Elder Ren felt Wu’s Open Palm coming a half-breath before it reached his lower back.

The technique was a kidney strike — an Open Palm elder used when he wanted a man to drop without giving him the dignity of a wound. Ren did not turn; there was no time. He stepped half a pace forward instead, taking the Palm against the muscle of his back rather than the kidney. The angle dulled the Qi. The angle bought him a heartbeat.

The heartbeat was what he had been waiting for.

His Qi left his body in one coordinated rise. The blade came up to a horizontal position at his chest, the Qi piling along the edge in compressed loops that began to bend at three distinct points along the steel. The bend at the tip stretched forward like a serpent’s neck.

he bend at the middle did the same. The bend at the hilt followed. Three Heads of the Old Dragon — Ren’s Qi had split into three serpentine dragon-heads simultaneously, each with its own neck, each independently fixed on a different target. Bao at the apex. Shan to the left. Wu directly behind. Ren released the technique with a single thrust — the blade pushed forward six inches, and the three heads detached from the steel at the same heartbeat.

The first head locked onto Bao and ripped through his guard like an old door coming off its hinges. The dragon-mouth opened at the moment of impact and closed across Bao’s torso from the right clavicle to the left flank, splitting the senior elder from rib to rib. Bao folded around the wound. The long sword slipped out of his fingers. He went to his knees with his organs in his hands and the rain washing pink over both.

The second head caught Shan’s twin daggers mid-parry. The bone of his right wrist gave under the pressure — the daggers spun free. The dragon-mouth closed across Shan’s chest at a shallower angle than Bao’s; he would live a few seconds longer than his brother, but only a few.

The third head ate the second Open Palm Wu had been mid-extension of. The Qi of the dragon-mouth and the Qi of the palm cancelled in the air between them — a precise detonation of opposing forces that knocked Wu six paces back along the wet rock and stripped the skin from the heel of his hand to the third knuckle. Wu did not fall. He had been an Open Palm practitioner for forty-seven years, and the body of an Open Palm practitioner did not fall easily.

He went to one knee instead.

Ren had no time to admire the technique. He pivoted into Shan, who had dropped his daggers and was reaching for them. Ren’s blade entered Shan’s throat in a horizontal cut that came up the inside of the carotid and out the other side of the neck. Shan went down with the steel half inside him. Ren pulled the blade free with a turn of the wrist that left Shan’s head at the wrong angle to his shoulders.

Behind Ren, Wu was rising.

The old man’s palms were a wet ruin but his Qi was not. The anger had taken the place of the technique. Wu was going to take one last strike and he was going to put everything inside him into it.

Ren turned to meet it.

He extended his left arm in front of his chest. What remained of his Qi after Three Heads flowed into the forearm and compacted, forming Iron Sleeve — a Qi-dense forearm guard that could absorb the strike of a Foundation Establishment master and split the impact along the bone. He had used the technique nine times in his life. It had held nine times.

Wu’s last Open Palm came down from above the shoulder, both palms aligned, the Qi compressed into a single line. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The Iron Sleeve held the first eighty percent of the impact.

The remaining twenty percent went somewhere.

Where it went was through the bone of Ren’s left arm, from the elbow up through the shoulder, in a single travelling shockwave that pulverised the humerus, separated the joint, and detached the entire arm from his body in one piece.

The arm fell into the mud beside Shan.

Ren’s left side opened into a fountain of dark blood. He did not register it. He had not used the time of the strike to defend — he had used the time of the strike to reach. The blade in his right hand had already begun moving toward Wu’s centre of mass while the left arm was being torn off, and the cut Ren made with that right-hand blade entered Wu’s lower belly two inches under the navel and exited along the hip on the same side.

It was not a kill cut. Wu was old and tough and Qi-armoured, and an Open Palm master required either a clean stroke through the heart or the separation of head from body. Ren had achieved neither. But the cut he had made would bleed Wu out across the next hour, and Wu knew it.

Wu staggered. The rain found the wound and ran red down his leg in seconds. He registered the two bodies on the wet stone — Bao folded over his own guts, Shan at the wrong angle to his shoulders. He registered Ren’s arm in the mud beside them.

"...Ren."

"Wu."

That was all the two of them gave each other after forty years.

Wu turned and went up the slope. He moved faster than a man with that wound should have moved, but he moved at the angle of a man who would not be making it to the top of the rim. The trail of blood behind him was already thicker than the rain could disperse. Wherever Wu was going to reach before he stopped, the route had a horizon attached.

Ren did not follow him. He stayed where he was on the wet stone, sword in his right hand, the place where his left arm had been a torn opening through which his own blood was leaving the body in steady pulses. He shifted his weight onto the right leg. He pressed the inside of his right elbow against the stump and clamped the brachial line as best he could without the use of his other hand.