Chương 35

Lodin watched the storm build around Han Yuan and felt a little amusement. Every fight since he set foot on this world had followed the same arc. The cultivators of Dragon's Rest, one after another, looked at him and saw a curiosity, something to be contemptuously tested at minimum power. And then he hit them, and the look on their faces changed. Yuan raised his sword above his head and brought it down in a vertical slash.

The arc of the cut trailed a crescent of compressed air edged in pale gold light that screamed across the arena floor and tore a trench through the packed dirt as it came. Lodin stepped to the left, and the crescent passed close enough to shave the hair from his arm and slammed into the arena wall behind him. Stone blew apart and spectators scrambled from the impact zone, mortals and cultivators alike, their faces pale as chunks of masonry rained down around them.

A second crescent followed, horizontal, waist height, faster than the first. Lodin dropped flat and the slash ripped through the air above his back and carved a deep gouge across the far wall of the arena. A third came on its heels, oriented diagonally, and this one was large enough to slice one side of the stands in half from top to bottom. The arena erupted into chaos. Spectators poured from the tiered seats in a stampede, knocked over vendors and trampled food stalls, shoved each other toward the exits.

A woman scooped a small child off an unconscious man's chest and ran. Cultivators who had filled the arena floor an hour ago vaulted the walls and scattered into the streets beyond. A section of the upper tier buckled where the second crescent had struck, and a cascade of loose stone tumbled into the empty seats below. Lodin rolled sideways across the dirt, and the third crescent split the ground next to him. He twisted and sprang to his feet and the fourth was already on its way. This one dwarfed the others.

Yuan had planted both feet and swung the jian in a full horizontal arc, his whole body behind the cut, and the crescent that screamed across the arena floor stood as tall as the arena itself and twice as wide. Gold-white light blazed from its edge. The packed dirt split open beneath it as it came, and the air in its wake shimmered and warped. Something old and stubborn settled into Lodin's chest. The feeling that kept his feet under him when his body begged to quit.

He set his stance, crossed his forearms in front of his chest, tucked his chin behind them, and leaned forward. The crescent hit him and passed through his guard in the same instant. Compressed air struck both forearms and the force behind it drove him back a full step. His teeth rattled in his skull and his vision whited out for a heartbeat. His foot found the ground behind him. He planted it. And then he took a step forward. He looked down at the thin red lines on his forearms from wrist to elbow.

Yuan stared at the cuts too, at the depth of them, and something shifted behind his eyes. Good. Let him chew on that. They circled each other for a moment. Lodin watched the swordsman's silk-soled boots find their marks, precise as a dancer's. The arena floor was Han Yuan's personal stage. Lodin decided to take the floor away. He raised his right foot and drove it down. The impact sounded like a thunderclap from underground.

A shockwave tore outward from his heel and the packed dirt didn't crack so much as erupt, slabs of foundation stone lurching upward at wild angles, a ring of destruction that raced across the arena and swallowed the crater at its center and kept going. The ground heaved. Dust billowed in a curtain that rose ten feet high. Sections of the tiered seating jolted loose from their moorings as the tremor reached the walls, and stone blocks tumbled from the upper tiers and shattered on the rubble below.

What remained looked like the aftermath of an earthquake, a jagged field of broken stone and upturned earth where nothing flat or stable survived. Yuan's lead foot landed on a tilted slab and his weight shifted wrong for a half-second. Lodin launched forward. But the swordsman was faster than the stumble suggested. Yuan pushed off the broken ground and rose, straight up, fifteen, twenty, thirty feet above the ruined floor. His robes snapped in the wind and the blade of his jian caught the sun and blazed.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. For a moment he hung there in the air, still as a statue, the arena below him a wreck of cracked stone and gouged earth. Then Yuan's sword arm became a blur, and the blade traced a sphere of cuts around his body so fast the crescents overlapped. Gold-white arcs screamed outward in every direction at once, a mesh of compressed air and killing light that expanded from his position like the unfolding of some terrible flower.

The slashes crossed and recrossed and wove together into a spherical lattice of force that descended on the arena floor and everything on it. The lattice hit the already broken ground and tore it to shreds. Stone exploded into gravel. Dirt became dust. The tiered seats along the western wall collapsed inward as three slashes intersected at their base. The eastern seats fared no better. Entire sections of the arena's structure buckled and fell, and the sound of it swallowed every other noise whole.

Lodin threw his arms over his head and the lattice found him. Cuts opened across his shoulders, his back, his ribs. A slash bit deep across the meat of his back and another opened his left shoulder. The pain arrived all at once, too much to separate into individual wounds, a single bright scream that ran the full length of his body. He tasted copper. His vision went red at the edges. His knees hit the rubble. Dust and stone fragments pelted his skin. A chunk of masonry struck his shoulder and bounced away.

When the lattice passed, the roar faded to the groan of settling stone and the patter of debris. Lodin knelt in the wreckage and breathed. His flesh mended slowly, and at the same time he felt a vague sense of his Roots mending as well, aglow with lacerations. This was how he got stronger. His bout with Lorn yesterday was the same, except it had been much shorter and more one-sided. Too bad opponents this strong were so rare. Blood trickled from a dozen new cuts and joined the dirt caked on his skin.

Around them, the Founders Memorial Fighting Ground was a ruin. The tiered seating had collapsed and the arena floor was a field of rubble and exposed foundation stone. His arms trembled. His back burned where the deepest cuts wept. But the bones held. The muscle held. Everything Yuan threw at him hurt, but none of it had stopped him. He spat blood into the dust and got his feet beneath him just in time to see Yuan vanish.

The swordsman crossed the full breadth of the ruined arena in a single step, one instant hanging in the air above and the next so close that the pale gold light from his eyes reflected off the sweat on Lodin's skin. The jian came down from above, a vertical cut aimed at the crown of his skull, fast enough that the displaced air screamed. The arrogance of it. That grin on Yuan's face. This was meant to be the killing stroke. He thought his work was done. He thought wrong.

Lodin brought his palms together and caught the blade between them. The impact jarred his teeth. Lightning crawled from the soulsteel into his fingers and up through his wrists, a current that locked the muscles of his forearms rigid for a half-second. But his hands held. The edge sat between his palms, trembling, and Yuan's eyes went wide above it. Lodin jerked his hips sideways, and at the same time he wrenched the blade down and to the left.

The rotation tore the grip of the jian from Yuan's fingers, and the swordsman's weight pitched forward with the lost momentum of his own cut. His head came down, and Lodin's right backfist met it on the way. The crack echoed across the wreckage. Yuan's head snapped sideways, and before it could rebound Lodin's left hook crashed into his temple from the opposite side and launched him off his feet. Yuan twisted in the air. His body rotated to face Lodin even as he flew backward.

His hand extended, and the jian dissolved from Lodin's grip and reformed in the swordsman's palm before his back ever touched the ground. He slashed mid-flight, a horizontal cut that sent a crescent of gold-white force screaming back the way he'd come. Lodin crossed his forearms in front of his chest and the crescent struck him square. The compressed air bit into the cuts the lattice had already opened and drove them wider.

Pain flared across both forearms and the force shoved him backward across the rubble, his boots scraping over broken stone and exposed foundation. Yuan landed on a slab of upturned rock, skidded once, and settled into a perfect stance as if he'd planned the entire exchange. Lodin dug his heel against a jut of foundation stone and launched forward. The rubble cracked beneath his foot and the distance between them collapsed in a single explosive stride.

His right hand shot toward the swordsman's jaw, and Yuan swayed back and let it pass, then answered with a cut that opened a fresh line across Lodin's chest. In trade, Lodin drove a shovelhook into Yuan's body before the blade finished its arc, and he felt the wet crunch of ribs crumpling under his fist. Yuan vanished again. He reappeared three paces to the left and thrust for Lodin's throat.

Lodin turned off the line and caught the edge across his shoulder, the blade biting into muscle that the lattice had already torn, and hammered an overhand right into the top of Yuan's skull as the swordsman passed. The blow drove Yuan to one knee on the broken stone. He rolled sideways, came up slashing, and a crescent of compressed air caught Lodin across the thigh and staggered him. Lodin stood in the rubble and bled.

Cuts crossed his chest, both arms, his back, his thigh, his shoulder where the blade had found the same wound twice. Blood ran down his torso and dripped from his fingertips onto the pale stone beneath him. Yuan breathed hard through his nose, a bruise darkened along his jaw, and he held his left arm close to the ribs Lodin's hook had broken. Neither of them had taken a step backward. Lodin's eyes drifted upward.

Two figures stood on what remained of the top tier, a shelf of broken stone that had once held the highest seats. They stood at the edge of the rubble as if they'd climbed there to watch, unbothered by the destruction below. Their forms looked familiar. He would have let the thought pass, except when Han Yuan's eyes followed his gaze to that spot, he scowled. Yuan straightened his posture and lowered his blade.

"I offer a draw," he said.

"I believe, for now, we've learned what we need to know about each other." Heat surged through Lodin's chest. His fists tightened, and his back foot ground against the rubble beneath it. But the crowd had already seen him plant the governor in a crater. A draw on paper could not change that. And Yuan was the Provisional Governor, a man who could help him find Lorn or make the search more difficult. No sense in turning an embarrassed rival into a vengeful enemy. He could beat the guy's ass after.

And then there were the two figures on the broken tier, the ones who made Yuan scowl. Why would he look at them, and then offer a draw? Something told him it would be wise to learn more. He lowered his fists.

"Sure."