Schedule Update
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Lu Changcheng split himself again.
This clone he did not suppress. It stood at full Mythical rank, the ceiling of what he had been before he transcended, every technique available. The air pressure in the room changed the moment it formed. The floor did not crack. It groaned under something it had not been asked to hold before.
Chu Xinghe felt it across the room and set his feet.
"Ready?" Lu Changcheng said from the wall.
"Yes."
The clone moved.
It covered half the room before Chu Xinghe had finished exhaling, a blur of white-gold qi that hit the air ahead of it like a prow through water. It drove an open palm strike at Chu Xinghe's sternum, not a killing blow but a testing one, and Chu Xinghe tilted his body sideways and let it pass close enough to feel the heat off it.
He drew his sword.
The blade came out blood-red and the blood energy in it woke immediately, responding to the proximity of genuine combat. He cut at the clone's extended arm and it withdrew, quick enough to avoid the edge, and then they separated and reset.
Lucy pressed herself against the wall. Ren stood in front of her with his arms folded.
This is fine, she thought. This is a controlled environment. The walls are titanium. The Guildmaster is watching. This is completely fine.
The floor cracked down the middle.
The clone had launched a palm strike at the ground, and the force of it buckled the reinforced plate in a single straight line from its feet to Chu Xinghe's position. Chu Xinghe jumped over it and came down with a downward cut that the clone caught on a ward of compressed qi. The impact rang through the room and pressed Lucy back an additional step she had not planned.
Titanium, she reminded herself. It is fine.
They traded four exchanges in the next few seconds, each one fast enough that Lucy was mostly tracking afterimages. The clone's qi burned white-gold at full Mythical intensity. Chu Xinghe's sword left red trails in the air that faded slowly, the blood energy in each arc hanging before it dispersed. The clone was stronger, heavier, each strike carrying more raw force. Chu Xinghe was giving ground but not breaking, redirecting more than blocking, finding the angles where the clone's power slid past him rather than landing flush.
The clone pressed. It drove Chu Xinghe toward the back wall with three consecutive strikes that landed progressively closer to center mass, and Chu Xinghe caught the third on his blade and was pushed back three meters, heels dragging grooves in the floor plate.
Lu Changcheng watched from the wall with focused attention, his arms unfolded now, reading everything.
The clone threw a space-cutting arc from its left hand, a technique that did not travel through air but through the fabric between here and somewhere else, arriving at Chu Xinghe's position without traversing the distance. Chu Xinghe moved left on instinct and it clipped his shoulder, opening a clean line through his jacket and the skin beneath.
He stopped, looked at his shoulder, then at the clone.
"I see," he said.
He raised his sword.
"Millionfold Slaughter Decree," he said. "All heads must fall."
The decree reached for the clone.
The clone's Pure Yang Sword flared and a ward of tribulation lightning condensed around its neck in the half second before the decree arrived. The impact was visible, a vibration that moved through the clone's form from the neck outward, the decree pressing against the ward. The clone staggered. It did not lose its head, but it went to one knee and the ward cracked in three places before the pressure equalized.
Silence in the room for a breath.
The clone rose from its knee, reformed its stance, and looked at Chu Xinghe with an expression that was new: careful.
"Interesting," Lu Changcheng said from the wall.
Ren said nothing.
It found a defense, Lucy thought. In half a second. It found a defense.
The clone attacked again, faster, driving Chu Xinghe across the room with a combination that used both hands and a space-cutting arc in sequence. Chu Xinghe blocked, redirected, stepped under one strike, caught another on his blade that knocked him sideways into the wall. He hit it with his back and came off it immediately, using the rebound to close distance and cut at the clone's flank.
They were close now, inside the reach of the full power strikes. The clone shifted to short palm strikes, each one a compressed detonation of qi at point-blank range. Chu Xinghe absorbed two on his arms and felt them go heavy, took a third on his chest that launched him backward three full meters.
He landed and kept his feet.
His breathing had changed. Faster. The blood energy in his sword was higher than before, the red color deepening as more head-count accumulated, the qi recovery cycling faster with each exchange. The decree was not just a skill. It was a system that grew with use. He could feel it.
He raised his sword again.
The clone saw it coming. This time the tribulation lightning ward formed earlier, denser, the clone angling its neck downward and bringing both hands up to reinforce the ward from beneath. The position was deliberate. It had learned the geometry of the decree in one exposure and adapted.
"Millionfold Slaughter Decree," Chu Xinghe said. "All heads must fall."
The decree hit the ward and the room went bright. Not the whole room, a concentrated flash at the point of impact, white-gold burning against red. The ward held. The decree pushed through approximately forty percent before the ward stabilized and pushed back. The clone's feet left the floor from the force of it, crashing it into the ceiling hard enough to dent the titanium plate, and it fell back to the ground in a crouch.
It came back up with a space-cutting arc already moving.
Chu Xinghe was not in the space it was aimed at. He had moved while the clone was in the ceiling.
He was standing at its left side, inside its guard, sword already in motion.
It was not the decree. It was just a cut, fast, angled at the neck. The clone brought a ward up and caught the blade two centimeters from the skin. They held there, sword against ward, both of them pressing.
"Stop," Lu Changcheng said.
They separated immediately.
The room settled. The cracks in the floor remained. The dent in the ceiling remained. Chu Xinghe stood in the center of the room with his sword at his side, blood from his shoulder running down his arm and dripping from his elbow. The clone stood across from him, the ward on its neck still faintly visible before it dissipated, its white-gold qi quieter now.
Lu Changcheng walked forward. The clone dissolved into light as he approached.
He stopped a few meters from Chu Xinghe and looked him over: the bleeding shoulder, the sword still drawn, the stance that had not loosened.
"Draw," Lu Changcheng said.
"Yes," Chu Xinghe said.
"The decree has a geometry." Lu Changcheng turned the observation over as he said it. "Straight line from user to target, through the neck's natural axis. If the neck angle changes, the approach angle changes. It can be partially warded if you know it's coming."
"Yes," Chu Xinghe said again.
"But the ward costs more than the decree does." Lu Changcheng looked at the dent in the ceiling. "In a sustained exchange, you run the ward dry before he runs out of the decree."
"I noticed that as well," Chu Xinghe said.
"And in close range it becomes irrelevant because you can cut without using it at all." He paused. "What did you graft?"
Chu Xinghe glanced at him. "A sword."
Lu Changcheng looked at the blood-red blade still in Chu Xinghe's hand, at the deepened color of the qi running through it, the blood energy still climbing rather than depleting.
"What rank," he said.
"S," Chu Xinghe said. "Before the grafting."
Lu Changcheng was quiet for a moment.
"I see," he said.
Lucy stood against the wall with both hands flat on the titanium behind her. She was a B-rank hunter with four years of experience and three guild wars worth of the Guildmaster's schedule behind her. She knew what high-level combat looked like from a distance.
She looked at the dent in the ceiling, the cracked floor, Chu Xinghe's bleeding shoulder, Ren standing completely still against the far wall in his black coat and mask.
What, she thought, is actually happening on this floor.