The training ground held its breath.
Nie Mingjue's Baxia trembled in anticipation, its jagged edge casting sawtooth shadows across the frost-licked stones. Across from him, Wei Xuan stood motionless, her unadorned blade hanging limp at her side like a dead branch.
Then she vanished.
Not in a blur of speed, but as though the mountain wind had plucked her from existence. Gasps rippled through the disciples. Wei Wuxian's knuckles whitened around the railing.
Clang!
The collision shook the pavilion's foundations. Nie Mingjue's boots scraped backward, carving furrows in stone as crimson spiritual energy erupted from Wei Xuan's blade. Her strike carried the weight of collapsing glaciers, the red glow along its edge pulsing like an exposed artery.
"Two years?" Nie Mingjue growled, muscles straining against her onslaught. "You wield steel like it's your skeleton."
Wei Xuan's answering smile held no warmth. Her knee shot upward – not toward flesh, but the gap in his spiritual armor below the ribcage. Nie Mingjue twisted, Baxia screaming as it deflected her follow-up slash.
The dance that followed defied mortal eyes. To the disciples, it appeared as flashes of crimson lightning striking an iron mountain. Only the Lan brothers tracked their true movements – Lan Xichen through cultivated insight, Lan Wangji by the frost fractals crystallizing in Wei Xuan's wake.
Clang-clang-CLANG!
Each collision birthed firestorms of sparks. Wei Xuan fought like winter incarnate – every parry precise as icicle formation, every thrust carrying the inevitability of avalanche. When Baxia locked against her hilt for the seventh time, the ground beneath them cracked in spiderweb patterns.
"Enough!"
The shout came not from Lan Qiren, but Wei Xuan herself. She disengaged in a whirl of snowflakes, blade sheathed before the last spark died. "This one concedes."
Nie Mingjue's laughter boomed across the silent grounds. "Concedes? Girl, you could've taken my arm three strikes ago."
"Five," Wei Xuan corrected softly, plucking a strand of hair severed by his qi from her shoulder. "But severed limbs make poor drinking companions."
The tension shattered. Wei Wuxian vaulted the railing, whooping as he spun his sister in a circle. "Since when did you learn to teleport, you little cheat?"
"Apocalyptic survival skills," she deadpanned, breath frosting the air.
Nie Huaisang inched toward his brother, fan fluttering like a startled moth. "D-da-ge, your armor..."
Nie Mingjue glanced down. The chestplate bore seven hairline fractures precisely over vital meridians. When he looked up, Wei Xuan was already walking away, her blade's crimson glow fading to dormancy.
"Wait."
The command froze even the falling snowflakes. Wei Xuan turned to find Baxia leveled at her throat.
"Finish what you started." Nie Mingjue's eyes burned with warrior's fire.
Lan Wangji's guqin string snapped.
Wei Xuan tilted her head, the motion eerily reminiscent of a wolf assessing prey. "Sect Leader Nie," she murmured, "Do you hear the crows?"
A single black feather drifted between them. In the pavilion's shadowed eaves, something with too many joints scuttled out of sight.
The snow began falling in earnest then, each flake edged in funeral black.