As Daro Kesh’s short Jade sword flashed out of the lower eastern seam—a thin ribbon of Seyun’s bright red forearm blood spinning off the matte-ground fuller onto the frosted granite—the edge of Daro’s retreating cut passed directly over the wicker basket of oak-and-iron splints that Halin had just dropped at the mouth of the first eastern pillar.
For a fighter still trapped inside the assumptions of the Bronze realm, that moment contained two fatal temptations at once.
The first temptation was the sunk cost of blood.
Seyun had just accepted a four-inch bare-steel cut along his right forearm to hold the eastern pillar lane open. Every proud, stubborn instinct in a fighter’s body hates to see a wound bought for a map point that is right away abandoned a heartbeat later. The mind wants to keep guarding the eastern pillar just to prove that the blood on his sleeve was not spent for an empty doorway.
The second temptation was the abandoned basket sitting on the stones.
Just as his right wrist had twitched in the dark courtyard last night to dip his staff tip under Pera’s falling clay water bowl, a bronze-realm habit of total property defense whispered that if he stretched the rear butt of his ash staff two feet to the right before turning west, he could hook the reed handle of the dropped splint basket and drag it along the flat stone slabs while turning to cover Mina and Halin.
