Dusk gathered in the corners of the seal court as Daro Kesh pressed his question one step further. He didn’t argue in favor of Vaska’s needles. Instead, he asked the hardest question a martial teacher could ask before a lethal campaign. What if the four or five breaths of Bronze endurance Seyun had surrendered at dawn turned out, on the night of the assault, to be the exact four breaths needed to carry a strike to the sky-slit’s anchor?
In any standard sect treatise, the hero would have declared that righteous posture with the Dao guaranteed his breath would never fall short. Just then, the crisis came. Seyun rejected that comfort fully.
Turning fully toward the steps so that Hall Mistress Soran could read his lips clearly, Seyun answered that his decision today didn’t win an abstract argument about every possible emergency in the world. She sat ten paces away oiling her plain iron spear in the fading light.
It established only what he was willing to do here, in this mountain valley, with known physical consequences that he and his sister had already measured and that he was prepared to carry in his own body. If the defense needed four more breaths of stamina on the night of the assault, he would have to earn them through cleaner footwork and honest preparation over the coming days—or else accept the limit of his reach without stealing someone else’s freedom to bridge the gap.
