Chương 134: Death in the Arena, I

The instant that the match began, Wu Hao had already spun his spear around. He pushed it full of qi, allowing it to suffuse both the spear and the arrays that he'd carved along its length. Then he pushed qi to his feet. Two seconds after the start had been called, he was soaring up high above the group, turning in mid air as he sought out a spot to land.

The group that had tried to taunt him earlier was still looking to where he'd been, but a few of them had already spotted him, and they were raising their fists and their weapons, pointing, tensing. He landed on the first man, stomping onto his shoulders, qi flashing to his feet again as it pooled while his spear spun and smashed the man over the head. This was the Weeding Iron Spear Art of the Earth tier.

Even as he was falling, though, Wu Hao had unleashed the qi again and erupted into a blurring step that took him over the head of another man who only managed to react by swinging his sword through the space where Wu Hao had been almost an entire second ago.

The next man got the butt of the spear driven into his stomach with all the force that had carried Wu Hao through the air, bending him double and pushing him back into the crush, which filled with cries of pain and confusion as feet were suddenly trampled and bodies slammed into each other. Wu Hao's speartip lashed out, carving a long furrow into the man's chest. He fell back and to the ground, where confused feet slammed into his head.

Another whirling, spinning step took Wu Hao out of the path of the charge from the bully who'd tried to taunt him, whose sword slammed into the stone arena floor with a loud thud. Wu Hao pivoted back, spear moving in concert with him as he activated the qi that had pooled in the arrays on his spear and thrust out. The spear in his hands shot forward like a living thing, impaling the bully before he could so much as get his sword back up again.

He stared with wide eyes as the sword clattered to the ground, hands flying to the wound in his belly. Wu Hao twisted his spear, drew it back, and was gone again before his opponent had even had a chance to slump to the ground as his hands filled with blood. He hadn't killed him outright, due to there being a rule against that, but it was a decent wound. He flashed through the crowd - not fleeing, just looking for more targets.

He heard the crackle of techniques, the mixing and muddying and indistinct sensations of qi being used. One particular roar of qi reached him as he was about to crush another weakling, though, and he held his spear up in a quick block. The blast of qi crashed against the steel of his spear tip and left razor-thin cracks along its edges, but Wu Hao himself was unharmed. Meeting his eyes from nearby was the pair of martial artists - the man and his woman.

The man's fists were extended and his qi still swirled around him, the same qi that Wu Hao had just blocked. Wu Hao grinned, set his spear, and advanced. He launched himself high up into the air, watching the woman's eyes track him and whispering into her partner's ears, who answered with a grunt and whose fists rose to target Wu Hao's movements through the air. In response, Wu Hao let his qi rush through one of the arrays that he'd carved into the length of his spear.

Suddenly it weighed twice, even three times as much, and he sunk to the ground, avoiding the blast of qi that screamed through the air where he'd been. Landing in a crouch, he bounded forward, slinging around one of the men who stumbled back to avoid somebody else's punch, before pouncing like a cat at the man he'd just targeted. Fists crossed, he met Wu Hao's charge with one of his own. Qi surged through their bodies and Wu Hao's spear met the man's fists, the steel slamming against toughened, scarred flesh.

A better class of opponent, this one. Best to use something better than an Earth-tier art. Wu Hao stepped back, avoiding another strike that could have taken his head off if he'd let it. He spun around, centering his qi in the same breath as he made it flood towards his spear, raised it above his head, and activating the weighting array again. Then he spoke again.

"One Shot Spear Art," Wu Hao spoke, while the man's fist was still being pulled back from the crater it'd driven into the ground.

"Skull Crusher." His spear came down like a blacksmith's hammer, cracking into his opponent's shoulder with enough force that the man was thrown to the ground and bounced, rolling and whirling, crashing into another contestant as he went and tangling hopelessly in his legs. From the state of his arm as he landed, something had very obviously broken, though the sound alone could have told everyone that. Wu Hao moved forward, ready to finish this.

But the man's partner stood in front of him, her lip quivering, and his attention was on her for just long enough that his opponent managed to activate a movement technique that sent him crashing to the ground outside the raised arena. Then she, too, jumped off from the stage, disqualifying herself before he'd even have a chance to attack her. Shame, but he understood. More and more people were being cleared off the stage.

Of the people he'd paid attention to, the boy with the sword was sitting on the ground below, nursing his wrist. The old man was glaring daggers at Wu Hao while his partner tried to get the attention of a nearby doctor, not that there was one. That left him and the tall man as the main contestants, he thought. The flickers of qi had mostly settled - the frantic, chaotic bursts had mostly fallen away as the rabble was cleared. Now what remained was more tightly regimented, kept under better control.

Wu Hao gripped his spear lightly, staring at the largest group remaining. That was the group of guards, and they were sweeping the arena methodically, pushing out people by ganging up on them. An older brawler with a large burn scar running up his arm took a swipe at a group of two, and while one of the guards took the hit with a muffled groan, the other guard struck out with his large club, smacking the brawler on the head. He went down, collapsing into a heap, and was summmarily pushed out of the arena.

In that way, a few more of them were cleared out, until all that remained was a couple of stragglers who had bunched up near one end of the arena and looked desperate, the group of guards, and of course Wu Hao himself. With a roar, the guards charged at the stragglers, leaving behind that single enormous man. Tall though he was, his height made him look lanky, especially for his size, contrasting oddly with his wide face.

His fists were raised into a boxer's stance, and cloth had been wrapped around his fists, with bracers strapped to each forearm that Wu Hao could have comfortably fit a leg inside. He didn't bear any sort of identification, carried no more pins than the other men around him that could mark him as a commander. He was also staring directly at Wu Hao, his yellowish teeth curling up into a grin as he set a first ponderous step, then started accelerating.

The idea, Wu Hao thought clinically, was probably to finish off the stragglers first while the big man either distracted him or beat him into wonton stuffing. When the men got back they'd surround him in either case and send him off, at which point he imagined they'd all surrender, leaving only the man they'd picked as the pre-arranged winner. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. It was a good plan, he had to admit.

He allowed more of that increasingly familiar pride to run through him, stoking his qi until it roared in his ears approvingly. The problem was that the plan had run into him. He let qi slip to his feet, vanishing into a blur of movement that deposited him two steps from the big man's charge, and then braced himself.

Another movement technique sent him soaring high into the air, hands snaking around to the correct position for his next move, but before he could activate it, the tall guard was already lashing out with a palm strike.

"Frond Palm Art," the tall guard's surprisingly reedy voice ground out.

"Fanning Flames." Wu Hao pushed himself away, soaring up higher as he activated the lightening function carved into his spear, the near-exact mirror of the array that made it weigh more, and gained just a few more inches, combined with another gust of qi to his feet. He let the qi flood away the next instant, pulling it back just so - not enough to reabsorb, enough to activate another array.

Failing to adjust to his new position, the grasping fingers of his opponent's hand were just a smidge shy of actually being able to strike Wu Hao. Instead, guiding his spear into the gap between the man's thumb and pointer finger, Wu Hao activated the weight function of his spear again and pushed with all of the weight he could muster, until there was a loud crack as the man's thumb simply gave way.

The hand jerked away instinctively as a sharp cry of pain filled the air but Wu Hao pulled himself forward with his spear, pushing himself further forward still with another application of his qi, and headbutted the tall guard straight in the nose.

There was a short moment in which their eyes met, the tall guard's the picture of pained confusion as he wondered what the hell had just happened, and then Wu Hao landed, spun, and drove the butt of his spear into the tall man's chest, bending him double and sending him rolling ass-over-head until he crashed into the ground just outside the arena. No killing today, he reminded himself. Another sharp intake of breath. Wu Hao turned.

One of the last stragglers had turned to him, hope in both his normal eye and the one that had been punched swollen, before he was finally just pushed off the stage. It had cost the guards, though, and in their haste to finish off the last of their opponents they'd lost a few men, so that there were only four of them left.

"You're gonna pay for that," the lead guard growled, turning to Wu Hao. He bore the extra pins of command, Wu Hao now saw, though he didn't seem to be any better of a martial artist, just going off his qi. He wasn't any more than a single step into the third-grade, much like the others.

"I doubt it," Wu Hao responded, channeling a bit of Wang Bin. Swelling, reddening, the lead guard barked an order at his men to charge and then followed himself, swinging a truncheon that could do some nasty damage. Wu Hao met them halfway, spear already moving as the Dragon Gate Ascending Art deposited him just in the right place, and his qi roaring in his ears. His blood was up and he lost himself in the haze of fighting.

Every thud as his spear slammed into someone, every whisper of movement in his senses that sent him whirling around, every rasp of the polished metal of his spearhead rending into flesh and leaving wounds - it felt like coming home. When it was done, Wu Hao breathed in, breathed out, felt the smile straining at the edges of his lips. It had been too long since he'd properly cut loose. There was a real pleasure in simply moving that no puzzle could ever match.

The crowd's roars came to him as the buzz from the fight itself faded. He cocked his head, though he could hear them all clearly.

"Cheating bastard!" one of them roared.

"You're not a third-grade at all!"

"Get his ass, ref!" another housewife screamed, red in the face, pointing at him.

"That little shit took out my husband! He's cheating, I know it!" Wu Hao smiled at them each, in turn, just to be petty, and inclined his head the way he'd heard that stage actors did. This enraged them further, and that housewife whipped her arm back to throw the bottle of wine that looked very much empty. She threw - it arced - it crashed into a tight-bound scream of qi, exploding and showering everyone caught beneath it on the stage with dregs of wine and powdered ceramic, pulverized by the blow that had hit it.

"Enough!" the main official boomed. He stormed up the stage, not looking much happier at the victory than the audience did, but as he stomped up to Wu Hao, his qi was easy to read. More than anything his anger seemed directed at the audience, and though there was a definite, shared undercurrent at how the hell Wu Hao had won, it was easily swallowed up by the larger sense of disgust at the way the audience was acting out.

"You will stop that," he roared, his throat bulging with repeated loops of qi as his voice rang out, "or you will be stopped, do I make myself clear?" The crowd stopped, buffetted by the wall of sound that had just punched up against them. A few whimpered, the housewife went from red as a grape to pale as a silkworm, and the others who had all shouted at the conclusion looked like they'd swallowed flies.

Wu Hao wanted to add something but the official shot him a glance when Wu Hao shifted on his feet, so instead he shrugged. The qi left the man's voice, and he spoke in a whisper to Wu Hao, in a complete contrast to his earlier roaring.

"Don't say anything," he hissed.

"Don't stir any shit. You're going to get your prize, so just shut up." Nothing to say to that except to nod, Wu Hao supposed.

"Everyone else off the stage!" the official commanded. Some of Wu Hao's opponents had to be helped off the stage, limping down the stairs with miserable looks on their faces, but after the first time where he waved one of them off and got the entire crowd to glare at him, he shrugged again and stopped it. There was a quick ceremony. A junior official, his hat sitting off-kilter on his head, hurried up the stage and presented a large scroll to Wu Hao.

He read it quickly, while for the benefit of the crowd and possible illiterate winners, the junior official ran through the main points: the sum of money, the right to access the main tournament, and the honor that came with being able to participate. The main official harrumphed when it was over, handed the scroll in a pompous manner to Wu Hao, and then fixed his beady eyes on Wu Hao. His voice ringing out loudly for the crowd, he spoke.

"Well, Young Hero Hao Wu, will you forfeit your prize and participate in the Winter Solstice Festival Tournament?" Now, finally, came the hard part. The fun part, he thought, already looking forward to meeting other martial artists. Real martial artists, not the outcasts that he'd faced today. This hadn't been more than a warmup.

"Of course."