Old Gu Pins Her

What the crowd saw, stripped of all its talk of technique, was simple pornography wearing the mask of training.

Cao Ning's body had always drawn eyes. On the arena boards, under motion and sweat and the accidents of grappling cloth, it became a spectacle. Every jump threatened to bare her ass. Every lock pressed her breasts into some lucky man's face. Every fall risked the string shifting another finger-width and showing the pink truth of her shaved pussy to fifty hard, lonely guards.

They cheered her wins with real pride, because she was the daughter of their house and she was beating men twice her size. They also collected images the way misers collected spirit stones — her ass in the air, her crotch printed in wet black cloth, her breasts nearly spilling, her thigh pressed against a man's hip.

She was not naive enough to miss it. She was not experienced enough to know what to do with the answering wetness between her own legs, except fight through it and pretend it was only qi heat from the fourth stage.

A gangly young servant brought her a ladle of water from the barrels between matches, and his hands shook so badly that half of it slopped over the rim before it reached her. She took it from him gently and drank.

A droplet escaped the corner of her mouth, ran down her chin and the long line of her throat, and traced a shining path down into the deep valley between her breasts, where it vanished under the silk.

Half a dozen men tracked that droplet with the concentration of sword saints watching a master's blade. She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist and handed the ladle back, and told herself she was imagining the hunger in their faces. She was not.

On the far side of the hall, three of the compound's few female guards had stopped their spear drill to watch. They stood together in a knot with their practice spears grounded, women in their twenties with hard brown arms and cropped hair, and they did not stare at Cao Ning the way the men did.

They looked at her with a sharper, more complicated expression — part pride that one of theirs was folding the men, part scorn at how she was doing it, part something else that made one of them lick her lips and glance sideways at the bearded Bao Kun.

When Cao Ning's eyes met theirs across the hall, the eldest of them lifted her chin in a small salute. Cao Ning did not know whether it was respect or mockery. She nodded back anyway.

At the rail, the talk had changed. The first wagers had all been settled, and now the men argued about who should go next and who would dare.

Nobody at the first or second stage wanted to climb up and be folded in front of the whole hall, and the third-stage men looked at Bao Kun sprawled happily on a bench with his arms behind his head and weighed their pride against their cocks.

Bao Kun himself was telling the story already, to anyone in range, with gestures. Like holding a warm peach in your hand, he said, cupping the air. And she smelled like — Someone cuffed him before he could finish. Someone else asked him to finish.

Lu Feng, still on his bench, said nothing to anyone. He was looking at his own palms.

Cao Ning walked a slow circle along the edge of the platform to keep her muscles warm, and the circle took her past every section of the crowd in turn.

She felt their gazes slide over her like water poured from a jug: down her back, over her ass, along the bare length of her thigh where the slit fell open with each step.

When she passed the front of the rail, a man with a shaved head leaned so far over that his chest was nearly on the boards, staring openly at her crotch, and she found herself slowing her step instead of quickening it.

She caught herself doing it. Her face flamed. She did not quicken her step.

What is wrong with me.

The qi of her new stage pooled low in her belly like warm syrup and refused to circulate properly. She tried to send it along her channels the way Elder Chang had taught her and it went sluggishly, distracted, curling back toward the throb between her legs as if it had a mind of its own.

Same-realm fights were rare gifts in this hall; same-realm fights against the Cao daughter were myths walking. Nobody stronger than the third stage had yet climbed the steps. She half hoped no one would.

Someone tried. A first-stage guard barely into his twenties, pushed from behind by his laughing friends, scrambled up the steps and onto the boards and stood there with his fists raised and his face the color of a ripe plum.

Cao Ning turned toward him and simply looked at him, letting her eyes travel from his face down to the pitiful tent in his trousers and back up. She did not even take a stance. The young man's raised fists wavered.

His throat bobbed. Then he lowered his hands, bowed so deeply his forehead nearly touched his knees, mumbled something about having mistaken the steps for the way to the latrine, and fled back down into a storm of jeers and thrown sandals.

The hall shook with laughter. Cao Ning felt a smile tug at her mouth for the first time all morning, and with it a dangerous little thrill at how easily a single look from her had emptied a man's courage.

---

After two straight wins, half the hall wanted to fight her and almost none of them had the strength to make it a contest.

Then an old man jumped the rail.

He landed lightly for his age, which looked to be somewhere past fifty, and rolled his heavy shoulders as he straightened. His face was lined and weathered like old leather, his topknot more gray than black, his nose broken at least twice and set crooked.

But his body under the sweat-darkened practice trousers was hard and dense with muscle from decades of drills and gate shifts, his forearms corded, his belly flat. The men around the rail went quiet in a different way than before. They knew him.

Old Gu had guarded the Cao walls for longer than most of them had been alive, and he was at the fourth stage of Qi Refining — the same stage as the young woman across from him — and he had been stuck there for twenty years.

Shame clung to him like a second shirt. Facing a young beauty of his own realm, a young woman a third his age who had reached in eighteen years what he had needed fifty for, should have embarrassed him into staying on his bench. His cock overruled the shame.

It stood hard and demanding in his thin trousers, pointing straight at her as he landed on the boards, and he made no attempt to hide it. He looked at her across the stage and there was nothing in his eyes at all but frank, perverted hunger.

"Miss," he said, his voice gravel. "I'll try not to bruise you."

Cao Ning met his look and felt something cold slide down her spine, chased by something hot.

Clang.

Old Gu fought like a man who had spent a lifetime losing to younger, more talented cultivators and had learned something from every loss. He did not chase her. He let her come to him and met each of her strikes at the last possible instant, so that every blow she landed hit a forearm or a shoulder already turning away.

When she tried to circle, he cut the circle off with one short sliding step. When she feinted, he did not bite. Twice he caught her wrist and twisted, and twice she tore free only by spending a burst of qi that left her breathing harder than she wanted.

He was not faster than her, and he was not stronger in qi; he simply wasted nothing, and she, with her wet thighs and her pounding heart and her body half-distracted by the eyes on it, was wasting a great deal.

The crowd felt the change. The shouting thinned into a tense, hungry murmur. Men who had been jeering a moment before leaned forward with their hands gripping the rail and their eyes flicking between her face and Old Gu's hands, waiting to see which of them would break first, and half of them, she knew without looking, were hoping it would be her.

Some of them had served under Old Gu for years. Some of them had lost to him on these same boards. All of them wanted to see what the old dog would do if he got the Cao daughter underneath him.

They crashed together in a storm of arms. Blocks, checks, short punishing strikes, qi flaring along bone with every impact. The boards shuddered beneath them. This was nothing like the first two fights; Old Gu did not waste a single motion, and every time she struck, his forearm was already there.

Cao Ning's breasts shook wildly with every collision, bouncing and swinging inside the deep-cut robe until it seemed the silk must give way and bare them to the whole hall. On the hardest exchanges her nipples flashed as dark shapes through the stretched fabric.

She poured qi into the robe in a desperate reinforcement, threading her energy through the silk the way she would brace a sword against a heavy blow, and the fabric held by stubborn spiritual thread and pride. The near exposure still drew a collective groan from the rail.

"If it falls," a man shouted, "I'll cultivate to the Heavenly Realm out of gratitude alone!"

Laughter rippled through the crowd. Under the laughter ran a hornier silence.

Cao Ning realized, cold and clear, that this opponent was the real problem. He was her own realm with a heavier body and thirty more years of fights in it, and he carried a filthier motivation than either of the men before him.

She narrowed her focus until the hall noise became distant surf breaking somewhere far away. He answered her with experience — angles, feints, the patience of a man who had lost enough fights to know exactly how to steal one.

Whenever the exchange allowed it, his eyes dropped to her bouncing breasts and to the dark wet line at her crotch. He was fighting her body as much as her skill, and he did not care that she could see it.

She threw a combination she had drilled ten thousand times — palm, elbow, knee — and he slipped the palm, ate the elbow on his shoulder, and caught the knee with both hands. Then he did something she did not expect: he dropped his own weight straight down, taking her leg with him, and drove his shoulder into her hip. Her standing knee folded. She hit the boards on her back with a gasp that bounced her breasts against her chin.

Old Gu was on her instantly. He dropped his full weight onto her belly, pinned both of her wrists to the boards above her head with his thick hands, and crushed her under muscle and years. He was heavy, immovable as a boulder. Only her legs were still free. She bucked and could not shift him.

She twisted and felt his weight settle deeper, his knees wedged at her sides, his crotch grinding against her ribs. She refused to lose to him. Not like this. Not with that hard cock already pressing against her body and the crowd smelling blood.

He leaned his face down close to hers, close enough that she could smell the tea on his breath and see the gray stubble on his chin, and spoke in a low rasp that only she could hear under the roar of the crowd.

"Twenty years I've watched you grow up in this house, Miss," he said. "Never thought I'd have you under me." His hips rocked once, deliberately, grinding the hard shape of his cock against her ribs. "You're shaking. Is that fear?"

She was shaking. It was not entirely fear. She stared up at him with her teeth bared and said nothing, and his eyes moved down from her face to her heaving chest, where the silk had shifted in the fall and the curve of one breast was bare almost to the nipple, and he made a low, pleased sound in his throat.

She strained against his grip with every scrap of qi she had. His hands did not move. Her wrists ground into the boards. She thought about the third stage and the fourth, and the twenty years of fights in his body, and understood that she could not muscle her way out of this. Her legs. She still had her legs.

She lifted her legs from behind him, swung them up over his back, hooked them around his neck from behind, and crossed her ankles into a tightening thigh lock.

He had not expected the angle. His bulk made escape ugly. He resisted, refusing to release her wrists even as her thighs closed around his throat and jaw, and the two of them locked there, straining, neither able to break the other.

The crowd went feral.

With her legs up and locked around his neck, Cao Ning's ass lifted clean off the boards. Her robe had fallen away from her hips entirely; the back panel lay crumpled under her shoulders. The string was all that remained, tucked deep in her crack, and her spread thighs pulled her cheeks wide apart.

From behind, the whole hall received a view that would fuel a season of barracks fantasy: her pale, perfect ass raised and open, the thin black thread hiding only the deepest line of her pussy while the pink, swollen flesh on either side of it puffed out around the soaked cloth, and above it, peeking out where the string pulled to one side, the small pink pucker of her anus.

Some of the men stared at her nearly visible lips. Some fixed on the tight pink ring above them. Several already had wet blooms darkening the front of their trousers where they had come from the sight alone, and did not care who saw.

Others shoved forward along the rail for a better angle on the most beautiful woman in the compound, lowly guards living out a dream they would retell drunk for the rest of their lives.

Cao Ning knew. She felt the air on her spread rear and the stares on it like hands. She felt the cool kiss of it against her asshole. She refused to quit.

She could hear individual voices now, separated out of the roar the way a single bird's call cuts through wind. Look at that pink. Her ass is shaking. Is she wet? She's wet, look at her, she's soaking. Every word landed on her skin.

Every word made the clench between her legs tighter. Her thighs trembled around Old Gu's thick neck, her calves burning, her ankles locked so tight the bones ground together, and she felt the strain of the lock pull her cheeks even wider apart, felt the string shift a fraction further to the side, felt the air reach a little more of her.

She could not let go to cover herself. Letting go meant losing. She held the lock.

As she struggled, the old man's weight shifted forward under the pull of her legs. His crotch dragged up her body from her ribs to her chest. His erect cock, still trapped in thin cotton, found the valley between her breasts and settled there, hot and hard and shameless, a thick rod of heat lying along her sternum with her breasts swelling up on either side of it.

His balls pressed heavily against the underside of one breast. She felt his shaft throb against her through two layers of thin cloth. If the robe had slipped one finger-width lower, her bare nipple would have kissed the head of his dick.

The thought should have disgusted her into greater fury. Instead arousal punched through her anger so hard that her vision blurred. Her pussy clenched and wept, and she felt drops of her own slick escape the soaked string and fall from her lifted ass onto the boards beneath her. She prayed the front row could not see them.

Instead her mind, treacherous and overheated, threw up the image of the dagger handle from last night, the rounded pommel pressing at her entrance, and set it beside the thick, throbbing length lying between her breasts now. The comparison was humiliating. The pommel had been small and cold and dead.

This was hot and heavy and alive, and it twitched against her sternum every time she breathed, as though it were answering her. She thought of her mother's lips stretching wide around Elder Chang's cock. She thought of how wide her own would have to stretch around this one.

The thought made her mouth water, and she swallowed hard, appalled at herself, and the old man felt her throat move against the head of his cock and groaned.

Around them men shouted advice that was half technique and half pornography. Squeeze harder! Lift higher! Show us more! Someone at the back was openly stroking himself through his trousers, and the men around him shifted aside to give him room rather than stop him. In a demonic hall, beauty on an arena floor was fair game for eyes, and nobody pretended otherwise.

She heard her own pulse thundering in her ears. She remembered the window. She remembered her mother swallowing, throat working, cheeks bulging, eyes wet and blissful.