Early in the morning, before the sun had risen above the hills, Wu Ling and Su Xiang walked through the forest until they could no longer see the camp through the trees.
"Hou," Wu Ling called, summoning the eager crow. "Go take a look around, find us a nice clearing to practice in today."
As soon as Wu Ling turned back to Su Xiang, however, her hand struck with the speed of a striking snake, slapping Wu Ling's face with enough force to send him sprawling to the ground.
"What happened to you Ling?" Su Xiang said, frustrated tears forming in the corners of her sapphire eyes. "Since when do you go sneaking out in the middle of the night to murder people without telling me what you're doing? In five days, did you change so much that you don't trust your elder sister anymore?"
"I…" Wu Ling tried to say only to wince as he realized that he'd bitten his tongue when Su Xiang slapped him. "Xiang, it's not that I didn't trust you," he finally managed to say. He tried standing up only to realize that his sense of 'up' had become skewed with the force of Su Xiang's slap. Slowly, reaching out to a nearby tree, he pulled himself to his feet while he tried to find the words to explain… the words that would help Su Xiang understand.
No matter how fast his mind raced, however, he couldn't find any words that would erase the lurid red hurt that he didn't need to be an artist to see in her aura. "I was worried about you," he finally said, struggling to meet her sapphire eyes.
"After what happened, I didn't want to add to your burdens while you were still," he started, only to be interrupted by Su Xiang.
"Shut up," Su Xiang said, stepping forward and wrapping her arms around Wu Ling in a fierce hug. "You helped me. You believed in me. You even gave me your father's manual," she sobbed into the hollow of Wu Ling's shoulder. "So don't you dare hold back on me when I can help you. If you pull back from me, if you won't let me in, then what did I endure all that for?"
For days, she'd insisted that nothing was more important to her than the bonds of Love she'd formed. Now, seeing the person she loved more than she could describe hiding things from her, it felt like she'd been stabbed in the gut with a blade made of ice. That he'd done it because he didn't feel she was strong enough to share his burdens only twisted the icy blade deeper.
"Xiang, I'm sorry," Wu Ling said, wrapping his arms around her and stroking her hair gently. "I won't do it again," he promised softly. "I might not be able to bring you with me, it wouldn't have been good for you to go with me that night, but from now on I will tell you. Is that okay?"
"Mmm," she murmured, nodding against his tear-soaked chest.
"Actually," he said gently, hoping to pull her back from the intense feelings of hurt and fear. "I asked you out here because I need your help."
"Truly?" Su Xiang said, pulling back and looking at Wu Ling with watery eyes. "You're not just inventing something because I…"
"No, not at all," Wu Ling interrupted. "Sit with me, I'll explain while we wait for Hou," he said, sliding down the tree and leaning up against it for support while the world continued to spin slightly. Once he felt steady again and Su Xiang had snuggled up under his arm, he continued.
"After yesterday, I spent a lot of time while we were walking thinking about how to bring the group together. I liked the idea you and Brother Zhang had about practicing together. Aside from you, we have three middle-stage Brawlers, a late-stage Alchemy Initiate, and a middle-stage Formation Initiate. Other than you and I, Yu Jinqi is the only other person close to breaking through to the second stage but he's probably not much of a combatant from what I've seen."
"He's not," Su Xiang agreed. "Even if he has techniques that he can use, he has no experience at all. We're better off keeping him as a reserve to help if anyone is injured than trying to build combat skills with him."
"That might not be entirely true," Wu Ling said. "He might be a little like me, able to do work in advance to create things that can be used in battle. For today, I'd like to split our group. You take the Brawlers, I'll take the Scholars. Our first goal is to get a good understanding of what everyone can do, and I'd like you to fight everyone one-on-one to give me your opinion of how good at fighting they are."
"I can do that," she promised readily. "After that, should we work in pairs?"
"Not exactly," Wu Ling said. "Unless I was willing to spend extravagantly, there's no way that I could hold off all four of you while protecting Yu Jinqi and Fang Lin. I want to get some practice working as a team to defeat the defenses we can put around our most vulnerable team members and to give them some experience of being attacked. It may be the three of us plus you, the three of us plus Brother Zhang, we can keep playing with the variations."
"That's fine, but we should put you in an offensive role too, and add Hou to the mix," Su Xiang added, thinking out loud. While nothing they expected to encounter fought quite the way Wu Ling did, she'd learned a great deal trying to resist his swarms of Blade Winged Birds and the effects he was able to produce with his talismans. Sharing that kind of experience with the other combatants in their group would be invaluable.
"And I want to be able just to watch sometimes," Su Xiang continued. "I may be able to see more if I'm not fighting than I would otherwise," she said with a twinkle in her eyes.