The metal in his hands crumbled as Adam forced his mana into it. For a heart-shattering moment he thought he must have done it wrong, and wasted a priceless weapon because he was an idiot. He was saved from that future when he saw the pieces of metal float through the air in an intricate pattern. A single flake came to rest on his outstretched fingertip. Squinting, he saw an exquisitely carved bird, smaller than his pinky nail. Then it took off to join the others.

His new flock vibrated, each little bird thrumming with mana and potential. The shining mass swirled around Adam in a murmuration he couldn't hope to track. He had a few moments to think. The battle hadn't stopped but the relative safety gave him a moment of calm. Adam considered everything Devon had said about tidal cultivators and the advantages of fine control, along with the man's now-glittering wardrobe. He might have a point.

His gaze drifted towards the gunners and the birds proved why Devon called it a last resort. The floating bits of metal arrowed at the enemy cultivators, almost too fast for Adam to track. Shaped like birds, they moved like bullets. And had the same impact.

The cultivators were shredded to pieces. Between one blink and another all three were gone. Adam watched as the body closest to the pit wavered and fell over the edge; no sound made it to him over the din of the battle.

He stumbled forward. It wasn't clear even in his own mind what he expected to happen, but killing three people without any effort was definitely not it. It was worse than the tunnels.

The miniature birds didn't stop. They flew towards the next closest enemy and killed her too. Then the next. That one at least saw them coming, but there wasn't much to be done. Adam reached out with his mana, to call them back or impose some order. He was smacked back like an amateur pickpocket. He tried again with the same result. Another two Laskarians died.

The next time, he reached out and didn't try to take control of the mana. Instead he cajoled the swarm to look up. There was a better target at hand. The remaining flock hovered for a moment, and then rocketed off at an angle.

The area around Adam was empty now, as calm as it could be when titans warred nearby. He picked his way across the uneven ground to his first victims, compelled by some morbid mix of curiosity and guilt. The sight made his stomach roil, and he quickly averted his eyes, only to happen upon a handful of the birds, now once more inert pieces of metal littering the ground, no mana to be seen or sensed. It was miniscule, sitting in the palm of his hand, but it had taken a life as eagerly as Adam cracked open a new book.

Adam had no idea how to feel. Part of him was proud, he had fought alongside his friends, protected them in some small way, so unlike the beast wave when he was forced to the sidelines by his own ineptitude. Another part was horrified. Was this going to be his life now, violence and slaughter, and coming up with more inventive ways to kill people? He was allowed some dramatic reactions on a day this stressful. With nothing else to do and no cards left to play, he turned to watch the rest of the fight.

**********

Martin ducked behind one of Devon's constructs as light blasted towards him. His makeshift shield held long enough to absorb the attack, but dripped to the ground afterwards as a chunk of useless slag. The stalemate they found themselves in was beginning to grate against Martin's nerves. Just a little. It was an embarrassment and a waste of time. But nothing would stop Dariella now that Devon had gotten the Legacy Stone – and torched the rest of the vault.

He shot more earth at the woman to keep her busy, even while cursing the ineffectual attacks. The flying construct she had produced when they came above ground kept her far enough away to easily dodge any rocks he flung towards her, while most of his water was abandoned below the surface. Devon was just as incensed, if the muttering he could hear was any indication. He was so close, just a few more minutes or a distraction and it would be over.

A speck of something bounced off Dariella's face. Then another. Then a swarm of some little insect was streaming past Martin and towards Dariella. He snagged one out of the air and realized it was a tiny bird, made of brass or some other burnished metal, fighting to get out of his hand and attack. Opening his fingers slightly, it sped out to join its fellows.

The flock reached Dariella en masse and dove into the fray. A few just flew as fast as possible, shredding her skin and flesh. Mortal weapons needed a gun or some other way of getting enough energy to penetrate their flesh, and even then they wouldn't get far. But each of these little monsters was steeped in mana and enchantments, designed to penetrate and sap strength from whatever they were attacking. More settled on her skin and started crawling for weak points, her eyes and nose, to try and destroy the woman from the inside.

A master cultivator hardly took that lying down. Dozens, maybe hundreds of the things died each time she moved. Light was not so good at fighting tiny objects at close range, but she was making up for that with control of the ambient mana and flinging the pests away. It was enough breathing room for Martin to act.

The ground shuddered throughout the complex, sending any remaining weaker cultivators to their knees. Martin's will and mana threaded throughout the earth. He commanded it to move and the stone and dirt answered. Like a sea in a storm, the earth raged, rising in a wave of spikes or falling into abyssal chasms. All of it converged on Dariella. A tidal wave of earth collapsed on top of her, cutting off any noise, and all of the light in the area.

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A few blinks later and Martin's eyes adjusted to the starlight. Devon was already sprinting away and Martin joined him. The pair detoured to where Adam was stumbling back to his feet after Martin's working. Without stopping, Martin bent and tossed the shorter man over his shoulder and kept running.

"Put me – ouch – put me down!"

"Can't," Martin said. He focused on putting one foot in front of the other while circulating the remnants of his mana as fast as possible. Dariella had done a number on his skin, but Devon hadn't been wrong when he said Martin was hard to injure. He would be able to keep running as long as it took.

"We have to keep moving, fast," Devon said. "If we don't we'll be close enough for her to track. We might be anyway."

"Wait, you're saying she survived all that? Fuck, that hurts Martin!"

"She was using some sort of damage sponge like the coward she is. Didn't stop everything but enough to make fucking hard to kill," Martin said.

"Where are we going then?"

"West," Devon answered. "There's no way we get back the way we came, but some of the city-states in the central continent have been holding out against the empire for decades. We have to hope whatever cultivators we find aren't hostile. And then we loop back home."

"Easier said than done," Martin added. There wasn't much more to say after that, so Martin ran in silence, with a small stop to resituate Adam on his back instead of over his shoulder.

*********

Days later Adam was informed that he would be allowed to reclaim some of his dignity by jogging under his own power. He kept the complaints inside. Despite his joints aching more than they had since he started cultivating, he was well aware the others were still healing injuries from the fight, on top of carting him around like a sack of grain.

"Another two days before we hit Caldrisiout," Devon said while they set up a rudimentary camp.

"How do you know?" Adam asked. "We're running from the middle of nowhere, there's no roads or anything nearby."

The enchanter looked perplexed. "We all studied the maps."

"I have no idea where we are," Adam announced. "If you told me to get home, I would know it's east or south to find the coast. And I might be able to make it work, but I definitely wouldn't pop out in front of a city I was aiming for."

"Kids these days," Martin said, shaking his head in false solemnity. "Can't even navigate a simple trek across an unfamiliar continent, dodging enemies that are definitely searching for them."

They all laughed. Adam forced his a bit but it felt good to even pretend at some levity.

"It's a matter of practice. You travel enough and you pick up the ability to find places."

"I'll have to believe you," Adam said. The brief spark of curiosity settled back down into numbness.

They lapsed back into silence, where they had been for most of the time since their headlong flight into the wilds. Not the comfortable silence of friends on an adventure, but the poisoned seeping silence after something unspeakable happens. Most of the time over the last week Adam spent floating in a gray fog. Almost as if he was looking down at the scene from above. A distant thought reminded him that disassociating was a bad sign, but he shrugged it off.

A gentle jostling from Martin startled him back to reality. "I found some raspberries in a bush over there."

The man held them out with the vague notion of a smile on his face. Not the normal smile, full of laughter and a glint of hidden secrets, but just a whisper that he might be happy if Adam ate the berries, his usual favorite. So he did. The same part of him that knew he wasn't handling things well was touched that Martin was going out of his way to try and cheer him up. But that part was continuously losing the battle with guilt and pure shock. He ate the berries, and the rest of the food he was handed, followed instructions for his part of the camp chores, and went to bed when he was told, only to lay awake at night and picture the teenage Laskarians, huddled around a campfire.

Two days later, the morning before they would arrive at Caldrisiout, by Devon's estimate, the man sat himself in front of where Adam was mechanically eating breakfast.

"If you're looking for an apology, you won't get one." He declared.

"What?" Adam's mind tried to catch up to what the other man was talking about, but days out of practice had made him slow.

"You heard me. I'm not sorry. There were dozens of them so I gave you something to keep you safe. And it worked. Even if I hadn't handed it off to you, I would have used it in that last fight. Trying to show mercy when you're that outnumbered is a good way to die. If you want to keep blaming me I don't mind, but we're about to reach the city so it's time to pull your head out of your ass and pay attention."

"That's not fair Devon," Martin said.

Shocked at the tirade, Adam didn't know how to react. "I don't blame you. What? It's just a lot okay? I killed people. I would kill them again if I had to. That's a lot to try and reconcile about yourself. I didn't grow up learning how to fight off bandits or whatever the fuck you two did in your childhoods. Okay?"

"Oh." Devon said. The indignant expression he had worn through his monologue melted into confused awkwardness. "Well, you did the right thing. First time's hard but you got through it, that's the important thing. It will be better next time."

"That's kind of what I'm afraid of."

"As long as you still feel bad after, you don't have to worry," Martin said. "In a perfect world, death and violence wouldn't be skills we needed. But if that perfect world exists it's far from here. When you seek power – and don't let anyone tell you that's not what cultivation is – you opt in to that part of the world. You agree to defend what you have or what you stand for."

"Sure, but you know as well as I do that most of those people didn't opt in to anything."

"I know!" Martin shouted. The change was so sudden neither of the others reacted. "I know," he said again, softer this time. "Most of them were probably just like George. Found and forced into something with threats or just knowing there wasn't anywhere else for them to go. I'm sorry about that, but war comes with casualties, and very rarely are those the people who made the decisions in the first place."

"So that's it? Just move on and hope I don't feel this way next time?"

"Of course not," Devon scoffed. "But you find a way to cope. And do what you can to make sure there aren't that many next times. Take this idiot and his friends," he gestured towards Martin, who responded with a rude gesture. "You think there are many people that attacked the Eternal Archive when they were around? Take my sect. You think people were willing to mess with the mortals under our protection when they knew what we would rain down on them? No."

"You cultivate in order to learn everything you can, right? Well take this as a lesson on what happens when the people in power don't behave appropriately, and learn something from it."

Nothing was resolved. One conversation didn't have the power to make him feel better or erase the actions of the last week. But when Adam went to bed that night, he actually slept for the first time since the battle.

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