“Erich, wake up.”

  He jolted upward from the pile of rocks he had been napping on next to Sathis. The cinderborn was looking noticeably thinner. His pitchblack skin had faded to an unhealthy gray and it was stretched tight over his gaunt cheeks. Even the glow of Sathis’ golden eyes seemed dimmer.

  The old cinderborn almost looked like a corpse in the fading light of the glowstone. Almost without thinking, Erich reached over and touched a hand to the rock, infusing a bit more mana into it and brightening the cave once again.

  “Sathis,” Erich said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he sat up. “You really need to eat and drink some water. You look like a corpse.”

  “I am a corpse,” the cinderborn replied dryly. “Just one that’s masquerading as a martial artist for another couple of days. I can live for a week without food or drink easily. It isn’t pleasant, but I’ve deprived myself for longer. As for you? That isn’t the case. There aren’t many supplies in my pack, and after I pass we need to make sure that there are enough left over so that you can do what you must.”

  Erich bit his lower lip. He wanted to shout Sathis down, to tell the cinderborn that he was wrong and to force the old man to recover, but the changes in the martial artist’s body over the last couple of days were too obvious to miss. His aether was fading away, and along with it his life. Every day Sathis looked older and weaker. Already there was the slightest tremor in his hands.

  “Never mind that,” Sathis said dismissively. “The scavenger that keeps haunting our doorstep is back. It has grown a lot bolder over the last couple of days, and this time I don't think that light alone is going to be enough to drive it away.”

  A scraping sound from the mouth of the cave drew Erich’s gaze. For a second, a pair of eyes reflected the light of the glowstone before the creature scuttled back into the dark. Erich had a vague impression of a large hairless body framed by giant wings before it disappeared entirely.

  Against his will, a shudder ran through his body. Whatever was out there, it was drawn straight from a nightmare.

  “You’re going to need to kill it, Erich,” Sathis said evenly. “It may have been drawn to the spire by the smell of the bodies, but if it gains the courage to crawl into this cave, it won’t settle for just them. The creature will attack both of us.”

  “How am I supposed to kill it?” Erich asked incredulously. “When you destroyed my image, my only technique went with it. Then you spent the last couple of days lecturing me on theory and refusing to actually teach me a technique. If I were to go out there right now, I’d barely be a martial artist. I’d just be some guy waving a sword around.”

  “I’ve only been lecturing you on theory for your own good,” Sathis replied. “A martial artist of your caliber will only find a handful of supreme masters that have a single technique capable of catching his eye. You have a long and lonely road ahead of you Erich. Almost every technique you learn will be self taught. Starting you down that path right now is a boon to you, not a burden.”

  “Also,” he continued slyly, “if you are ‘just a guy waving a sword around’ many low level warriors would need to hang their heads in shame. While it is true that your abilities are no longer grounded in a sword technique, I don’t think you’ve realized the severity of the changes brought on by your improved image. The only thing about you that hasn’t increased notably is your agility. Your movements are much faster and carry more force.”

  Another scraping sound echoed through the cave. This time, when the monster’s eyes remained visible, seeming to glow in the dark as the reflected the light of the glowstone. They bobbed slightly as it paced back and forth, hungrily watching Sathis and Erich.

  “Can’t you kill it?” Erich asked, expression hardening as he watched the predator. “Even if I’m stronger and faster than the average person, a scavenger is beyond most first tier warriors that have a proper technique. It wouldn’t be a good idea for me to fight that thing before we broke my image. Right now? It’d be a death sentence.”

  “I can kill it quite easily,” Sathis replied, only to shrug helplessly. “The problem is that doing so would involve shattering the last of the control I’ve exerted over my image. The minute I use my mana, I will die within a matter of hours. There is still a lot that I must teach you. Dying suddenly would be an awful shame. Plus, I am sure that you will be able to handle the monster. After all, it is a flying scavenger. Here in the confines of the cave it won’t be able to escape your blade. Even if you don’t have a special move to finish it off, your physical prowess alone should be enough to defeat it.”

  Erich stood up. His body was still sore and stiff from sleeping on the rubble as he walked over to where his sword was resting against a nearby rock. He picked it up, and gave the curved blade a couple of practice swings.

  For some reason it felt off. The flowing and graceful feints and sweeping strokes of the Swaying Willow Blade felt alien to him. It felt like pointless waste. He would be much better off with a sword that could handle sharp jabs and thrusts mixed in between brutal hacking blows.

  “You can feel it can’t you,” Sathis said, the grin on his face as bright as his eyes. “The sword you brought in here is a bad fit for you. It’s all curves and subtlety, perfect for a wind or a water user, but that isn’t how your new body works. You need something simpler and more direct. A weapon that can keep up with your speed as you pepper someone with attacks faster than the eye can see.”

  Erich felt his eyes being drawn back to Sathis’ blade, a straight double edged sword forged from a reddish metal that the cinderborn had easily stabbed a foot deep into the tunnel’s stone floor.

  “That’s right,” Sathis prodded, following Erich’s gaze. “Something like my sword. Meteor steel is a bit heavy for you, after all, lightning focuses a bit more on speed than fire does, but once you grow a bit stronger, it would be a solid fit for you. For now, you’ll have to use the scrap steel you brought in here.”

  From the entrance to the cave, something made a high pitched clicking sound. The eyes had stopped moving. Instead they were frozen, fixed on Erich.

  “It’s mostly blind,” Sathis said helpfully. “The sound is how it locates you. If you’re ever out in the unclaimed lands and you hear that sound, duck. Some scouts wear metal armor with a large number of fins and folds because it seems to confuse the scavengers that evolved from bats, but we don’t have anything like that now.”

  “What do we have right now?” Erich asked uncertainly, feet dropping into what felt vaguely like a defensive stance. It wasn’t exactly the same as the one he’d used when he had access to the Swaying Willow Sword. His legs were bent more than usually, putting his center of gravity lower to the ground but also preparing Erich to spring into action with a devastating opening thrust.

  He couldn’t really explain why he took that stance, just that it felt right. Maybe there was something to what Sathis had been saying, that he simply needed to practice and trust his instincts, that a new sword style would come to him naturally.

  “Right now?” Sathis questioned. He was lounging against the wall of the cavern. Maddeningly calm despite the increasing urgency of the clicks and squeaks from the mouth of the tunnel.

  “Yes right now,” Erich bit back, maybe a little more aggressively than he’d like. “You haven’t let me relearn my old sword style and you haven’t taught me a new technique to make up for it. All I have is your assurances that I’m strong enough to handle this thing without any actual skill or training.”

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  “Right now?” Sathis pursed his lips. “Right now we have about ten seconds before it attacks.”

  “What?!” Erich squeaked, snapping his gaze away from the end of the tunnel to look at the placid cinderborn.”

  “Oh,” Sathis said with a slight frown. “You broke eye contact and it took that as a sign of weakness. It’s coming.”

  Erich barely got his head back around as the monster charged toward him. It was about twice the size of his body and covered in gray skin. The jagged pink lines of scars mottled its otherwise uniform appearance, drawing the eye even as the half-bat scrambled forward, using hook hands at the end of its wings like paws to scurry awkwardly along the tunnel floor.

  He swung his sword in an overhand downward slash. There wasn’t any control or art to it, just an inaccurate chopping motion, but the speed of his blade took his breath away.

  The monster screeched in frustration, pausing to lift up one of its wing arms in order to block the blow. Erich’s sword hit, and it felt like he was trying to chop down a pine tree with a single blow.

  Then, to both his surprise and the bat-creature’s, it’s arm broke.

  “Capture that moment,” Sathis called out from where he was laying against the wall. “The speed and brutality of that attack are what it means to use the fire element. Lightning sword styles are similar, but they rely more on a quick eye and cat-like reflexes. Let yourself go and trust your instincts, Erich.”

  He could only grunt a reply. The monster shrieked and lunged at him, exposing a mouth full of jagged and foul smelling fangs.

  Erich didn’t bother to parry, jumping to the side faster than he imagined possible. His sword darted out, barely visible as it clumsily tore a hole in the webbing of the monster’s wings. It tumbled away from him, wings flapping wildly.

  A thrill of adrenaline ran through Erich as he pushed forward stabbing the misshapen animal a second time. His blade pushed through its leathery skin, brushing past one of the monster’s ribs.

  It slammed a shoulder into him, sending Erich flying. He landed on his side, rolling awkwardly along the cave floor to bleed off the energy of the blow.

  He pulled himself to his feet with a groan. Blood trickled down his face from a cut above his left eye and a slash that had opened up his lip. Erich’s shoulder throbbed with pain, a dull ache that would likely floor him tomorrow.

  The bat thing stumbled toward him, unable to put proper weight on its right wing after Erich’s opening sword blow had broken it. It didn’t even look at Sathis as it hopped past him, beady pink eyes focused entirely on Erich.

  “You’re doing a good job,” Sathis said helpfully. “Try and think of a first stance, something that will allow you to defend, attack, and dodge easily. Your body will guide you in the right direction, just follow its lead.”

  He didn’t reply, dropping once again into the half crouch. Adrenaline pumped through Erich’s veins, demanding that he spring into action, that he attack the aether twisted bat before it had a chance to attack him.

  Whether it was some mysterious ‘martial artist’s intuition’ or simply impatience, Erich lunged forward, sword darting out in front of him in a quick, tight slash. The monster tried to jerk backward out of his reach, but compared to him it was slow and clumsy.

  There wasn’t any elegance in his attack. Elias would have forced him to run around the courtyard with sandbags for an hour if he caught Erich trying something as ugly and stupid as the half-slash, half-stab that he launched at the monster.

  The cut drew a ragged gash into the monster’s one good arm-wing, deflecting off of the creature’s bone and taking a good sized chunk of meat with it.

  The bat jerked backward, but Erich didn’t let it escape his range. He was faster than the monster, and it was on its last leg.

  Erich switched to a two handed grip on his sword. His slash was barely worthy of the name. It was more the heavy hacking blow that someone would expect from a butcher or a lumberjack.

  What it lacked in artistry and agility, the attack made up for in speed and violence. The monster didn’t manage to get its injured arms up in time, and Erich’s sword hit its neck and shoulder with the force of an avalanche.

  His sword shattered, unable to withstand the force of the blow without a healthy infusion of mana, but not before it cut halfway through the monster’s neck. Shards of metal peppered Erich, cutting open a dozen small cuts in his skin as he backpeddled away from the injured scavenger.

  It staggered toward him, breath rasping as it struggled to stand upright on both of its injured front wing-arms. Blood bubbled up out of its fanged mouth and dripped down its face, staining the creature’s gray leather.

  Erich’s heel caught on a piece of rubble and he fell over backwards, landing on his butt. The bat towered over him, glaring down at Erich through pain clouded eyes.

  It took a single step forward and its body shook. Then, the monster’s broken arm gave out, sending it tumbling to the cavern’s floor. It mewled in pain, more blood flowing out of its mouth, but its eyes were unfocused and vacant.

  Each breath the monster took was shallower than the last until barely ten seconds later, it stopped moving entirely. Slowly, Erich stood up. His hands were shaking with the after effects of the adrenaline from his fight. He closed his eyes, trying to slow the rapid thumping of his racing heart.

  “How did that feel?” Sathis asked. “You should’ve absorbed a good deal of aether from the kill, but that’s something we can worry about a bit later. After all, there’s still some distance to go before you enter the second tier. For now, you should focus on the sensations you felt while you were fighting the scavenger. Your body isn’t going to invent a sword style on its own, you’ll have to put a lot more effort in on that front, but it should start you down the right path.”

  “The sensations I felt?” Erich replied with a shaky breath as he shook himself to calm his nerves. “Does that mean that my new sword school is going to be called the ‘abject terror’ style? Maybe the ‘soiling my pants technique’ will come first?”

  “Fear is ordinary,” Sathis said dismissively. “Plus, I was here the entire time. It might have cut or injured you, but I would have stopped it before it could kill you. It hardly matters though because you were able to slay it.”

  “Right,” Erich responded, unsatisfied and more than a little disgruntled. “I’m still bruised and bleeding and it felt like I was going to die.”

  “And any training that doesn’t involve injury and fear of death is watered down to the point of being useless,” Sathis shot back, an easy smile on his face. “You are no longer walking the path of a junior martial artist learning rote techniques at a school. The only way for you to properly realize your potential is for you to develop your own abilities. I know one or two that would be suitable for you, but before you progress too far, you will have to make your own.”

  “We don’t have much time Erich,” Sathis continued, the amber glow of his eyes dimming slightly. “I wish I had months if not years to teach you the theory that you will need to become a proper swordsman, but that opportunity has been taken from us. A bloody struggle like this one, followed by the two of us reflecting on what you learned together so that I can help guide you is the best opportunity that we can hope for.”

  Erich sighed. The thump of his heart had slowed down a bit, almost to a normal rate. Once again he had a hard time complaining too loudly to Sathis. The man hadn’t moved from his seat in almost four days, and it was clear that he was in a lot of pain as he slowly wasted away. Still, the old cinderborn was as cheerful as the first day when Erich had tried to give him a drink of water. Despite Sathis’ sunken cheeks and the dimness of his eyes, he never voices a word of complaint.

  At times, Erich suspected that Sathis was weaponizing his condition. Pushing past Erich’s complaints in order to force him to focus on the constant theory discussions.

  He sat down, wincing a bit at the sting from the minor cuts that covered his face and arms. Blood was beginning to trickle from the scratches left by his broken sword, but there wasn’t much he could do about it at the moment.

  Ultimately, Sathis was right. They only had a handful of days left together, and as hard as it was for him to process information through the dehydration headache that was throbbing behind his eyes, he needed to take advantage of the time he had. Studying under the cinderborn swordsman was a rare opportunity, one he would be foolish to pass by.

  Kicking his feet and complaining would be childish. Erich might have been a child when he was first deployed to the bridge between worlds, but at the moment I was living in a cave next to the bodies of his dead friends. A pinprick of light in the midst of an ocean of absolute darkness. He didn’t have the luxury of staying a child.