivators, and his hands stopped shaking because he had made a decision, and the decision was written in every line of his body: the Elder is crippled, the Elder cannot fight, the Elder must escape, and I will buy him the time to do it even if buying that time costs everything I have.
"Elder, r-run!" The boy's voice cracked on the second word. He didn't seem to notice. "We'll hold them, we can hold them long enough—"
The girl with the sword was already moving to join him, planting herself beside him with the blade raised in a guard position that Shao Wen's memories recognised as Autumn Holds the Gate, a defensive form designed for exactly this: buying time for someone more important to retreat.
It made his heart ache in ways he had not felt in over half a century.
The rest joined the other two, lining up to die for him, these children, these students, arranging themselves into a wall of broken bodies and borrowed courage because an elder's life was worth more than theirs and that was simply how the world worked and no one had ever told them otherwise.
Calid's chest continued to hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the shattered core.
"Nay," he said in a low voice.
The word it carried in the wind with the weight of his presence. The Qi in the air did something odd, it stilled around his voice, the way water stills when a stone is about to break the surface. The students froze and the demonic cultivators, who had been watching this display with the amused patience of cats observing mice argue about door placement, paused.
Calid walked forward, past the boy with the bleeding ear, who reached for his sleeve and missed. Past the girl with the sword, whose mouth opened and closed without producing sound. Through the line they had formed, stepping between them the way he had stepped between rows of desks, and out into the open space between his students and the things that wanted to kill them.
"Today…" he said as he spoke to the demonic cultivators, and his voice was Elder Wen's voice but the cadence was entirely his own, the measured, unhurried tone of a man who had stood in front of a thousand classrooms and never once raised his voice because he had never needed to, "...you will learn the first lesson in a universal truth many do not understand–"
The scarred man tilted his head as his smile widened. "The cripple speaks. What truth is that, old man? That the dead should stay dead?"
Laughter erupted from the semicircle, elbows nudging ribs.
Someone made a comment about broken cores and broken minds that got a round of appreciative snickering.
Calid ignored them as he turned his head, just slightly, so the students could see his profile and eyes; the absolute, immovable calm in them.
"–why elders are elders and others are not."
The scarred man laughed. It was a big, generous laugh that made his shoulders shake. "I'll give you this, old man, you've got spirit. The Hall Commander crushed your core six hours ago. I watched it happen. You've got nothing left. No Qi, no techniques, no sect, no patriarch." He spread his arms wide. "What exactly are you going to do? Talk me to death?"
Calid raised his hands.
The students behind him made small involuntary sounds of protest and fear, because they could see what the demonic cultivators could see: an old man with a destroyed core, raising empty hands against twelve armed enemies. A gesture that was either brave or insane, and the distance between those two things had never been shorter.
He turned to his students to address them. "Your first lesson… You don't need a core to be a force to be reckoned with."