All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [188]
Mr. Ma halted and cocked his head.
The other students, even Robert, stared, astonished . . . and backed farther away.
Mr. Ma slowly turned, his eyes narrowed, and he nodded. “Perhaps I should’ve at that.”
He lunged at her; she met him.
He struck three times. Her arms moved on their own—without thought—and parried. She riposted, but he just as effortlessly deflected her blows.
Mr. Ma slipped inside her guard and struck her dead center in the chest. The force shattered his bokken into splinters.
The impact pushed Fiona backwards into a crouch.
It had force enough to shatter a person’s rib rage and liquefy a human heart.
Fiona gritted her teeth. Fortunately, she wasn’t feeling very human at the moment. She smiled. His strike hadn’t even bruised her.
The world to her looked as if it were on fire—all brilliant ruby red and tinged with the blood that pounded through her, blazing with anger.
Mr. Ma backpedaled as she approached. He grabbed two new bokkens off the weapons rack.
Fiona swung with wild abandon, screaming her rage.
He parried each blow. His defense was solid . . . perfect, in fact. She would never get through. She would beat on him until he wore her down, and then she’d make a mistake, or collapse from exhaustion, and she’d lose.
Her anger doubled and redoubled, and it felt as if her world would explode.
But the other, submerged Fiona started thinking again. She had to get around that perfect defense of his somehow . . . from behind? Under? No, those wouldn’t work.
Maybe the way around his defense was straight through.
Fiona stepped back and gazed upon the chiseled wooden surfaces of her bokken, and forged her hate into something stronger: resolve.
The planes and fibers of the wood stiffened, and the length of the bokken hummed with power. The rounded notched surfaces smoothed to a clean edge, a line that seemed to slide in and out of her vision, it was so fine.
A cutting edge.
Her rage subsiding, she strode toward him, her bokken held high—and brought it down.
Mr. Ma must have sensed a flaw in his perfect defense, some danger—even before her bokken touched his, because his ever-calm expression puckered and she saw the tiniest flicker of fear in his eyes.
Her bokken passed through his as if it weren’t there, cleaving the wood in two.
Mr. Ma leaned back.
Not far enough, though.
The tip of Fiona’s bokken crossed his face . . . and she felt resistance along her cutting edge—something hard, so she pushed harder with her arms and her mind—and his flesh yielded.
It was nothing serious. She hadn’t wanted to cut off his head. It was just a reminder that he should never turn his back on her again: a nearly microscopic slash curved from his cheek to chin.
She stepped back.
Mr. Ma felt the wound, and his fingers came away a tiny smear of red. He stared at it for the longest time.
The other students stared, too.
Fiona no longer felt the anger; she wasn’t even glad that she’d given Mr. Ma a taste of his own medicine.
Something was wrong.
It felt as was if she’d broken a rule—and not just some Paxington rule that might get her expelled. This rule felt like it should not have been able to be broken, like gravity. The entire universe felt as if it might unravel because of what she’d just done . . . starting from where Mr. Ma stood . . . from that one tiny cut.
Mr. Ma curled his fingers into a fist and took a breath. The wound on his chin stopped bleeding.
He moved toward Fiona.
The bokken slipped from her grasp. She started to say she was sorry—but halted herself. She wasn’t sorry, and she wouldn’t lie about it.
Mr. Ma gazed into her eyes. He wasn’t angry. It was as if he were searching for something that he’d misplaced a thousand years ago.
And then he blinked and nodded. “Very nicely done, Miss Post. Come, we were covering the basic fighting stance . . . which I note you could use some improvement on.” He motioned for her to join the other