Heaven's Bound: The Rise Of The Infernal Sage

Chapter 6

Jian Lei's POV

Sun Hao didn't have time to turn all the way. He simply moved, the way a man moves when he's spent a lifetime training his body to decide faster than his mind can argue with it, and the blade meant for my chest buried itself in his side instead.

"No," I said, and the word came out of me broken in half.

The second rider yanked his sword free, and Sun Hao staggered but didn't fall, one hand pressed flat against his own ribs, blood already dark between his fingers in the firelight.

"You," Sun Hao said, voice rough now, nothing calm left in it, "should not have done that."

The first bandit, the one I'd swung a branch at, was staring at the old man with something new in his face. Not confusion. Recognition.

"Wait," he said slowly. "Wait, I know that stance. I know that voice." His eyes went wide. "You're supposed to be dead. They told us everyone from that generation was dead."

"Rumors of my death," Sun Hao said, "were apparently exaggerated enough to get you both killed tonight."

He moved before either of them could answer, and it wasn't like anything I'd ever seen a person do. One moment he was standing with blood soaking through his robe, the next he was between the two riders, hands moving in patterns too fast for my eyes to follow, and both men were on the ground before I'd finished pushing myself up off my bruised knee.

Neither of them got back up.

"Elder Sun," I said, scrambling toward him. "Elder Sun, you're bleeding, let me see—"

"There's no time for that," he said, but his voice had gone thin, and when I got close enough to grab his arm I felt how badly he was shaking under the calm he was still forcing into his words. "More of them. Coming from the ridge. I can hear the horses."

"Then we run," I said. "Together. Right now."

"I'm not going to make it far like this," he said, and the honesty in it scared me worse than any wound I could see. "Listen to me, Jian Lei. Listen carefully, because I don't know how much time I have to say this."

"Don't talk like that," I said. "You're not dying tonight, I won't let you—"

"You don't get to decide that," he said, almost gentle despite the blood soaking through his robe faster now, spreading dark across the fabric. "What you felt tonight, behind the fire, that warmth in your chest. That wasn't nothing. That was the first crack in something that's been sealed inside you since before you could walk."

"Sealed by who," I said, my voice cracking. "You keep saying that and never telling me who."

"I don't have time to tell you everything," he said. "I have time to tell you this. There's a name. Write it down somewhere only you would think to look. The Infernal Sage. Do you hear me. The Infernal Sage."

The words meant nothing to me and everything to him, the way his whole body seemed to tighten just saying them out loud, like even now, dying in a burning yard, he was afraid of who might overhear.

"Elder Sun—"

"Mei Lin'er's grandmother," he said, cutting me off, words coming faster now, like he could feel something running out. "She knows more than she's told the girl. Find her. Ask her about the jade token. Ask her what her mother taught her before she ever came to this village."

Horses were close now, close enough that I could hear men shouting to each other across the burning farms, close enough that firelight caught the edge of approaching torches on the ridge above us.

"I'm not leaving you," I said.

"You don't have a choice," Sun Hao said, and then, with strength I didn't understand where he found it, he pushed me, hard, sending me stumbling backward toward the treeline. "Run, Jian Lei. Whatever happens to me tonight doesn't matter if you die trying to carry my body instead of your own life."

"Elder Sun, please—"

The first rider from the ridge broke through the smoke behind him, blade already raised, and Sun Hao turned to face it without looking back at me one more time.

"Run," he said again, and it was the last word I heard him say before the sword came down.