Redmoon had been speaking with the pilot and a pair of navigators, but he had also sensed Red Faith coming, and so was prepared for him. The Herald wrung pink hands in impatience and spoke as soon as the Sage came in.
“I take it you’ve made a breakthrough in your research.”
Without a word, the Sage of Red Faith tossed him a dream tablet containing his conclusion and the reasoning behind it. It was short.
Redmoon witnessed the thoughts in moments and scanned the rest of the memories rather than experiencing them completely.
“I see,” the Herald said. “So the flaw was in you all along, as I proposed from the beginning.”
“The flaw is in us both, but I believe it can be avoided in others. We will develop psychological and interpersonal training to be used as part of the humanoid Shadow cultivation method.”
Redmoon tilted his head. “The flaw was in me as well, inherited from you, but I have overcome it. You cannot do so because you fail to see yourself accurately. I can indeed subordinate myself in the spirit of cooperation. I intend to serve the Bleeding Phoenix now that its will has been woken from its long sleep.”
The other members of Redmoon Hall scurried away, as they always did before a conflict between the two leaders of their sect.
The Blood Sage examined the icy fury inside of him and found it quite reasonable. “Idiot. How could you come to that conclusion with the information I provided you? We should have cooperated because our goals were mutual.”
“What do you imagine the Bleeding Phoenix’s goals are?” the Herald countered. “They are the same as any other biological being: to survive, feed, and replicate itself. Now that it is conscious, it sees us as its children, and we can accomplish our goals with its backing.”
“We can accomplish any of our goals with its corpse,” the Blood Sage spat. “It is a bird, do you understand? It is a fat mutant swollen with power; it is no god, and we have no reason to dread it.”
His boiling frustration had bubbled up and finally burst, but he knew he had made a mistake when he saw the faint hint of a smile flicker across Redmoon’s mask of a face.
Flawed or not, the Sage of Red Faith was no idiot…though he felt like one at the moment.
He saw what Redmoon had done, how the Herald had taken a false position to maneuver the Sage into a corner, but it was too late. Red Faith had been too slow to realize, too caught up in his own failure.
He didn’t need to extend his spiritual perception to know that Redmoon had activated a script on the control panel behind him, broadcasting their conversation to the rest of Redmoon Hall.
Red Faith had been too used to the status quo. His Blood Shadow had never moved against him, all this time, because the Herald needed a Sage. Only the two of them together could resist the experts of the Monarch factions.
Now, the situation had changed, and Redmoon had been the first to recognize it. He wouldn’t need a Sage anymore if he had the Phoenix, fully empowered and self-aware.
In that first moment, the Sage of Red Faith tilted his head to his twin and long-time opponent. He conceded the match.
Redmoon the Herald gave a fractional nod in return. A gracious victor.
But not a merciful one.
A fake expression covered Redmoon’s face: crazed anger. He bit through the skin of his knuckle in feigned outrage. “Traitor! I knew your selfish pursuits would lead you to betray us one day. If you have any conscience left within you, surrender yourself to face the punishment of the Hall!”
They both knew that wasn’t going to happen.
Red Faith knew what his opposite would expect. The Sage had only one advantage over the Herald, and he would try to escape by traveling through the Way. However, if Redmoon were ready for that, he could disperse the Sage’s working.
In case he couldn’t, Redmoon had strategically placed Archlords nearby. One of them was still in the room, another in the hall outside, and two more on the deck above.
While none would be Red Faith’s opponent individually, he couldn’t overwhelm them either, and they had enough refined control over their willpower to interfere with his workings. But if he kept the fight to raw sacred arts, the Herald would always have an advantage.
His options were limited, but worst of all was doing nothing.
And he did have some preparations of his own.
From his soulspace, the Sage of Red Faith summoned a set of nine floating daggers. They appeared immediately and shot in nine different directions.
Redmoon knocked them from the air before they could kill his subordinates, but that was a moment of distraction. The Sage’s void space tore open, a ragged red hole in the world, and he pulled out a gatestone and crushed it to sapphire powder in an instant.