A desperate duelist who abandons footwork to protect his pride is merely a walking corpse awaiting forced payout.
Xie Lingfeng’s charge was devoid of the clean, sharp-angled discipline he had displayed in the opening seconds of the bout.
His face was twisted into a mask of high-born hysteria, his veins bulging against his temples like cords of purple hemp. He had pushed his Qi-blood past its safe living threshold. That forced his unbound tiny blood vessels to flood his right arm with uncontrolled crushing pressure. The air around him screamed as his internal energy leaked erratically into the cold air, freezing the falling drizzle into a jagged shroud of frost along his white silk sleeves.
He was unleashing the supreme lethal art of the Azure Cloud Sect’s lay students: The Frost Dragon Pierces the Heart.
This was not a multi-thrust combination designed to confuse an opponent. It was a single, all-or-nothing linear puncture.
Xie Lingfeng channeled his entire piled up training into the star-fallen cold-iron blade. The four-foot dress sword turned blinding white. It shook at a high-pitched hum that emitted a piercing whistle capable of inducing nausea in the spectators fifty paces away. The blade was aimed with total, murderous intent: directly at the center of Pei Jing’s chest, designed to pierce through the Cloud-Splitter’s hard dark metal spine, through his chest bone, and sever his main heart artery in a single nonstop line of piercing penetration.
