Bathala's Forsaken Daughter
A genuine laugh, short and disbelieving, the laugh of someone who has encountered something so far outside their expected category that their threat response hasn't activated yet.
"A child," he said. "They sent a child—"
He moved fast for a Foundation cultivator. The kampilan came in a diagonal arc — a proper technique, Crimson Bone Slash by the form of it, Blood Clan methodology — and the aura pressure riding the blade edge was real and would have opened me from shoulder to hip if I had been standing still.
I was not standing still.