Chapter 63: 135. Prelude

Yoshika was feeling a little bit better the next morning, thanks to Heian’s support and her new epiphany. Of course, as soon as she’d left her room, the little traitor turned back into a kitten and went to let Yue fawn over her. Yoshika was still feeling a little bit depressed, but it wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling—Eui had worked through much worse before. It had been such a long time since she’d felt this way that Yoshika had naively thought that perhaps somehow Jia’s positivity would cancel it out. In hindsight, knowing that Jia just shut out and ignored the things that caused her distress, she should have known that it wouldn’t be so simple.

Only a few days in, and trying to maintain herself as Yoshika was becoming exhausting. It was something she’d started on a whim, but she was beginning to realize how important it would be. Spending time just living her life like this was causing her to learn things about herself that she hadn’t known before, either as Jia or as Eui. As painful as it was to suffer the bad days, it was crucial to her growth to understand them.

Yue glanced up from trying to convince Heian to ask nicely for a treat of light ki—for all she spoiled the spirit rotten, Yue did her part to help teach Heian.

“Finished sulking? If so, I’ve made arrangements to get us special permission to practice and discuss strategy with our team.”

Yoshika frowned, dark impulses running through her at the sight of Yue’s casual insults. Normally, she might simply write it off as friendly banter, but today? Today she kicked her in the shin.

“Ow! What was that for!?”

“We’re not in the mood for messing around today. When and where?”

Yue rubbed her shin, pouting.

“Noted. The training field is a crater, but we’ve been given allowance to do our training in a park near the east wing. I’ve also got a schedule of the upcoming matchups and a breakdown of the rules for the team division.”

Yoshika frowned, normally she would default to speaking in Jia’s voice, since she was more talkative, but she was feeling very Eui-like today.

“Shouldn’t they have done an announcement for that?”

Yue gave her a flat look, noticing the discrepancy in Yoshika’s typical behavior and focusing her attention on Eui’s face rather than Jia’s. People rarely knew where to look when conversing with her, but Yue had a pretty good handle on it.

“There was an announcement—you missed it. I tried knocking, but you didn’t respond and your domain felt a bit oppressive. I assume you were busy with something important.”

Yoshika nodded, thinking about the progress she’d made with her gloves. Then she did a double take as her mind caught up with what Yue was telling her. Yoshika peered out the window, and for the first time noticed that the sun was on the wrong side of the sky—it wasn’t morning, it was evening. Oops.

“I lost track of time. I think I know the place you’re talking about. Elder Qin does his lessons there.”

“Indeed. We can go as early as this evening, if you wish, or we can wait until you’re feeling...”

Yue trailed off but Yoshika shook her heads.

“No, we should go now. Do you know who our first opponents are?”

Yue did, and she filled them in on the way to the park. Yoshika’s depressed concerns about karma were reversed when she heard who they were facing in the first round. Sun Jaehwa and her team had somehow failed to learn their lesson in the singles qualifiers, and had been unlucky enough to be matched up against Yoshika’s team just when she was feeling the need to blow off some steam. Yue shuddered at the savage grin on both of Yoshika’s faces—it seemed entirely out of place on Jia’s face.

There would only be three rounds for the team division, much like the doubles. That was still three times as many entrants as the doubles tournament, but not anywhere close to the maximum possible number of teams. Though Elder Qin had suggested that the team division would be the most prestigious and closely watched by the visitors, the students had been mostly interested in the singles.

The rules for the team matches were quite similar to that of the qualifiers, and Yoshika realized that it was probably the other way around. They had reused the team rules when they discovered that a qualifying round was necessary. No wonder that round had seemed so out-of-place. Unlike the singles and doubles tournaments, the team division allowed weapons and would take place on a larger scale—specifically, they’d be returning to the forest just outside the city. Teams would begin on opposite ends of the forest, and would need to track each other down.

Rika recognized the format, explaining it to the group once they met under Elder Qin’s gazebo.

“That must have been Master Ienaga’s idea. It’s a battlefield training exercise that’s pretty common in military training. A lot of the time the best way to take down a foreign cultivator is to track them down and ambush them with superior numbers.”

Yamato was a country that made up for its lack of high level cultivators with a quantity that the other nations couldn’t match, and they clearly knew how to take advantage of what they had. It was a reminder that the relatively peaceful academy atmosphere was not representative of the historical relationships between the three nations. If Hayakawa was to be believed, the current peace was only a brief respite before something set the nations off against each other once more.

Dae scratched his head, ever the awkward one as the only boy in the group.

“I see—since you seem to be more familiar with it Miss Takeda, have you any suggestions?”

Rika shrugged and shook her head.

“Not really. I skipped military training to come here instead. I know about it, but it’s not like I’ve ever done it before. What about you? Isn’t your buddy on the other team?”

“Ehehe, Tae In-Su is indeed among our opponents for the first round. There’s not much to say—late second stage mage, no other disciplines yet, typical college education, but quite talented with formations.”

Yoshika grimaced as she recalled what they had done in their duel against her, and couldn’t help but glare at Dae as she responded.

“Any chance he steals the formation you used against us and shares it with Sun?”

“Ah! The sealing formation? It would hardly be theft—we developed it together! The most difficult part was devising a way to block domains without highly expensive and specialized materials, but I still had the materials you had requested of me before and I was able to reverse engineer a common formation in order to...”

Dae trailed off when he realized that all of the girls were giving him the stink-eye. Even Eunae was grimacing, though she kept her eyes closed.

“W-what’s wrong?”

Yue was the one to respond, jabbing him in the shoulder with her long fingernails as she scolded him.

“What’s wrong!? Did you think for a moment about the implications of developing a countermeasure to Yoshika alongside someone with ties to one of her greatest enemies!?”

Dae’s expression faltered for a moment, casting about at the rest of the group and finding no support. Given what she’d learned about the Awakening Dragon sect, Yoshika wasn’t really inclined to think of Sun as one of her ‘greatest’ enemies, but she wasn’t about to argue with it either.

“Uh, w-well, Tae In-Su doesn’t associate that closely with Sun Jaehwa—and didn’t she apologize after that whole incident?”

Yoshika opened her mouth to respond, but Yue wasn’t having any of it.

“Apologized!? She paid some lip service and gave up a tiny bit of face because she thought that she’d draw the ire of multiple xiantian cultivators if she didn’t. And do I have to remind you that Tae In-Su is on a team with Sun Jaehwa? Or that they already tried to use a barrier against Jia in the qualifiers?”

Dae’s eyes were fixed firmly to his feet, his ears and tail drooping as his cheeks flushed red with embarrassment.

“I—I wasn’t thinking. I only saw an interesting problem to solve, and didn’t consider the ramifications behind my actions. I apologize.”

Yoshika sighed. It was hard to stay mad with Dae, but he had really messed up.

“That’s not even the worst part, you know. That barrier nearly severed our connection, like Yue did before the kidnapping incident. If we had been any weaker, or the barrier more powerful, it might have seriously damaged our cultivation. The last time that happened, Jia literally died to fix it.”

Yue cringed at the reminder of her past mistakes, but Dae’s face went white as a sheet. Even Eunae and Rika seemed shocked—they had never heard the full story before.

“That’s—I’m so sorry! I didn’t know!”

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Yoshika wanted to tell him that it was fine, and that she forgave him, but she couldn’t. She was too upset by it—too disturbed at the implications that it made possible, and the fact that it had been delivered straight into the hands of her enemies by someone who was supposed to be one of her best friends. Instead, Yoshika tried to focus on the practical, putting some distance between herself and her emotions.

“How well does Tae understand the formation? You used it against me as a seal, but is there a possibility they could modify it into a shield?”

Dae frowned for a moment before shaking his head.

“I don’t think so, no. The formations are already so complex that I can barely understand them, and spell-scribed formations tend not to be very flexible.”

“Is that what those are called? They’ve never been mentioned in Hwang or Do’s classes.”

Dae nodded excitedly.

“They’re an advanced technique! A spell can be written to—”

“We get the idea, Dae. We did something similar during our breakthrough. You just need to use an elemental manifestation to carve out a formation, right?”

He hesitated at the interruption, but nodded slowly.

“Right, hehe. The challenging part is infusing the spell talismans with the proper element and a clear enough image of the formation it’s meant to create. It can allow for greater effects with relatively fewer resource requirements, given the right environment.”

Yoshika nodded along. She’d had to create a flat surface on which to inscribe her own formation when she’d been trying to defend herself against those damnable lightning bolts. The spell-scribing probably required the same.

“So we can expect them to try using them to set traps, like you did. What about that spell you used to counteract Corruption of the Fetid Bog?”

Dae winced.

“That...is probably going to be ubiquitous among our opponents. It’s not a complicated spell—just a very narrow one.”

Yoshika huffed irritably. The ability to create narrow spells for specific situations like that was the greatest strength of mages, and not really one that she’d been able to exercise for herself. Her cultivation had advanced quickly, but if there was one thing that had fallen behind even more than her technical proficiency, it was her education. She was extremely proficient at casting the spells that she knew, but it was mostly rote-memorization. She’d experimented with spellcraft, but her lightning nova spell was about as far as she’d ever gotten, and it was just a clumsy combination of lightning bolt and mana shield.

“Is there any way to counteract it? We thought we’d be able to just overpower it, but it was way too efficient.”

“Hmm, the element of purity is particularly effective against that sort of attack. The spell works by counteracting only the toxic aspects of your aura. Your qi still invades the target, it simply loses the corrosive effect.”

She considered the implications of that for a moment.

“So we basically just pumped you both full of water essence?”

“That’s right. It was...oddly refreshing, but not exactly comfortable. Still, it was infinitely preferable to being rotted from the inside out.”

Yoshika grimaced. She knew what her technique did, but hearing it put into words like that still kind of made her uncomfortable. Giving it a bit of thought, she was pretty sure she understood the problem. A spiritual art had two main components to it—cultivation of the element, and forming that element into an intent. The pathways the qi took through her meridians handled both, but the intent also involved a certain amount of will and visualization on her part. The pathways for Verdant Marsh and Fetid Bog were exactly the same, but the element and intent was different because of the alignments of Jia and Eui’s souls. Dae’s spell was altering the element in a way that neutralized the intent—the essence of water couldn’t corrupt the way corrosion could.

Could she change the intent somehow? Switch the image of her aura from decay to erosion, focusing on the water aspect of the element as much as possible. She crossed Eui’s arms, tapping a finger against her upper arm impatiently as she considered the problem. It was a lot harder than it sounded—the intent of a technique was a product of both her understanding of the pathways within the meridians, and an image that she had refined over months of meditation. It wasn’t so simple to adjust it on the fly. If there was something to the idea, it wasn’t something she’d be figuring out before their match.

“Okay, so they are probably going to try to seal us. The good news is that it will be extremely obvious where their traps are set and where they are thanks to our domain. Dae, do you have a spell that can neutralize the purity shield? Our plasma aura was really effective against it.”

Yue grumbled something about ‘trueflame’ but she went ignored as Dae responded.

“Plasma is a difficult element to work with, but I think I can work out a spell that will do. Miss Eunae, could I get your assistance with that?”

“Of course. Though I’m not sure what I could possibly add.”

Dae shook his head, denying Eunae’s modesty.

“Spellcraft isn’t about talent, it’s all knowledge! You spend nearly as much time studying as I do, and I have every confidence in your ability. Besides, I think that your soulfire might have similar properties to plasma.”

The two mages got to work devising a spell that would let them bypass the shield and a strategy began to form in Yoshika’s head. She intended to take all her frustration from the last few weeks out on Sun Jaehwa, and send a message that the two-faced, rabbit-eared jerk wasn’t likely to forget. Yoshika turned her attention to her two remaining teammates.

“Yue, your role is going to be to confuse and manipulate. We’ll be relying on you to isolate our enemies and draw them out away from their traps.”

Yue nodded, grinning.

“I should be able to do that. I may not be able to trap them in a dreamscape, but I have other tricks. Assuming they don’t all deafen themselves.”

“Good. Rika—”

Rika sighed, shaking her head.

“I know—I’m the weak link. I doubt I’ll be able to contribute anything to this fight.”

Yoshika shook both her heads.

“Actually, you might have the most important role. I’ve got an idea, but only you can pull it off.”

Rika’s eyes lit up with excitement, and she leaned in closer.

“I’m listening!”

 

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The next day, Yoshika and her team were assembled outside of the forest. The cold, winter air went almost entirely unnoticed to the cultivators. Yoshika didn’t keep close track of the days, but she realized that it was getting close to exactly a year since her first trip up to the mountain, where she had been ‘born’. It was also where Yan Zhihao had died, in the very same cavern. Where the demon that had brought so much trouble down on her head had been released. Though without Jianmo, would ‘Yoshika’ even exist? Almost certainly not. Good and bad, she owed the strange demon quite a bit.

Yoshika’s mood had been steadily improving in anticipation of Sun’s comeuppance, but the reminder of Yan Zhihao’s death and all the trouble it had brought her was enough to sour it again. Still, she wasn’t going to let anything ruin this. Though Yoshika had already come to terms with the history she shared with Sun Jaehwa, the other girl was in dire need of a reminder. Today, Yoshika planned to deliver it. Armed with the spells that Dae had created, her team would be able to counteract the shield that protected their opponents from Yoshika’s aura. The spell required physical contact, which wasn’t ideal, but they had their strategy, and everyone knew their role in it. 

Yet, there was something bothering Yoshika. She couldn’t quite place her finger on what it was—some strange pressure in the back of her mind. The more she tried to focus on it, the more it seemed to slip away. She kept checking and rechecking her domain to make sure she wasn’t being spied on again, even flashing Absolute Awareness just to be sure. Nothing. She couldn’t figure out what the feeling was, but it made her nervous.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to contemplate it any further as they received the signal to begin. Yoshika set aside all of her concerns as she expanded her domain to encompass the entire forest, immediately spotting her opponents—who had predictably already protected themselves from her toxic aura. It was time to get to work.