As Qin Yan's spear drew near, The Yellow Fox attempted to hold him at bay with the sharpened end of her improvised weapon. But as she balanced on the bamboo stalks, her footing proved too volatile to carry out her intentions, and it was trivial for the king to slip right past her feeble threats.
He jabbed out towards her stomach. The masked woman launched herself to the side with unexpected dynamism, like she had been shot out of a sling. She evaded the blow, and even kept some control of her aerial trajectory by swinging around the poles. Qin Yan's blows struggled to reach her as she spun around the grove like a monkey. Instead of a king, Qin Yan resembled a fisherman struggling to skewer a deft little koi swimming around a pond.
But though it may have bordered on the amusing to an outsider peering in, both combatants knew that this was not a winning position. Beneath her fox mask, she was sweating bullets as she struggled for her life with every last cell, her mind racing for a plan. The fight would not even truly begin unless she first got out from underneath him.
But the only thought that came to her was the countermeasure to her own antics. And to her dread, Qin Yan came up with that same idea.
He twirled his spear in a deadly whirlwind. One by one the bamboo stalks began to fall down, and with them, the surfaces that had been preserving her life. To continue maneuvering along a lower point of the bamboo forest would require preparation that she had simply not performed. With realistic options for defense all but taken away from her, offense and desperation were all that remained.
The Yellow Fox thrust her crude spear at the king's foot. She kicked the top of the shortened piece of bamboo behind her with her heel, to provide herself with maybe a tenth of a proper foothold and gift herself with a drop of momentum. Though in her clumsy position the very idea seemed preposterous, the move had by some miracle granted her the boost she sought, and her edge was delivered forth with unexpectedly lethal speed.
With his spear still chopping down bamboo, Qin Yan lacked the means to repel the strike. It was his fortune that his intuition was as sharp as it was; her strike, which, having come from a foe that was entirely airborne and seemed like it should have no power behind it, he inexplicably recognized as a threat. He moved his foot out of the way. On such perilous ground, even something so trivial involved a huge commitment of repositioning oneself onto an entirely different stalk, which bought the Yellow Fox the moments necessary to save her life.
With her free hand she had gripped the tip of a bamboo pole, and in a feat of immense strength, hurled herself up into the air with just her arm. When she landed with each foot on a stalk of bamboo, they bent again, but hardly by much. She had now returned to being face to face with her foe, or at least as closely as their chosen fighting ground had allowed, for the naturally grown bamboo poles varied in height even before Qin Yan had shortened a number of them.
As Qin Yan observed, his eyes widened. "You..." He began, but failed to muster up the words. The origin of the sudden momentum she had displayed a moment ago was beginning to dawn on him, but he found it difficult to accept.
"Sorry about that. We can now begin." Audaciously, the Yellow Fox had suddenly gone on the offensive. She crossed the distance between them in the blink of an eye, and her lone thrust was reinforced by the renowned footwork that Qin Yan had been bragging about. Qin Yan ducked out of the way and struck back thrice, but two of his attacks met with nothing but air, while his last attack, having had cut through another piece of bamboo the Yellow Fox was using for her footing, hadn't had the desired effect of challenging her balance; the severed piece failed to even detach from the stem until the Fox had jumped away.
As they parted, Qin Yan spoke with furrowed brows. "I don't understand. Were you just pretending? You knew how to use the Sky Dancing Steps all along?"
The Yellow Fox now balanced on a single foot, just like Qin Yan. The bamboo hadn't curved even slightly beneath her weight. The pole even swayed gently in the wind.
"Though at first I thought to respect that mask of yours," Qin Yan began. "I simply can't help but ask. Who are you, and what exactly is your purpose in coming here?"
High in the sky where their battle was taking place, a strong wind picked up. The Yellow Fox's white attire billowed in the gale; she resembled a ghost.
"This is a test of skill." She replied.
Qin Yan smiled, even as the chilly wind made him conscious of the sweat on the back of his neck. "I'd say that you have passed it stupendously. Surely there's no one in the entire world that would question your skills."
The Yellow Fox held her tongue. There was something about her silence that gave Qin Yan a dreadful feeling. His intuition screamed at him in tongues he was unable to comprehend, had never heard before.
As the Fox's hostility grew, Qin Yan stilled his drumming heart. They leaped at each other simultaneously, their figures flickering in and out of sight as they exchanged countless strikes, the only evidence of their trades being the frequent thumping of wood against wood, and the rare flash of deadly steel as it reflected the rays of morning sunlight.
The poles they were fighting on hadn't swayed at all.
Qin Yan's suspicions mounted as they continued to trade stances. "The first strike she performed on me was far more vicious than the ones she's peppering me with now. Why? What am I missing? Until I figure it out, I shouldn't fully commit either."
Inadvertently, during one exchange, they had both retreated at the same time, and the gap between them ended up bigger than they anticipated. Neither party desired to approach from this distance in fear of leaving themselves open to attack.
The Yellow Fox used this lull in the action to speak. "I would like to ask you something."
By now, all of the playfulness had been drained out of Qin Yan, and he answered with stern silence.
The Yellow Fox continued. "This meek attitude that you have adopted all of a sudden - and of course I'm talking about your martial arts - I've seen this once before, and I would like to know what causes it."
Qin Yan's brows rose. Even though they both knew they were holding back, their pace was still not something lesser fighters could keep up with. He wagered that even his sixth rank subordinates would have perished a few strikes in.
Qin Yan asked, "May I ask where the lady has seen it before?"
"When I fought a man named Deng Hong." She gave the information away freely. It seemed to hold little weight to her.
Qin Yan instantly disputed her words, "The Wuyi sect's master was killed by the poison of the Desolator of Life."
But even though he had proclaimed that with a great deal of confidence, he began to pale. The gears in his head were beginning to turn, giving loose shape to a disturbing theory.
He had, in fact, heard a report about a week ago that a man greatly resembling Cui Shen, the Desolator of Life, had been sighted in the lands of the Qin.
Moreover, he subconsciously leaped to the conclusion that Deng Hong's encounter with her had turned out fatal. As he had caught himself on this presumption, the grim reality of his current situation had truly struck him. His subconscious fears became quite conscious.
"No..." The Yellow Fox shook her head. "He wasn't poisoned. But I suppose I can see why someone might assume that. He died from a qi deviation." Perhaps realizing that she made his death sound incidental, she added, "That had been induced in him by me."
Her long fingers touched her mask.
"Qi deviation...?" Qin Yan mouthed the words. He had a hundred questions running through his mind, but had only managed to mumble just that lone phrase. Of course, he knew what the term meant. Any martial artist who had cultivated their internal energy to certain heights was in danger of injuring their own body with it; this was a blanket term for all such phenomena.
The Yellow Fox cocked her head. "It's a long story. How about you answer my question now?"
Qin Yan tightened the grip on his spear. A cold light glinted in his eye as he assumed a strange stance. The Yellow Fox took her branch into both hands, sensing sudden danger.
Qin Yan leaped towards her, his figure blurring atop the bamboo grove. He had to take an extra step to get around the area of shortened stalks that he had cut down earlier in pursuit of his elusive foe at the start of their fight. This provided the Yellow Fox with a brief moment before the attack came, so she twirled her improvised weapon, making a slash through the bamboo pole she was standing on. Even though she used the thick, half-blunt tip of her hastily sharpened branch to slice through, the cut had turned out so seamless and thin that the plant remained seemingly undisturbed.
Qin Yan jabbed his spear with exquisite form bordering on perfection. The air it had cut through heated up to the point it left a trail of thin smoke in its wake. The strike was swift enough to appear instantaneous; there was simply no avoiding it. And the power it carried was so enormous that even if one were to stay well beyond the reach of the spear, they would still not be safe as long as they existed within its direction.
The Yellow Fox blocked the strike by placing her branch in its path, as though she had been handling the world's slimmest shield. Despite the prodigious amounts of internal energy that she had channeled into the branch, Qin Yan's spear had effortlessly slid halfway into it at once. In the next instant, when the spearhead began to feel just a hint of resistance, the impact shook the grove with an immense shockwave. Realizing that her defense wouldn't hold, the woman slightly shifted her foot.
The upper piece of the bamboo that the Yellow Fox had previously cut through flew right off the stalk together with her, the power of the spear technique flinging her away. The forest crunched and snapped as she descended through it like a cannonball. It took her several seconds to regain her wits. The Yellow Fox's fall had suddenly slowed. She grabbed onto a piece of the tall grass, throwing herself back to the top.
Her balance remained unsteady for several moments. Though on the outside, she appeared unharmed, Qin Yan surmised that she had suffered an internal injury.
"You're the first to survive my Divine Thunder Lance." Qin Yan said. His confidence was coming back. "As a farewell gift to you, I suppose I might as well answer your question, just to send you off with less regrets. It's nothing complicated, really. When you're so obviously holding back and waiting for something, it puts people on their guard."
"Asking people..." The Yellow Fox began, her voice gurgling; Qin Yan surmised it to be blood. She swallowed heavily, and her tone normalized. "Just coming out and asking people to use their best technique on me feels like it would have the opposite effect."
"Well, I suppose you're correct. The truly experienced ones are somewhat prone to overthinking." Qin Yan shook his head.
"But going as hard as I can from the beginning and killing by accident would be even worse, wouldn't it?"
Qin Yan burst into laughter. "Even in your current state you still have the heart to be this arrogant! What an incredible woman you are. You barely survived the first one, and naturally I can perform this strike many times over."
The Yellow Fox continued as though she hadn't heard him. "So then what am I to do...? I have no idea what suddenly made you decide to use your strongest technique. If I keep relying on the unfathomable flights of fancy of you people, I'll get unlucky one day and spoil the results." She suddenly gasped. "It already happened once! What if I never find that beggar again...?"
Qin Yan seemed content to let her remain in her own little world, until she suddenly turned to him and asked, "That WAS your strongest technique, wasn't it?"
The king had only exhaled sharply in response. He assumed the stance of the Divine Thunder Lance, preparing himself to deliver the technique once more.
The Yellow Fox muttered, "Then we are done here."
She mirrored his stance.
Qin Yan chuckled. "Women always face death in the most interesting ways. But, you know, instead of a fox, you're acting more like a monkey, don't you think?"
His light attitude flowed smoothly into absolute focus.
The winds ceased. The air grew cold.
They both faded from sight simultaneously. They appeared again in range of each other's spears. Their attacks began in the same moment, and pursued identical paths. Inevitably, they had collided halfway to each other's hearts. As the fierce powers contained at the tips of their weapons collided, they erupted into a mighty blast. The end of the branch had chipped, though it only served to make the point narrower and sharper. They both channeled a drop of internal energy into the stalks they were balancing on, causing those two poles to be the only ones to remain upright in the sweeping shockwave.
The Yellow Fox had solidified her bamboo footing less firmly than her foe, and it swayed back by just a smidge.
The collision threw off the trajectories of both of their attacks, and the ends of their weapons had both been sent upwards, towards each other's heads.
Qin Yan's spear reached the end of its path just an inch away from her right eye. The fierce gale at the tip of the spear sprung onto her mask and chipped off a part of it. For just a moment, he glimpsed the golden eye underneath gaping wide with viciousness that bordered on madness, the black pupil like a pin needle. In the next instant, he was assailed by indescribable pain, his head flung back as something rammed into his own right eye.
Qin Yan screamed. As he was forced to lean up towards the heavens, he felt the spear in his hands getting pulled away from him. He had little choice but to give up on it, as struggling would have driven the Fox's branch deeper into his skull.
Once he had surrendered his weapon, she took the stick out of his eye in a motion that was mercifully swift and mercilessly efficient, but nevertheless had caused the king untold suffering.
Blood splattered onto the emerald green stalks.
Though Qin Yan's spear was slightly longer than her branch, the Fox's arms were far longer than his own. The miniscule delay caused by their brief clash had given her the opportunity to exploit this difference in natural reach.
Gripping his injured eye, Qin Yan knelt down, his head low. He dared not even look at his foe, and remained still.
But, as the moments dragged, his patience grew thin.
"Do it!" He shouted, only now looking up at the Yellow Fox. In her lone eye, he had found none of the wickedness he saw before. Since the sight of it was so fleeting, he began to doubt the veracity of what he had witnessed. But even so, he couldn't bear to look at her, as that vague image flashed through his mind, interposing itself over her currently nonchalant features.
As he made to lower his eyes again, he felt cold metal under his chin. His head was propped up by his own spear. As he was forced to stare at her half-masked visage again, he could tell by her slightly narrowed eye that she was grinning.
"What exactly would you like me to do?" She asked.
"Enough of this circus! You've made your point. Just kill me!"
As he pleaded, he felt the spear tip pressing into his neck. It drew a drop of blood before being pulled away.
The Yellow Fox dropped both of her spears to the ground far below. She pivoted on her foot, turning away from the kneeling king. She took off her mask, and let it fall from her hand.
"What are you doing? Claim my life!" He yelled.
"I already have." A cold gust blew by as she glimpsed at him over her shoulder. Her hair spilled over her face, covering all but the lone eye that Qin Yan had seen before. "And one day I shall return to make use of what I have claimed."
Using his Sky Dancing Steps, she disappeared.
Qin Yan remained still atop the grove, overwhelmed.
As the battle came to a close, the observer furrowed his brows.
Far off in the distance, perched on the roof of a neighboring pavilion, Tao Geming had been watching the fight unfold with crossed arms. The longer he mulled over the events, the darker his expression grew. He hopped off, fleeing back towards the city unnoticed.
...