[ This one fancies himself. Same stage as you, give or take. The closest thing to a spine they left behind. ]

’Loud and middling. My favorite.’

"You picked the wrong hole in the ground, boy." The overseer’s lip peeled back as he took in the hoods and the slaughter behind them. "Skyedge pups playing soldier. I’ve gutted better than the lot of you for less."

Xuan said nothing. He had quit spending words on the dead a while back.

The overseer’s eyes ticked sideways, and his real play surfaced. Bolted to the rock behind him hung a wide bronze gong with a padded striker on a cord, a thing that existed for one purpose only, to throw a noise up this mountain loud enough to reach the Second Prince’s people working somewhere near. His hand was already going for it, faster than the bluster had let on, the striker swinging up toward the bronze.

Everything in Xuan pulled tight.

Cloud Step. The world smeared and he was simply there, no travel in the middle of it, Marrow Dragon already falling. The edge took the cord, the striker, and the three fingers wrapped around it in one pass, and the severed hand and the dead bronze tongue dropped into the dirt together a hair before metal could kiss metal. No note rang. The gong hung mute and shivering on its bracket.

The tunnel held its breath, and let it go. Nothing climbed the mountain. No one out there had caught a sound of it, and the relief slid down Xuan’s spine like meltwater.

The overseer shrieked, hugging the spurting ruin of his hand to his chest, the swagger draining off his face all at once as the arithmetic caught him up. Same stage, he had reckoned. Even fight. He had reckoned wrong, and now he had a moment to learn precisely how wrong, which was the cruelest thing Xuan had to hand a man who talked that much. So he handed it over.

He started to move. Cloud Step, slower now, measured, each footfall set with intent, and where his boot kissed the floor a coin of silver light stayed behind, hovering at ankle height, in no rush to leave.

The overseer’s good eye chased it, uncomprehending. That was the first star. Xuan stepped again, four paces down a single even diagonal, and a second point bloomed at the man’s hip, floating a hand’s width off his flank. A third hung behind his left shoulder. A fourth winked alive at the zenith above his head and closed the bowl. A fifth a stride in front of him at the line of the chest, beginning the handle. A sixth past that, level with his throat. And the seventh at the far end of the arc, two steps beyond him, suspended in empty air.

Seven points of cold starlight ringed the overseer in a shape he could feel pressing his skin and could not lay a finger on. He wrenched his head around, frantic, trying to back out of a cage with no bars, and his boots would not carry him past the lights.

Then the air between them filled. Thread-fine lines of silver leapt point to point, stitching star to star in an order older than the sect, four strands cupping the bowl, three drawing the handle out long, a chart of heaven hung at human scale around one shaking man in a mine.

Off to the side, Lin Kai muttered. "That bloody thing again..."

Xuan stopped. Marrow Dragon left his hip for the first time since the lights began, one horizontal sweep at the height of the bowl, the edge crossing the lowest strand, the one strung between the first star and the second.

The cut arrived on all seven strands at once.

Not seven swords. One sword, brushing a single thread of the constellation and landing on the other six in the same instant, because the seven were one thing now, and what opened one opened them all. The overseer took seven cuts from seven angles in the time a single arm needs to finish one swing. One climbed him from the ankle. One drove in through the flank. One came down off the shoulder. One split downward from above into the line of his spine. One punched through the chest and out the back. One opened the throat sideways. One crossed him from behind to the front. He came apart along seven seams at once, neat as a draftsman’s diagram, and for a heartbeat sheer surprise held him together.

The stars guttered out in reverse, seventh to first. By the time the last winked dark the threads had melted from the air, and the chamber was only a chamber again, the air only air. The overseer looked down at his chest, his side, his split throat, and only then, as understanding and gravity reached him together, did the seven pieces of him remember to come undone.

What slapped the dirt did not fall as a man.

Quiet rolled back into the mine. Xuan stood in the ruin and let his breathing level out, dantian scraped down to the dregs, the relief of the silent gong loosening something behind his ribs.

[ Showoff. ] Mira, fond. [ He talked a great deal for a man about to become a puzzle. ]

’He had it coming.’ Xuan whipped the worst of the red off Marrow Dragon and looked past the cooling pieces of the overseer, deeper, to the back of the chamber, where the rock pinched down again and a heavier door waited, banded and barred and built to keep something safer than tired men. ’Whatever they were really sitting on down here, it’s behind that.’

The others caught up through the last scraps of slaughter. Lin Kai came first, his mother’s blade hanging low, red running from the tip in slow drops. Wei followed a few steps behind him, pale around the mouth, chest lifting hard, but still upright and still holding his sword. That counted for something down here.

Han Ying moved last. He crossed the chamber with the calm of a man who had not just butchered his own sect brothers, spear lowered, expression empty in a way that made Lin Kai’s grip tighten all over again.

Xuan noticed and gave him half a glance.

"Not yet."

Lin Kai’s jaw worked, but he held.

Wei searched the overseer’s belt and found the key ring with trembling fingers. Xuan took it, chose the heaviest key, and slid it into the lock.

The door opened inward.