Chương 7

The lightning around Chao Wei's hands snuffed out. A hush fell over the arena. The crackle and hum of his qi died, and the torchlight seemed to dim. The ground rumbled beneath Lodin's feet. A low sound at first, then deeper, stronger, a tremor that rattled the stone benches and set the torches swaying in their brackets. The sky darkened overhead. Blue-black clouds rolled in from nowhere, swallowed the stars, spiraled above the arena like a whirlpool turned on its side. Thunder split the night.

The sound hit Lodin's chest like a fist. A column of white fire fell from heaven and struck Chao Wei where he stood. The light swallowed everything. Lodin threw up his arm and the flash seared through his eyelids, burned spots into his vision. The thunder that followed shook the arena hard enough to crack stone and knock spectators from their seats. The heat washed over him in a wave. Screams rose from the crowd, voices lost beneath the roar. The column held for three heartbeats, four, five.

Then it vanished, and the sky cleared as abruptly as it had clouded over.. Lodin blinked. His vision swam. Smoke hung in the air. Chao Wei stood where he had stood before. Sweat ran down his face and dried blood crusted his lip, but his posture had changed. His spine was straight. His shoulders were square. The bruises that had purpled his jaw were gone. He was upright, and his eyes blazed blue-white in the torchlight. His lips moved.

The words came out small, a whisper meant for no one, but Lodin's ears caught them.

"I've been trying to break through for seventeen years..." Lodin watched Chao Wei try to make it make sense.

"You wanna keep going?" Chao Wei stared at him, wild-eyed. His chest rose and fell with quick, heavy breaths. Dried blood crusted his upper lip and chin, and red-brown smears marked his torn robes where he had wiped his hands. But the bruises that had purpled his jaw moments ago had faded, his split lip had sealed. The breakthrough mended what Lodin's fists had broken. Chao Wei's bloodstained grin was a mirror of Lodin's.

"Yes." Wei launched himself forward, and his foot struck the concrete with a crack that shook dust from the torch brackets. Wind ripped across Lodin's face. The force stung his eyes and tugged at his hair, and by the time he registered the motion Chao Wei was already behind him, a few feet past his mark. The man's heels scraped stone as he fought to arrest momentum his legs had never produced before. Lodin's pulse quickened. He turned to face Chao Wei, and his grin grew wider. Chao Wei's jaw tightened.

He reset his stance, coiled his legs, and came again. The air cracked in the wake of his knuckles. Chao Wei's fist shot past Lodin's ribs before he could check it, close enough to tug at his shirt, and his momentum pitched him forward into empty space. Lodin stepped aside and let him pass. The third attempt came closer. Chao Wei's hook would have torn Lodin's head from his shoulders, but the blow passed behind his skull by a hand's width.

The force of the miss spun Chao Wei a quarter turn, and he caught himself with a snarl trapped behind his teeth. Lodin waited. A body remade in an instant needed time to learn its new strength. Wei shuffled on the fractured stone, each step wider than it needed to be. His shoulders rose and fell too fast, every muscle taut with force his body had never carried. The fourth strike came low, a sweep aimed at Lodin's ankles. He hopped it and the follow-up kick sailed a foot above his ducked head.

The fifth was a palm strike that stopped six inches from Lodin's nose. Chao Wei was over-correcting in the wrong direction. But the next came closer. And the next closer still, each blow faster than anything from the first round, each miss narrower than the one before. At the edge of his vision, the crowd had gone still. Their heads no longer tracked the exchanges. Their eyes swept back and forth across the arena, searched for shapes they could not find.

What Lodin and Wei saw as exchanges, strikes and blocks and evasions and counters, the audience saw as a blur. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Chao Wei found his range on the eighth strike. His hook clipped Lodin's jaw. A clean shot, the first Chao Wei had landed since his breakthrough. Heat bloomed across his cheek and ran down through his neck. His teeth clacked together.

The taste of copper touched his tongue, and his head rocked a quarter inch before he caught it. He rolled his jaw and felt the bone settle. The sound of the crowd's roar crashed over the arena like a wave. Chao Wei stood where he had skidded to a halt, chest heaving, and an exultant grin split his bloodied face. His indignation over Lodin's insults to the Divine Gale Sect appeared to have been at least temporarily forgotten. Wei threw a wheel kick charged with air qi, and the force took his body aloft.

A second kick carried him higher. A third higher still. At the apex he raised a flattened hand, wreathed it in lightning, and drove himself back to earth like a spear hurled from heaven. The stone cracked under the edge of his hand, and there was a sound like rolling thunder. Wei rose from the crater and launched himself, his fist swept up in a rising punch that trailed a comet's tail of lightning.

Before it reached full extension he pivoted into a spinning backfist wreathed in compressed air that screamed as it cut the space. His foot came around in a turning side kick that left a blue-white arc hanging in the air like a scar. He planted and threw a straight palm, and the air compressed before it and shot forward in a visible ripple that shattered a torch bracket twenty feet away. He dropped low and swept, and lightning crackled along the stone in the wake of his leg.

He rose with a knee strike that split the air with a thunderclap. He followed with an elbow, then a headbutt, then a hammerfist that cratered the ground where it landed. His hands blurred, trailing sparks and thunder. Each one shook the arena. His feet never stopped moving. His body spun and twisted and leaped and struck, a storm of limbs and lightning, faster and stronger and wilder than anything he had ever produced before.

Lodin slipped and a punch passed his ear, close enough for the lightning to sting his skin. He leaned back and the backfist cut the air an inch from his nose. He tilted his head and the crescent kick grazed his temple, left a line of heat across his scalp. His feet moved no more than they had to, an inch here, two inches there. His hands rose to meet strikes and turned them aside with just enough force to change their paths and no more.

The hammerfist that would have cratered his skull glanced off his palm and struck stone instead. The knee that would have caved his ribs scraped past his hip. A palm strike hissed toward his sternum. Lodin rolled his chest and the heel of Wei's hand grazed his collarbone. The lightning left a hot trail across his skin that faded before it stung. Wei's elbow followed on the same line, aimed at the hollow of his throat, and Lodin tucked his chin and dipped, let it whoosh over the top of his head.

The stone beneath his feet had gone slick. Sweat, dust, fragments of shattered rock ground to powder under their soles. The world went quiet behind Lodin's eyes. His breath came slow and even. His shoulders were loose, his jaw unclenched. His pulse beat low and steady in his throat. The heat from Wei's lightning still clung to his skin, but it felt distant, like warmth from a fire in another room. There was no fear in him, no urgency.

Only a calm enjoyment, a relaxed focus that let him handle the next move, deflection, evasion. All to watch the new Chao Wei in action. He'd never been the cause of someone's advancement before. It was a nice feeling. Like watching a child who had just discovered his legs could run. Every strike carried more power, force, speed and qi than it needed, as if Wei were doing so simply to experience how much deeper his reserves of power were in his new state.

Wei threw techniques he had probably drilled for years, but now they came out bigger, faster, wrapped in lightning and thunder, and the joy on his face was plain to see. Lodin remembered that feeling. The first time his strength exceeded his intent. It had come after taking a very different path, but it had come nonetheless. Lodin stepped off a wheel kick and took another step back. Wei's breath came ragged.

His shoulders had dropped a half inch since the last exchange, and the lightning around his fists had dimmed subtly, from white to pale blue. He was still fast and dangerous, but he'd drank deeply of his new reserves. The crowd had gone silent again. Lodin could hear the crackle of the torches and the scrape of Wei's boots on fractured stone. He raised his hand, palm open, fingers spread. Chao Wei stopped mid-stride.

Sweat ran down his face and dripped from his chin, and his breath came in deep pulls that swelled his chest and emptied it again. Lightning still crackled around his fists, reluctant to fade, threads of blue-white current that jumped between his knuckles and cast sharp shadows on the fractured stone beneath him.

"Got an idea," Lodin said, with a grin.

"Put everything you've got into one single blow. I won't block, parry or dodge. If I'm still standing afterward, you have to take a shot from me." Chao Wei's eyes narrowed. A slow smile spread across his face.

"Your funeral," he said. He stepped back and planted his feet wide, knees bent deeply, back straight. His hands came together before his chest, palms cupped around empty air, and lightning began to gather between them. The current flickered to life between his fingers, and it began as wispy filaments of blue-white that jumped from knuckle to knuckle. The filaments found each other, braided together, thickened into ribbons that crackled and spat.

Then the ribbons wound tighter and became ropes, and the air between his palms compressed until it shimmered like a mirage, like the air above a forge at full burn. Chao Wei drew a breath and pulled deeper. The ropes of lightning thickened and brightened. The hum that filled the arena rose in pitch and became a whine that set teeth on edge. His robes rippled in the wind, the veins in his forearms bulged, traced with pale light that pulsed beneath his skin.

The cables of lightning collapsed into a single point between his palms, a blazing sphere of compressed qi no larger than a fingernail. It burned too bright to look at. The whine became a scream. The stone beneath his feet cracked and blackened. Spectators in the front row scrambled backward, hands raised to shield their faces from the glare. Air qi joined the lightning. It spun around the sun-like nucleus in a tight spiral, a vortex that pulled dust and debris from the fractured arena floor.

The spiral widened, accelerated, became a screaming funnel that stretched from Chao Wei's cupped hands to the darkened sky above. Loose stones lifted from the ground. A torch tore free from its bracket and vanished into the whirlwind. Chao Wei, Chief Outer Disciple of the Divine Gale Sect laughed, and a bloodstained grin spread across his face. The power in his hands coalesced into a point no larger than a marble. And he thrust his hands forward and released it.