Bonus: Snake and Spider 2

The training field was unrecognizable.

It had begun as an artificial cavern with a high ceiling and uneven scalloped floor, full of columns and other stone growths to obstruct combatants. Now, sizzling acid pooled in the pockmarked floor, and glittering crystalline webbing had consumed the ceiling. Hanging prismatic sheets and nets obscured above, and rising clouds of toxic mist mingled with dissolved minerals below.

Bai Meizhen advanced, liquid coils noiselessly parting the acidic pool below. In her hand, the ribbons of her blade shifted restlessly, filling the cavern with their metallic hiss.

She was having fun.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the quiver of a crystal thread, and a twitch of her hand had ribbon blades lashing out to intercept the gleaming silver needles which erupted through the pouring acid rain. The high ring of metal on metal sounded, and needles scattered, burning finger-thick holes through already pockmarked stone columns to impact the walls. Her tail lashed out and smashed apart the figure dangling from the threads. Another decoy, already falling apart into shredded webbing. Where…?

Bai Meizhen raised her empty left hand and caught the tines of Bao Qingling’s tigerclaw blades on her forearm. The force of the blow sent a ripple through her mantle, and the sizzling liquid pool beneath exploded backward at the sudden pressure, cracking the stone beneath. For a single moment, she met the girl’s dark eyes as her arm trembled with the effort of holding back the girl’s superior strength.

Bao Qingling parted her lips and spat a glimmering needle of black jade. Bai Meizhen jerked her head to the side as the jet black missile cut through her mantle and scored her cheek. Pain spread from the wound, burning hot.

How fast did her heart beat.

With a skirling cry, ribbons lashed out, and Bao Qingling danced backward, balanced upon a nigh invisible thread, her arms blurring as she batted away the reaching blades of venomous steel. Though Bai Meizhen’s burning rain fell upon her, it affected her no more than mundane water, weighing her heavy clothing and soaking her hair. Yet the envenomed silk drank in the harmful properties of the rain, growing all the stronger for it.

It seemed that her companion’s project truly was a success.

Bai Meizhen smiled, and a thunderclap split the air as her flying sword shot from the shadows, trailing rings of broken air. Bao Qingling let out a frustrated hiss through her teeth as she fell to the side, clinging to her thread by the bottom of her feet, wet hair dangling down as she scurried backward. Prismatic light gleamed, and the other girl vanished, reappearing crouched upon a thread further into the cavern.

Meizhen had long since given up on severing them all. The twin needles of carved red jade which were Bao Qingling’s own domain weapon spun them faster than they could be destroyed, and the weapons themselves were indestructible at her current strength.

Bai Meizhen advanced. Threads snapped beneath the bulk of her coils, and a score of arrays spun in thread flared, raining down silvery needles. The air howled as her ribbon blades batted them away by the dozen. More still impacted her mantle in clouds of sizzling spray and steam. Half a score, she caught and flung away, their venom doing little more than making her skin itch.

The rain ended, and she stood tall. Such was the way of a Bai, implacable, unmoved, imperious.

But Bao Qingling was gone again, vanishing back into her nest of webs.

Bai Meizhen advanced. With confirmation that her venomous rain would avail her not, she pulled back on the qi invested, and burning clouds and sizzling liquid alike spiraled down to shroud her ribbon blades. Flicking her wrist, meters-long lashes carved their way through the cavern, ripping trenches in stone and snapping threads.

Bai Meizhen peered into the nest of snapped and ruined webbing. There, a decoy, and there, another, and there… Bai Meizhen shrouded herself in a sphere of black water as crystal spikes erupted from the ground, blooming fractally with hundreds of spikes. Her tail lashed out, shattering them and launching her forward to where Bao Qingling even now crouched, ready against the far wall.

Bai Meizhen’s smile grew. She wanted to clash again, to feel Bao Qingling’s breath on her face, to…

She felt a pressure and then a snap. At her waist, the torn ends of a single invisible thread curled away, crumbling into nothing. All around her, explosive arrays woven from crystal thread flared.

… Perhaps she had been a touch arrogant.

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***​

The cavern rocked with the roar of the explosion.

Let it not be said that the Bao clan library was useless to her. Millenia of experience in mining had led to a library of some of the most advanced blasting formations in the Empire. Some would call it crude, but to Bao Qingling, transforming the chaotic undirected power of an explosion into something shaped and controlled could only be called art.

She smiled thinly as she felt the ripple of surprise pass through the other girl’s qi. For any other disciple two steps beneath her, Eight Mantle Piercer charges would have been wasteful and excessive.

However, she was facing a Bai. To hold back was to lose.