Two Quick Wins

Lu Feng had never been so nervous in his life, and everyone pressed against the rail could smell it on him.

He knew the rules as well as he knew his own name. Once feet touched the arena boards, identity meant nothing — not birth, not family.

Only strength mattered here, and locks, and the will to keep breathing under someone else's weight. Knowing all that did nothing to slow the hammering of his heart. She was the daughter of the Cao family.

By every honest ranking whispered between drunk guards in the barracks, she was also the most beautiful woman of their generation. He had watched her for three years from doorways and the edges of practice yards, hoping for a glimpse of thigh through those side slits or the bounce of her breasts when she hurried up a staircase.

He had never had contact. Not a brush of fingers in passing. Not even a bow at close range, until a moment ago.

Now that beauty stood in front of him in dusk-blue training silk cut deep between her breasts, side slits climbing to her waist, silver hair shining in the morning light through the open wall, and he was supposed to fight her.

He watched her prepare. She stepped out of her practice slippers and nudged them to the edge of the boards with her toes, and her bare feet were narrow and pale with pink heels.

She reached up with both hands to retie her hair higher and tighter, and the motion lifted her breasts and pulled the deep neckline taut across them until he could see the exact shape of each one through the silk, full and high and swaying faintly as her arms moved.

She pulled the ribbon snug with her teeth. When she lowered her arms, her breasts settled with a small, heavy bounce that he felt in the pit of his stomach. She rolled her neck from side to side, and a thin line of sweat ran down from her nape and disappeared under the silk between her shoulder blades.

It was overwhelming. He did not want to waste the opportunity. He decided to fight with all his strength, and he prayed that his cock would stay down long enough not to humiliate him before the first exchange.

The hall had never been this full so early. Word moved through a demonic compound the way fire moved through dry grass: Cao Ning is on the arena. Cao Ning is challenging. Cao Ning's robe is doing things a robe should not do when a woman jumps. Men abandoned their morning forms and drifted in from the outer yards.

The training hall's high windows let in long slanted columns of light that cut through the dust of a thousand earlier bouts, and the platform boards, scoured pale by years of bare feet, held a faint brown stain at the north corner that every guard knew the story of. Bamboo benches had been dragged against the walls, and the men in the back row stood on them, balanced on their toes, with their hands clamped on each other's shoulders.

A pair of outer disciples from the neighboring courtyard who had no business in the guards' hall happened to lean against the open wall, arms folded, pretending to be interested in the weapon racks. A cook's assistant arrived with a basket of steamed buns, saw the crowd, and stopped where he was.

Even a maidservant carrying folded linen slowed her steps at the far door, looked at the forest of tented trousers around the rail, blushed to the roots of her hair, and hurried on.

Cao Ning did not feel that attention as simple flattery. She felt it as heat on her skin — on the bare insides of her thighs framed by the side slits, on the deep cleavage that her ready stance pressed into a shadowed canyon between her arms, on the round curve of her ass that the black string divided like a gift already half-unwrapped.

Before last night's window, that kind of heat would have stayed politely outside her body. Now it sank in. It found its way down to her clit and settled there, and it made her want to fight for more reasons than strength alone.

---

The judge pulled the bell rope.

Clang.

Noise detonated around the arena. Cheers, whistles, palms slapping the rail in a ragged drumroll. The cook's assistant stuck his head through the open side wall and forgot the buns in his basket entirely.

Both fighters stepped to the center and settled into ready poses, and dust motes spun lazily in the shafts of light between them. The boards were warm under Cao Ning's bare feet — she had kicked off her practice slippers at the foot of the steps for grip — and faintly tacky with the sweat of earlier matches.

Her stance was clean and textbook, the product of four years under Elder Chang's eye: weight balanced on the balls of her feet, hands forward and open, silver lashes still.

Lu Feng's stance was serviceable until his gaze dropped, helplessly, into the cleavage framed between her arms. Her posture pressed her breasts together and up, two pale swells crowding the deep neckline, and through the silk he could see the faint bumps of her nipples. Blood rushed south so fast his vision swam. His thin trousers tented in front of the entire hall. He flushed scarlet. He refused to be humiliated in front of every man he ate with. So he moved.

He threw a kick at her left shoulder — fast, committed, the kind of opening strike meant to test reflexes and force space. Cao Ning's hand met his shin with a crack of qi-backed force, turned it aside, and shoved. He stumbled back two steps with his arms windmilling, and the crowd roared. Every exchange drew more noise. Men leaned over the rail. Someone shouted her name as if it were a bet he had already won.

He came again before the noise had settled, and this time he was smarter about it. He feinted high with his hands to draw her guard up and then stepped in low, trying to catch her around the waist and drive her into the rail with his shoulder.

She turned her hips and his arms closed on empty air, but his palm skidded across her belly as he went past, and for an instant his fingers dragged over the thin silk just below her navel, a hand's breadth above the place where her underwear began. Both of them froze for a fraction of a breath.

He felt the heat of her skin through the cloth and the shiver of her stomach muscles flinching under his hand. She felt his fingertips like a brand. Then she drove her elbow into his shoulder and sent him staggering away, and the men at the rail groaned at the lost contact as though it had happened to them.

Lu Feng's ears were bright red. He circled her twice, breathing hard, his eyes darting between her face and her hips, and she saw him decide that he could not out-strike her and would have to take her off her feet.

Thrown off balance, Lu Feng dropped flat and swept for her ankles from the floor — quick, dirty, and practical, the kind of move that won barracks brawls. Cao Ning jumped.

The leap lifted her robe in a sudden flutter of dusk-blue silk. For one long heartbeat the back of the crowd saw everything the string underwear failed to hide: both cheeks of her ass, round and taut and pale as fresh milk, with a thin black thread vanishing deep into the crack between them.

A man at the rear rail made a sound like he had been punched. But the man lying on the boards beneath her got the closer gift.

As she hung in the air above him, her underwear had glued itself to her pussy with sweat and the wetness left over from the morning, and from below he could see every line of her printed against the soaked black cloth — the plump outer lips, the shallow seam between them, the swell of her mound. The sight punched the air out of his lungs. His technique went blank.

Cao Ning came down on him like judgment.

She landed behind his shoulders, dropped to her knees, and hooked her right arm around his neck, then locked it with her left and squeezed. The choke pulled his head back against her chest, and his face mashed into the undersides of her breasts — warm silk, the sweet scent of her skin, the heavy give of flesh he had only ever dreamed about.

She shifted to tighten the hold and her breasts rolled against his cheeks, molding around his face, and through the thin silk he felt the drag of her stiff nipples across his forehead. Even with the loss already climbing his throat, something shamelessly happy bloomed in his chest.

His nose filled with her: clean sweat and hair oil and, underneath, the musky sweetness of a woman who had been wet before the match began. His expression went slack and dazed. His hips gave a small, involuntary thrust against empty air.

The crowd boiled with jealousy. Every man along the rail wanted to be the one choking happily between those breasts, breathing that scent, feeling that warm weight cut off his air like a blessing.

Lu Feng tapped her forearm twice. He did it slowly.

The judge barked her win.

She released him and rose to her feet, chest heaving, and stood alone in the middle of the boards waiting for the next challenger. Her nipples were harder now from adrenaline and the friction of the hold, standing out through the silk so clearly that the men in the front row could have counted them. She pretended not to notice the dark line spreading along the crotch of her robe where the silk had pressed against her underwear.

Lu Feng crawled to the edge of the platform and slid down the steps with a face like a man coming out of a temple. He sat on the nearest bench, put his hands on his knees, and stared at nothing. A friend clapped him on the shoulder and asked what it had been like. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and shook his head slowly, and the friend laughed so hard he had to hold onto the rail.

---

Between the first pin and the second challenge, Cao Ning rolled her shoulders loose and tasted copper where she had bitten her lip again without noticing.

Lu Feng's smell still clung faintly to the front of her robe where his face had pressed into her breasts — sweat and cheap barracks soap and raw male excitement, a sharp, sour-sweet scent she had always wrinkled her nose at when she passed the guards' quarters. She should have felt only triumph. She had folded him in under twenty breaths without drawing on half her qi.

Instead, slick heat kept gathering along her pussy lips, soaking the black string until every small shift of her stance dragged the wet cloth over her clit and made her toes curl against the boards. She could feel the eyes of the hall crawling over her body openly now, no longer bothering to pretend they were watching technique.

Her thighs, her chest, the curve of her waist, the place where the silk had darkened between her legs. She straightened her spine and lifted her chin and told herself the wetness was only sweat.

Across the hall, Captain Hou stood beside the weapon racks with his arms still folded. His face showed nothing. He did not look away.

Nearer the rail, a thickset guard with a square black beard had stopped pretending to watch anything but her. He stood with his arms folded and his weight on his heels, and his eyes moved over her slowly and deliberately, from her bare feet to her thighs to the damp front of her robe, and lingered there. When she caught him at it, he held her gaze and smiled through his beard, unhurried.

Cao Ning looked at the dark patch on the boards where Lu Feng's sweat had dripped and thought about the choke. She had felt his breath against her breasts through the silk, hot and fast and shuddering.

She had felt his body go loose and surrender under her, the whole weight of a grown man melting because of what her chest was doing to his face.

She had a sudden, vivid memory of her mother's face pressed sideways against Elder Chang's chest, mouth open, eyes rolled back. Her pussy clenched hard around nothing, and she shifted her weight to the other foot to hide the small shudder that ran up her legs.

---

She did not have to wait for raised hands.

A man vaulted the rail and landed on the stage before the echo of the judge's call had died — no steps, just a hand on the post and a swing of his legs, heavy feet thudding onto the boards.

He was in the prime of life, perhaps thirty-five, with a full black beard trimmed square at the jaw and a chest like a wine barrel covered in coarse dark hair. His arms were thick from years of hauling gate bars. His eyes were straightforward and horny in equal measure, and he did not bother to hide either.

The men at the rail knew him; they shouted his name — Bao Kun — and pounded their palms on the wood. He was at the third stage of Qi Refining, close enough to her fourth to make the match real, and far stronger in raw body than the young guard she had just folded.

"Miss Cao," he said, and bowed just deep enough to satisfy the rules, his eyes never leaving her chest. "Forgive this rough one in advance."

Cao Ning accepted with a short nod and reset her stance. The noise of the hall climbed another octave.

Clang.

They leapt almost together. They met in the air in a quick exchange of checks, wrist against wrist and shin against shin, and dropped back to the boards with a twin thud that made the platform shiver. He was strong. Experience lived in his shoulders, in the way he kept his elbows tucked and his chin low.

But Cao Ning still held the cultivation edge, and she used it — a burst of speed that blurred her outline, her right leg whipping up toward his guard in a kick meant to break his arms apart and force him to commit.

The kick missed its mark by a finger as he turned his forearm into it, and the impact rang up her shin like a struck bell. He was faster than his bulk suggested.

He stepped inside her reach and caught her around the waist with one arm, hauling her body against his chest, and for a breathless moment she was pressed full-length against him — her breasts crushed flat against his hairy chest, his thick forearm locked across the small of her back, his hard cock grinding against her belly through two layers of thin cloth.

He smelled of sweat and garlic and iron. His hand slid down from her waist to her hip and then, so quickly that it might have been an accident, over the curve of her ass, his broad palm cupping one cheek through the silk and squeezing.

A shocked, breathy sound escaped her. The crowd heard it and howled. She broke his grip with a sharp twist and a palm strike under his chin that snapped his head back, and they separated, both breathing hard.

He grinned at her through his beard and flexed his fingers, as if remembering the shape of what they had held. Her ass burned where he had squeezed it. She reset her stance and threw the kick again, harder.

He took the kick head-on, and caught her leg with one thick hand.

The catch hiked her robe up ruinously.

The front panel and the back panel both fell aside, and for a stretched moment her lower body was bare to the hall except for the black string. The men in front saw her crotch up close: the underwear wedged deep between her pussy lips, her flesh puffing out on both sides of the narrow strip, the cloth gone dark with a wetness that sweat alone could not explain.

The men behind saw her ass split by that lewd black line, both cheeks tensed and flexing as she balanced on her supporting leg. With the twist of her torso her breasts nearly spilled out of the deep neckline, the silk sliding sideways until the outer curve of one was bare almost to the areola, her nipple straining against the edge of the cloth.

For one long second Bao Kun forgot he was fighting. Her pussy was right there in front of him, outlined, glistening at the edges of the string, close enough that he could smell it. He stood holding her ankle at the height of his shoulder and stared.

The crowd howled like a pack.

Cao Ning met his eyes along the length of her own raised leg. She saw his pupils blown wide. She saw his lips part. She felt the heat of his gaze on the soaked strip between her legs like a hand cupped there, and her pussy pulsed so hard that she was certain he could see it twitch through the cloth.

His thumb moved on her ankle. It was a small thing, a slow stroke along the knob of bone and down over the tendon at the back of her heel, the kind of touch a man gives a woman in bed rather than an opponent on a stage. Nobody in the crowd could have seen it.

She felt it all the way up the inside of her leg, a warm line drawn from her ankle to the soaked cloth between her thighs, and her breath caught audibly. He heard it. The corner of his mouth lifted under his beard, and his thumb made the same slow stroke again, and her toes curled in his grip.

He threw her leg back at her. The view snapped shut. Silk fell into place. Breathing did not return to normal for anyone in the hall.

Now Cao Ning saw them clearly — the erect cocks tenting thin practice trousers all around the rail, a whole forest of stiff outlines pointing at her like accusations. Some of the men had their hands pressed against themselves openly. One near the front had a dark wet spot already spreading on the gray cloth.

Even her opponent stood with his cock blatant in his trousers, a thick ridge running sideways toward his hip. The sight of so much raw male hunger sent a shiver of heat through her own cunt, a ripple that went all the way up her spine and lifted the fine hairs on her arms.

Last night's window opened behind her eyes again. She swallowed, forced her focus back to her opponent's shoulders, and moved.

Bao Kun had already half given up on winning. His mind had switched to her body — how to grab, how to press, how to steal another second of contact with that flesh. He came forward with his arms spread wide, looking for a clinch that would let him wrap himself around her, and Cao Ning ducked under his reaching hands, swept his base out from under him with a low scything kick, and dumped him onto his back.

Before he could roll, she was on him. She flipped him face-down with a twist of his wrist, drove her knee into the small of his back, wrenched one arm up between his shoulder blades, and locked her leg over both of his, the same hold that had ended the first match on this stage.

He was immobile. He was beaten. Her weight pressed down on his back. Her breath stirred the hair at his ear.

The judge called it. Victory two.

The cheer shook dust from the rafters. Under her, Bao Kun lay with his cheek on the boards and did not struggle at all. He enjoyed the warm press of her thigh against his hip and the brush of her breast against his shoulder blade as she leaned over him, and when she let him go he rolled onto his back and looked up at her with a lazy, shameless grin, already looking forward to whatever the world might give him next.

"Thank you for the lesson, Miss Cao," he said. "I'll be coming back for another one."

She stepped over him without answering, and the hall laughed.

But she felt his eyes follow her across the boards, and she felt the place on her ass where his palm had closed. The burn of it had not faded. If anything it had spread, a warm handprint glowing under the silk, and every step she took made the cheek he had squeezed shift against the robe and remind her.

No man had ever touched her there. Not like that — not with a grab, with intent, with his fingers sinking in. She had expected to feel violated, and she was angry, truly angry, at the liberty he had taken in front of the whole hall.

She was also, under the anger, keenly aware of the exact size and heat of his hand.