Wu Hao bounced up and down on his feet, settling his nerves. He had prepared, obviously, but no matter what else he'd told himself, his confidence had taken a significant hit. He had died once before: the risk was that he would die again.
Still that annoying hesitation to die.
Su Biao arrived in the arena, walking slowly. He hadn't paid attention to her entry before, but for the first time he realized that her emotions were evident even before the match had started. She was a little nervous, but as much as him. Mostly she was wondering who he was.
And there was pity.
Wu Hao could stand a lot of things, but not pity. Accepting pity was an admission of inferiority, and he couldn't abide that.
Their eyes met, Su Biao's bright blue eyes scrunched into a frown as they met Hao Wu's dull brown eyes. Another part of the disguise.
Tai Buzhou raised a hand, his qi making it clear how he expected this match to go.
"Ready?" he asked.
"I'm ready," Wu Hao said, as brusquely as he could.
"I have a question," Su Biao said slowly. "Why do you not simply give up? You saw your friend earlier. He couldn't win, either, and now he is grievously wounded."
"He's not my friend," Wu Hao snapped.
"That's not an answer."
"You're right," he responded, and raised his spear. "It isn't."
"I will hurt you if you make me," Su Biao said quite imperiously.
Wu Hao smiled thinly. "You'll try."
The crowd didn't consider this much of a barb, judging by the boos he got in response to that.
"Are you ready?" Tai Buzhou interrupted, before Su Biao could answer. "Both of you?"
"I'm ready," Wu Hao said honestly.
Su Biao nodded and moved into a combat stance as well, finally. The same stance as she had used last time.
Tai Buzhou's hand raised higher, ready to get on with it. Then it came crashing down, barely halting before the stone itself, and then Tai Buzhou was gone, leaving only his resounding voice:
"Begin!"
Wu Hao activated the first - and to be honest, only - countermeasure he had prepared for this specific fight. He had suspected that he would face Su Biao again, even before he'd had it confirmed that the matches were rigged.
Qi flooded the new array that he'd carved into the side of his spear. It wasn't his best work. Its edges were ragged and would waste a decent chunk of qi that he pumped into it. He hadn't bothered thinking about backup channels, or clever tricks, or anything like it to improve how long the array would work for.
If it just worked once, he could iterate on it later. If it didn't, the victory he was hoping for would turn out to be nothing but a fever dream.
But as the qi burned its way through the spear, Wu Hao felt a distant tingle as the array began to churn with power. He felt the qi that leaked from the sides, could see with his own eyes areas where he could've improved it significantly now that he knew how it worked in practice.
Because it worked.
The array had been a desperate bastardization of one that he'd seen more times than he'd wanted to. The Array Dolls had had things inscribed into their flesh that allowed them to convert natural, unattuned qi into that vile, shadow-slime qi.
He'd aped it, but instead of producing a reproduction of that, he'd made it so it produced a similar qi as that which he'd use for the Storm-Cutting Saber Art.
The snap resounded loudly. Wu Hao felt the currents take shape underneath his fingers as he uncurled them, letting them race into the spear. The wood deadened the electricity somewhat and the spear began to smoke from the thunder running through it, but nonetheless it managed to reach the spearhead, where it gathered into an angry, buzzing ripple of power unmistakable to his senses.
That had been part one. Now came the hard part.
He breathed in deeply, setting his feet just right. He repeated the words in his mind like a mantra: one shot. One shot. One shot.
Su Biao was staring at him. Her hands had tightened around her spear, until with a grunt she broke off what she'd been preparing herself for and rushed Wu Hao.
She had realized that he was planning something, then. She was probably aiming to destabilize it before he could finish what he was doing and fire it off at her. Threads of surprised worry made their way across the waves of her qi.
Wu Hao just pushed more of his own qi into his technique. The snap of lightning began to resound, again, again, again. Thunder raced up the spear's shaft, concentrating at the mongrel steel of the spearhead. It began to buzz and quake in his hands, but Wu Hao held on with everything he had, even as the skin of his hand began to feel like it was burning.
More qi. Enough that he could feel an aching sort of cold begin to steal the edges of his awareness away from him, and the forming burns on his hands went from a source of pain to something reassuring, the tether by which he had kept himself attached to the world.
Even as she appeared next to him and her spear lashed out, he simply accepted the slash to his shoulder.
It was funny, in a way. If she had simply attacked him with everything she had, then he would've been left dying on the arena floor again. Instead, she was trying to feel him out by using attacks that would break his concentration. She didn't have the stomach to simply beat him down.
He grinned as her spearhead ripped open the skin on his arms, and a vague sense of disturbance could only keep growing in her qi. Her next step, followed by an attack that would end him, was wobbly when it should have been dead certain, solid as a mountain.
One shot, he thought for the final time. Then he took a single step - the first he'd moved since the fight had begun - and he struck.
Su Biao tried to retreat, but it was too late. He'd charged every single bit of thunder into the spear, which was almost glowing as he thrust it out in a stab faster than even his eyes could track.
"One Shot Spear Art," he mumbled. "Heart Seeker."
And like a storm at sea, thunder struck the waves and broke them into nothingness.
The qi that Su Biao had surrounded herself with was simply torn apart, the super-real water parting before the tip of Wu Hao's spear, leaving only a thin tunnel where his spear had pierced through. It was as if a single ray of light - a needle thrown idly down from Heaven - had ripped through every cloud in its way.
The spear's head came to a shuddering, jeering stop, crashing against a thin pane of thick blue qi. From beneath Su Biao's neck, a necklace gave a loud, rumbling crack, but the pane held no matter how much Wu Hao pressed down on it, tried to cut through it with everything he had.
His one shot hadn't yet finished.
He had hit her hard enough to kill her, if he'd wanted to. At that moment, he had wanted to. Her hands slid to the side of her own spear, which whirled around dangerously. She tried to wedge it between the pane and her body, but the pane refused to budge.
Their eyes met. Her eyes had gone cloudy with a deep sense of panic and confusion. Thunder chirped around them and the approving roar of a tiger resounded in his ears, overwhelming everything else to the point where he couldn't hear anything. It felt like a moment that stretched on into centuries.
Her mouth fell open and Su Biao tried to speak. She managed two syllables: "I surr-"
The pressure that he'd been concentrating on top of his spear erupted with the loud sound of a thunderclap, interrupting her, and hurled her away from the arena like a child skipping stones over a lake. She slammed into the stone, left spiderleg cracks where she had landed, and was flung into the air again.
When she landed again, she was outside the arena entirely. She didn't get up and she didn't speak.
One shot.
He raised his spear to the sky, unable to speak. Ragged breaths slipped from his mouth. The world came back to him in fits and spurts, but most of all he enjoyed the blessed silence that had overtaken the entire arena. The thunder had burned through him to the point where he didn't feel much, other than simply tired.
One kill.
Then the silence was broken. Tai Buzhou moved from where he'd been standing to the side of the arena, appearing next to Su Biao with wide-eyed shock evident on his features. He touched her with a palm, rolled her over indelicately. No one quite seemed to know what to say.
Blank eyes stared up to heaven, but her chest rose as Wu Hao watched. He let his spear sag back down, fighting not to simply let it go crashing down to earth and sink down alongside it.
"She's alive," Tai Buzhou announced, a few breaths later. "But she's unconscious."
This was met with stunned silence, at first, before whispers began to spread.
Wu Hao ignored them all.
"I'm the winner," he managed. "Announce it."
"Su Biao requires medical help," Tai Buzhou said. He swished his sleeve; a few men in vaguely apothecarial outfits appeared out of the shadows, charging over using movement techniques.
Where had they all been for Ao Ying, then? There were barely even wounds on Su Biao - that pane had wrapped around her at the last possible instant, preventing her from being all that injured by the blow.
Tai Buzhou remained respectfully standing next to Su Biao, and then his eyes snapped up to Wu Hao. Anger radiated from his every pore, and to Wu Hao's senses that wasn't a metaphor. Qi that was angry and humiliated in equal measure ran through the man's every vein, occasionally forming bubbles on his skin that popped soundlessly.
"You," he said. "What do you have to say for yourself?"
"That I'm the winner," Wu Hao said.
"Do you think these are deathmatches?" Tai Buzhou roared. "This is a friendly competition, meant to showcase the best and brightest of our age!"
His voice crashed into Wu Hao like a physical thing, and the wind all but blew him clear off his feet. Only by planting his spear into the stone and clinging to it prevented him from being bounced like Su Biao had just been.
"I won," Wu Hao said, defiant in the face of the hurricane winds beating down on him. "Announce it."
"First," Tai Buzhou bellowed, "I will -"
A voice cut through the entire clamor and the hubbub. Wu Hao had thought that Su Biao's qi had felt like the sea, but in comparison to the sheer immensity and solidness of the qi he now felt, it couldn't even have been called a lake. Even a puddle would have seemed doubtable.
Compared to this Su Biao's amount of qi had been the dregs of ocean water left in shells scattered across the beach when the tide retreated.
"Stop."
Everything and everyone stopped, right away. Other qi still moved - equally ludicrous amounts of qi shoving the stifling pressure of the sea of qi aside. Flowering trees, the radiance of the sun, burning petals...
Tai Buzhou's last word trailed off into the sudden, vast silence, and he turned slowly to the stands.
A figure in blue had stood up straight. It was the master of the Qingcheng Sect, Su Yi. He had made a friendly impression earlier, talking and laughing with the junior members of his sect, but right now his power was holding down the entire arena from a distance. He had ripped Tai Buzhou's voice from him without so much as a gesture, and he didn't even seem winded - the only thing to reveal that it was him doing it was Wu Hao's senses and the slight frown that marred his face.
"I, Su Yi of the Qingcheng Sect, have made a decision," he said, his tone imperious. "We will recognize the victory of Hao Wu."
Tai Buzhou was on the edge of saying something, before he thought better of it.
"Understood, sir," he said. He bowed low.
But the look that he directed Wu Hao's way had in no way cooled.