Sky Star Continent. One of the great landmasses of the world, vast enough to swallow kingdoms whole and still have room for mysteries unsolved. Spring had just ended, giving way to winter's embrace. Snow blanketed the mountain ranges and flower valleys in white, transforming the landscape into something both majestic and unforgiving. The scenery could inspire awe in poets and dread in travelers.
Beasts roamed freely across the continent. Small ones skittered through underbrush. Large ones prowled open plains. Wide-bodied creatures waded through frozen lakes while serpentine forms coiled around ancient trees. The continent was as deadly as it was beautiful, a place where survival demanded respect for the natural order.
Within Sky Star Continent lay a forest. Not just any forest, but one of the largest and most dangerous on the entire landmass. Cultivators spoke its name in hushed tones. Merchants paid extra to avoid routes that skirted its edges. Even beast tamers thought twice before venturing into its depths.
Tonight, snow continued to fall. Fat flakes drifted down through the canopy, settling on branches that creaked under accumulated weight. The forest floor crunched beneath every footfall. Visibility was poor, the darkness broken only by occasional moonlight filtering through gaps in the trees.
Shadowy figures moved through this darkness with practiced efficiency. They leaped from branch to branch, their movements fluid despite the treacherous conditions. Their target was a single person, fleeing ahead of them with desperate speed.
The chase led deeper into the forest, toward a structure that had no business existing in such a wild place.
An abandoned mansion.
It stood in a clearing that nature had tried and failed to fully reclaim. The building looked old, ancient even, as if no one had set foot inside for decades. Walls showed cracks. Roof tiles had fallen away. Weeds grew through the foundation. Everything about it screamed abandonment.
But tonight, that wasn't the case.
The fleeing figure burst through the tree line and landed hard in the mansion's courtyard. Snow kicked up around her feet. Before she could take another step, the shadowy figures emerged from all directions.
They surrounded the mansion completely. Some perched on the slanted roof, silhouettes against the night sky. Others spread across the courtyard itself, forming a loose circle that tightened with each passing second. There was no escape route. They'd planned this well.
The wind picked up, swirling snow and pulling back the hood of the cornered figure.
A woman.
She would have been beautiful. Everything about her features suggested it, the bone structure, the proportions, the way moonlight caught her profile. But scars marred her face, old wounds that had healed poorly, transforming what might have been striking into something people would look away from. She had everything a woman could want except an unmarred face.
Her hand gripped a katana. Blood dripped from its edge, pattering onto the snow in a slow rhythm. The veins in her arms and neck stood out prominently, bulging in a way that suggested poison coursing through her system. A sword wound punctured her stomach, the fabric around it soaked dark. More blood dripped steadily, staining the pristine snow beneath her feet.
The abandoned courtyard fell silent.
It was the kind of silence that only forgotten places could produce. Eerie. Hollow. The weight of emptiness pressing down on everything. Moonlight leaked through shattered roof tiles above, washing over broken pillars that had once held up elegant walkways. Fallen lanterns lay scattered across the ground, their frames rusted beyond use. Weeds grew like wild hair through every crack in the stone courtyard.
And in the center of that ruined space stood the woman.
Her breath came uneven, each exhale visible in the cold air. But her katana remained perfectly level, not a tremor in her grip despite the wound, despite the poison.
Then her pupils changed.
What had been dark and inky suddenly glowed. Serpent-green light emanated from her eyes, faint but unmistakable beneath the shadows that half-hid her face.
For any sane person, this would have been warning enough. A signal to retreat, to reconsider, to perhaps negotiate instead of fight.
But the black-cloaked men surrounding her were not sane. Or perhaps they simply had orders that outweighed self-preservation.
They charged.
She didn't waste breath on a battle cry. She simply moved.
Steel whispered through the air with that clean, lethal sound only a well-maintained blade could produce. The first cloaked man's head separated from his shoulders before his body understood what had happened. It hit the courtyard wall with a wet thump. His corpse followed a moment later, collapsing in a heap.
Another attacker swung at her from behind, thinking the blind spot would give him advantage. She twisted sideways with fluid grace, ignoring the fresh agony that tore through her stomach wound. His blade passed inches from her ribs, close enough that she felt the displaced air. Her katana moved in response, slicing through his wrist in one clean motion. His hand, still gripping his sword, fell to the ground separately from the rest of him.
His scream started to build in his throat. She didn't let it finish. The tip of her katana drove into his throat, punching through and pinning him to a rotten wooden beam behind him. He gurgled once, then went still.
Three more rushed her at once, trying to overwhelm with numbers.
She jumped, using momentum instead of wasted energy. Her foot planted on the shoulder of the man she'd just pinned to the beam, and she vaulted upward. Mid-air, her katana spun in a precise arc, moonlight catching its edge. Two necks opened simultaneously. Blood sprayed in twin fountains.
She landed lightly on cracked courtyard tiles, her feet finding stable ground despite the uneven surface. The third attacker from that group stumbled past her, his expression confused. He took two more steps before looking down.
His legs had been cut. Severed just above the knees during that same spinning strike. He collapsed a second later, shock preventing him from even screaming.
The poison burned hotter in her veins. She could feel it spreading, making her muscles twitch involuntarily. Each heartbeat pumped the toxin further through her system.
Her pupils narrowed further. The serpent gaze that had been merely glowing now fully awakened.
One of the remaining cloaked men made the mistake of looking directly into her eyes. Their gazes locked for a fraction of a second.
WHOOMPH!
Black-green flames erupted across his body. Not normal fire. Something else, something wrong. He flailed, screaming as the flames consumed him from the outside in. Within seconds, he'd been reduced to ash that scattered across the snowy courtyard.
Another cloaked figure saw this and tried to look away. Too slow. A serpent-shaped flare materialized around him, coiling and constricting. The flames devoured him from inside outward this time, a different variation of the same horrifying death.
The last man standing began to tremble. He backed toward a broken section of the courtyard wall, blade forgotten in his shaking hand.
"Don't," he begged, his voice cracking. "Don't look at me."
She didn't.
She let him have one last moment. One breath of hope that maybe, just maybe, he'd survive this.
Then she raised her katana and slit his throat with a single economical motion. No wasted movement. No excess force. Just a bored, efficient kill.
Silence returned to the courtyard.
Green flames still flickered on some of the corpses. Bodies lay scattered across the snow, blood pooling and steaming in the cold air. Her eyes faded back to their normal black, inky color.
Her breath echoed in the space, too loud in the stillness. Her knees almost buckled. The poison was winning its slow war inside her body. She clenched her jaw and gripped her stomach wound, trying to keep pressure on it. Her vision swam, edges going dark.
Then the air changed.
A cold pressure swept across the courtyard like a wave, making the green flames flicker and bow as if in reverence to something greater. The temperature seemed to drop another ten degrees.
She turned slowly, katana still ready despite her condition.
At the entrance to the ruined mansion, where old wooden doors hung half-rotted and half-broken, something was happening. The doors creaked open by themselves, groaning on rusted hinges. No hand touched them. They simply opened.
A lone figure stepped through the darkness beyond.
Tall. Cloaked in deep crimson that looked black in the poor light. A silver mask covered its face completely, revealing nothing of the person beneath. The presence radiating from this figure felt like a blood-soaked night stretching infinitely in all directions, oppressive and unavoidable.
Then the moonlight shifted, clouds parting slightly.
The light revealed what stood behind the masked figure.
An army. No, calling it an army was insufficient. An ocean of bodies. Rows upon rows of black-cloaked figures packed the courtyard entrance, spilling back into the forest shadows. They stood in perfect formation, utterly silent. A thousand bodies at minimum. Possibly more. She couldn't see where their ranks ended. Each one held a blade that glimmered like cold starlight in their hands.
The masked figure tilted its head at her, the gesture almost curious.
"Well," he said, his voice smooth and genuinely amused. "You killed the warm-up."
She exhaled slowly through clenched teeth. Her grip tightened on her katana despite the tremor now running through her arms. Blood continued to drip from her wound, each drop seeming louder than the last.
Her serpent eyes began glowing again, green light pushing back the darkness around her face.