Chapter 943 — Wolf-Howl Spear

CHAPTER 943

Wolf-Howl Spear

Zhangsun Lie took his place at the east edge of the square, and Shi Feng took the west.

Forty paces of packed snow lay between them, pressed flat and hard by Qin Wuyan’s pressure. Torches burned along the courtyard walls. The whole Zhangsun clan stood on the galleries above, and the patriarch had been carried out in his furs to a chair under the eaves with a wine jar in his lap.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword from his ring and held it low.

“Late Shattering Void,” Zhangsun Lie said, and let his aura out fully. It came across the yard hot and heavy, and the torches leaned away from it. “So you know what you’re measuring.”

“Mid Shattering Void,” Shi Feng said. “I know the gap. Come.”

Zhangsun Lie laughed and came.

He crossed twenty paces in three strides, and the spear came ahead of him in a straight thrust at Shi Feng’s chest. A breath before the steel arrived, the howl did. It came off the spearhead long and rising, and the air in front of it shook.

Shi Feng stepped into Void-Crossing Step.

At Major Success the step folded space so that one place touched another, and he crossed between them without walking. He aimed the fold for a point three paces behind the heir’s left shoulder. The fold opened.

Then the howl reached it.

The far end of the fold shook, and Shi Feng came out a hand’s breadth from where he’d aimed, with his weight on the wrong foot. The spear was already there. He caught it on the grey Sword’s flat and was thrown back three paces through the snow. His right arm went numb to the elbow.

The galleries roared.

“He missed his own step!”

“That’s the Wolf-Howl Spear! It shakes space! You can’t fold against it!”

“Mid against late. What did he expect?”

Shi Feng shook the feeling back into his arm and understood. A fold needed still space at both ends. The howl didn’t strike his body at all. It struck the space around him and kept it trembling, so wherever he folded to, the far end moved before he got there.

Zhangsun Lie spun the spear once over his head, and the howl rose again and didn’t stop.

“It doesn’t only sound when I thrust, Master Shi,” Zhangsun Lie said cheerfully. “It sounds as long as I’m turning it.”

He came again, and Shi Feng didn’t try to fold.

He went in on foot instead, low and fast across the snow, to get inside the spear’s reach where a long weapon couldn’t turn. Zhangsun Lie had fought sword users all his life. He gave ground in a half-circle and kept the spearhead between them, and when Shi Feng closed to six paces, the shaft came round. Shi Feng twisted. The tip opened his robe across the ribs and the skin under it, a hand’s length, and a line of blood ran down into his belt.

“First cut to the Zhangsun!”

“Seventeenth over twelfth! The Tianji printed it wrong!”

At the edge of the line Pan Shouren was wringing his hands.

“Senior,” Pan Shouren said to Qin Wuyan in a panic. “He saved the patriarch this morning! Shouldn’t someone stop this?”

“It is his fight,” Qin Wuyan said, and didn’t move.

Shi Feng went in again, and again. Every time he closed to six paces, the shaft came round and drove him back to ten.

The heir’s spear was heavier than it looked, and so was the man. Each time Shi Feng blocked, late Shattering Void qi came up through the shaft into his sword. Each block cost him more than the last.

Zhangsun Lie leapt.

He went up off the snow higher than the torches, turned in the air, and came down with the spear driving straight at Shi Feng from above with all his weight behind it. The howl came down with it at full strength, and the whole square shook. Snow jumped off the packed floor.

Shi Feng tried a fold to the right, testing whether he could escape the howl’s reach before the spear landed. He misjudged it. The fold opened, wobbled under the howl and set him down a hand’s breadth short, exactly where the spear was coming.

The spear took him in the left shoulder.

It went in under the collarbone, through the same place Gou Ran’s palm had opened at Snow Wolf Pass, and out the back. The force of it drove him back across the snow, his heels cutting two furrows, until one heel touched Qin Wuyan’s line. Pain went down his whole left side, and the old bone-rot cold in the shoulder woke up and bit.

The galleries went wild.

“Zhangsun! Zhangsun!”

“He’s at the line! One more step and he’s out!”

“Twice he’s stepped through space, and twice he’s come out on the spear!”

“…”

On his chair under the eaves, the patriarch raised his wine jar and bellowed something nobody could hear. Pan Shouren had both hands over his mouth.

Shi Feng stood with the spear through his shoulder and the heir’s weight leaning on the far end of it. Down the length of the shaft, Zhangsun Lie’s face was wet with sweat. The howl was still coming off the spearhead behind his back, rising and falling.

He didn’t look at the heir. He looked down at his own right sleeve.

The cloth was shivering. The howl was qi, carried on the air in waves, and wherever the air took it, the cloth shook a breath before the space did. When the howl dipped, the sleeve went still.

With his right thumb, Shi Feng pulled loose the cord at his right wrist, and the sleeve fell open.