Chapter 921 — Glacier-Splitting Axe

CHAPTER 921

Glacier-Splitting Axe

The Helian had swept a circle on the lake two hundred paces across, and the ice inside it was black and clear enough to see the water moving underneath.

Three villages had come to watch. They stood on the shore in their sheepskins, thousands of them, with children on their fathers’ shoulders and old men on sledges. The Helian stood in front of the Hold with their drums. Qin Wuyan stood alone at the edge of the swept circle, and Pang Yue stood a little way along the shore, with his arms folded and his mourning band on his sleeve.

Helian Zhan walked out to the centre of the ice with his axe on his shoulder.

It was shorter than Helian Ba’s and much heavier, with a broad blade the colour of deep ice. When he set it down, frost spread out from the edge across the ice in a ring.

“Twelfth against thirteenth!” someone shouted from the shore.

“The heir’s late Shattering Void! The southerner’s only mid!”

“Zhan! Zhan! Zhan!”

The chant spread along the shore until all three villages were shouting it.

“Ready?” Helian Zhan asked.

“Ready,” Shi Feng said, and drew the grey Sword.

Helian Zhan stepped in and cut sideways.

The axe split the air, and it split the space behind the air. A rift opened along the line of the cut, black and thin. It didn’t close. Frost raced along its edges and froze it open, and then it stood there on the ice, a sheet of frozen void taller than a man and five paces long, white at the edges and black in the middle.

Shi Feng had stepped back from the cut. The end of his sleeve had brushed the edge of the frozen rift as it formed. The cloth fell off, cut clean.

Glacier-Splitting Axe. Each rift stayed open, and even its edge could cut him. Shi Feng couldn’t afford to brush another one.

Helian Zhan didn’t wait. Score, score, split. Two light cuts and one heavy one, and three more walls of frozen void stood on the ice, one on either side of Shi Feng and one behind. He slipped out through the only gap, and Helian Zhan was already there to meet him with the next cut.

Shi Feng reached for Void-Crossing Step, to cross through a fold of space past the walls.

The fold wouldn’t open. The frozen rifts were space itself, cut and held. There was nothing on the other side of them for his step to reach.

Shi Feng chose to retreat while he studied the frozen rifts.

He went back and to the left, then back again. Helian Zhan followed him across the ice without hurrying, and with every three strokes there were three more walls. By the twentieth exchange the swept circle was a maze of standing white edges. By the thirtieth there was very little of it left to stand on.

A wall caught Shi Feng’s right thigh as he turned, and opened it to the bone. He kept moving. Another took a strip of skin off his cheek. His blood fell on the black ice and froze there in red drops.

“He can’t get near him!”

“He’s running out of lake!”

“A strong dragon can’t crush the local snake!”

Shi Feng watched Helian Zhan’s shoulder.

Score, score, split. Helian Ba had been right. The heir changed the order, and the heavy cut came first, or second, or last, but the right shoulder dropped half a finger before the heavy one every time. Shi Feng saw the drop and went right, and the heavy cut came down on his left and made a wall so close that he felt its cold on his ear.

Reading the shoulder let him avoid the heavy strokes. Shi Feng was frustrated. He needed a way through before the heir trapped him completely.

He looked down instead.

The walls were standing on the lake ice. Their bottom edges were frozen into it. Under the ice was the lake.

Shi Feng drew flame into his left palm, folded it back on itself and struck it with the second fold. Then he laid his palm flat on the ice at the foot of the nearest wall.

The Second Anvil Fire beat once into the ice, deep and heavy.

The ice melted. It didn’t crack. It turned to water all at once in a long line under the wall’s edge, and the wall had nothing left to stand on. It tipped, slowly, and slid down into the black water of the lake. The water closed over it.

The shore went silent.

Shi Feng ran along the line of walls with his palm low and struck the fire again, and again. Each beat melted the ice under another wall’s foot, and each wall tipped and dropped into the lake. Meltwater spread across the ice in sheets, rushing and swirling into the holes.

He ran on it.

Riverless Step was made for moving water. The meltwater was moving fast, pouring toward the holes, and he went with it at its own speed and faster. Twelve walls went into the lake one after another. The maze opened up in front of him, and suddenly there was a clear wet path across the ice, straight to Helian Zhan.

“He’s sinking them!”

“He’s walking on the melt! He’s walking on running water!”

“Is that a southern art? What kind of southern art is that?”

“…”

Helian Ba’s voice came across the ice above all of them.

“Zhan! He’s put your ice in the lake!” Helian Ba bellowed. “Do something!”

Helian Zhan stood in the middle of the open ice with his axe held low, and for the first time he smiled.

“Good,” Helian Zhan said.

He raised the axe straight up over his head with both hands.

All over the swept circle, every wall that was still standing began to shake. Shi Feng had sunk twelve. More than thirty were left, and every one of them was humming.

He started toward the heir along the wet path. The nearest wall lurched sideways along its own cut line, and its white edge brushed his left forearm.

The cold went into the flesh at once. In one breath his left arm turned white from the fingers to the elbow, and the fingers wouldn’t close.

“Ten Thousand Li Avalanche,” Helian Zhan said.

Every frozen wall on the lake tipped inward at once, toward the one place where Shi Feng was standing, and Helian Zhan brought the axe down.