Chương 34

– FORMAL CHALLENGE Han Yuan (Divine Gale Sect) challenges Lodin Lundgren (Unaffiliated) to sanctioned combat. Victory Conditions: Submission, Incapacity, Death Accept? [Y/N] – Lodin glanced at the man's Registry badge. – Han Yuan Realm: Nascent Immortal, 3rd Stage Affiliation: Divine Gale Sect Rank: Patriarch – Nascent Immortal. About time he ran across one. And with a healthy crowd gathered to witness this, no less. The heat from the last fight still sat in Lodin's muscles. His knuckles throbbed.

His blood ran hot and fast. He accepted. Han Yuan raised his hand and a jian materialized from his storage ring. The blade was long and pale, the soulsteel so clean it held a perfect mirror image of the arena around them. He saluted, the flat of the blade aligned with the bridge of his nose, then swept it down and bowed. His robes fell without a crease. His topknot sat without a hair displaced.

When he rose and settled into his stance, back foot weighted, front foot light, blade held out to his side, he looked like something out of a painting. Lodin rolled his neck until it popped. He wiped the blood off his knuckles, shook out his hands, and raised his fists. Sweat ran down the planes of his bare chest. Dirt caked his boots. A shallow cut on his forearm from the mob fight had dried to a brown crust. Next to Han Yuan, he looked like a longshoreman who fought for coin after shifts on the dock.

Yuan closed the distance in a swift glide, weight low, feet silent on the packed dirt. The jian thrust toward Lodin's throat, straight and clean, the point a sliver of light aimed at the hollow of his trachea. Lodin turned his chin to the right. The blade passed his neck close enough to feel the cold of the soulsteel. His feet stayed planted. His weight stayed centered. The thrust missed by the width of a finger and nothing more. Lodin noticed Yuan's eyes registering that.

Just as he stepped in and snapped a jab at his face. Yuan tilted his head. A fraction of movement, a mirror of what Lodin had used, the jab passing his cheek close enough to graze the skin. He used the same sort of minimal evasion, like he was mimicking him. Mocking him a little, maybe. The jian came around in a tight arc, a wrist rotation that deftly turned the blade, and the edge kissed Lodin's extended forearm as it passed. Soulsteel bit into his skin and a thin line of red opened from wrist to elbow.

But there was no time to inspect the cut. Han was still coming. Han went for five slashes, starting at the bottom and working his way up: the left calf, inside of the right thigh, left side of the waist, right bicep, left side of the neck. Five cuts, but they came out with the speed of one. Like a lightning strike, a thing that appears to the eye in a flash, fully formed. Lodin threw himself backward from it, and Yuan followed him through his own flash of steel.

His lunge ate the space between them and the jian sought Lodin's heart like an arrow loosed from a bow. Lodin slapped the flat of the blade aside with his left palm and swung a right hand over the top, an overhand that carried his full weight behind it. Yuan turned his shoulder and stepped to the side and Lodin's fist screamed through the air where his head had been an instant before. Han pivoted smoothly and his feet settled into position as if the dirt had been measured and marked for them in advance.

"My regards to your teacher," Han said, with a smile.

"Whoever trained you did admirable work with limited material."

"I'll pass it along," said Lodin. Lodin stepped in and the jian came for his throat. He slipped leftward, let the blade shoot past his shoulder and his own left hand shot back, straight down the centerline. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. His fist scraped Yuan's jaw and he answered with a backswing Lodin had to duck underneath.

He came up on the swordsman's open side with a vicious right hook Yuan had no choice but to twist away from again. But this time Lodin wouldn't let him pose and quip. He gave chase, threw a salvo of jabs that came out just as fast as Yuan's five-cut combination a moment before, and the swordsman's blade blurred in the air and rang like a bell as he parried them all. Fast enough, but only barely. The first hint of a frown touched Han Yuan's face. Lodin grinned.

He kept on with the lightning-fast flurry of jabs for a moment longer, then he planted his feet and slammed in a straight right hand that sent Yuan skidding backward. He struck on the right side, hook to the body, hook to the head. He struck on the left side, jab to the nose, uppercut to the liver. He zig zagged forward, throwing lopsided combinations, his rhythm broken, his pattern of attack asymmetrical, confusing.

It wasn't so much a wager that Han Yuan wouldn't know how to defend himself from such an assault, he certainly would. He had the air of someone with centuries of experience, who had been trained by the best, by people like Master Yan, by divinities themselves perhaps. It was more of a stress test. How much of this could Yuan handle before his composure broke. How much would he bear, before the doubt began to creep into his mind.

How would he face the reality that this unkempt, unrefined outsider, this barbarian, could very well get the best of him. In front of all these people, no less. Judging by the look on his face, Han Yuan was not enjoying the thought. Yuan stepped back and let the distance open between them. His footwork changed. The glide became a weave, lateral movement that kept him off the centerline, and the jian traced small circles in front of him as he recalculated. Then he struck.

Three cuts came in a descending sequence, shoulder to hip to knee, each one faster than the last, and the third reversed into a rising thrust aimed at the hollow of Lodin's throat. He turned his chin and caught the edge across his jaw instead. Yuan's blade opened a thin line from the center of his collarbones, up the hinge of his jaw to the corner of his lip, and the sting of it arrived a heartbeat after the blade had already moved on. Blood ran warm down his neck. The taste of copper filled his mouth.

Lodin spat blood onto the dirt and raised his fists. Yuan frowned, reset his stance and came again. The jian shot forward in a straight thrust aimed at the center of Lodin's chest, and the swordsman's weight committed behind it. Lodin turned off the centerline and the blade passed his ribs close enough to part the air against his skin, but this time he didn't counter. He let the rotation carry his left hand across his body and caught Yuan's sword wrist in his fingers. The swordsman's eyes widened.

Lodin's grip sank into the tendons like a vise hammered shut. The bones of Yuan's wrist ground together beneath his fingers, and the man's arm locked rigid, because the instinct to retract met the reality that escape was no longer possible. His right hand found Yuan's throat. He hauled the swordsman forward off his back foot. Their faces came close enough that Lodin could see the veins in Yuan's eyes, the fine sheen of sweat on his upper lip, the precise moment his composure slipped.

Yuan's free hand struck at Lodin's forearm, a palm strike followed by a chop aimed at the elbow joint, both fast and technical. The grip held. Lodin grinned, and the ground exploded beneath his boots. The power of his jump drove them skyward, and packed dirt cratered outward and stone split as the force of the leap hurled both men into the air so fast the arena blurred to a smear of brown and grey. The wind roared in his ears. Yuan's robes whipped and snapped like sails torn loose in a squall.

The crowd's noise dropped away, replaced by the rush of altitude and the ragged sound of breath forced through the fingers on the swordsman's throat. The apex arrived roughly forty feet in the air. For a held breath they hung there, the arena below them a circle of packed dirt ringed by onlookers staring up at them. The rooftops of the Terraces spread beyond the walls. The harbor glittered past the eastern edge of the city. Wind pulled at Lodin's hair and tugged at the sword arm he still held pinned.

He looked Yuan in the eye. Gravity took them, and Lodin drove him down. The fall was faster than the rise. Yuan's robes pressed flat against his body. His hair streamed upward. The round arena floor rushed toward them like a fist of stone. Lodin's arm locked straight, his full weight stacked above the hand on Yuan's throat, and the swordsman hit the packed dirt back-first at the speed of a fallen star. The sound shook the arena walls.

A concussive blast blew a ring of dust outward across the dirt and sent spectators stumbling backward from the shockwave. The ground buckled. Cracks split through the stone beneath the packed earth. The impact carved a crater three feet deep, and Yuan's jian flew from his hand and cartwheeled through the air and stabbed point-first into the dirt ten paces away. Lodin crouched in the crater, one hand still locked on the swordsman's throat. Dust settled on his shoulders.

Below him, Han Yuan lay flat on his back in the broken earth, mouth open, the blue-and-white silk of his robes torn at the shoulder and ground full of dirt.

"Regards to your teacher," Lodin said.

"They did what they could with limited material." Yuan's jaw clenched. A muscle twitched beneath the skin of his cheek, and for an instant his mask of civility cracked open and something raw and furious stared up from beneath it. He swatted Lodin's hand from his throat and rolled sideways out of the crater, one knee beneath him, then both feet, and he rose with dirt in his hair and a tear in the silk at his shoulder and a red imprint of Lodin's fingers across his neck.

He extended his sword hand and the jian answered the call, the blade dissolving from where it stood buried in the dirt ten paces away and reforming in his palm. The moment his fingers closed around the grip the weapon began to hum, a high clear note like a struck tuning fork that climbed in pitch until it sat at the edge of what the ear could bear. Pale light flooded the dark of Yuan's irises, blue-white tinged with gold, like lightning through fog.

Qi poured off him in waves that pressed against Lodin's skin like heat from an open furnace. The air around the swordsman thickened, and dust motes that had been drifting through the crater reversed course and spiraled away from him. His robes rippled in a blast of wind centered on the spot where he stood, and the torn silk at his shoulder snapped taut and fluttered as if the nucleus of a storm had begun to gather within his body. The crowd went quiet.

Lodin felt the pressure of it on his chest, on the backs of his hands, on the cuts that lined his forearms. He could feel it the way one feels the air change before a typhoon; in the marrow, in the teeth, in the fine hairs that rose along the back of his neck.

"It would appear that I haven't been taking you seriously," Yuan said, and his voice echoed with power.

"Nope," said Lodin.

"I shall not make that mistake again."