Chapter 853 — Inside the Swing

CHAPTER 853

Inside the Swing

The axe came down.

Shi Feng didn’t step back, and he didn’t step aside. He stepped forward without crossing the ground in between.

Void-Crossing Step at Entry was a clumsy thing. It folded the space under one foot against the space a few paces ahead and let the foot fall through. There was no grace in it and no control past the first step, and the strain squeezed the breath from his cracked ribs. But the edge of the axe never touched the space it skipped.

His foot came down half a pace short of where he’d aimed, right against Helian Ba’s chest.

The heavy stroke finished behind him. The seam it opened ran down the field where Shi Feng had been standing, a long black line that cut the white boundary in two and stayed open for a breath and a half.

The stands went silent.

“He’s inside it!”

“Where did he come from? I didn’t see him cross!”

“…”

Helian Ba reacted faster than any of them. He drew the haft back across his chest in both hands, a bar of iron-wood between his body and Shi Feng’s sword, and shoved.

The shove lifted Shi Feng clean off his feet.

He let it. He went up and back with his left arm tucked in, over the black seam, and at the top of the rise he turned the grey Sword point-down.

Falling Star Sword wasn’t a cut. It was a drop. At the ridge he’d let it fall like a stone and hoped. This time he chose the place it would land: the haft, right between Helian Ba’s two hands, where the shove had left both arms locked out and stiff.

He fell.

Boom!

The grey Sword struck the haft with the full force of the drop. The iron-wood didn’t break, but Helian Ba’s grip did. His right hand tore loose. The haft slammed back into his own face, and the great axe swung out wide to his left, its edge pointing at nothing.

Shi Feng landed in front of him on one knee. The grey Sword’s point came to rest against Helian Ba’s collarbone and stopped there.

Neither of them moved.

Then Helian Ba laughed. There was blood on his teeth where the haft had hit him, and he laughed anyway, loud enough to shake dust off the stand roofs.

“Good!” Helian Ba said. “Good!”

He opened his left hand and let the axe fall. It rang on the cut flagstones.

“I said next time, when you had a void of your own,” Helian Ba said, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I didn’t think you’d use it to walk through my swing on the third day.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Shi Feng said, and lowered the sword. “There was nowhere else on the field you didn’t cut.”

The stands broke apart into noise.

“Three days at Shattering Void, and he beat Helian Ba!”

“Helian Ba is thirty-ninth on the Tianxing!”

“Three days apart, and you have to look at a man with new eyes.”

“I lost a hundred silver on the northerner…”

“…”

Madam Liu Su closed her odds-book with a snap, looking very pleased with herself. Down by the front row, Ji Yuanhe had stopped counting and was sitting with both hands on his knees, visibly relieved that all forty-one exchanges were over.

Helian Ba picked up his axe and laid it across his shoulder. Then he pulled the leather cord out of his hair and put it in Shi Feng’s hand.

“A tent, if you come north,” Helian Ba said. “A place at my fire. A call I’ll answer without being owed.”

The stands went quiet.

“The draw’s finished,” Helian Ba said. “I’m going home in spring. If you ever come north to the steppe, ask for the Helian tents. I’ll give you a sheep.”

“A whole sheep?” Shi Feng asked.

“A thin one,” Helian Ba said, and walked off the field laughing.

Shi Feng sat down on the edge of the stands. Now that the fight was over, everything hurt at once. His ribs, the opened shoulder, the black arm where the bandage hung loose. He took out the jar of burn salve from his sleeve and looked at it.

“Are you going to use that?” Ji Yuanhe asked, coming over.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said, opening it carefully. “Master Ji, help me reach the back of the arm.”

On the balcony above, Long Caili looked at the cut flagstones over her veil for a while. Then she went inside without saying anything about the repairs.

The Tianji Mansion’s new issue came out two days later.

A paper-seller cried it at the gate of the Phoenix Tail Pavilion’s training field, where workmen were levering up broken flagstones. On the list of the Hundred Famed Tianxing, the name at thirty-eighth had changed.

Thirty-eighth. Shi Feng. One place above Helian Ba.

The workmen didn’t buy a copy. The paper-seller didn’t stay long.

That same morning, in the pavilion garden, the servants were sweeping the paths when the door of the east wing opened.

A small woman with grey hair pinned flat came out into the sunlight on her own two feet. Nobody in the Phoenix Tail Pavilion had seen her standing in half a year.

The servant with the broom dropped it.