A Long Road Chapter 15 Ficbit – Braced

Bones stabbed like talons, lit by a thousand mad eyes of green fire. Screeched off blue arrays shielding their formation, casting dark sparks of resentment over crowd and water alike.

In the back of his mind, Lan Wangji noted the screaming. Not all from human throats.

:I told the foals this wouldn’t be pretty…: Kellen shuddered, one hoof stamping a rhythm to help regulate the qi he lent his Chosen. :Can we hold this?:

Lan Wangji deliberately ignored panicked cries, as the crowd scattered. Guided by white and green, they were scattering away from the water.

Every night-hunt is a risk, he’d emphasized to the Monarch’s Own. The number of restless spirits Wei Wuxian reports, the time they have had to build their resentment – anyone nearby may be in grave danger.

And yet it was Queen Selenay’s capital at risk, and her own Companions’ Field in the center of the danger. It would be a loss of face for her own people if they did not at least try to solve the matter without foreign interference.

So they’d called upon the priests, and made plans. Now to see if those plans would hold.

Even through his shields Lan Wangji could feel the pulse of panic, panic, panic! Yet above the fear came Talia’s projection of focus, stay together, run away from the danger-!

:The situation is… less than optimal,: he admitted, as most of the screaming moved behind them. :We do not yet know if that was the yaoguai’s full strength or merely a testing-:

For a moment there was nothing – only an endless, breathless blink of impact.

And then the drowning wave, the raging icy hate that crawled through meridians and tore, tore, tore, trying to douse the golden flame of his core and swallow it up, swallow him up, infect and warp a living body to drag more spirits down to watery death-