#swordplay

If you have not yet seen the two Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman films, then I highly recommend seeing them out. Xie Miao has been doing big things in China's straight-to-streaming film industry and these films are easily two of his best.

WARNING: The fight I posted above is a pivotal part of the first film, so, if you don't like spoilers, please avoid.

If you want to seek these out (which you should), they're both available on Blu-ray and they're streaming on the wonderful Hi-Yah! streaming service.

The thing about fighting with two swords is that the line between attack and defense is thoroughly blurred. My parries are attacks on my opponent’s blade, trying to force it out of line to give my other sword an opening. My strikes sweep a protective arc in front of me to make it harder for my opponent to sneak a cut through. And of course parry becomes riposte and attack returns to guard, each move flowing into the next in the ancient grammar of swordplay.

When you put a couple of two-sword fighters up against each other, well, there are a lot of blades spinning around doing a lot of things. It’s exciting, it’s dynamic, and it’s messy. You’re either standing back taking cautious little cuts, trying to draw each other out, or you’re all in—and if you’re all in, it’s fast and furious and someone is going to get hurt. Probably both of you are going to get hurt.

I would have really preferred to be cautious, because I don’t like getting hurt. But the Echo was all in, so I was all in. The Echo was fast, and it liked to fight in close.

We became a snarl of flashing blades, eye to eye and at times almost chest to chest. The Echo could only thrust with the icicle sword, which lacked an edge; it fought with its point angled down and forward to protect its body and take sharp jabs at me that were difficult to parry. Its glass sword was light and quick, but rigid, without the flexibility to do sneaky arcs around my guard like I could with the Echo blade. Not brittle enough to shatter, though—any hopes I might have had to break one of those fragile-looking weapons with a good hard parry didn’t last beyond our first furious exchange.

When we stepped back from each other to catch our breath, panting, I had another cut on the same forearm Rai had injured, which wasn’t great—that was going to slow me down and could lose me this fight. The Echo was leaking bluish icemelt from a slash along its ribs and grinning like this was the best day of its life.

“You’re pretty good,” I said.

"But where's the fulcrum?" you might be asking. It's the wielder's grip.

The wielder's physical strength is one of the least important factors in how well they'd do in a fight or a fencing match. A woman who's spent years practicing swordplay isn't going to lose to a big burly man that's mad at her if he's never been in a fencing match before. No, he can't just cleave through her sword if she knows what she's doing.