Stonecutter swung his saber, and his qi ran before the killing edge. Tian rolled to his feet, his staff swinging out to bat the saber away. Stonecutter dropped his wrist, let his saber come under the staff, then lunged forward, the chisel tip stretching towards Tian’s chest. Tian countered by stepping back and dropping his suddenly heavy staff down on Stonecutter’s head, inviting mutual destruction. It was met with an iron hard arm that guided the staff past Stonecutter’s body, as he pressed forward with his attack. Tian had to scramble back, the parapet too narrow to give Heavenly cultivators much maneuvering room. Then he countered with his own thrust, a narrow pillar of qi coming from the end of his staff, directly for Stonecutter’s eye.
They fought five rounds before the mortals even realized there was a fight going on. Their battle was rather cautious and technical, compared to Liren and Redspear.
“Two enemies meeting on a narrow path, the brave one shall win!” Tian could hear Redspear roar.
“Thanks for the good wishes! I’ll burn incense for you a year from today!” Liren snarled back, their spears meeting with a staccato clatter, thrusts and parries and sweeps coming high and low. Both restrained their qi, Liren to avoid exterminating all the soldiers on the wall, Redspear, presumably, to avoid stabbing Stonecutter in the back. Liren had often told Tian that there was more to spearplay than pure aggression, that the overwhelming Yang of the spear was guided by tactics and required deflection and recovery as much as the explosive thrust. He couldn’t see it. It wasn’t as crazed as a saber duel, but it wasn’t far off.
Stonecutter was a saber user, through and through. Everything went into a furious attack, each chop falling like a boulder, each slash so quick, you only knew where it had been after it passed. That was no exaggeration- even with his grasp of qi and the flow of elements, Tian was forced to try and anticipate the movements of the saber, rather than block its actual path. There was a subtle spell being used, or some technique he had never seen before.
Stonecutter’s left hand reached out to grab the staff, his right hacking down on Tian’s arms. Tian retaliated with a kick to the crotch that would have left Stonecutter gelded and with a shattered pelvis even as he twisted the staff up to block the descending saber. He thought he had diverted the blade enough, until a sudden gust of metal qi cut down from the blade and slammed into his chest. The mermaid silk robes held, but Tian could feel his bones creaking under the weight of the blow.
Tian didn’t stop his foot rising, even as the chop landed. Stonecutter’s eyes were wide as an owl’s, his desperately angled knee not quite enough to stop the heavy impact smashing upward. He kept his nuts, but Tian reckoned the crunching feeling was Stonecutter losing his knee.
“Ruthless!” Stonecutter hacked wildly, creating a barrage of qi blades while cramming a pill into his mouth. Tian couldn’t be bothered to say anything, and just gave him a look. The green black smoke from the trapped decoy was still lingering. He could see the ruined meat where the soldiers had once stood, casualties of proximity to Heavenly battle. He blinked, then slightly shook his head. He really was too new to battling Heavenly cultivators. He hopped back two steps and tossed out a flying sword.
“Running off?” Stonecutter sneered. Tian thought he could hear the bones sliding back into place. The older man was pale and sweating. It seemed there was a price for speed. Tian just pointed up with one finger, then waved a spare ax he had picked up from the fortress loot.
“Any good at dodging?” Tian stepped onto his sword and soared upward.
“Bastard! See how I deal with you.”
Tian threw the ax at Stonecutter. There wasn’t any skill behind it, but as Tian had learned, force had a way of overcoming all objections. Stonecutter plainly knew that truth too, as a heavy blow from his straight saber deflected the Earthly ax into the city wall, burying it three feet deep in the stone and packed earth.
“Come fight me in the sky, traitor. At least I won’t be able to make you a palace official up here, right?”
“Palace official?” Stonecutter’s eyes narrowed, then widened until Tian could see the white of them all the way around. “I’ll have your head!” He threw out a leaf and jumped on it, racing upward to cut Tian in half. Tian spun his staff, beckoning Stonecutter forward.
“As a trainee doctor, I can probably protect your life through the procedure. No need for thanks.”
The storm of saber qi was all the thanks Stonecutter was prepared to offer. Waves of metal and cold light rose up, and were dodged, batted away or simply blocked by Tian. The storm was met with the bending willow, flowing over and around, pushing it back, never breaking it. Stonecutter grunted and shifted tactics. He raised his saber over his head, putting two hands on the hilt. Tian could sense a calamitous energy gathering within it. So he attacked.
This time it was Tian who came like the storm. His thrusts were sharp and accurate, each aiming for a meridian or accupoint, his chops and sweeps heavy enough to break bones and crush skulls. He struck from range too- alternating between closing in to crush with the spear and standing well back to thrust with qi at Stonecutter’s vitals. The gathering energy on Stonecutter’s blade was dispersed, his full efforts put into blocking the heavy staff. And while a staff could never cut like a saber, no saber could carry the weight or momentum of a staff. Not with yin qi making it heavy as a stone hill.
Not that it stopped Stonecutter from trying to block with his saber. His treasured blade was doubtless much finer quality than Tian’s nameless staff, and doubtless the cutting edge of his well honed qi could slice iron like mud. Tian didn’t favor subtlety in his staff play. His blows had slowly accumulated the hammering power of the waves of the Darknorth Sea. Waves that could drown a ship, gobble it up in a single bite. All those beast cores Tian had eaten hadn't been for nothing.
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The plain staff, battered and chipped by the sharp saber, rose and fell once more, coming down on Stonecutter’s shoulder. The older man got the blade up to block once more, as he had a dozen times before. This time, his face turned white. Tian smiled, a cold and eerie expression under his white hair.
“I heard a crack. In my professional opinion, your scapula just broke, as did your clavicle, compounded with a tearing of the ligaments in the shoulder joint. All that force had to be absorbed somewhere, and you really haven’t thought about what it means to fight in the sky.”
“A junior dares to lecture me on fighting in the sky? Did you even have a flying sword when I last saw you?”
“I did not. I envy your leaf. I’ll use it from now on.”
“You think this wound is enough to kill me?”
Tian’s smile grew colder and more terrible. “Oh yes. You really haven’t thought about how your flying treasure works in a fight.” Tian didn’t give Stonecutter a chance to take another pill. Didn’t give him a chance to run away, either. He stayed on top of him, battering him, his staff blows fast, heavy and coming from every angle. The wide sweeps meant there was nowhere to dodge. Not with Tian forcing the range so close.
Stonecutter gave up on defense, trying to trade a wound for a wound, only to be foiled by the staff’s reach. He even gave up on controlling the saber with his hand, relying on qi instead. Tian scoffed and smashed the saber down, wedging it into the cobblestones of the city below. Stonecutter swore, retreating. He reached into his robe, and yanked out a thin stone tablet, covered in vermilion twisting characters.
“Don’t force me! One inch closer, and I’ll shatter the tablet. I can do it with a thought! Once I do, I might die, but you will die too, and so will this city! This whole damn city!”
Tian gave the stone talisman a look. There was a brutal, dense knot of qi inside of it. Like a forest-consuming fire was packed into a space the size of a palm.
“I’ll do it! You won this round, but if you try to keep me here, you will never live to fight another day!” Stonecutter waved it wildly, screaming his threats. “You hear me, boy? I said clear a path! Scram to one side for your grandfather, and maybe we can both live!”
Something moved by the leaf, something small and dull looking. Tian didn’t wait to find out what it was, sending a Heavenly Swallow dart into it instead.
This proved to be a debatably correct choice. The explosion sent Tian spinning away from Stonecutter, tossing him through the air like a child’s toy. It took him a few long seconds to stabilize himself, an eternity in a fight. Even when he had earth and sky correctly ordered, the momentum of the blast was still throwing him across the city. Tian braced the sword against the air, and himself against the sword. The momentum slowed, stopped and reversed; too fast for a mortal to endure, and even an Earthly cultivator might have had serious injuries, but for his strong physique, it was just right.
Stonecutter wasn’t so lucky. Tian saw the top half of Stonecutter still flying through the air, though the arc of his flight suggested he would clear the top of the wall and land in the steppes. Tian rushed over and intercepted the flying not-yet corpse. He didn’t waste any words, simply smashing out with his staff and destroying the older man’s head. A sharp follow up stab destroyed the heart. In two practiced moves, the storage ring was retrieved and the body collected.
His attention shifted to Liren. Her battle with Redspear had reached a cataclysmic speed, flickers of spearlight flashing between and around them, sprays of hot blood raining across black tile roofs, thunder shaking the heavens. They, too, had taken their battle to the sky. Tian looked back at where he had been fighting Stonecutter. He had nailed that sneaky talisman pretty quickly, but which direction had it been heading in? Because it wasn’t headed towards him.
He drew a mental line, assuming that a frantic Stonecutter wouldn’t risk going for some circuitous path to his target, and that his target would be something that would benefit from being blown up. “The gate! The bastard was going to blow up one of the gates, and damn the harm to the mortals!”
He wanted to spit, then glared at the fragmentary corpse in his storage ring.
“I really don’t know how an old hand like you didn’t think about what it means to fight on a flying weapon. Battling with qi, there is no problem. Battling hand to hand, and you have a big problem. If you are pressing up against my staff, it’s not just your arm pressing up, you are also pressing up with your qi against your feet. You have to meet the descending force with an equal rising force. If you let me press you down, you wouldn’t have come to any harm. As it was, you battered yourself from two directions, and got crushed. Then you tried to forcibly resist an explosion, and got torn in half. Wouldn’t have happened if you let it blow you away. Tsk. Now just where did you leave that talisman? Got it!”
He swept his attention around and he grabbed it with a thread of qi as he rushed to join Liren.
“Brother, let me finish him off. This is a rare opportunity. I feel my spear dao advancing.” Liren messaged him.
Tian hesitated. Battles weren’t spars. You killed the enemy and ended it fast. Things were a little different now. He couldn’t put words to it, but he could feel things changing the longer he was in the Heavenly Realm. Understanding the dao, pursuing the dao, gathering the strength and resources necessary to withstand the buffeting of heaven’s will…
Tian stepped back, but invisibly released his Heavenly Swallow darts. One had been badly damaged in the explosion, but it was one of the new acupuncture needles, not one of the core ones. It could be repaired without too much trouble. He hoped. If Redspear tried to sneak an attack on the wall or gate, he would be there to intercept and destroy it.
Not that it came to it. Liren bound Redspear’s spear, forcing their points up high. Trusting her strength, she let go of the spear with her right hand, formed her fingers into a speartip, and stabbed Redspear through the heart. What came out his back was covered in bones and gore, clenching a fistful of something no human could do without.
The body was stowed, the ring collected, his spear casually tossed on the pile of spears Liren didn’t give a damn about. Tian came over with a pitcher of water and some clean towels. He gently washed her hands with soft, sweet smelling soap.
“Two traitors.” Tian kept his eyes on Liren’s hands. They didn’t look damaged at all. Even her nails were neatly trimmed, not too long, but not so short that she would look menial.
“Yeah. Our seniors warned us about life in the Heavenly realm.”
“They sure did.” Tian dried Liren’s hands with a soft towel. “Were they threatened, do you think? Controlled by some powerful spirit? Or did they think they could borrow the Yuu to clear out the other sects for the Blazing Sun sect?”
“No idea. But let’s go with the latter idea. We can use that. It seems the Yuu are losing patience, starting to use their hidden pieces. Your scheme will be needed soon.”
Tian sighed silently, and nodded. “Well, let’s keep a positive attitude. It might work, and we might survive it working.”