Chapter 852 — Forty Exchanges

CHAPTER 852

Forty Exchanges

Helian Ba hadn’t moved from the middle of the field.

The Phoenix Tail’s training field lay behind the Talent Hall, a hundred paces of grey flagstones ringed by stands that had last been full for the contest final. They were full again now. Word had run out of the pavilion faster than the page, and half the capital’s juniors had arrived to sit in them.

Helian Ba sat cross-legged on the stones with his axe across his knees. He was a big northerner with his black hair tied back in a leather cord and a sheepskin coat thrown back off one shoulder. The axe was nearly as long as he was tall, and its edge was so thin it was hard to see.

“You ate?” Helian Ba asked.

“I ate,” Shi Feng said, walking out onto the stones.

“Good,” Helian Ba said, standing up. “A man shouldn’t lose hungry.”

The stands laughed. Shi Feng smiled too, and drew the grey Sword with his right hand. His left arm stayed bound against his side.

“That’s the princess’s alchemist? The one from the ridge?”

“He only broke through three days ago!”

“Helian Ba has been at Shattering Void for two years. Early against early, but that’s not the same thing!”

“Look at his arm. He’s fighting one-handed.”

On the stands, Madam Liu Su had already opened her odds-book on her knee, and silver was changing hands along her row.

From the pavilion’s balcony above the field, Long Caili’s voice came down through her veil, cool and clear.

“If the flagstones break, the repairs come out of your fee,” Long Caili said.

“I’ll watch where I put my feet, Your Highness,” Shi Feng called back, turning toward Helian Ba.

Helian Ba didn’t wait for the laughter to finish. He came forward in two long strides and swung.

It was a plain cut from the right, shoulder high, and Shi Feng set the grey Sword in its path with the flat angled to turn it. Iron River Sword Art had turned heavier blows than this.

The axe’s edge touched the flat. Shi Feng felt nothing at all through the hilt. A breath later, the cloth of his right shoulder opened behind the sword, and a line of blood ran down his arm.

The Void-Splitting Axe split space along its edge. Whatever stood in that space was cut with it, and a sword held in front only meant the sword was cut too, from the inside of the space it stood in. The grey Sword was whole only because Shi Feng had felt the cold and pulled it back half an inch at the last moment.

A block wouldn’t protect him from that cut, Shi Feng thought. He had to clear the space the axe opened, not just turn the blade.

The second cut came low. Blood from his shoulder had run onto the flagstone under his heel, and Riverless Step took Shi Feng off the ground and set him down three paces to the left, and the axe passed through the air he’d left. Behind it, a thin black seam hung in the air for a breath and then closed. The flagstone under it had a straight cut through it from end to end.

“There goes the repair money!” someone in the stands shouted.

Shi Feng gave ground.

He gave it around the field in a slow circle, left and back, never more than three paces from the edge. Helian Ba followed him. The northerner didn’t rush. He stepped in with each cut, and each cut left a seam behind it that closed a breath later.

“Ten,” Ji Yuanhe said from the front of the stands. He’d started counting the exchanges without anyone asking him to.

At the fourteenth exchange, Shi Feng tried a counter. He let the axe pass and sent the Sunset-Splitting Sword after it, and red light poured down the blade at Helian Ba’s ribs. Helian Ba turned the axe back on its own line. The edge went through the red light, and the light split in two and went out.

“Is that all of it?” Helian Ba asked, without slowing down.

“That was most of it,” Shi Feng admitted, and went back to giving ground.

“Twenty,” Ji Yuanhe said.

By then Shi Feng had the rhythm.

Helian Ba swung in threes. A short cut, a short cut, then a long, heavy stroke down from above the head. The two short cuts herded a man. The heavy one finished him. After the heavy stroke, the seam it left was the longest, a full breath and a half, and the axe had to come back up through the space it had just opened.

Behind the swing, the seam was waiting. In front of it, the edge. There was only one place on the field the edge never went.

Inside it. Between the axe’s edge and the man holding it.

At the thirty-third exchange, a short cut came closer than the others, and the bandage on Shi Feng’s left forearm opened. The burned skin under it was black. The stands gasped. He didn’t look down.

“Thirty-five,” Ji Yuanhe said. His voice tightened when he saw the opened bandage.

“Shi Feng,” Helian Ba said, and for the first time he stopped. “You’ve been walking backwards for half an hour. When are you going to fight?”

Shi Feng’s heels were on the white line at the edge of the field. Behind him was the stand wall, and behind that, the gamblers.

“Soon,” Shi Feng said. “I’m still learning where you don’t cut.”

Helian Ba laughed, a big laugh from deep in his chest, and raised the axe.

“Forty,” Ji Yuanhe said.

Short cut. Short cut. Shi Feng let both pass a hair from his face.

Then Helian Ba lifted the axe high above his head for the heavy stroke, and Shi Feng stopped retreating.