Seyun saw the trap in its entirety. Not as a malicious trick by an enemy who wanted to hurt him. It would have been easy to hate. But as the honest, merciless question of a woman who had spent three hundred years being chained by other people’s need.
Nara Soth knew that slanted lane was open. With three hundred years of combat judgment, she had left it open on purpose to see what the bearer of the Answering Spirit vein would do. Just then, the only way left to save his precious stone tablet was to throw his injured chest in front of her staff. And Seyun knew something else with equal certainty: after fighting beside him in the northern chamber, after watching him kneel in the mud at the hillside shrine to bandage the seis-scars on her back, and after watching Mina splint his ribs in the nook, Nara Soth didn’t want to crush his chest bone.
If he dove into that channel overload right now, his staff tip would touch the gap. And Nara would be forced to yank her walking staff back at the last fraction of an inch to avoid driving broken bone into his lungs. He would keep the tablet. He would preserve the third rival mark. And he would have won solely by converting her human concern for his life into a duty to let him succeed.
