Chapter 1008: The Broken Sword

The improvised training field behind the mansion no longer looked like a field.

The duel between Samira and Zi Bai had transformed the area into a strip of devastation that was clean, brutal, and strangely instructive. Thick trunks lay fallen in different directions, some cut diagonally with absurd precision, others split in half by impacts that should not have been possible with swords alone. Branches still fell slowly from mutilated trees, and leaves spun through the air alongside dust and small fragments of wood.

The last metallic echoes of the clash still seemed to vibrate among the remaining trunks, as if the environment itself was taking time to accept that the exchange of blows had ended.

Samira remained on her knees among the wreckage, staring at the broken blade with an emptiness that did not suit her at all.

The sword she had carried for more than twenty years lay in two pieces before her knees, the cut so clean it almost felt insulting. There had been no meaningful resistance, no gradual cracking, no visible effort.

Zi Bai had simply passed through the blade as if cutting wet cloth.

For someone like Samira—proud, stubborn, and accustomed to associating strength with permanence—it was worse than taking a direct blow to the chest.

Her hand hovered over the broken metal for several seconds, as if she still expected to feel some response from the weapon, some refusal to accept its end.

Zi Bai sheathed her newly transformed sword with a calm posture that seemed far too composed for the amount of destruction she had caused.

Her long white hair moved in the wind, and her eyes remained fixed on Samira with an almost harsh serenity.

She did not look regretful.

There had been no pointless cruelty in what she had done, but there had been no softness either.

Zi Bai had been trying to teach Samira for days, and the problem repeated itself every time in exactly the same way.

Samira attacked like a proud storm.

She insisted on explosiveness, weight, instinct, and anger, and ignored every correction she was given.

When the swordswoman told her to feel the blade, Samira answered with more force.

When she told her to control her body before the strike, Samira stepped early and attacked before the thought had even finished.

In the end, Zi Bai had concluded that words were not enough.

"Why..." Samira murmured, barely audible, still staring at the broken sword. "Why did you do that?"

Zi Bai let out a long sigh, the kind produced by someone who had spent days explaining the same truth and had finally lost patience with the other person’s refusal to hear it.

She walked forward slowly until she stood a few steps away from Samira, looking at both the warrior and the pieces of the weapon on the ground.

When she spoke, her voice was firm.

Not theatrically cruel.

Simply honest in the way of someone who saw no value in softening reality.

"Because you weren’t listening to anything," she replied. "You wanted to win, wanted to cut harder, wanted to prove you could break through your wall with shouting, weight, and stubbornness. But you learned nothing. You still fight like someone who thinks a sword is an expensive hammer. You keep confusing momentum with understanding. And above all, you’re still far too emotional. You enter a fight as if every strike needs to carry every frustration in your life, and that makes you a dangerous fighter, but a limited swordswoman."

Samira closed her hand around the broken hilt, gripping it so tightly her knuckles turned white.

Her face was still pale, but the shock was beginning to share space with anger.

Not necessarily anger at Zi Bai.

At the entire situation.

At her own weakness.

At the unbearable feeling of having been standing still for so long.

"That sword was with me for more than twenty years," she said, slowly raising her eyes. "I brought it with me when I had nothing. I killed with it, survived with it, bled with it. And you talk about it as though it were just some piece of iron."

Zi Bai held her gaze without retreating a millimeter.

"Because that is exactly what it was. A piece of iron that should have been replaced a long time ago. It was rotten. Not because it lacked history, but because you depended on it too much. The weapon stopped existing as a weapon long ago. It only remained whole because you kept feeding its body with your energy. You didn’t notice because you became attached to the symbol instead of the truth. That sword was no longer a reliable companion. It was a corpse held together by your insistence."

The words struck hard.

Samira lowered her gaze to the broken metal and, for the first time since the cut, tried to look at the weapon without the veil of attachment.

There was old wear beneath the surface.

Small structural faults.

Signs of poorly distributed tension.

A material exhaustion that her own energy had hidden for far too long.

That hurt even more, because it confirmed that Zi Bai had not humiliated her for no reason.

She had only exposed something Samira refused to see.

Sitting on a thick branch of a tree that had miraculously survived the exchange intact, Strax had been watching the scene in silence from the beginning.

One leg hung loosely, one arm rested on his knee, and his expression was far too calm for someone surrounded by that much tension.

When Zi Bai finally turned her eyes toward him and said, "Strax, talk to her," he did not hesitate.

He let out a small sigh, jumped lightly from the branch, and landed without making much noise, walking toward the center of the ruined clearing as though entering a conversation he already knew would be his job to finish.

Zi Bai stepped a few paces away and crossed her arms, leaving the scene to him.

Samira remained kneeling, still clutching the broken hilt, and that alone said a great deal.

If it were only anger, she would already be shouting.

If it were only shame, she would already have left.

The fact that she remained there, motionless, meant the blow had landed in the right place.

Strax stopped in front of her and looked first at the sword, then at the warrior’s face.

"Does it hurt more because she broke it," he asked calmly, "or because you realized it had already been dead for a long time?"

Samira did not answer immediately.

The question made her narrow her eyes, irritated by how cruelly precise it was.

When she finally spoke, her voice was hoarse and lower than usual.

"Both."

Strax nodded as if that were exactly the answer he had expected.

"Good. That means you can still be fixed."

She snapped her head up, clearly offended.

"You know how to be unbearable when you want to."

"I know," he replied without concern. "But you don’t need comfort right now. You need to understand why you’re stuck."

Samira let out a short, bitter laugh without humor.

"Stuck? I’ve been training until my body nearly tears apart. I’ve been fighting, hunting, testing techniques, trying to break through this damned wall. What do you mean, stuck?"

Strax crouched in front of her and picked up one of the pieces of the sword, slowly turning it between his fingers as he spoke.

"You’re confusing movement with progress. You’re doing a lot, but learning very little. Every time someone shows you a different path, you return to the same answer. Force. Pressure. Persistence. You act as if you can crush your limitation until it turns into evolution. That works for breaking through weaker enemies. It doesn’t work for breaking through yourself."

The silence that followed was uncomfortable because it was true.

Around them, the wind passed through the severed trees and carried the scent of freshly cut wood.

Zi Bai watched from a distance, quiet and uninvolved.

Samira seemed divided between the instinct to reject everything and the private obligation to admit that she had been hearing the same criticism in different forms.

Kryssia had told her she lacked foundation.

Zi Bai said she did not listen.

Now Strax was telling her that she tried to rip evolution out of herself through brutality.

Three different voices.

The same wound.

"I don’t know how to do it any other way," Samira finally admitted, visibly irritated with herself. "It’s always been like this. I survived like this. I grew like this. I fought like this."

"And it brought you this far," Strax replied. "The problem is that the method that gets you to a wall is rarely the same one that gets you through it. There comes a point in every warrior’s life when endlessly repeating your own nature stops being a virtue and becomes a prison."

Samira lowered her head again.

The sword hilt was still in her hand like a bone torn from some beloved animal.

"So what do you want me to do? Abandon everything I am? Become one of those cold swordswomen who seem to calculate even their breathing?"

Strax smiled faintly.

"No. If I wanted another Zi Bai, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I’d tell her to train alone in front of a mirror. The point isn’t to kill who you are. The point is to stop letting your emotions steer the cut. Emotion should feed your will. It shouldn’t pilot your technique."

Zi Bai gave a small nod when she heard that, but remained silent.

Strax placed the sword fragment back on the ground and extended a hand toward Samira.

She stared at it for a moment before accepting and slowly standing.

There was anger in her eyes, but now it was directed less at the world and more at the need to confront her own stagnation.

Once she was standing, Strax turned and pointed at the scene around them.

"Look at this," he said. "Cut trees, cracked ground, wasted energy. It was a loud training session, impressive to watch, and mostly useless. Do you know why?"

Samira crossed her arms, still sulking.

"Because I lost."

"No. Because you tried to beat Zi Bai. That wasn’t what the training was about. It was about understanding what you were missing. You turn every exercise into a contest of pride. And pride is a wonderful tool until it starts preventing you from learning."

She bit the inside of her cheek, clearly irritated that she could not find a good enough answer to knock that argument down.

"It’s easy for you to say when you keep getting stronger as if the whole world bends over backward to make your path easier."

Strax laughed without humor.

"No, it isn’t easy. I’ve just already had to abandon too many things in order to keep growing. Techniques, weapons, beliefs, ways of fighting, even the idea I had of myself. You’re crying over a sword that should have been buried a long time ago. That isn’t love for the weapon. That’s fear of admitting that part of you also needs to die so another can be born."

The sentence remained between them like a naked blade.

Samira looked away.

For the first time since the beginning, there was something deeper than irritation on her face.

There was exhaustion.

Old exhaustion.

Accumulated exhaustion.

The kind belonging to someone who had spent her entire life pushing herself forward through sheer willpower only to discover that willpower alone was no longer enough.

Her pride was enormous, but to those who truly knew her, it was also transparent.

Samira hated feeling ordinary.

She hated feeling surpassed.

Being defeated by a woman who had once been a horse—and in such a humiliating way—had opened a crack inside her that everything happening now only widened.

Zi Bai finally approached again, but this time without hostility.

She stopped beside Strax and spoke in a slightly softer tone.

"I didn’t break your sword to take something from you. I broke it to remove a lie from your path. You were using a grave as if it were a blade. As long as you keep dead weight out of sentimentality, you’ll keep thinking you’re moving forward because you carry the past on your back. No swordsman cuts properly while holding corpses."

Samira slowly exhaled and closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them again, the pain was still there, but she no longer looked ready to explode.

She looked thoughtful.

Truly thoughtful.

Which, for her, was sometimes rarer than any rare technique.

"And if I can’t do it?" she asked, with the dry honesty of someone too tired to keep pretending she was invulnerable.

Strax answered immediately.

"Then you try again, but the right way. And if you fail, you try again. The problem was never falling. The problem was that you kept smashing your head against the same wall and calling it progress."

Samira lowered her eyes to the pieces of the sword once more.

This time, however, her gaze was no longer pure loss.

There was farewell in it.

Slow.

Uncomfortable.

Necessary.

She crouched, carefully picked up both halves, and held them against her body for several seconds.

"I’m going to bury it," she murmured.

Strax nodded.

"Good idea."

Zi Bai added, "And after that, you’re going to train empty-handed for a few days."

Samira immediately raised her head.

"That sounds like punishment."

"It’s cleansing," Zi Bai replied. "You will not touch another sword until you learn to listen to your own body without hiding behind a weapon. Your hand is addicted to compensating for mistakes with force."

Samira grimaced, but did not argue.

That alone was almost a miracle.

Strax looked from one to the other and smiled faintly.

"There. Now this finally looks like useful training."

Samira huffed, still holding the broken sword.

"I still want to punch both of you."

"Good," Strax replied. "Save that feeling. Then turn it into something useful."

Zi Bai turned her back and began walking a few steps away, already returning to the center of the clearing.

"When you finish burying that thing, come back. Today you’re going to learn how to stand still without looking like you’re being tortured."

Samira looked at her suspiciously.

"Stand still?"

"Yes," Zi Bai said without turning around. "Because a woman who cannot endure her own silence will never hear the cut before making it."

Strax watched Samira for a moment and finally saw something important happen.

The anger was still there.

So was the humiliation.

The grief over the sword was real.

But beneath all of it, something else had begun to emerge.

A rough, uncomfortable, promising acceptance.

The kind that comes before real change.

There was no magical breakthrough.

No beautiful epiphany.

Only a proud warrior being forced to recognize that she had reached the limit of herself, and that if she wanted to move forward, she would need to learn another way to exist with the sword.

Samira tightened the fragments of the weapon against her arm, took a deep breath, and finally nodded.

"Fine," she said, her voice still dry. "I’ll bury it, come back, and listen."

Strax smiled with genuine satisfaction.

"There it is. Finally, some intelligence."

She shot him an irritated look.

"Don’t ruin the moment."

"I never ruin anything. I improve it."

Zi Bai let out a sigh that sounded suspiciously like it was hiding a laugh, though her expression remained almost impassive.

Samira turned and began walking away, carrying the remains of the sword that had accompanied her for two decades.

The weight on her shoulders was still there, but it no longer seemed the same.

For the first time in a long while, she was not carrying only frustration.

She was also carrying the real possibility of change.

Strax watched her leave for several seconds before looking at Zi Bai.

"You could have warned me you were going to break the sword."

Zi Bai shrugged.

"If I had warned you, she would have tried to stop me. And she still wouldn’t have listened."

He laughed quietly.

"Fair."

Then both of them looked in the direction where Samira had disappeared among the ruined trees, knowing that the conversation was still far from the end of the problem.

In truth, perhaps it had only been the first real step.

And considering who Samira was, that was already worth quite a lot.