The half breed crossed the space between them in the blink of an eye. His sword came at Marroo in a whistling arch, invisible to anyone without Marroo’s open meridians. Marroo’s sword flew up and steel screamed as they clashed.

The half breed telegraphed a cut to Marroo’s left while his sword descended like lightning towards his right and again their blades screamed. The cut hit with enough force to drive Marroo backwards and Marroo let it drive him six feet up the slope before he caught himself and braced for the half breed’s renewed onslaught.

He came like the wind, and in the space of two seconds they traded a flurry of blows that made their swords sound like the ringing of a city full of bells, each stroke too fast for the unaided eye to follow, each hammering blow driven with enough force to shatter stone or bend steel, if they hadn’t reinforced their blades with their breath.

For the first minute, they tested one another. The half-breed bore down on Marroo while Marroo tried to lure him into artificial openings in his defense. They battled back and forth across the basin while the old men on the pipe above them gasped and yelled encouragement to the half-breed.

The half breed was fast, opening the first three meridians did that. The core gave the body strength, Extremis moved that strength to the limbs, while an open Sensorium gave Marroo’s opponent the ability to keep up with the speeds it let him reach, but there were pauses in the fight, moments less than a second in length when Marroo adjusted his stance or the half-breed recovered from a flurry of cuts, pauses that wouldn’t have existed if he’d opened up his Mentalis Meridian as well, the tangled channels responsible for accelerating the mind of a cultivator to the same speed as his flesh.

Marroo’s opponent compensated admirably by planning out whole series of cuts in advance, katas designed to apply wicked pressure while maintaining a defensive posture that could respond to any attack at a speed faster than thought. A chop turned to a parry, a parry to a swing meant to open Marroo’s center, then a jab, fast as lightning that Marroo barely pushed toward the ground before the sword spun to shoot at his face and had to be deflected once again.

Marroo leapt away and the cultivator followed, sword angled to impale Marroo while he landed or deflect a strike aimed at him while he was still in the air.

Their sword’s rang together, and the backlash from their cuts and counter cuts whipped the weeds around them as though in a storm.

The half breed was the first to project his breath. He shoved his sword at Marroo in what his father called a push cut, not quite a stab, but a slash aimed in a sideways cut towards the arteries on Marroo’s neck. Marroo slid sideways easily and yanked his sword right to knock it away, but as his sword connected with the half-breed’s he felt the man’s spirit convulse and breath blasted out of the sword blade still inches from his head.

In all of his lessons on breath, Marroo’s father called breath a man’s spiritual hands, while the icons were the things that filled them. “Change your hand into a blade, and you can cut anything your spirit can touch.”

The “hands” of the half breed were empty as he pushed his breath through the sword. Thanks to the sword itself, the breath was imbued with a very dull edge, but when it slammed into Marroo it felt more like he’d slapped Marroo in the face with the sharp edge of a board. Marroo cried out and reeled backwards from the blow, but his sword moved of its own volition and long training to smack away the half breeds follow up attack. Steel bit at Marroo as he leapt away and he felt his spirit shake as the ground caught his feet. He leaned forward as the half-breed leapt after him and met the mismatched silver and crimson eyes that chased him, felt blood drip from a shallow cut across one ear, and felt the beginnings of fear rise from deep within his guts.

“There are two kinds of emotions.” His father grated when Marroo was six years old, a stone pressed between the child’s palms. “There are those you can’t control. Pain, hunger, pleasure. They don’t matter. The others are the ones we choose. Grief, anger, fear, love. Ignore them, and they disappear, but feed them, and they become a weapon in your hand, a weapon capable of overcoming every other emotion in a battle, even the greatest pain.” Six year old Marroo’s vision wavered as he looked up at his father through the tears brought on by the waves of pain radiating from the stone. “Choose.” His father commanded.

Marroo chose.

He chose anger.

Marroo whipped his sword at the half-breed while he was still in the air. The breath he projected from the cut went out from his blade like the wind. It slammed into the man while he still hurtled through the air. An invisible wave of breath shot out of the half-breed’s sword to meet Marroo’s and the grass around them rocked from the impact. When the half breed’s sword met Marroo’s the two came together in a tangled snarl of projected breath and spiritual techniques that cracked the cement around them and sent dirt and weeds flying from the arch of their deflected cuts.

The crimson eye of the half-breed flicked as it followed Marroo’s sword across the dance floor of their twisting arms, and Marroo saw the body of a crimson eyed girl as it flopped onto a crimson bed when he was only ten years old. He slammed his breath forward and remembered the thug he’d cut in half slide apart as the spiritual blades turned him into lifeless gore, he remembered his mother’s books, and the park, remembered the stone, his mother’s touch, the old man’s hand as he clutched Marroo’s and Marroo whispered that he would not die alone. He heard his father’s voice.

The sword cuts.

The icon whispered to him. It resonated with the clangor of their clashing swords, roared with the wash of spirit blasted from their combined projections, sighed from the sea of lambent spiritual breath that swirled and eddied around them as they fought to break each other’s stance, or style, or flesh.

The breath wanted a shape, it wanted Marroo to shape it, but the only shape he knew was the one he’d sworn he would never touch. The half breed’s sword swung high then fell, and Marroo heard the icon as it struck sparks from his own.

The strike sang with the voice of the Icon, a voice Marroo refused to hear.

He pivoted with the force of the blow, dropped his sword and turned to kick, hard, at the half-breeds hands wrapped tight around the sword moving for his open side. Breath hammered into the half-breed’s hand with the kick and the sword staggered while the grass billowed behind him. The last embers of the spiritual bonfire at Marroo’s core guttered as he overdrew on his channels, but in the half second stagger before the Half-Breed recovered with a savage swipe for Marroo’s eyes, he saw an opening.

He saw it in the split second between the strikes that followed, a cut at his leg, a slash at his chest, a clash of blades that turned into a flurry of cuts toward Marroo’s neck, the kind of opening Marroo would never have noticed without his fourth meridian open.

The half breed’s sword wove a complex pattern of strokes and cuts that relied upon Marroo countering them to position them for their next attack. It was an easy thing to rely on. Breath slammed out of every one of the half-breed’s cuts which forced Marroo to counter each and every single one of them with a cut and burst of breath of his own or risk having his stance broken or his forms thrown into the kind of disarray that would end in pain and violent death, but the breath was no the thing that would kill him. It was the sword.

The half breed rammed his sword tip towards Marroo’s chest, accompanied by a burst of breath. Marroo intercepted it with a twist, drove it upwards and slammed his spiritual hands into his opponent’s to counter the burst. He felt the dregs of his spirit gutter again at the expenditure of breath as he opened himself for the same sort of push-cut the half-breed used to open their spiritual battle.

He could sensed the weakness that would come with the last of his breath like a premonition in the moments when the fire winked off and on in his core. He slowed, marginally, as he lifted the half-breed’s sword past his chest, over his shoulder just a few inches from his neck, saw the moment when the half-breed drew his breath towards the sword, shifted his weight to push for the air a few inches from Marroo’s face.

Marroo dropped.

He sucked power from his core to power his limbs as he drove the tip of his sword towards the half-breed’s kidney with the force of habit and long, far too long, training.

His father’s Katas all had florid names in the manuals Marroo’s old man pulled them from. He’d come up with different names for all of them when he was forced to memorize them step by step for fear of enduring the stone. “Father’s Rebuke”, “Father Scolds”, “Father Lectures”, “Father gets the stone”.

Father Kills.

“You stab to kill.”

The tip of Marroo’s sword should have kissed the half-breed’s shirt, right above the hip and a little to the right of the belly button. It should have punched through his kidney and severed a half dozen meridians that curled and knotted through the organs there. It would have, if Marroo was his father. Marroo turned the sword in the last instant and slammed the last of his breath through his knuckles into the half-breeds flesh instead.

He felt the bonfire at his core go out, saw the half-breed fly across the crater’s basin from the force of the blow, staggered, as breath from the half-breeds technique rocked the world around him, and caught himself on his blade.

The half breed tumbled in a spray of dust and broken weeds as he landed on the other side of the basin. He rolled with the skill of a hundred fights to catch the ground with his feet and rose at a crouch, sword up, facing Marroo.

Marroo sucked for air as his body tried in vain to recapture the spiritual breath he’d expended. Empty, Marroo’s channels felt like vacuums pulling at the center of his soul. His limbs felt like led weights attached to his joints.

The half-breed tensed as Marroo stumbled, but Marroo tossed away his sword and clutched his chest. He glared at the half-breed, the enforcer, and waited to die.

The icon was quiet in his mind.

The half breed looked at Marroo in puzzlement, then slowly, as though expecting a trap, touched the spot where Marroo hit him. He pulled the hand away and looked at it. When he found no blood he stared at the hand, then at Marroo while the men on the pipe yelled for the half breed to finish the job.

He straightened, as Marroo’s chest heaved, and he sheathed his sword.

“What are you doing?” One of the old men shouted. “Kill him!”

The half-breed studied Marroo across the crater. “I will not kill a man who will not kill me.” He finally said.

“He won.” one of the old men said. “He clearly won.”

Marroo’s father glowered down at the half-breed without replying.

The half breed met Marroo’s eyes across the empty basin, then he bowed. “Thank you for the fight.”

When he straightened, he left, not out of the bowl, but to the old men who squabbled with Marroo’s father over whether or not they would be paid.

“My son is still alive.” Marroo’s father growled. “I wasn’t paying for a sparring match.” Marroo’s breathing slowed as he caught his breath while the men argued. The Nausea from emptying his spirit faded as his breath returned and wind stirred the dust kicked up from shattered cement by their battle. Above, the engine of the Night Plains howled its distant howl while roaches screamed back in answer from the grass beyond the shattered basin.

When the old men finally left, empty handed, his father descended through the flattened weeds until he stood in front of Marroo.

The anger that carried Marroo through the fight still burned hot within him as he met his father’s eyes.

Neither spoke.

It couldn’t last.

The anger transformed as Marroo showered after their return. He stood under the hot water with his face pressed to the wall as he wept.

They were done with the wasteland after that. Marroo never returned with his father, and no one ever collected the thousand Drachmae Darro’d offered for his death, but the training continued.

“What does the blade do?” His father grated as spiritual blades spun around the training room.

Marroo sat in across from him, numb to everything inside but the voice that whispered from the cuts manifested in the world by his father’s Icon.

“It cuts.”

It took four more months for his father to finally break him.