The curtains were drawn around Emperor Tandu’s sedan chair and he was borne away, back into the luxurious safety of the Pearl. Guardian Yama and General Cobu followed, Yama walking alone, Cobu flanked by his soldiers. All of them would return after the preliminary rounds had winnowed the field to the top candidates.
As soon as they were gone, the registrar posted the listing of first-round matches on the wall next to the revised rules. The neat lines of people arrayed in front of the platform fell apart. Some candidates rushed over to the wall, crowding up to the board to see the draw. Others turned and strode in the other direction—away from the arena. Jun glimpsed faces blank with shock, others flushed with anger, fighting tears of disappointment as they walked away from a goal they’d worked toward for as long as Jun had, or longer.
Not all martial schools or styles emphasized weapons training. Even among those that did, preparation for the Guardian’s Tournament focused on unarmed contests. Some of the candidates who’d traveled all the way to Xicheng specialized exclusively in empty- hand combat—striking, grappling, attacking pressure points, or locking joints. Even if one of them were to reach the quarterfinals, they wouldn’t be equipped to fight an opponent with a spear or a halberd. Especially not when the new rules all but mandated lethal outcomes.
Jun stood in what felt like the center of movement, his shoulders jostled in both directions. The monk with the two swords shook his head gravely, then turned and joined those who were departing. He clearly had weapons expertise but was leaving anyway. Refusing to take part in a tournament whose spirit and purpose had been so egregiously altered by one man.
Yin Yue came up to Jun. When Yin was concerned, his brows came together and a vein stood out on the right side of his forehead. “This isn’t good,” he said to Jun in a lowered voice. “Changing the rules at the last minute so no one could oppose the decision or prepare for the tournament differently—it’s wrong. People will die in the arena because of this.”
Jun looked around them. About a third of the candidates who’d been present at the opening ceremonies had left. “Look how many fewer people there are now,” Jun pointed out. “The field’s been winnowed down already. We’re lucky we’re among those who can still compete.” The Iron Core school’s curriculum included a robust foundation in weapons use. Jun was grateful now that Chang hadn’t let him neglect that side of his training over the past month.
Had the flutist suspected all along that the rules would be changed?
“Just because we can still compete doesn’t mean we should. General Cobu’s making a play for power and he’s using the Guardian’s Tournament to do it.” Yin paced two steps in each direction, visibly torn. “What would Master Song want us to do?”
At every previous Guardian’s Tournament, there had been a few fatalities. But they were usually accidental. Judges would step in and declare a winner if the fight was one-sided and the life of a competitor was at risk. More importantly, though, the Guardian was supposed to be a paragon of martial virtue and a representative of the entire martial community, not a heartless killer of those weaker than them. Martial schools throughout the country expected their chosen candidates to exemplify their values and bring them prestige, not shame. They sponsored competitors who would not only win, but who would attract an influx of new students to train where the Guardian had trained. People generally wanted to emulate Guardians who were noble and sportsmanlike.
Like Yin Yue.
The Guardian who emerged this week would not only be the country’s top warrior, but one willing to accept General Cobu’s way of doing things.
Was that the type of Guardian Jun wanted to be?
Jun took several firm steps away from Yin and turned around. “There’s no us in this situation,” he reminded his former classmate. “This isn’t a joint decision. I don’t represent Master Song or the Iron Core school. I’ve come too far and given up too much to back out now. Do what you like, but I’ve got to get to my first match.”
Yin Yue’s expression hardened. As Jun turned away, he knew with certainty that Yin wasn’t leaving either. Like Jun, he’d invested too much time, sweat, and pride into winning the tournament to walk away.
Maybe they were alike.
Cobu could change the rules of the tournament, but he couldn’t mandate the outcome. If Jun won and became the Guardian, he would be the type of Guardian he wanted to be. Someone his instructors—Song, Chang, and his father—would be proud of. He would outrank General Cobu and have the ear of the emperor. Yama had avoided getting involved in politics, but his tenure was coming to an end. A new Guardian could challenge Cobu and keep his influence and ambitions in check. No doubt the general feared that happening.
Change the rules all you like. I’ll win anyway.
He imagined Sai grinning the way he used to when Jun took a dare.
Jun shouldered his way close enough to see the posted matches. Six fights were scheduled simultaneously, every thirty minutes. Given the new rules, Jun wasn’t sure how accurate the timetable would be. Fighting until submission, surrender, or death might take a while. Then again, some matches were bound to end very quickly. Jun shoved the chilling thought away before it could swell into fear that would eat away his resolve.
Jun found his name on the board. He was fighting in the very first set of matches. His opponent would be Peng Fu from the Tiger Spirit Combat School. One of the three toughs he’d seen riding past on the road a couple of days ago.
All thoughts about what he’d just witnessed vanished from Jun’s head. He pushed his way back through the crowd, heading for the designated Green Arena.
When he arrived, he saw that the crowd surrounding it consisted almost entirely of Tiger Spirit school attendants and supporters who formed a loud and colorful cheering section, complete with flags in the school colors and drummers to accompany the chanting. Jun’s opponent, Peng, was already at one end of the arena, talking to his two schoolmates. He was taller and older than Jun, with at least a fist’s length worth of additional reach and rippling shoulder muscles that he rolled back and forth as he took off his tunic. Peng glanced over at Jun, assessing him quickly and dismissively before turning back to his friends.
Jun tried to ignore the eyes on him as he claimed the other side of the arena and began warming up. The notes that Chang had made him keep for more than a month had taught him a lot about his own body, including that his energy was naturally higher later in the day. “If you must fight in the morning, eat a small amount—something with meat or fish or eggs—and give yourself plenty of time to warm up,” Chang had told him.
Heeding the advice, Jun kept his shirt on for warmth and took his time stretching, breathing, lightly running on the spot and trying to think about nothing else but the task ahead of him. Unfortunately, it seemed that the more time he took, the larger the Tiger Spirit cheering section grew.
“Who’s Peng’s opponent?” asked an eager bettor with a gap between his front teeth.
“Never heard of him,” said a fan who’d painted tiger stripes on his face. “Some kid from the south who somehow got in without school sponsorship. Odds are six-to-one against him right now.”
“I’ll take that bet,” said the spectator next to him, a middle-aged woman with long hair in a single plait down her back. “I like to root for underdogs.”
Jun glanced over at her with an unreasonable amount of gratitude. The woman gave him a reassuring smile and a nod in return. Jun scanned the spectators, looking for Ren, hoping for another supportive face in the crowd. He couldn’t see her.
Peng finished his warm-up routine by throwing powerful strikes into a straw dummy that his schoolmates held up for him, taking the head off the dummy with a roundhouse kick. He ran a circle around the arena before returning to his side, bouncing on the balls of his feet and waiting impatiently to fight.
Jun took every minute available to him to warm up, waiting until the judge, whom General Cobu had stripped of any decision-making responsibility and reduced to merely an announcer, called them both to the center of the arena. Jun stepped forward, pressed his right fist to his left palm, and bent into a salute. The other young man returned it quickly and a touch distractedly.
He’s already thinking past me.
Jun sank into a ready stance. A gong sounded to begin the fight.
Peng catapulted forward at once with a flurry of strikes and kicks. Jun dodged aside as a blow passed within an inch of his face, then dropped his shoulder and elbow to block a powerful roundhouse kick into his side. The kick slammed into his biceps instead and he hissed as his arm went numb. To his horror, Jun found himself backing up, almost to the arena boundary.
He was ordinarily the one to launch the first attack. An explosive offense was his advantage, as it had been in the match against Yin Yue. Being on the defensive right out of the gate was so disorienting that for several seconds Jun couldn’t recompose himself; it was all he could do just to avoid and block Peng’s onslaught.
He should’ve known this wouldn’t be like sparring in Cheon. This was the national stage, the Guardian’s Tournament, with the best fighters in the country. What had he been thinking, that he would be equal to competitors from bigger schools and cities? The Tiger Spirit Combat School trained its adherents to embody the characteristics of the tiger: fluidity, strength, and unrelenting direct aggression. And it certainly seemed that Peng was a pinnacle example of what the school could produce.
Sensing Jun on the back foot, Peng escalated his relentless offense. His long legs flew at Jun left and right, bruising his thighs and the side of his torso; blows rained down like rocks in a landslide onto his forearms as he fought to keep his head out of range of a knockout blow. If it hadn’t been for Jun’s years of hard physical conditioning under the Iron Core style, he would’ve already crumbled under the sustained impacts.
Jun tried to regain the advantage. He shot a counterpunch like a straight arrow through Peng’s guard toward his face, but the young man batted it away with a powerful swipe. Jun deflected one of the man’s kicks and went in for a sweep, but Peng sprang away with remarkable nimbleness. Jun grabbed for the other man’s neck and for a second, they were clinched together. He began slamming his knees into his opponent’s body, but Peng somehow twisted his lithe body out of Jun’s grasp and elbowed him in the head hard enough that stars erupted in Jun’s vision.
Jun swayed, nearly going down but managing at the last moment to hang on to his footing and pivot away, putting enough distance between the two of them for him to regain his balance and composure. Dragon’s piss, that was close. He’d been seconds away from being knocked out and seeing his long dream extinguished in the first few minutes of his Guardian run.
The Tiger Spirit cheering section erupted at the near knockout. “Tiger Peng! Tiger Peng!” they roared, waving their black and orange pennants. Amid the distracting sights and sounds, from the corner of his vision Jun caught sight of a single spectator standing apart from the flag wavers. Yin Yue was watching the match, his arms crossed, a slight frown on his face.
The sight of Yin jolted Jun harder than Peng’s blows.
What am I doing?
He hadn’t trained all his life and come this far to lose with Yin Yue watching. Peng had more raw power and aggression than anyone he’d ever fought, but he had tools of his own. He’d been training for over a month to improve his awareness and control of Dragon’s Breath. In the heat of the opening minutes of the fight, Chang’s teachings had all fled his mind.
Jun gave his head a sharp shake. The opponent, the setting, the noisy crowd—those things were new. But combat was not. As Chang had said, it was infinitely nuanced and complex in execution, but on a fundamental level, it was simple. One person forced the other to stop.
He wasn’t going to be able to exceed his opponent when it came to ferocity. It wasn’t familiar territory for Jun, to be the one with less strength and speed and aggression, but Master Chang had spent the last month teaching him to regulate himself during a fight. To control oneself was to control the pace of the contest.
Jun found his Breath again. He stopped trying to counterattack. He kept evading Peng’s attacks, but he settled into his body and stopped trying to meet force with equal force. With each of Peng’s blistering strikes, he pivoted out of the way. He slid aside from each whirling kick, responding not with a powerful attack of his own, but with short jabs and nudges, little pushes that redirected Peng’s considerable momentum away from him. He remembered how Master Chang had dealt with him when they’d first sparred, when he’d been tasked with grabbing the blindfold off the man’s face and Chang had effortlessly danced aside, always knowing where not to be, toying with Jun.
Jun followed that example now. He countered straight lines with circles, directness with evasion, and hardness with softness. His breathing came down, his body relaxed. Peng was still attacking him with as much energy as ever, and seemed in no danger of tiring, but Jun was no longer overwhelmed. He could feel the Breath that Chang had taught him to harness swirling, steady and controlled, in his gut, a pot bubbling on a steady boil but not spilling over.
Peng sensed the change but didn’t understand it. He’d nearly knocked Jun out within the first three minutes, but he hadn’t come close to doing so again. Now it seemed that his opponent, a nobody who didn’t have a school to his name, was moving more easily and was less tired than he had been at the beginning. Jun’s refusal to fight back in a meaningful way began to infuriate him. His stamina was superb, but even he couldn’t keep fighting indefinitely against a man who seemed determined to dodge rather than engage. And there was no longer a judge’s decision to rely on. This fight could go on for a long while, and Peng was the one expending more energy.
“Stop running around the arena,” he snarled. “Stand and fight properly!”
“I’m not going to fight your fight,” Jun replied. “You’ll have to catch me.”
The crowd, which was already largely on Peng’s side, began to voice its disapproval. They booed and shouted insults at Jun. “You’re not going to win by dancing, boy!” someone shouted. Others yelled encouragement to Peng. “Finish him off, already! Knock his bobbing head off!”
The noise, which had been such a distraction to Jun at the beginning, started to have an effect on Peng as he felt the pressure of the audience begin to push at him. The Tiger Spirit school emphasized finesse and power, but even a tiger would have a difficult time pinning a slippery fish. With his next exasperated attack, instead of trying to strike Jun, he grabbed for him, lightning fast, intending to pin him in place long enough to finally deliver a fight-ending blow. His hand closed on the front of Jun’s shirt in a viselike grip and he yanked Jun bodily forward, finally prepared to connect his face with a coiled, waiting fist.
Except that Jun’s leading hand closed into a fist and smashed into Peng’s sternum from no distance at all. All the energy Jun had kept at a constant simmer shot through him like the launch of an arrow from a crossbow. The punch that Chang had made him practice against the wooden boards from a fingertip away, the punch that had splintered Zhang’s table, connected with Peng’s chest with explosive force.
Peng went sailing backward several meters. He landed on his back and lay still. For a few seconds, Jun was afraid he’d killed the man, but Peng rolled over, tried to rise, vomited, and lay back down.
“The winner,” the announcer declared, sounding stunned himself, “is Li Jun of Cheon!”
Astonished silence fell over the spectators. Peng’s two schoolmates gawked in disbelief, then ran to his side to help him from the arena. The Tiger Spirit cheering section lowered its colorful pennants and stared at Jun.
A stranger in the audience shouted, “Dragon’s blood! Did you see that?!” and began to clap. The woman who’d put money on Jun smiled and departed to collect her winnings, as if she’d been confident of an underdog victory all along.
Several others joined in the applause as Jun, still stunned, turned and walked out of the arena. He paused only to look back at where Yin Yue had been standing, but the older student was no longer there.