The first strike missed. The second didn't.
Her palm hit his shoulder — a directed qi burst, not physically aimed but internally targeted. He felt his qi circulation stutter on the right side.
She was using the Pale Flame technique against him. Of course she was. Nine years of partial training. She couldn't read internal structures the way he could, but she could disrupt qi flow patterns.
He rolled into the disruption instead of fighting it — let his right side go partially passive and shifted all active qi to his left.
Her eyes tracked this. She adapted.
She was very good.
He couldn't fight her directly. Level Three against Level Two was brutal arithmetic.
Behind her, the other three would be coming from the east.
He needed something else.
"Iron Moth," he said, backpedaling, keeping her attention on his movement. "Shao Wei spent nine years teaching you. He knew you were loyal. He knew your dedication. Why would he not give you the inheritance?"
She came at him again. He deflected and kept moving.
"If the answer is that the two techniques must be combined and you didn't have the Question Fist — then the choice was never about you failing. It was about the technique needing something you didn't carry." He deflected another strike. The impact jarred his arms to the shoulder. "He didn't choose me over you. He completed the system."
"Be quiet."
"Does that possibility change anything for you?"
"Be QUIET."
She hit him with a full qi burst. He took it on crossed forearms. The force lifted him off his feet and threw him back against the wall.
He hit stone. Slid to the floor. Vision went white at the edges.
Get up. Now.
He got up.
The three others were in the corridor behind her. Zhou Jin was in the open doorway at the far end — he'd taken a cut to his side, favoring his left, but upright and alert.
And from the corridor intersection at the south end: a walking stick.
Elder Tang.
Not walking. Moving at a speed that did not match his age or his stick.
He hit the lead of the three rear companions with a qi suppression wave that dropped the man in one step. The second he disarmed with a wrist movement so efficient it barely looked like effort.
The third turned to face Tang.
Iron Moth looked back.
Tang and Iron Moth exchanged one look across the corridor.
"Pale Remnant," Tang said.
"Iron Mountain Elder," she replied.
A pause in the fighting. Nobody moved.
Wen Dao stayed still against the wall. His arms were numb to the elbow from the blocked qi burst.
"This child," Tang said carefully, "carries the complete combination of both traditions for the first time in six hundred years. If you destroy him, the combination ends. Again."
Iron Moth's jaw was tight.
"The technique belongs to—"
"The technique belongs to whoever can complete it," Tang said. "That is what Shao Wei understood. That is what you don't."
A long silence.
Iron Moth looked at Wen Dao.
He looked back at her. His arms hurt enormously. He was still standing.
"If the combination is complete in him," she said, very quietly, "then what Shao Wei built still exists."
"Yes."
Her remaining companion was watching her. She made a small gesture.
They stepped back. Then out. Through the east garden and gone.
No words. No threat. Just gone.
The corridor was silent except for the sound of the dropped man's breathing.
Wen Dao looked at his hands. The numbness was fading.
"Did she understand?" he said.
"I don't know," Tang said honestly. "She is a practitioner of Shao Wei's technique. She knows the theory. Whether she can accept the implication of the theory when it applies to herself—" He shook his head slightly. "That is a different question."
Zhou Jin pushed off the doorframe and walked over. He looked at Wen Dao's arms. "You need the healing room."
"Yes," Wen Dao agreed.
He walked toward it.
Behind him, Tang watched him go.
In the old man's expression, carefully hidden: something that might have been pride.