Chapter 6
The Weight of a Crane
The semifinals were held at dawn.
Not by tradition — by the court observer's request. Inspector Luo Mingzhi had sent a sealed note to Headmaster Fang the previous evening, politely phrased in the way that imperial requests were always politely phrased when they were not actually requests. He wished to observe the remaining matches under optimal conditions. Dawn light. Full gallery. No distractions.
Headmaster Fang had complied.
Wei Liang stood on the arena floor in the thin gold of early morning and watched the mist lift off the stone. The galleries were already half-full. More observers than yesterday — word had spread through the city overnight in the way that interesting things always spread, faster than anyone intended.
Song Baiyu emerged from the competitor's corridor and crossed the floor without ceremony. She had her white training robes on again, her hair pinned with the same jade needle, and she walked like someone who had already decided the outcome of everything in her life and was simply waiting for events to catch up.
She stopped eight feet away.
"You slept," she said. It was not a question.
"Some."
"I did not." She looked at him with the particular attention of someone taking an honest inventory. "Your summon. Does it tire?"
"I do not think so. Not the way we do."
She nodded once, as if this confirmed something. Then she summoned her Crane.
The Celestial Crane unfolded from its diagram with the unhurried grace of something that has never in its existence been required to hurry. Seven feet of white feather and cold intelligence, its gold beak and talons catching the first light. It regarded Achilles — when Wei Liang summoned him a moment later — with the direct, measuring focus of a creature deciding whether something is prey or peer.
Achilles looked back at it with the same expression.
The signal bell rang.
✦ ✦ ✦
What followed was not the kind of fight that produced easy descriptions.
The Crane opened with distance — it climbed immediately, spiraling upward on the warm air rising from the stone, putting thirty feet between itself and the arena floor. From that height it began its resonance, not the full-force pulse it had used against the Iron Dragon but something more precise: a sustained, modulated frequency aimed at the binding point between Wei Liang and Achilles.
Achilles staggered.
Not much — a half-step, his bronze armor ringing faintly — but it was the first time in the Exhibition that anything had moved him involuntarily, and the galleries registered it with a collective intake of breath.
Wei Liang felt it too, a vibration in his chest where the binding lived, like a lute string plucked by the wrong hand.
"Push through it," he said.
Achilles straightened. Raised his shield. The shield's face began to glow — those intricate designs activating in response to the resonance, absorbing some of the frequency, scattering the rest. Not immunity. Resistance. Enough.
The Crane dove.
Achilles read it — stepped to the side, shield angled to deflect rather than absorb — and the Crane's wing-strike caught the shield's edge and glanced off, leaving a long bright scratch in the bronze. The Crane banked, climbed, dove again from a different angle. Achilles deflected again. A third time. A fourth.
The gallery began to understand what it was watching: not a clash of power but a test of endurance. The Crane was trying to exhaust the shield's resistance. Achilles was trying to outlast the Crane's precision.
It was, Wei Liang realized, the kind of fight that could go on for a very long time.
Across the arena, Song Baiyu stood still with her eyes closed. Her lips moved faintly — not words, something more like breath-patterns, a technique Wei Liang had seen described in theory class but never witnessed: deep-synchronization, where the summoner and beast shared not just intention but perception. The Crane was seeing through her eyes. She was feeling through its wings.
It was extraordinarily difficult. It was also extraordinarily effective.
The fifth dive came from directly above, the Crane in a near-vertical drop, and this time it did not aim for the shield — it aimed for Achilles' feet, trying to knock him from his stance, and the wing-edge caught his right greave and sent a crack running up the bronze.
Achilles went down on one knee.
The Crane wheeled upward.
In the moment before it dove again, Wei Liang made a decision.
"Black-out," he said quietly.
✦ ✦ ✦
The change moved through Achilles like weather.
His armor darkened — not in stages, but all at once, bronze becoming deep crimson becoming something near-black at the edges. The cracks in his greave sealed. He rose from one knee to his full height and turned his face upward toward the Crane descending at killing speed.
He did not raise his shield.
He raised his hand.
The Crane's resonance had been building since the fight began, frequency layering on frequency in Achilles' armor, and in the Black-out State something had happened to all of that absorbed sound: it had been converted. Not dissipated. Converted into something else — a vibration that ran through Achilles' bones and emerged from his open palm as a single focused pulse, the Crane's own resonance reflected back at precisely the frequency that the Crane itself could not withstand.
The Celestial Crane hit an invisible wall at twenty feet and recoiled.
Not injured. Stunned. Its own voice thrown back at it, briefly scrambling the deep-synchronization, severing the shared perception between Baiyu and her beast for the span of four heartbeats.
Four heartbeats was enough.
Achilles was already moving.
He crossed the arena floor in the time it took the Crane to recover its orientation, and had his sword resting against its primary feathers — the killing point — before it could climb again.
The gallery was absolutely silent.
Then: a sound from somewhere in the upper tiers. A grinding, mechanical groan that had nothing to do with the fight.
The eastern wall of the arena buckled.
✦ ✦ ✦
It happened in less than three seconds.
The eastern wall — twenty feet of stone that had stood for two hundred years — did not collapse so much as come apart, each block separating from its neighbor with deliberate, coordinated precision, and through the gap that opened stepped something that had no business being inside the city walls of Chang'an.
A Nightmare Hound.
Tier 6.8. The size of a draft horse, its body the colour of a bruise, its fur standing in rigid spines that dripped a slow black ichor. Its eyes were not eyes so much as absences — voids that pulled light inward without returning it. It had six legs, the rear four splayed for stability, the front two raised and ending in curved black talons that had left three parallel gouges in the arena stone just from its entry.
Behind it, standing in the gap in the wall, was a boy.
He was perhaps Wei Liang's age — perhaps slightly older — with the kind of face that would have been handsome if its default expression were anything other than contempt. His robes were dark blue, unmarked by any clan crest Wei Liang recognized, and he held a black jade control ring loosely in two fingers the way someone holds a thing they could drop at any moment and not care.
His gaze moved across the arena. Past the scrambling students. Past the instructors already on their feet. Past the court observer reaching for the seal at his belt.
It stopped on Wei Liang.
"Wei Liang," the boy said, with the calm of someone who has rehearsed. "My name is Shen Wuque. I have a message for you from the people who actually ended your father's life."