The second-to-st day at Yellow Pine forced me to look at everything without excuses. Before, I’d been in such a rush to get out of here, and now that the main threat had been dealt with, I simply didn’t have enough time. If I stopped massaging the facts to fit my desired outcome and instead assessed my progress with brutal honesty: things were going well. Better than well, even. The discs obeyed, tilting came easier, flight paths had stabilised, and my channels were on the final stretch toward full recovery. Even the Double Cycle worked properly in seven out of ten attempts. With mental techniques, I had a hundred per cent success rate with one disc, and around sixty to sixty-five per cent with two.

  The minimum programme had been overachieved. But I still hadn’t reached my maximum.

  The entire time I’d been at Yellow Pine, I hadn’t had a single proper duel. No one-on-one, no tournament, not even a decent spar where both sides entered with the understanding that this would be a test, not a performance or a teaching session. Everything I’d done had either been training, experimenting, or target work.

  Sure, there was the metro. That was a fight — hell of a one. But that was different. That was survival, where you don’t test your skills, you wring out whatever still works. There’s no time to analyse distance or timing. You either walk away alive, or you don’t.

  A duel is different. In a duel, both you and your opponent are at your peak, giving it your all in a calm, focused state. A mistake doesn’t mean death, so you can afford to make one, assess it, and correct it.

  And I hadn’t had that.

  I could have arranged a duel today. I could’ve found a partner. But Novak was arriving tomorrow.

  It would be awkward, to say the least, if the duel ended with me in the infirmary, spending a few days in a pod regenerating my intestines.

  I could praise my progress all I liked, and there had been progress, but I was still not at the peak of my abilities. My channels weren’t fully restored. Sometimes I still had to control disc flight with my hands instead of my mind, as it should’ve been. The Double Cycle often flipped from a useful tool into a burden.

  So the duel was off the table.

  I didn’t want one for the sake of winning or ticking a box. I needed it for the experience of using techniques while someone was actively trying to stop me. It was time to transition from academic application to practical use. Besides, real combat experience against cultivators with types of qi not represented in Bck Lotus wouldn’t hurt either.

  That left sparring.

  Finding a reliable sparring partner was harder than finding an opponent for a duel. An unfamiliar person, after taking a beating, might lose control and throw caution to the wind, which almost certainly ends in injury.

  I figured I could probably arrange something through the hall, via Eriksen, under instructor supervision, but that would be a strictly refined and reguted sparring match. What I needed was something looser. Less clinical.

  And no matter how I turned the thought around, it kept circling back to one name.

  Zhang.

  The problem was, the st time we trained togather, she’d called me an idiot about ten times and promised “never again.”

  I called her just as I started doubting whether today was even the right time. The second-to-st day has this strange quality: everything feels either too te or too rushed.

  “Yes?” Her voice was ft, almost indifferent. Background noise suggested she was in the hall or between training sessions.

  “Got a minute?”

  A short pause. A few deep breaths.

  “Go on.”

  “I need a sparring partner.”

  The silence was so sharp I checked to see if the call had dropped.

  “After st time?!” Her voice jumped a pitch, ringing with outrage. “No,” she said. Her tone had turned steely. “Don’t even ask. I’m not going to be part of your self-destruction again.”

  “We all make mistakes,” I said. “You, for example, sometimes take some pretty questionable stuff.”

  “Oh, so now you’re bckmailing me?” she shot back, daring me to give the wrong answer.

  “Rex,” I said. “Just a reminder — none of us are perfect.”

  She had no comeback for that, so I went on.

  “This time, I’m not pnning to hurt myself. I’m going to kick your arse,” I said. “Armoured arse. Sparring in armour. And, pre-empting any objections — I’ll cover repairs.”

  “You’re serious?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Still sounds like masochism. You won’t beat me.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. And I’ll be sincerely grateful if you let me go all out.”

  “This smells like…”

  “It doesn’t smell like anything!” I snapped. “I don’t want to pay extra for repairs either. And my armour costs way more than yours!” I said, deliberately cocky, trying to provoke her.

  “So you just want to use me as a dummy? I’m not even supposed to fight back?” Her voice was filled with disbelief.

  Seemed like I’d pyed my hand a bit wrong.

  “I need one serious sparring match — one I can walk away on my own feet,” I said firmly. “But I am going to try to win.”

  Somehow, I convinced her.

  “Fine!” she said. “This evening. Around half six.”

  “Perfect!”

  I booked the hall for an hour, though I didn’t expect it to st that long. I almost reserved a smaller chamber, it would’ve given me more room to manoeuvre, but Zhang would’ve been at a disadvantage. Long-range attacks were her strength.

  From what I’d seen, standard Lightning Finger tactics relied on quick retreats, avoiding contact, and bombarding the opponent from a distance with beams.

  So I went for a massive hall, with matte walls and a domed ceiling. No pilrs, no stands, no obstacles. Just clean space for two people who’d promised not to do anything stupid, at least in theory.

  I arrived early and ran through the Double Cycle a few times with cheap combat discs. I wasn’t about to fight her with pstic ones.

  Zhang arrived exactly on time. She gnced at the discs and gave a short snort.

  “Being frugal?” she asked.

  “You know much about them?”

  “Not really. But they look cheap.”

  “They are. I haven’t settled on a main set yet.”

  “Fair enough…” she said, looking around the hall. “Shall we start?”

  I gestured for her to step back.

  “Throwing away your st chance?” she said as she backed away.

  I swear, I could’ve ended it with an Iron Head before the fight even properly began! She was being way too cocky…

  Or she was deliberately trying to trigger me.

  I didn’t lunge forward. Instead, I stepped sideways and up, pushing off the air like it was a springboard. The Mad Monkey of East had a tendency to surprise those unfamiliar with it. A jump, Thousand Sparks, Parallelisation, a somersault, Double Cycle, and a disc throw. Another push, a sharp change of direction. I wasn’t trying to attack yet. I was just preparing.

  The discs spun around me like moons around Earth.

  Zhang didn’t wait. She turned into a ser turret. A wave of nausea swept through my gut, the telltale sign of Finger Qi, and the formations took the first salvo.

  I changed my movement path, but I was mid-jump. All she had to do to counter was twitch a finger.

  The beams tracked me, tearing through my defensive formations like cardboard.

  I had to get her moving. I needed to attack, but my hands were still ‘holding the discs.’ The pressure of the fight made it impossible to shift control to my head and free my hands for Fist techniques. I had to keep flicking my fingers, adjusting the discs’ trajectory.

  The first disc dove toward the ground and curved up into the formation in front of her left arm.

  It startled Zhang. I felt the nausea vanish. She’d lost her aim. I lost a disc, but gained a free hand. Still...

  I sent the second disc roughly toward her head, knowing her formation would absorb the hit and deflect it upward. I followed it with two Hooks and surged closer and lower, hoping to intercept the disc mid-air before it fell too far.

  Zhang reevaluated her attitude toward the fight in a matter of seconds.

  She jumped back, leaving behind a cloud of sparks. She’d switched to the cssic strategy of her kind, showing this was now serious.

  She stopped pressing forward. That was the first thing I noticed. The beams vanished, and the hall suddenly felt far too big and quiet. Zhang wasn’t retreating in panic, she was moving. Fast, economical, with the cold precision that comes when someone decides to fight seriously, but without frenzy.

  Manoeuvre combat.

  Though bound to the floor, she glided over it with arming speed, never letting me pin her down. I, on the other hand, began pushing. The Mad Monkey kept me airborne, while Chain Punches came in long bursts for pressure. I wasn’t trying to hit her,I was trying to drive her into a corner.

  I had one disc left, so I redirected one thread of focus solely to it, freeing up my hands. Plus, catching the disc after it bounced off her formation became much easier. The only catch, I had to keep the strike trajectory the same each time: low to high, so it would rebound upwards.

  Zhang dodged. She’d stopped attacking altogether.

  I thought she couldn’t handle my pressure.

  No, she was good. Very good. Every movement she made was minimal, every shift calcuted. But the dodging had been a trap.

  In a fsh, Zhang stopped. Nausea surged through me.

  Two beams shot from her hands simultaneously, both aimed at a single point. A clean, high-powered bst. My formations burned away in an instant, and a moment ter, my right shoulder exploded with pain. Sharp and hot, it blurred my vision. My muscles seized, and I crashed face-first into the floor at full speed.

  I hadn’t even taken a breath before the world flipped. Zhang was above me. Her boot pressed against my chest. One finger pointed at the visor of my helmet.

  “Looks like that’s the end,” she said.

  “Or maybe… Ow!”

  She didn’t let me finish. My shoulder fred with pure electric pain. Her other finger was aimed at the gap in my armour.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked. “You lot don’t have anything that piercing.”

  “Ultimate,” Zhang replied, stepping back and offering me a hand.

  “What the fuck? If I had used my ult, you’d be a smear on the floor!”

  “Oh, really? If you didn’t want me to use mine, maybe you should’ve said so at the start.”

  Should’ve opened with Iron Head...

  “By the way,” she added, “your armour’s really good. I’ve used that technique to punch straight through a few idiots.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Did you actually think you’d win?” she asked.

  “I didn’t rule it out. But I was more disappointed by the discs. Thought they’d perform better.”

  “Oh, they did perform,” Zhang said. “My formation was hanging by a thread. It’s because of those discs I decided to finish you off in one move.”

  “You definitely need better-quality ones.”

  I really hope that was true, and not just her being nice.

  MaksymPachesiuk