Gaiden 3.5

Selara paid the clerk little heed as she danced around the training dummy, her arms coiling in serpentine patterns, hook-swords in hand. The clerk waited patiently for a time, and finally coughed politely. "Ah, Corporal..."

"I heard you the first time. I'm telling you, we don't need a replacement, Yao Ye will be fine. She's too stupid to let herself be slowed down by something as simple as a collapsed building."

The clerk wrung his hands nervously. "I'm, ahh, pleased to hear that Corporal Yao is doing well. However..." Selara hissed and plunged her swords deep into the stuffed dummy, sending an explosion of straw throughout the practice yard. The clerk flinched and took a step back as she glared at him.

"... It is Master Rivers' policy to make sure that all Amalgamated Emmisary squads have backup agents available should one of their comrades fall on the field of battle blah blah blah. I heard you the first time, and I'm telling you, you're wasting your time."

The clerk brushed the straw off of his robes. "Please, Corporal, see it my way. The regulations are very specific! Besides, General Nekuto and His Excellency the Nameless Ravine are doing an inspection tour, ahh, right now. They'll be here any minute. Please do this, if only so that I can keep my job."

Selara rolled her eyes and muttered an unflattering remark about civil servants. At last, she stood up and folded her arms across her chest. "Fine, fine. Bring in the new Spirit Censor"

As he scurried out of the room, the clerk raised his stylus to the heavens. "Finally, she talks sense." He returned shortly thereafter, followed by a foreign woman with pale skin the color of an Aspen tree. She wore a silk hakama and a cream colored shirt, both crafted out a fashionable cut of rich silk. Green-skinned Selara looked the newcomer over and scowled.

"Corporal Selara, may I present Shai Mei. She comes to us from..."

Selara cut him off. "Another civilian. Just what I need in my life. You look mundane enough; what powers were you granted in your amalgamation? The powers of impeccable fashion sense? What are you going to do when some abomination tries to snap your pretty little neck?"

The clerk tried one last time to speak. "Ahh, Corporal, she's not actually an amalg..."

This time, the newcomer cut him off, in a sweet voice tinged with challenge. "Why, I'll stand behind my valorous sempai. One look at you, and the beast will flee in terror, and I won't have to lift a finger. What exactly were you granted by your amalgamation? The power to make small children weep?"

Selara angrily plunged her hookswords into what remained of the training dummy, and left them there. She turned and pointed an accusing finger at the newcomer. "Even though I personally think it's a ridiculous title, I'll die of shame before I let someone like you be hailed as a 'Daybringer'. Go back to Great Forks, or Lookshy, or wherever you came from, and marry some fat rich merchant. Daybringer? Feh! 'Teabringer' is more your style."

Shai Mei raised her hand in a modest gesture of refusal. "Oh, you wouldn't want me to bring you tea. You're quite green enough already."

Selara's unusually-colored cheeks turned beet-red in outrage. "All right, that's it. I don't know who you think you are, and we've barely met, but I'm already sick of you. That's some kind of record. Even Yao Ye took a few hours to get on my nerves the first time."

"I aim for excellence in all things, sempai"

---

"Well, you're excellently annoying. Now, shut up and show me what you've got." In the space of a single breath, Selara utterly relaxed and suddenly clenched every muscle in her body. Though her back muscles were sore from her injury, she welcomed the pain as shefell into the terrifying rhythms of Snake Style Kung Fu.

The clerk finally decided he'd had enough. He threw up his hands - and his tools of office - in disgust and fled the training ground, bowing deeply to two bystanders on the way out. As his slate and stylus clattered on the hard ground, the spirit censor assumed the loose stance and alert posture of a trained but undistinguished fighter. The two fighters circled each other for a few moments, never breaking eye contact. Shai Mei watched Selara's posture carefully, made a half-hearted feinting attack, and finally took three steps back, sweat pouring down her brow as she assumed a defensive posture. "You know I can't beat you, sempai."

Selara cracked a grin. "That's the first reasonable thing I've heard come out of your mouth." Selara struck hard and fast and low; the first blow shattered Shai Mei's defense, and the second and third lifted her off her feet with a spectacular detonation of essence, sending her flying backward into a weapons rack. The wooden rack snapped in two, depositing its contents all over Selara's opponent.

When the dust settled, Selara spat upon the ground. "Know this, girl, there is only one Yao Ye."

Selara turned to the clerk, not realizing that he had left. "As I was saying, little man, we don't need a replaceme..." Selara stopped dead in her tracks, her jaw hanging open. She faced not one of Plum Blossom Retreat's innumerable civil servents; instead, none other than Nameless Ravine and Cathak Nekuto stood before her. Both looked intensely displeased. Selara bowed deeply to hide her panic.

Nekuto merely shook his head.

---

Nameless Ravine looked at Shai Mei, who was sprawled over a pile of wooden weapons in a most undignified manner, gasping for breath, blood starting to soak through her torn silk clothes. Then he turned his attention to Selara. "You think you're good, do you corporal? You are proud, are you, that one who has attained the Third Pillar of Discipline may vanquish her junior with ease?" He walked over to another weapon rack, his every footstep resounding with restrained fury and, took up a battered oaken staff.

"I..." she stammered, and then was still.

"Well, you've made an excellent mess of things. Now shut up and show me what you've got." Brilliant motes of essence flared from his hands and feet as he assumed the Fivefold Bulwark Stance.

Selara's strikes were fuelled by raw desperation and burning shame. Nameless Ravine did not attack, and yet he forced her to take step after step backwards towards the edge of the parade ground. Try as she might, she could not penetrate Nameless Ravine's wall of effortless parries. Still she pushed, pushed through the flares of golden essence and the staff's brutal interceptions. Her hands bled as they gouged jagged chunks of wood. Finally, the Exalt's anima assumed its iconic form, and she felt like she was drowning in resplendent energy, dragged down by a coiling sea-beast.

She choked back a sob and forced herself to strike deep into the heart of the blinding light. Selara pushed beyond what she thought she was capable of, pouring essence through her feet and hands and spine until it was all gone. Finally, she felt as if the world itself turned upside down. She found herself flat on her back, with Nameless Ravine standing over her, his staff poised to impale her windpipe.

The exalt stepped back and discarded the staff, now little more than a useless stick. "You have created enough work for the medics already today; I will not add to their burdens. You are dismissed, Corporal."

Selara pulled herself to her feet, bowed, and fled in tears.

After she left, Nekuto raised an eyebrow. "She's as good as Rivers said she would be".

Nameless Ravine shook his head once. "No. She was better than Rivers said she would be."

"Then it is decided; the Daybringers shall travel to Varsi."

"So they shall. I will find Rivers and tell him that his plan is a sound one. In the meantime, see that Shai Mei gets whatever care she needs. Then track down that poor clerk and tell him to find her a new assignment." Nekuto bowed as Ravine departed.

---

Shai Mai had crawled off of broken wreckage of the weapons-rack, and lay flat on the ground, breathing deeply. Nekuto looked her up and down. The warmaster had seen all kinds of martial injury in his long career as a soldier. He could tell at a glance that Shai Mei's wounds were not fatal. Actually, the bruises were surprisingly shallow, considering Selara's snake-style assault. Was Selara holding back during the initial fight? No, thought Nekuto, she doesn't know the meaning of the word restraint. In that respect, she and Yao Ye resemble one another.

That's when Nekuto noticed that Shai Mei's wounds were glowing with a green energy that rose and fell with her cycles of breath. Five by five gentle exhalations later, they were hardly visible, and Shai Mei sat up and opened her eyes, and she grinned. "He was right," she said, chuckling at some inscrutable inner realization. Nekuto extended a hand and helped her to her feet. She brushed the dust off of her hakama and and bowed with a poise and dignity that was all the more remarkable considering the tattered, dirty, bloodstained state of her attire.

Nekuto reached down and picked up the clerk's slate and examined the markings carved upon it. "That technique just now - that was the Mind-Over-Body Meditation. I can only assume that you dispersed some of the force of Selara's blows with Wood Dragon Vitality. And you were not hypnotized by the Snake Style Form - you used the Eyes of the Wood Dragon to evaluate your foe, and you found your own Kung Fu lacking.

Shai Mei curtsied. "M'lord is most perceptive."

And yet your dossier has no mention of Immaculate Wood Dragon Discipline. Would you care to explain?"

"M'lord, what you saw represents the limits of my understanding of the form. I do not know the Form, merely the early Kata. My uncle taught me when I was but a child."

Nekuto looked down once more at the slate, and his eyes widened in disbelief. "Your uncle? You couldn't possibly mean..."

---

"...Shu Zhuang! Old Zhang! Heeeyyy!" Yao Ye waved her hands over her head to get the old man's attention. Zhang smiled and turned in her direction. Yao Ye and Toruna were loitering outside the infirmary.

As Yao Ye caught her breath from all the yelling, Toruna finally got a word in edgewise. "The Legion is holding a ceremony to celebrate the commissioning of the first set of officers to go through Storm of Amber and Nameless Ravine's new training regimen -"

Having filled her lungs, Yao Ye resumed yelling. " - And there's gonna be a banquet! ban-QUET! ban-QUET!"

Shu Zhuang couldn't help but smile. "Will the others be joining us?"

"No," said Toruna, "Selara is off sulking somewhere. Something happened on the training ground, and she seems insistent on being miserable for the moment. You know, the two of them are even more alike than I'd realized."

"Who's more like who?" asked Yao Ye, curiously. Toruna ignored her. Shu Zhang smiled again.

"As for Zhou Wing, he can't go. Whatever happened with Selara ended with a member of one of the other teams being injured. Nameless Ravine ran into Zhou Wing and told him that since a Daybringer had screwed up, a fellow Daybringer must make amends. He's inside packing up his medical gear; he's going to be too busy looking after someone named Shai Mei in the guest wing. By the time he's done," she cast a sharp glance at Yao Ye, "he knows the food will be gone."

Shu Zhang raised a wrinkly eyebrow. "Shai Mei, you don't say..." He flashed a smile. "Tell young Zhou Wing that I will go in his place."

Yao Ye's eyes widened in horror: "But you'll miss the feast!"

Shu Zhang shook his head; when he spoke, his voice was full of mirth and exaggerated piety. "I'm an old man, I just don't have the energy for these big celebrations anymore. I've seen plenty of feasts in my day, so it's only fitting and proper that I permit Zhou Wing, who is a young man, to go in my place. I in turn will see to his duty. It is only by charitably relieving others of their burdens that I may make amends for a long life full of debauchery."

With that, Shu Zhang bowed theatricically and plodded off towards the garrison. For once, even Yao Ye was left speechless.

---

As Shu Zhang made his way across the retreat towards the guest wing, Cathak Nekuto fell in beside him. "Why did you not mention that you know how to teach the Wood Dragon Forms, Corporal?"

Shu Zhang shook his head. "I knew Wood Dragon once. I was younger. I forgot it years ago."

Now it was Nekuto's turn to shake his head. "You... forgot it."

Shu Zhang clasped his hands behind his back as he walked. " 'A man drinks mead at dawn, wine by day, and brandy at dusk.' I stopped drinking wine a long time ago."

Nekuto grinned, and waved the old man off. "She's in the ninth guest house. She'll be joining the Third Northern Expedition, unless something more suitable comes up. You do make a truly terrible soldier, you know that Corporal? Now if you'll excuse me, I have a ceremony to attend."

---

Shu Zhang ambled into the guest house. Shai Mei was waiting for him, dressed in a kimono the color of autumn leaves.

"And how's my favorite niece doing?"

Shai Mei leaned over and kissed Shu Zhang on his wrinkly forehead. "Splendidly, uncle." She looked him over. "You know, I do believe that now that you're an Amalgam, you actually have fewer wrinkles."

Shu Zhang laughed long and deep, the kind of laugh that starts in the belly and echoes for miles around. A flock of startled birds outside found this greatly disturbing; everyone else, though, was away at the feast. "It is good to see you well. And how is your mother?"

Shai Mei's face lit up, filled with hope. "Just two years ago, I despaired for her. But then Nameless Ravine's teachings began to spread, and the people were unafraid to give give tribute. She gets better by the day, as the Immaculates lose their grip."

"Ahh yes, Nameless Ravine. Nice fellow, good writer." Shu Zhang gazed out the window at the setting sun. "A shame he's still drinking mead; by the time he's drinks brandy, he'll be that much more interesting indeed."

Shai Mei rolled her eyes. "Another of your little sayings, nuncle?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about, Little Tree."

She laughed. "Oh, and before I forget - you were right about what you said in your last letter. Selara really does care for Yao Ye."

Shu Zhang's expression turned serious. "Does she now? Then I have great hope for the future. Assuming, that is, that we can survive the coming famine."

"Famine? What famine?"

"Oh, nothing, nothing. We can all be grateful that there is only one Yao Ye." Unable to hold it in any longer, Shu Zhang let loose another belly-laugh.

---

Heaven's Mandate