Chapter 950 — The Drag

CHAPTER 950

The Drag

Every step he took, the claw would catch. So Shi Feng stopped stepping away.

He stood in the snow by the frozen stream with the grey Sword low in his right hand. Blood ran down his back and soaked into his belt. The frost in the wound was still coming, and he was still swallowing it. Each breath tasted of iron and ice.

Que Han stood thirty paces up the stream. The two hunters stood to the left and right with their rifts open beside them, waiting for him to fold.

He didn’t fold. He waited too.

“Master Shi has stopped running,” Que Han said. “Good. Then I’ll fetch him.”

He closed the claw in the air.

The five grey lines tore out across the stream and hooked into the space around Shi Feng’s body. Then Que Han pulled, and the whole patch of space Shi Feng stood in began to slide toward the claw.

This time Shi Feng felt it clearly. When the claw dragged, space didn’t break. It moved. It ran toward Que Han’s hand in a current thirty paces long, pulling everything on it toward the iron hooks.

Riverless Step at Perfection walked on anything that flowed.

Shi Feng put his foot on the current.

He didn’t fight the drag. He ran with it. The current Que Han had made carried him up the stream twice as fast as the claw meant to pull him, across the ice in a straight white line. Que Han braced to drag him in. Shi Feng arrived early on his left, inside the claw’s reach.

Que Han’s narrow face went blank.

The claw was on his right hand. Shi Feng was on his left, too close for the hooks to turn. The grey Sword went in under Que Han’s arm and opened him from the elbow to the armpit, and the deacon’s furs turned red.

Que Han screamed and threw himself backward. His real pressure tore loose as he went, and it wasn’t Deity Transformation at all. It was Shattering Void, mid stage at least, flaring out over the ice in a cold wave.

“Help me!” Que Han shouted. “Cut him!”

The hunter on the left reacted first. He opened the Hidden Door Cut beside Shi Feng’s right hip, low, and the hook-sword came through it at his ribs.

Every rift had two ends. One end was next to Shi Feng. The other end was next to the man holding the sword.

Shi Feng turned the grey Sword point down and let the Falling Star Sword drop.

He didn’t need height for it. At Minor Success the Falling Star Sword fell through anything in its way and kept its edge, and from where he stood the rift was right under his point. The stroke went down into the black slit, past the hook-sword coming the other way, and out of the far end.

The far end opened beside the hunter’s own chest.

The hunter looked down. The point of the grey Sword was standing out of his breastbone, coming out of his own door.

He fell forward into the snow, and the rift closed over the blade as Shi Feng pulled it back.

For a moment, nobody in the valley moved.

Que Han stood at the edge of the stream holding his arm, with blood running between his fingers. He looked at the dead hunter. He looked at the eastern ridge, where the Profound Heaven presence still sat, unmoving, and where Qin Wuyan had gone over. Then he looked at Shi Feng.

“You’re mid Shattering Void,” Que Han said. “You’re bleeding to the bone.”

“Yes,” Shi Feng said. “And you’re thinking about how long it takes an old man to walk back down a ridge.”

Que Han’s face twisted. He whistled once, sharply. The second hunter tore a rift beside him, and Que Han went into it without another word. The hunter followed him. The rift closed, and the white valley was empty except for the sledges, the dead man and the snow falling on him.

Shi Feng’s legs went out from under him.

He sat down hard on the ice. The wound in his back opened wider when he sat, and he felt the cold air on bare bone. The frost had stopped coming in. What was left in him he could swallow later.

The porters came out from behind the sledges one by one, very slowly.

“Are they gone? Are they really gone?”

“One of them’s dead! The bandit’s dead!”

“He put his sword into a hole in the air, and it came out of the bandit!”

“I saw it! I saw it with my own eyes!”

“Three of them, and he’s sitting here alive.”

“…”

Old Tie came over with his wolfskin hat in his hands. He looked at Shi Feng’s back and went pale.

“Honoured guest,” Old Tie said hoarsely. “Your back. I can see your bones.”

“Bind it first,” Shi Feng said. “Clean cloth and a needle. Can you bring them?”

Old Tie shouted, and three porters ran for the sledges. They brought cloth and a needle and a jar of sledge grease, which Shi Feng refused. They bound his back as tightly as they could while he sat on the ice and breathed.

“Old Tie,” Shi Feng said, when they’d finished. “The herbs?”

“Not one crate touched,” Old Tie said. “Not one.”

“Good,” Shi Feng said. “Get your people moving while the road’s clear.”

Old Tie nodded in relief and shouted for the porters to get the sledges moving.

On the eastern ridge, the Profound Heaven presence went out.

It didn’t move away or fade. One moment it was there, and the next it was simply gone. A little later, Qin Wuyan came back over the ridge and down the slope. He walked fast, for him, and there was something small and pale in his right hand.