Serpent's Eyes 8

The scream of the grinding blade tearing across bone echoed shrilly in her ears. Bai Nuying’s head jerked black crimson pouring down her cheek as she reflexively squeezed her eye shut.

It was the most she needed for an opening. Her watery coils flexed, strength against strength, she was weaker than her cousin, but a momentary unsteadiness was enough to unbalance her, to take control of the coil and drag her down and out of position for the next block. She felt Bai Nuying’s nose crunch under her knuckles, hastily raised qi scattering under the precise blow. Cloth tore, Bai Nuying’s sleeve was shredded as she caught the next rising elbow strike across her own forearm, pale flesh scoured red by the alkaline water shadow.

But she could already tell that her fangs would not be finding her enemy's throat yet. She felt the gathering power down in her cousin’s core, a bone rattling rumble of insult and fury. She felt a hissing burn spread across her skin, welts rising across her throat as clinking chains tightened around her domain blade above their heads.

Her eyes widened a fraction before both of her arms instinctively snapped up into a tight guard position, forcing her to rip qi away from her water blades to shield herself as a spear gripped just below its blade was driven upward to pierce her stomach.

She just barely deflected it, the metallic threads of her dress shrieking as they were severed, the eruption of vibration from the end of the blade ripping a meters long gouge in the earth behind them.

Worse though was the constricting choke she felt around her neck, the searing blisters left by what felt like boiling quicksilver eating into her skin, bypassing her defenses entirely. Her eyes flicked up to the tangle of chains around her domain blade.

A second spearhead held in her cousins empty off hand tore through the black waters of her mantle and nearly pierced her thigh before her own hand could lash out drive into Bai Nuying’s sternum with a burst of pressure driven by rapidly formed ‘muscle’ of pressurized water, formed around her arm.

They flew apart water scattering as their coils tore and reformed beneath them, leaving them once again facing each other across the arena. Bai Meizhen grit her teeth, yanking on her connection to her domain weapon, it felt like ripping her arm out of the jaws of a gnawing beast, but the smooth steel blade tore free, scattering drops of quicksilver and smoking from the patches where the steel had gone black.

“You are not the only one whose mother gifted her with a powerful reagent,” Bai Nuying said coldly. In her hands the twin spearblades, held more like punching blades, hissed and snaked out, both sprouting longer hafts, the wood writhing like living serpents coils as the lengths coiled around her arms slid down and snapped straight, transforming both blades back into short spears.

They were botht he same weapon she had begun with, divided only in form. The twitch of motion in her cousin’s shoulder was her only warning as the left hand spear thrust forward, tearing the area with an explosive shockwave. Bai Meizhen darted to the side as a furrow wider than a wagon was torn out of the earth, the energies tearing onward untilt hey struck the arena barrier with a dull sound like a rung gong, sending ripples of light into the sky.

The haft of the spear flexed midthrust, bending like a serpents body, redirecting the the sonic current in seconds. Her domain blade shot back out, interposed. She had to grit her teeth as steel rippled with the impact, even as it spun and finally scattered the power of the attack.

The second spear tore through the air with a deafening crack, and only barely did she divert the blow with the blade ribbons of her own weapon, all of her strength needed just to divert the blow a bare few inches.

“Feigning vulnerability is a pathetic trick. A White Serpent needs no such thing on the battlefield.”

Her chain links rang like a bell, circling overhead among disrupted clouds of her own technique, quicksilver gleaming as it descendined to cage her. Boxed in, her domain blade and personal weapon occupied. She should have been trapped.

She met Bai Nuying’s eyes for a bare second, before she sank, diving into the earth.

Soil and muck. Solid and crushing and black. The claustrophobia of it, of diving intot he earth had been the first trial to overcome in mastering these arts. There was nowhere to go above in the light and the air. So she could only descend. A fact she knew her cousin must be aware of.

She could not see or hear like this, not in the usual sense, but she had spent many long hours with Bao Qingling, and some of them had even been in cultivation. She sensed the moment the packed in stratified qi of the earth was infiltrated by the first buzzing pulses of thunder, beginning to rattle the gravel and dust.

Patience. Stillness. Preparation.

These were all lessons embedded in the Bai clans most fundamental arts, but they were… secondary in many considerations. Control, of both the world and the self. These were the twin lessons of Grandmother Serpent and Yao the Fisher. Each exemplified one of the them. The Imperious Serpent commanded and the world obeyed. The Fisherman controlled himself, and was inviolate against the world.

Sloppy. Grandfather had called her emotional, lacking in control, he was not wrong, but she wondered that his eyes did not see how little self control so many of her cousins had, how many of her kin had.The sonic vibrations spread all across the arena grounds, radiating out into the soil. It was the proper counter to a user of the arts of earth and stone. Textbook, really. Do not pierce the earth, use its own properties against it. Liquifaction, mimicking the way the earth would heave and groan when greatest spirits of its kind had their quarrels. Surrounded in soil, Bai Meizhen felt her domain blade against her palm. Her ribbon blades dismissed, her fingers sank into the steel. She didn’t need a tool getting in the way for this, not when she had her fang, as much a part of her as her own hand.

The bloated black clouds still tied to her qi rumbled and disgorged their acid contents, a sizzling rain that rapidly flooded the bucking, heaving earth, trickling down into the grinding cracks beginning to spiderweb out over the arean surface.

She felt the shaking, felt the shockwaves. It rattled, it ground away at her, made her bones feel as if they would splinter. She could feel her cousin’s weight above feel her guard, and her senses fixed on the earth as she shifted the minimum of qi to shield herself against the venomous rain.

Water was not so far from earth, not really. Especially not when it heaved and shook like this, rolling like the waves of the sea.

Bai Meizhen’s coils tightened winding like a spring, and she charged through the liquifying earth. The ground behind Bai Nuying erupted, and her cousin was already spinning, spears lancing out to strike Bai Meizhen down for her impunity.

They struck an empty geyser of mud and rock, infused with just enough qi to fool the senses.

The Rains were the bond between heaven and earth. One could swim those roads, if they knew them.

Her domain blade, her fang, temporarily fused to her outrstretched arm, struck Bai Nuying’s back in a hammerblow, followed a half second later by the grinding scream of her water shadow blade. Her cousin was driven down into the mud, qi flaring, sparks screaming as cloth and metal underweave strained and shredded. Her coiled liquid tail swung upward as she thrashed against the earth and Bai Meizhen grimaced as she felt her ribs groan with the impact.

But she felt her blade bite into flesh.

The arena flashed. Blinding bright, and she felt her head spin as she felt herself dislocated across space, left blinking away blindness, coils whirling to raise her back up from the earth.

The open palm of the proctor was held out in front of her.

“The match is over. The winner is Bai Meizhen.”