The Broken Knife

Kaz wasn’t really worried about the humans, not even Lianhua. Bites and blows from barbed legs alike slid from the male’s skin, leaving only red marks or shallow scratches. Lianhua was reinforcing her own skin, and her shell was actually more effective in protecting her, for at least as long as her ki lasted.

Pilla’s shield, on the other hand, had already been reduced to an arc in front of her, rather than a complete dome protecting her on all sides. Only someone who could see the power, like Kaz, would have known, since she was adept at moving the shield around as needed, but if enough zhiwu got past the humans, they could surround and take her down.

For this reason, Kaz found himself remaining by the young chief’s side. He followed Raff’s example and spun his blade around. The long hilt, made for a human’s larger hand, made it easy to grasp it just beneath the crossguard and use the end to bludgeon the oncoming insects. He sent a thought to Li, and she carefully thinned the image protecting the channels in his arms, allowing more ki into his muscles, while preventing the leak from becoming so significant that it destabilized the rest of his cycle.

Each blow of the knife’s hilt shattered chitin, though not all of the strikes were on the heads of the skittering monsters. He and Pilla fell into a rhythm, with her following his attacks with a sharp crack from her club, pulping the flesh inside the broken carapace. They didn’t have as many targets as the others, being further from the front of the fray, and the zhiwu that reached them were mostly the smaller ones that managed to skitter past as the humans dealt with the larger creatures.

Three zhiwu, with only five or six segments each, surrounded Pilla as her club cracked loudly against the shell of another. Kaz hit one, and another bounced off Pilla’s shield, but the third clamped its pincers just below her knee. She yipped as the leg folded beneath her, and Kaz whirled, his weapon coming down on the thing with enough force to crush most of its head. The body went limp, and Kaz quickly reversed his knife, severing the body from what remained of the head. The jaw, however, remained clenched tight on Pilla’s limb.

Pilla tried to struggle to her paws as Kaz stood over her, forcing back the bugs, but her leg wouldn’t support her, and Kaz knew that the zhiwu’s poison would already be invading her body. It wasn’t a bad poison, as such things went, and she should survive a single bite. The problem was that once one zhiwu bit someone, a hundred other such bites were close behind.

“Lianhua!” he barked, and she glanced up from her work. Her eyes widened, and she took a step toward the two kobolds. She had stopped trying to use her ki bolts, and instead infused power into her fists, just as Gaoda was doing. Her efficiency at this was much lower, however, and Kaz could tell that though she had started with more ki than the male, she now had less, and it was draining fast. Still, she crushed one head after another, though she grimaced as bug brains covered her.

She looked over at Chi Yincang, who had also reversed his weapon, and used the long haft to strike at the insects with precise blows. “I’m going to cover Kaz and Pilla,” she told him, and received a silent nod, though Chi Yincang didn’t even glance at her as a zhiwu with at least twenty segments, each the width of his thigh, lunged at him.

Lianhua retreated, and Chi Yincang took a single smooth step to the side, filling in the gap left by her absence. The human female whirled, taking out an eight-segment zhiwu while Kaz killed a smaller one.

Leaning down, Kaz quickly scooped the fallen kobold into his arms, lifting her small body easily. She gasped at his boldness, but he ignored it, carrying her to the side, where a depression in the cave wall created a natural shelter on two sides. After depositing Pilla in this shallow cavity, Kaz turned back, seeing that Lianhua was struggling to control all of the small zhiwu that slipped past the males.

Kaz hurried to her side, and she glanced at him, smiling gratefully as he crushed another insect’s head with the hilt of his knife. “I’m not sure how much longer I can do this,” she admitted quietly in a short lull between attacks.

Kaz glanced at her, seeing that though she was still pulling in a good amount of mana, the node in her belly wasn’t producing ki nearly fast enough. In fact, what it was putting out had become somewhat murky; the black a charcoal gray, the blue was dull, and the usual gleaming gold was only faintly yellow. Her channels were still full, but the ki they contained was weak. Even the shell of power surrounding her body was pale and dull.

Kaz, meanwhile, still felt as strong as ever, with his core churning out ki at its heightened rate, and Li making sure that it stayed where it needed to be. The little dragon clung tight to his neck, no longer whistling or emitting her tiny roars, her entire focus on maintaining the flow of ki within Kaz’s body.

Kaz spun and struck down another zhiwu that was skittering between them, dozens of barbed legs clicking against the stone. It was larger than any of the ones that had reached them before, and he dared a look at the male humans. He was horrified to see that they were confronting the largest zhiwu he had ever seen. The insect had to have at least fifty segments, with pincers as long as Kaz’s arm. It swung in sinuous patterns, dodging every attempt to cut or crush its enormous head, and Kaz could see the telltale glow of a core inside it. He would get no help from them until they managed to bring it down.

On the other hand, that also meant they were well and truly distracted. Kaz had only a moment to consider whether he was about to make a colossal mistake, before turning and stepping to the side so his body was pressed against Lianhua’s. On the outside, it probably looked like he was just protecting her back as she flagged, but Kaz clearly remembered what had happened when Raff had carried him during that first long descent, though it seemed so long ago now.

The moment Kaz touched Lianhua, he felt weaker. She was still trying to pull in mana from the air around them, but her cycle quickly latched onto the pure, clean ki Kaz produced. Li clicked angrily as she nearly lost control of their mingled power, but Kaz was already opening a path from his core to the node of power in Lianhua’s belly.

This time, Kaz’s ki wasn’t being drained from him against his will, and he was better able to control it. Lianhua only needed gold, black, and blue ki, while the dragon took gold, black, and white, and the distant seed still drew a faint thread of golden power that Kaz could see trailing into the distance.

Fortunately, Kaz’s core produced mostly gold ki, followed by white, and then smaller trickles of black, blue, and red. He could send all of the blue to Lianhua without truly disturbing anything else, keep all the red for himself, and then split the gold, white, and black between all the others drawing on him.

Kaz staggered, his legs growing weak even as Lianhua gasped. Color returned to her cheeks, and the blue ki in her cycle blazed into sapphire brilliance. The yellow brightened to something nearer gold, and black deepened.

With a whimper, Kaz pulled away, feeling an almost physical tearing sensation as he did so. Lianhua’s nodes wavered within her body, greedily reaching for what was left of his strength. Kaz’s arm trembled as he struck at another zhiwu, and the carapace cracked beneath the blow, but didn’t break.

A burst of blue light surrounded Lianhua’s fist as it punched through the bug’s head, and she whirled, arms and legs flickering out in short, crisp strikes that crushed insect after insect. Even though these were all relatively small ones, it was still an impressive sight.

Kaz’s core strained to refill his channels, and he felt one of the shards shift painfully. Li instantly clamped down on it, holding the core together while also cutting off the flow of ki almost completely. Kaz’s body continued to function, pulling ki from what was stored in the dantian in his chest, but without the flow from his core, it soon began to wobble unsteadily.

Cautiously, Li relaxed her grip on Kaz’s core as he stumbled to one knee. The ache in his belly had lessened already, and his core seemed to have stabilized, though he was fairly certain that one shard now protruded a little further than it had before. Ki flowed out into his body again, and he drew in a deep, shaky breath as he managed to climb back to his paws.

Lianhua whirled around him, bringing graceful death to the insects that drew near her. He could see, however, that she had already burned through a great deal of what she had taken from him, and soon she would be back in the same condition she had been before. Unfortunately, there was no way he could risk feeding her cycle again, so he could only hope that this was enough.

He focused on the smallest of the zhiwu, making sure not a single one managed to get past him, heading for the Copperstriker’s den. Beside him, Lianhua took down the larger ones, until the whole area around them was littered with crushed chitin and slippery insect entrails.

And then it was over.

Kaz stepped on a four-segment bug, and the crunch was loud in the strange silence. No more clicking, skittering legs scraped against stone. No more squelching crunches echoed from beyond them. Slowly, he lifted his head, blinking as he looked toward the males.

They were as filthy as he and Lianhua, and insect corpses were piled around them to their hips. Raff and Gaoda looked tired, and Kaz could see that even Chi Yincang’s ki was nearly exhausted, though the male’s expression revealed nothing.

“Is it over?” Gaoda asked, plucking at his once-blue robe with disgust. “I never want to see another centipede again.”

They all waited, listening for any sign that there were still stragglers coming behind the main swarm. None came, and slowly, they all relaxed.

Lianhua’s shoulders slumped, but she glared at Gaoda. “This was your fault. If you hadn’t insisted on-”

He glared back. “If you weren’t so insistent that we couldn’t go on until you were ready, I wouldn’t have-”

Raff cleared his throat loudly, and Lianhua’s cheeks turned pink beneath their coating of slime. Gaoda turned his glare on the larger male, who gave a conciliatory smile.

“Ah, any cores in these things, Lianhua?” he asked, prodding the largest zhiwu with his foot.

Lianhua closed her eyes, and her hand lifted. She pointed at the big insect, which had a neat, round hole punched through its carapace, right in the middle of its ring of eyes. “That one. And…” her finger tracked to another large zhiwu, one of the first to fall, nearly buried beneath a pile of its brethren. “There.”

Raff nodded. “One to Chi Yincang, then, and-” He pulled the pile of bodies apart, Lianhua’s pointing finger tracking the particular insect with a bright core gleaming inside its head. Grunting with satisfaction, he finished, “this one’s mine.”

Gaoda frowned, looking at the crushed head. “It could be mine.”

Raff tapped the round mark at the center of the radiating web of cracks in the chitin. “That’s from my sword hilt. You just smashed ‘em like eggs. The messy ones’re yours. And I get all the cores from anything I kill. That was the deal.”

Gaoda’s eye twitched, but he shrugged and turned away.