Epsilon Twilight
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28. Thousand
🕑 Added 2025-01-31 12:27:32 +0000 UTC"They are legion!" A cultivator shouted with wariness as the dust dissipated and allowed them to see the magnitude of the stampede.
"It's a weird feeling, really," Aloe mused to herself back in the safety of the train.
"What's a weird feeling, Aloe?" Xochipilli asked at her sight, still holding her hand.
"Did I say that aloud?" The child nodded even though it was a rhetorical question. She still found that endearing, so she scrambled his hair a bit.
Aloe looked around before explaining herself as her next words were going to be very incriminatory. Fortunately, the ticket examiner had decided to remain with the cultivators, and she doubted the men would wield the sense stance when they were going to take on such a foe, so she considered it was safe to talk. She still picked up Xochipilli with one hand and placed him on her shoulder, though, just to be safe.
She was so tall and the child so small – sho smol and cute! She thought to herself – that he would hear her better this way, especially this close to the loud engine.
"Well," the old druid started, "the plants they are fighting are my creation."
"Really?" Even though she couldn't see the child from her perspective, she could still feel his eyes beaming with wonder.
"Really," Aloe nodded. "It's been a while since I created that first seed, so somehow it has survived since then, and then proliferated enough to create such a vast stampede."
"Wait," Xochipilli tilted his body to the side. If she weren't a tree of a woman, the gesture would have driven them both to the ground. "Did you make them with Evolution?"
Aloe hummed in affirmation. She marveled at the way glamour made something as trivial as a hum into a harmonic melody.
"Does that mean I could also create them?" He bounced excitedly on her shoulder.
"Indeed," Aloe nodded, her ivy hair brushing Xochipilli's leg with the movement. "Though I'd rather not have you evolve such problematic plants when there are plenty of useful ones."
Now that she saw it before her eyes, the Thousand Cuts was the only real problematic evolution she had created. The Myriad had been a nuisance but the people of this generation had managed to convert it into a cornerstone of their civilization; and the Slowtide, whilst it was a cataclysm in the making, she alone could harness its potential. The Slowtide would really be another problematic plant if I couldn't control it with the Heartgrowth, huh?
She was well aware that the evolved lichen would kill her if the Heartgrowth didn't keep it in check. In a way, it had evolved into the opposite of a symbiont, only with another symbiont she had managed to correct that.
Xochipilli was partially deflated by her words, but the child soon bounced back as he started seeing the unfolding battle at the engine wagon. Well, battle was a bit of a misnomer. The Thousand Cuts were mindless plants that just sought life, so their pattern of attack was just rolling forward. It was more of an extermination, or more accurately, a pruning.
Some of the cultivators had rough shields composed of wood planks and others had longswords. The design was unique, curved like a saber, but with a thicker blade. Aloe questioned herself why they were using such makeshift shields if these stampedes were supposed to be commonplace, but as soon as one of the Thousand Cuts became stuck in the wood, the reason became obvious.
So the thorns can easily tear wood, but then they become lodged in it. A cultivator swiftly cut by half the Thousand Cuts that had become lodged, making the plant collapse as it lost its integrity. Aloe got close to the window to see what happened with the cut plant that had fallen and was rapidly vanishing as the train continued moving, and she was surprised to see that it continued to wiggle around, but it struggled to find any purchase as it was now a loose collection of thorns rather than a sphere the size of a person.
As she heard the door of their wagon open, she saw the examiner had decided to accompany them.
"Was the action too much for you?" Aloe questioned him.
"Very much so, lady," the man took out a handkerchief and wiped some beads of sweat from his temples. "This is one of the biggest stampedes I've ever seen."
"They aren't many," she lazily commented as the Death-aligned plants kept swarming the cultivators.
"You are a cultivator, aren't you?" The examiner asked.
"Why do you ask that?" The vegetable woman turned to face him. A smile was drawn on her face.
"So you are one." Aloe didn't confirm nor deny the accusation. The man sighed after realizing that. "Why don't you help them?"
"With this dress? Nonsense!" She pointed at the train worker with her parasol. "It's a new one, and I don't want it to be torn to shreds."
That seemed to be enough of an excuse for the examiner, but he still looked with worry at struggling cultivators. By any means, there weren't many Thousand Cuts, but they were big and vicious. And these cultivators didn't have that much vitality. Considering some only had two Haya, they weren't frankly cultivators, just hired muscle that had consumed one of those monthly pills.
With her passive vitality sense, Aloe could easily tell which stances the 'cultivators' were donning. The two with the swords were changing between speed and strength, making their attacks mean and swift. The two with the shields were exclusively wielding agility, which confounded Aloe, until she saw a Thousand Cuts scratch a shield-wielder but its thorn failed to find purchase. So dexterity can be used like that… She was aware that the agility stance could grant ductility to the skin, but she hadn't had many opportunities to use that internal infusion, most of her usage came from her passive applications rather than active ones.
As for the last man…
"Oh, this is going to be interesting," Aloe mused aloud as she sensed the man change to the flowing stance. By far her most uncharted stance of Nurture, even if she had used it far more than the stealth or agility stances.
The man who had poorly been contributing until now activated his flowing stance and Aloe understood why he, the one who had the most vitality, hadn't been doing much until now.
For he unleashed a sea of flames.
"Quite the interesting flowing stance technique," Aloe said mostly to inform Xochipilli of the source of the fire. "I've known for long that cultivators can summon fire with the flowing stance but this is my first time seeing it."
Yes, she had known since centuries ago when she was first introduced to the nine stances by Fatima… Wait, was it Naila? No. That makes no sense, it must have been Fatima who mentioned it since she was the one who taught me how to use the stance in the first place. She placed a palm on the side of her head. Being unable to remember things was a bit… angering, for the lack of better words. It has been centuries, but it doesn't feel like it… and it bothers me so much.
Most of her memories were composed of mindless noise as that was what she had been doing on the chasm for most of her life, repeated activities which memories could only translate to noise. And that angered her. She was angry at herself.
"Could I do that?" Xochipilli moved her head around frantically in awe. Well, tried to. Her neck was as immovable as a mountain after all.
"Depends," Aloe calmed the boy down a bit instead of throwing fuel into the fire. "A person only has a flowing stance technique by default, and if yours isn't a fire one, then you would need to be taught it."
"Could you teach me then?" The old druid tilted her head to face her young disciple and found herself unable to say no to those sparkling crimson eyes.
"We'll see," she added with a mute groan, which was more than enough for Xochipilli to start hopping on her shoulder again.
Naturally, she was incapable of teaching her disciple that specific technique as she only knew a single one. And not for a lack of trying. There must be something special, a key detail to learning flowing stance techniques, that I have missed. Oh well, we could always try the flowing pills the pill maker talked about.
Even though she was perfectly calm and Xochipilli was giddy, the same couldn't be said for the train workers and the cultivators. The cultivators were losing ground against the overwhelming numbers. One of the shield-bearers was bleeding from one arm, and the flowing stance cultivator was quickly running out of vitality. His flames were doing fine against the stampede, but there were just too many.
"How is it that the Thousand Cuts can keep up with the train?" She casually asked.
"H-how can you be so calm?" The examiner almost shouted at her, but his nervousness won.
"These plants aren't much of a menace, really," she mused. Her current self couldn't begin to muster even a single grain of worry. Aloe felt no danger whatsoever from the stampede. "Could you answer my question?"
"I… uh…" The man pathetically clutched his handheld device as he watched the cultivators bleed. "Will you help them if I answer you?"
"Maybe," the vegetable woman shrugged. If the train was in any danger, she would step up, she had even a plan for it.
"T-the Thousand Cuts… eek!" The examiner yelped as one cut plant forcefully impacted against the glass closest to him. "They… uh… can match the speed of their prey."
"But we are standing still… oh!" Xochipilli interjected but quickly saw the error of his thoughts. They may be standing still, but the train was not.
"Huh, curious." It truly was for her. Death and Life alignment? They should be Space alignment from what I'm hearing. How does that 'matching speed' trait even work? Is it a joke about not being able to outrun death? She wondered about the common saying. Do things as trivial as jokes influence something as important as alignments?
As much as she wanted answers, Aloe had asked these questions too many times in her life before, and she already knew she would never get her desires. Instead, she groaned, placed Xochipilli on the ground, and opened the door to the engine.
"Heads down!" She shouted and everyone obeyed, if only because she put a bit of pressure on her glamour.
The next instant, a conflagration like any other erupted from her hands. For the onlookers, it would look to them like the same flowing stance technique the man had used, but in reality, she had grown a miniature Blossomflame and was pushing copious amounts of vitality through her flowing stance.
Dunes, that was close. A bit more and I would have needed to change to the flowing stance in front of them. She thanked her foresight to push a hundred Haya into her flowing stance backlog, otherwise now her dress would have fallen to the ground as she needed to sustain the fires for a solid half a minute before all the surrounding Thousand Cuts burned to a crisp.
That had been the most peril she had been in, having people see her without glamour. Having seen how little humanity she had left.
She had pushed all that vitality into the flowing stance whilst the examiner was clutching at his device. The man didn't notice, but Xochipilli probably did as her shape started to shift by the end, if ever-so-slightly.
The cultivators looked at her in awe whilst she had swiftly disposed of the stampede without so much of a scratch. She looked at the rugged men and scoffed, before going back to the train. No words were needed to tell them how pathetic they had been.
As she decided to go back to the back of the train to continue enjoying the vistas, the examiner stopped her.
"Didn't you say that was the first time you'd seen a fire flowing stance technique?"
To Aloe simply responded with an "Ah."
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The3rd
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