Zhou Tai drove his spear into the beast’s shoulder where the bony plates were thinnest. The point sank in deep and the beast screamed, a sound that shook the walls of the grain stores and sent dust falling from the rafters. It swung its head toward him and he threw himself sideways, barely clearing the tusks.

  Shu Yingyue came in from behind. She moved low and fast with both swords angled inward and cut across the backs of its hind legs in two quick strokes. The beast’s rear end dropped and it stumbled, its massive weight shifting forward onto its front legs.

  Liang Feng was already there. He struck the same spot on its neck where he had hit before, harder this time, and Yan Qiu heard something crack beneath the hide. The beast’s head dipped and its front legs buckled.

  Yan Qiu ran in and grabbed his sword from where it was still lodged between the plates on its ribs. He pulled it free and drove it back in at a different angle, aiming for the gap beneath the shoulder joint where the plates did not cover. The blade went in to the hilt.

  The beast made a sound that was not a roar. It was lower and wetter, like air being forced through a throat full of fluid. Its legs gave out and it collapsed onto its side with a crash that shook the ground. The red mist around it thickened and pulsed once, twice, and then a wave of murky stench rolled off its body as something dark and oily seeped from the wounds and pooled on the dirt beneath it.

  It twitched once and went still.

  They stood around it, breathing hard. Zhou Tai pulled his spear free and wiped the point on the grass. Chen Bao was leaning against the grain store wall with one hand pressed to his ribs where the beast had thrown him earlier. Shu Yingyue flicked the blood off her swords and sheathed them at her back.

  Liang Feng crouched beside the beast’s head and studied it. The red light in its eyes was fading, dimming to a dull brown. The mist that had been pouring off its body was thinning, drifting apart in the wind.

  “It is dead,” he said. He stood up and looked at the group. “Is everyone alright?”

  “Ribs are bruised,” Chen Bao said. “Nothing broken.”

  “Fine,” Zhou Tai said.

  Shu Yingyue nodded.

  Yan Qiu pulled his sword from the carcass and wiped it on his sleeve. His arms were shaking from the effort of driving the blade through the beast’s hide, but his breathing was steady. “I am fine.”

  A howl rose from somewhere behind the houses. Then another, and another, coming from different directions. The smaller beasts.

  Without the big one holding them together, they scattered. Yan Qiu could hear them crashing through fences and scrambling over rooftops, moving in every direction at once. Some were heading for the fields and some were running deeper into the village, and the howling was getting further apart as they spread out.

  “They are running,” Shu Yingyue said.

  Liang Feng straightened up. “We split. Zhou Tai, take the south side. Chen Bao, stay near the cellar and keep the villagers safe. Yingyue, take Yan Qiu and clear the east. I will handle the north.”

  They moved.

  Yan Qiu followed Shu Yingyue through the narrow lanes on the east side of the village. She was faster than him, and he had to push his Dust Treading Step to keep up as she cut between houses and vaulted over a low stone wall without breaking stride.

  They found three of the smaller beasts in a yard behind a collapsed shed. Two of them were tearing at something on the ground and the third was pacing in circles with its head low and its clouded eyes darting. When it saw them it charged.

  Shu Yingyue killed it before it covered half the distance. She drew both swords in one motion and cut it down with a single crossing slash that opened it from shoulder to hip. The other two turned and lunged at the same time, one at each of them.

  Yan Qiu stepped forward and caught the one coming at Shu Yingyue with a Gale Palm that drove it sideways into the shed wall. It hit hard and crumpled. The second beast was already on him and he brought his sword up and took its head off with a short upward cut.

  Shu Yingyue looked at him. He had stepped in front of her to deflect the attack, and for a moment they stood there with the dead beasts around them and the red mist curling at their feet.

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  She nodded once and looked away.

  They cleared two more groups after that, working through the eastern lanes until the howling stopped and the only sounds were the wind and the distant calls of the others finishing their own sections.

  They regrouped in the village square. The mist was almost gone now, just thin wisps clinging to the ground in the shadows between buildings. The bodies of the smaller beasts were scattered through the streets, and the villagers were starting to come out of the cellar, blinking in the light and looking around at what was left of their village.

  Liang Feng counted the dead beasts and checked the perimeter. When he was satisfied, he gathered the group.

  “The village is clear,” he said. “But the beasts that ran did not scatter randomly. Most of them went west.” He looked at the tree line beyond the fields where the last of the fleeing beasts had disappeared. “That is the direction of the second village.”

  He turned to Zhou Tai and Chen Bao. “You two stay here. Help the villagers, treat the wounded, and hold the village in case anything comes back. We will take the second village.”

  Zhou Tai nodded. Chen Bao straightened up from where he had been sitting against a wall and winced at his ribs but said nothing.

  “The three of us should be enough,” Liang Feng said, looking at Shu Yingyue and Yan Qiu. “If it is worse than expected, we will use the talismans.”

  They left Stonehollow with the sun past its peak and the shadows starting to lengthen. Liang Feng set a fast pace through the fields west of the village, following the trail of trampled grass and claw marks in the dirt that the fleeing beasts had left behind.

  Yan Qiu ran behind them and watched the landscape change. The hills were familiar. The shape of the ridgeline against the sky, the way the fields gave way to scrubland and then to the edge of the forest, the particular angle of the slope where the ground rose toward the north. He had walked these hills as a child, following his father to check the traps along the tree line.

  His chest tightened.

  He had known since Elder Han described the mission. The direction, the distance, the timing of the attacks. All of it pointed to the same place. He had told himself it might not be, that there were other villages in the northern hills, but the further west they went the less room there was for doubt.

  If Stonehollow looked like that, with bodies in the streets and survivors hiding in cellars, what would he find ahead? His mother’s letter had said the beasts came fast and nobody was prepared. She had said people died and the survivors left. But the letter was weeks old, and the beasts had not stopped. They had gotten worse.

  He kept running and did not say anything.

  The trail led them over a low ridge and down into a valley where the trees grew thick along a stream. They crossed the water and climbed the far bank, and when they came over the next rise Yan Qiu saw it.

  The village sat in a shallow basin between the hills. Low houses with thatched roofs and dirt paths running between them and fields stretching out to the tree line on three sides. He could see the well in the center of the village and the old storage shed near the eastern edge and the path that led up to the forest where his father used to gather firewood.

  Beasts were moving through the streets. He could see them from up here, grey shapes prowling between the houses and crouching over dark shapes on the ground that were not moving. There were more of them than there had been in Stonehollow. The red mist hung over everything, thicker and darker than before, and the smell hit him even from this distance.

  There were piles of bodies near the village square.

  Liang Feng stopped at the top of the ridge and studied the village below. His face was tight.

  “This is worse,” he said quietly. “Much worse than the first one.”

  Shu Yingyue stood beside him with her hands on her sword hilts. She did not say anything, but her jaw was clenched hard enough that Yan Qiu could see the muscle working beneath her skin.

  Yan Qiu stared down at the village. His body had gone numb. He could feel his heart beating but it sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else. His skin prickled and a cold sensation spread through his limbs, starting at his fingers and moving inward.

  He recognized the storage shed. He recognized the well. He recognized the shape of the path that wound up from the village center to the northern fields where his father had worked every morning for as long as Yan Qiu could remember.

  And he recognized one of the bodies near the square. He could not see the face clearly from this distance, but he knew the build and the clothes and the way the body was lying, crumpled against the wall of a house with one arm stretched out toward the door. He did not remember the name. He could not pull it up no matter how hard he tried. But he remembered the face, and he remembered sitting in that man’s yard as a small child while his mother talked to the man’s wife about the harvest.

  His skin had turned purple where his hands were clenched at his sides. The qi in his body was moving on its own, circulating through his channels in hard uneven pulses that he was not controlling.

  “Yan Qiu.” Liang Feng’s voice came from beside him. “Are you alright?”

  Yan Qiu did not answer.

  “It is normal,” Liang Feng said. His voice was steady and careful. “For new disciples seeing this for the first time. The first village had fewer bodies, but this looks like a massacre. It is alright to feel sick.”

  Yan Qiu shook his head slowly.

  “No,” he said. His voice came out quiet and uneven, and he could feel his jaw trembling. “It is not that.”

  Liang Feng and Shu Yingyue both looked at him.

  “This is the village where I am from,” he said. “It is my whole life.”

  Neither of them spoke. The wind moved through the grass around them and the distant howling of the beasts drifted up from the village below.

  Liang Feng closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he put his hand on Yan Qiu’s shoulder and squeezed once.

  “Then you have got more reason to slay those beasts,” he said.