She crossed the thirty paces in a single stepping burst that cracked the new stone, and the relic came down in an arc that carried enough force to split a shield wall, aimed at the spot where her sister stood.
Ayame was no longer in it.
She had read the line of the cut before Kaede's heel finished planting, slid a half step inside its arc, and let the blade fall past her shoulder close enough to part stray hairs, and the floor where she'd stood burst into a crater of stone shards behind her.
Her counter flicked toward Kaede's wrist, and the relic wrenched itself around to catch it, steel meeting steel with a crack that rolled around the bowl.
The impact drove Ayame's heels a full pace across the stone.
The gap was real. Her sister remained a cliff above her even at the exact promised threshold, and every clean meeting of blades said so through her wrists.
So Ayame stopped meeting the blades cleanly.
The second exchange, she gave Kaede's monstrous cuts nothing to land on, angling her katana so each strike slid off on a tangent, her deflections measured in degrees rather than force, and Kaede's power kept arriving in places her sister had already left.
The third exchange, she began to steer it.
A tilt of her blade sent the relic's downstroke screaming past her hip into the floor.
A quarter turn of her wrists guided the follow-up wide, dragging Kaede's balance with it, and for one full heartbeat the Duchess of Silverwind stood stretched over her own front foot like a student mid-drill.
"Back foot."
Ayame said it the way she'd said it a thousand times in a labyrinth to a level 1 nobody with an iron spear, flat and matter-of-fact, and then her katana licked out and opened a thin red line across the back of Kaede's trailing calf, a teacher's cane made of steel.
The bowl made a sound. Quiet, vast, involuntary, a hundred thousand people inhaling at once.
"Don't you dare lecture me!" The words left Kaede low and strangled, the effort of keeping them level visible from the stands.
Ayame reset her stance and said nothing.
"Sisters, are you watching closely? I'm not quite sure you're fully grasping what you're witnessing, so let me add some context..." Seraphiel's voice rang over the elven sections, the Dawnbringer standing on her seat with her arms spread.
"That girl is my amazing samurai friend, Ayame Fujimori, and she's barely twenty years old! Us elves can barely function at that age, yet here she is, fighting the leader of a whole Dukedom!"
The elven ranks lost what remained of their posure, and the gossip current jumped rows like wildfire.
In the Fujimori prisoner block, nobody spoke at all.
The lieutenant with the ruined arm leaned forward with her lips parted, tracking the angles of the duel with a soldier's eyes, and the angles kept answering questions she had not dared to ask out loud.
"The root forms are ours," she whispered to the samurai beside her. "Watch her entries. Third Gate, Falling Reed, all of it, that's our school..." Her voice thinned. "And then it bees... what does it bee?"
No one had an answer.
What grew out of those root forms had outgrown clan memory, and every veteran in the block knew they were watching their own art carried somewhere their clan had never managed to take it.
On the floor, Kaede started swinging harder.
The relic's arcs came faster and heavier, raw statistical violence pressed into cuts that would have ended any duel in the clan's history, and her sister moved through them with an economy so absolute it looked unhurried, giving ground in centimeters and reclaiming it in angles.
"Shoulders." Ayame slid beneath a horizontal cut that parted the air where her neck had been. "They climb when you swing angry. Our tutors drilled that out of me before I turned six, but I see they never managed to do the same to you."
"Shut your mouth!" Kaede's next three cuts came twice as fast and half as clean, fury bleeding the geometry out of every line the relic tried to draw.
'I am stronger.' The thought circled Kaede's skull, picking up speed. 'The numbers are real. I am much stronger! So why?!'
Inside her grip, the whispers had stopped purring.
The blade kept reaching for openings that sealed a half-beat before its edge arrived, kept surging toward seams in Ayame's guard that turned out to be doors held open on purpose, and a confusion that did not belong to Kaede buzzed up through the hilt and into her arms.
"You're telegraphing."
The correction came mid-exchange this time, conversational, and Ayame stepped through Kaede's hip feint as if it had been announced by herald, rotated past the real cut, and laid her edge against her sister's cheek, gentle as a brushstroke.
A hair-thin line of red opened across the Duchess of Silverwind's cheekbone.
Kaede stumbled back three full steps, and her hand rose to her face on its own, fingertips ing away red, and the duel ground went quiet.
"She measured that cut to the millimeter," Alexios murmured, leaning forward, the connoisseur in him overruling the king.
"The girl is fencing a duchess and grading her," Lilith said dryly.
On the arena floor, Kaede Fujimori looked at the blood on her fingers.
Her teachers were ice.
Her clan knelt in the stands.
Her sister stood across the stone, untouched, unhurried, blue eyes level, waiting for her, patient as the end of every childhood drill, and the relic in Kaede's hands buzzed its alien confusion into her bones while the numbers in her head kept insisting on a victory that refused to arrive.
Then Ayame lowered her katana a fraction, and for the first time since the duel began, the teacher delivered a full assessment instead of a correction.
"All that stolen power and technique, but to my eyes, you cut like the sister I remember from my childhood. Always a klutz, tripping over her own feet."
The last of the duchess's restraint bent past its limit.
"SHUT UP!" She broke distance with a leap, lungs heaving more from fury than effort, and her voice tore across the bowl raw and cracking. "SHUT YOUR ARROGANT MOUTH!"
"[Ougon Zan]!"
Jagged waves of molten gold ripped off her blade and screamed toward Ayame in a fan, and the floor between the sisters detonated.
High in the prisoner block, the sound landed like a blade between ribs.
Every Fujimori veteran in those rows knew exactly what they had just heard, and what it meant that they were hearing it minutes into a sacred duel of blades.
Their chosen had run out of swordsmanship and started slinging spells.
Somewhere in the rows, an old samurai shed a dejected tear.
"We chose 'this' over that girl?"
User Comments
0 comments from readers