Vivian
So yeah… the fireball was not hers. Of course that was true. She couldn’t cast something like that even with hours of preparation. It wasn’t Anmei’s either, obviously. It came from above the Red Orc line, not from the fortress or flanks, but from the sky itself. The explosion was an impressive one, ripping through armor and flesh alike, hurling bodies outward as the orcs’ loose definition of formation collapsed in confusion. Heat rolled across the battlefield, followed by a wave of pressurized mana that sundered defensive castings and made her teeth rattle.
She turned, breath catching.
She watched as flying carriages broke through the clouds above Crescent Hyr, not one or two, but half a dozen, maybe more.
They came in fast, angled dives, their hulls etched with visible spellwork that Vivian recognized immediately. Li family sigils flared along their sides, restrained and unmistakable. Doors burst open midair and figures dropped from impossible heights, landing in tight formations that spread and rotated the instant their boots struck grassy stone. Cultivators acting like soldiers grouped together and attacked the orcs.
All of this happened while spells fell like rain.
But not in the wild, desperate casting of moments ago. These were controlled strikes, layered and deliberate, slamming into the orc lines and tearing them apart before the formations could recover and raise defenses. More carriages cut in from either side. Men and women, clearly Li family retainers, continued to pour down, hitting the ground moving, already cutting, already casting as if the battle had simply been waiting for them.
The battlefield reshaped itself in seconds.
Vivian’s gaze lifted instinctively.
One carriage did not descend, but hovered above the crescent bowl, steady and unmoving despite the chaos currents clawing at the air. Its ward-lights burned brighter than the rest, arrays cycling in complex, overlapping patterns that made her skin prickle. From the open side of the flying carriage, a single figure stood braced, one arm extended, the other feeding mana into a spell construct so dense it bent the air around it. She could literally feel the pull of the mana.
Gavin Li, her older brother, stood like a god preparing to pass judgment.
She felt it before she fully understood what she was seeing. The gathering pressure. The compression of heat and force being drawn inward, refined, compressed, readied to be released. Vivian knew her brother was a powerful caster, but this level of control and power was unreal.
The firestrike fell, and it was even bigger than the last one.
And everything after that was different.
Then it happened.
She heard it through the bustle of war, over the roar of steel and fire, through the screams and the thunder of collapsing formations and dying mortals.
Actually, it was not sound at all.
It was pressure. A pulse that rolled through her chest, through her breath, through the place behind her heart where mana lived. The world seemed to tighten for a fraction of a heartbeat, as if reality itself were bracing.
It was then she saw it—a lone carriage cutting through the air. She watched as the door opened and a figure dropped from the sky and landed in front of her.
Stone cracked beneath his boots.
He straightened, calm as if he had stepped off a stair instead of fallen from the clouds. She watched him with wide eyes.
Nathan Li landed beside him a heartbeat later, sword already in motion, mana shroud flaring bright and wild.
She could only watch. Only anticipate. Only hold her breath.
Then Ethan Zhou, her husband, looked her in the eyes and smiled.
“Hey there, pretty girl,” he said easily. “Long time no see.”
Vivian froze as heat rushed to her face. Her mana spiked without permission, frost flashing along her blade in a reflex she did not bother to suppress.
Before she could say anything, Nathan sprinted forward with a shout, meeting a wedge of incoming force head-on and shattering it with a strike that cracked the ground.
“Little brother,” Ethan said, already reaching into a canvas bag slung at his side. “Give me a second with your sister and her friend. You all are going to team up to kill that guy.”
Nathan laughed, delighted, as he sent off an arc of wind and force in the direction of the Murai. “Brother-in-law, you always say the nicest things.”
He launched himself straight at Hoji, and they instantly started exchanging blows.
Vivian stared after Nathan for half a heartbeat, then turned back to Ethan. She could barely focus on his face. Why was it so hard to look directly at him? Was he always this handsome? This calm? This present? Why was her heart racing? Why was her face warm? Her mouth dry? Why did her mana feel like it was humming just beneath her skin?
Ethan’s eyes were warm and an amazing sky blue. Were his eyes always that color? He broke eye contact, looking toward his bag. He pulled out two small crimson pills that looked like rubies that weren’t quite fully formed or solidified.
“Don’t chew,” he said, pressing one into her hand and one into Anmei’s. “Just swallow and cycle your mana immediately.”
She almost dropped her sword when he touched her, the slight contact sending jolts through her arm.
“What is this?” Vivian demanded, more aggressively than she intended.
“A second mana source,” Ethan replied. “It should feed naturally into your reserve and give you a boost in potency as well as heal your wounds.”
Anmei looked at the pill, then back at him. She looked like she wanted to rip his clothes off right there. She swallowed immediately and shot him a smoldering glance.
“Good lord. Yes. Sign me up. So sexy.”
Vivian resisted the urge to punch her and swallowed her pill a moment later.
The effect was instant.
Warmth bloomed beneath her sternum. There was a strange surge, and something deeper as mana that felt like medicine smoothed her channels. She did what she was told and cycled her mana.
Holy shit.
It was incredible.
It felt like another core settling beside her own, mana that was not hers but answered to her anyway, mixing with her reserve. It spread through her channels, smoothing the strain of nonstop fighting, filling gaps she had not known existed.
Her breath steadied. Her legs felt lighter. Her blade felt eager.
And then her cultivation rose.
Vivian gave her husband a heated look. This man… and his brain…
He wasn’t watching her. He was pulling something else free from the bag he carried. The sheer density of mana made Vivian stagger.
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It flooded the air around him in strange waves that pressed against her senses like a physical force. This was not the wild overextension of a desperate cultivator. This was contained power, packed so tightly it felt like the moment before a storm broke.
Ethan popped a pill into his mouth and closed his eyes. She saw the density of his own mana shoot up several times. It was strange, because his mana was already denser than usual. He had a lot more of it than he should. Clearly, he was preparing for something.
After a moment, Ethan seemed satisfied and a bit relieved like he was afraid he was going to explode or something. Then he reached into the satchel again.
He drew out a long, heavy device, too solid to be a spell focus and far too packed with power to be ceremonial. Matte black alloy formed its body, solid enough that even looking at it made her shoulders tense. Containment runes were etched along its length in tight, overlapping bands clearly designed to condense and funnel. A thick barrel ran forward, reinforced with rings meant to endure enormous internal stress. Beneath it sat a solid grip shaped for a human hand, worn smooth in places as if it had already seen use. Along the underside ran a ribbed black segment, mechanical rather than magical, fitted with unnerving precision.
Ethan braced the device against his shoulder, then pulled the ribbed segment back as if to double-check the mechanism, which created an opening in the center of the device and a flap-like intake on the bottom. She could see the mechanism move with the racking motion.
The sound that followed was deep and final, metal sliding over metal with locked certainty. The runes flared once as something inside seated into place.
Vivian’s breath caught. She could feel it now. This contraption was power restrained by structure, mechanics, and will alone. A single fracture in those runes would turn it into a catastrophe.
What in the world had her husband created?
“What,” she said slowly, “are you doing?”
“Loading,” Ethan replied calmly.
He reached back into the satchel.
What he withdrew was thick, cylindrical, and heavy. A thin black alloy encased some sort of payload packed with incredibly dense mana, encased in containment glyphs spiraling from base to tip and reinforced where stress would peak. Inside, mana churned, compressed and unstable, frozen at the moment, apparently waiting to be unleashed.
Vivian stared at it. The damn thing felt like a mana bomb. Her instincts screamed at her to step back. She did not.
Ethan did not rush. He inspected it once, then slid it into the open breach beneath the barrel. The fit was exact. When it seated, the runes along both shell and weapon aligned and flared together—a fact she knew despite not being able to see the shell once implanted into the weapon. She could feel it as the machine applied mana to both weapon and shell.
A weapon it was. That much she knew without hesitation.
The air tightened as Ethan added a second shell.
Then a third.
Each loaded with deliberate care, each swallowed by the mechanism with a muted click that sounded far too final.
By the time he finished, the weapon thrummed softly against his shoulder. It felt longer, but it couldn’t have been more than a few moments that seemed to slow to a crawl.
“Husband,” she said, “what is that thing?”
“Insurance,” Ethan said lightly. “I’m basically cheating. Now go help your brother while I double-check the glyphs and supercharge the payload.”
Vivian smiled despite herself. Only he could talk to her like that and get away with it.
She turned. Anmei was already moving beside her, and they charged back into the fray.
The Murai was still there. Still untouched. Still standing as if the battle were nothing more than an inconvenience.
Together they pressed him as Vivian wondered vaguely where her brother had gone.
Vivian struck high, frost snapping along her blade as she cut for shoulder and throat, testing angles, forcing movement. Anmei struck low and wide, fire rolling in disciplined waves that denied space and punished retreat. Months of sparring together showed in the way they moved; nothing was spoken, nothing needed to be. The two women simply understood what needed to be done. When Vivian shifted, Anmei filled. When Anmei overextended, Vivian closed the gap. Fire and frost crashed again and again against the Murai’s defenses.
And still, he held.
The pill burned through Vivian’s system, flooding her channels with power she should not have been able to sustain. Anmei pushed her flames harder than ever before, heat screaming past safe thresholds, fire coiling so densely it looked almost solid. Even so, they could not break him.
But they were forcing him back.
Just a little.
Then Nathan arrived like a thunderbolt, more than a little ruffled from trying to fight the Murai alone.
He came without announcement from the flank with a roar that sounded like joy given teeth, his sword wreathed in wild, undisciplined power that should have torn him apart and somehow did not.
“Hey!” Nathan bellowed, laughter in his voice. “How did you survive my super combo, you bastard?”
The Murai turned for the first time with something like irritation.
Nathan’s strike slammed into the Murai’s guard with brutal force and overwhelming intent. The impact cracked stone beneath their feet and sent a shockwave rippling outward. The Murai slid back a half step, boots carving lines into the ground.
Vivian seized the opening.
Her blade flashed, frost biting deep as she drove in again, forcing the Murai to split his attention. Anmei followed immediately, fire surging up and around Nathan’s strike, layering pressure upon pressure.
For the first time, the Murai’s stance shifted.
Not much, but enough for Nathan to score a hit, a thin line of blood appearing where a vambrace had been sheared off.
Nathan grinned like a madman. “Oh good, this bastard can bleed. Brother-in-law, let’s kill this fool. Sabine awaits.”
They pressed harder.
Three points of attack now—precision, control, and raw destructive joy working in concert. Vivian could feel the rhythm forming, the balance beginning to tilt. The Murai was no longer dictating the flow of the fight.
He was reacting.
And that meant, for the first time since they had reached him, that victory was no longer impossible.
The Murai exhaled.
The battlefield around him went still, not silent but compressed, as if the air itself had been folded inward. His power shroud tightened, collapsing from a wide, controlling presence into something narrow and lethal, focused entirely on the space they occupied.
Then he moved through them.
Vivian’s blade met his for an instant, frost screaming as it tried to bite, and then the pressure vanished. The Murai slid past her guard like water slipping through fingers, his sword turning just enough to angle her strike with the flat, not the edge. Her sword was struck out of position, and the impact hit her ribs like a collapsing wall. Pain detonated, breath tearing from her lungs as she was hurled sideways. She was lucky. If that had been a reinforced edge, she would have died.
Anmei shouted, fire flaring instinctively. The Murai was already there.
He stepped inside the arc of her flame, his shroud parting it rather than resisting it. His elbow drove into her sternum with brutal precision. The blow knocked the air from her chest and sent her skidding across the stone, fire sputtering out in a scatter of sparks.
Nathan roared and charged, mana surging unchecked.
The Murai turned to meet him fully.
Steel rang once.
Then again.
Then Nathan was airborne.
The strike caught him square in the torso, not a cut but a focused release of force that bypassed muscle and bone alike. He crashed into the ground hard enough to leave a shallow crater, skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust and shattered stone.
For one horrifying heartbeat, all three of them were down.
The Murai straightened, blade lowering once more, posture calm as ever. But he was breathing hard, and his armor was flickering.
“Better,” he said, almost approvingly. “But still insufficient.”
Vivian forced herself upright, ribs screaming, vision swimming. Anmei dragged herself to one knee, teeth clenched, blood at the corner of her mouth. Nathan rolled onto his side and laughed once, wet and breathless.
“Oh damn,” he rasped. “Yeah. That one hurt.”
The Murai lifted his sword again.
And this time, he did not wait.
The gap between them vanished as he advanced, intent sharpening into something final.
It was then that Ethan called out.
“Vivian, pull from the extra source. I need you and Nathan to buy me fifteen seconds.”
Vivian did so without hesitation and wondered idly when it had become so natural to listen to her husband. She did what Ethan asked, and she and Nathan exchanged blows with the Murai.
“Redhead,” Ethan’s voice cut through the chaos, calm and absolute. “Flare your mana and put everything you’ve got into a fire wave. Do it in five, four, three—”
“Vivian. Nathan. Scatter.”
They moved instantly.
“Redhead. Now.”
Vivian dove left. Anmei leapt back, then forward, unleashing a wave of fire so dense it looked solid. The flames slammed into the Murai’s defenses, and for the first time, they buckled.
The shock in his eyes was priceless.
Anmei collapsed immediately after. Nathan caught her and dragged her back.
It was then that Ethan tossed his sword directly at Hoji, but not before layering it with as much mana as he could. The Murai tried to slap it away but was pushed back.
“Who are you?” the Murai demanded, armor cracked and smoking. “And why would you throw away your only weapon?”
Ethan met his gaze.
“The name is Ethan Zhou,” he said evenly. “I am the husband of Vivian Li and the live-in son-in-law of the Li family. That is my only claim to fame. I am a nobody. But who said that was my only weapon?”
He shouldered the dark matte contraption and pulled what looked like a trigger.
The roar tore through the battlefield like a lightning storm from heaven. The impact hit like a collapsing wall, a blast of supercharged mana, shattered force, and molten alloy that ripped straight through the Murai’s armor—armor that until now had shrugged off everything else.
The Murai staggered, shock evident on his face as half his mask was peeled away.
Ethan racked the mechanism.
He fired again. The impact hit once more with devastating force.
It was like being struck over and over again by a siege array designed to destroy castle defenses. That was how much power was being flung at the Murai right now.
Another rack. Another hit.
The Murai hit the ground, his armor destroyed, his body torn apart.
Vivian stared.
What. The. Hell.
Ethan walked toward the Murai, racking another shell.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, voice cold. “For you and all your little demon friends that want to invade our world. I have a message for them, and I want to make myself very clear.”
The Murai looked up at him, and for the first time, probably in his life, Hoji looked afraid.
Ethan’s eyes went cold as he leveled the weapon at the man’s head.
“Do not f*** with my wife.”
He pulled the trigger.