It became apparent where Yin Yue had gone.
As Jun walked to the competitors’ pavilion to find water and shade, he heard an announcer shout, “In the Blue Arena, representing the Immortal Strength Academy, Mr. Chen the Indomitable will face his opponent, representing the Iron Core school, Prodigy Yin!”
Jun stopped in his tracks. Yin Yue has a martial name?
It must’ve been given to him by Master Song and his fellow students before he left for Xicheng. Swallowing down the sour taste of jealousy, Jun shouldered his way into the crowd surrounding the Blue Arena, arriving in time to see the opening of the fight.
Mr. Chen, it turned out, was the huge, grinning, loincloth-clad wrestler who had been standing next to Jun during the opening ceremony. As the gong sounded, he stomped his feet into a wide stance, throwing up puffs of dust from the raked arena floor, and slapped his thick hands on his thighs. With a roar, he charged Yin Yue.
Despite his size, Mr. Chen was fast. He was also considerably larger and heavier than Yin, and Yin Yue was not a small fighter. If he gets knocked down or thrown by that beast, he might be done for. Jun held his breath, unsure of what he was hoping would happen.
As his opponent rushed forward, head down like a thundering bull, Yin Yue leapt straight into Chen with a flying knee. Jun heard the crack of its impact on the other man’s chin.
The clashing momentum of the two fighters brought them both to the ground, Mr. Chen the Indominable on top of Yin, but completely unconscious. Yin rolled his prone opponent off himself and stood up, wiping the dirt off his hands and trousers. A murmur of confusion and then astonishment rose from the spectators.
“And the winner,” shouted the announcer, “is Prodigy Yin, who clearly lives up to his martial name!” Some of the audience made noises of disappointment. The fight had ended too quickly. To many of those watching, the knockout seemed like it could’ve been an accident, simple bad luck for the giant Mr. Chen.
Jun knew it was nothing of the sort; Yin would’ve been well aware that he would have no advantage in a brawl or a grappling match, and he had the absolute precision to make a single blow count against any opponent careless enough to lower their head to where Yin’s long legs could easily reach. Yin had stayed levelheaded and calculating. He certainly hadn’t been thrown off by the newness of the arena.
Yin walked out of the arena, not even breathing heavily, as two attendants bent over the groggy Mr. Chen and helped him to the sidelines. Jun recalled the words of the registrar the previous day. Those with the most boastful martial names were often the quickest to be eliminated.
Jun debated whether to say anything to his classmate as he passed. “You handled that pretty quickly,” he said. “Nice to start out with an easy fight.”
Yin took a towel from the basket of a nearby arena assistant and wiped off the back of his neck—not that Jun could see any sweat on him—before turning to Jun with narrowed eyes. “What was all that dancing around you did in your first match?” he said, disapproval dripping from his voice. “Why didn’t you protect your center line and counterattack the way Master Song taught us to? At the rate that fight was going, you’re lucky you were able to slip in that finishing blow when you did.”
Jun bristled. “It was no more lucky than your flying knee,” he countered. “Iron Core techniques weren’t working, so I used something else.”
“The techniques weren’t working because you didn’t commit to them,” Yin said. “You’ve gotten rusty in the past month. Dodging around in a fight isn’t our way.”
“Our way?” Jun was too surprised to be angry. “How many times do I have to remind you that I’m not sponsored by the Iron Core school? Representing Master Song is your job here, not mine. The only thing I care about is winning, and I’ll use anything that works to do it.”
Yin ground his jaw and looked on the verge of lecturing Jun further, as if they were still in the school in Cheon and Jun was a lower-ranked student in need of instruction, but both of them were distracted by a rush of people pushing past them toward the Red Arena. “You have to see this match!” someone shouted. “It’s Savage Ma fighting Leopard!”
Jun and Yin glanced at each other, agreeing with grudging silence to put their argument on hold, and moved to where the action was. Savage Ma, the frightening woman whom Jun had seen briefly the day before, was walking slowly around a man who was, astonishingly, even more intimidating in appearance than she was.
The man called Leopard stood bare-chested, the corded muscles of his neck, chest, and arms crisscrossed with whip scars. His face was short and flat, like that of a purebred lapdog, but his bulbous nose and ears spoke to how many times his features had been smashed and healed. More disconcerting, however, was his expression, a piercing, feral stare full of contempt.
“I hear he’s an ex-convict that General Cobu plucked out of a fighting den near the eastern border,” muttered a gap-toothed man whom Jun recognized as the one who’d bet against him earlier. “The general is sponsoring him, but no one knows anything else about the man. He doesn’t have a school. He doesn’t even have a family name. Just goes by Leopard. I put eighty copper yun on him.”
Savage Ma didn’t appear at all intimidated by the stranger before her. She wrinkled her nose as she sized him up. She was shorter and lighter than her opponent, but her scale-tipped fingers were stained with blood.
“She crushed her first opponent’s throat,” the first bettor’s companion countered enthusiastically. “This is her second time at the Guardian’s Tournament. She was only eighteen the first time and still made it all the way to semifinals. My money’s on her.”
At the sound of the gong, Leopard stalked toward his opponent with a dark, implacable sense of purpose. Savage Ma did not wait for him to reach her. She attacked without hesitation, flying at him with her hands extended, bloodstained fingers crooked into claws, aiming for his face. For sheer speed and ferocity, she made even the Tiger Spirit students seem like amateurs.
Leopard avoided her first attack; her second tore parallel gashes across his chest, but he didn’t react as blood ran down his bare skin. Leopard caught his opponent’s arm and smashed the extended elbow upward with all his force.
Jun wasn’t the only one who flinched, braced for the joint to snap in a sickening way. Ma only grunted in discomfort, her thin arm as unbent as a metal bar. It seemed her unusual strength wasn’t limited to her hands; she had the gift of bones too strong to break.
In the moment that Leopard stood confused by his unsuccessful effort, Savage Ma launched herself up, spinning around her opponent like a monkey on a branch, wrapping her legs around his torso from behind. Perched high on the man’s back, she seized the sides of his shaved head in her unusually powerful hands.
The gap-toothed man, visibly distressed at how he was about to lose one bet right after the other, cried, “Dragon’s blood, is she going to crush his skull?”
It certainly seemed that way. Jun watched with nauseated fascination as Savage Ma’s sharp red fingertips sank into Leopard’s scalp. A breathmark like that really is unbeatable.
It was just as Old Man Zhang had said.
Leopard grimaced as Savage Ma’s arms began to strain with inhuman strength. Jun caught a glimpse of the man’s small, crooked teeth, two of them missing. Reaching over his shoulder, Leopard yanked his opponent forward by the front of her shirt, pulling Ma down to his face, and sank his teeth into his opponent’s neck.
Savage Ma let out a piercing scream. A collective gasp went up as Leopard threw the woman forward over his shoulder. She landed on her back in front of him and before she could move to spring up again, Leopard stomped straight down on her throat, crushing her windpipe.
Savage Ma writhed on the ground, her hands clutching her neck, eyes bulging, tongue and lips flapping, unable to do more than wheeze. It was a long, grueling three minutes before she lay completely still. Red gashes streaked the sides of Leopard’s head like macabre war paint as he looked down at her body impassively.
The announcer’s stunned voice was much quieter than it had been at the start of the fight, but nevertheless stood out in the silence. “Leopard wins and moves on to the next round!”
Half the spectators began walking away in disgust, but others burst into excited shouts and cheers. The gap-toothed bettor was grinning. Money changed hands. The fact that these people had just seen a woman murdered in the arena didn’t seem to faze them.
Jun felt queasy. Everything had suddenly become a little too real.
“Leopard! Leopard!” chanted half a dozen men wearing red scarves, punching their fists into the air. Leopard stood unmoved, indifferent to their acclaim. Two attendants nervously approached the victor and escorted him from the arena, afraid, it seemed, to touch him even to treat his wounds.
“So that’s General Cobu’s candidate.” Yin Yue’s voice was low, and the cords of his neck stood out beneath his set jaw. “That animal can’t become the Guardian.”