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Martial arts, when you got down to it, were the sort of thing people made to fight other people. The optimizations of movements to cause violence had to inherently make a whole lot of assumptions about what was being fought to matter. It even made a whole lot of assumptions about the users of it too, which just compounded the issue.

Among its many assumptions was that an opponent’s height and weight would be manageable, to begin with or that, at the very least, the person using the martial arts had the inherent qualities to deal with them. It also assumed the range of actions and movements from an opponent had to be limited to a certain number of permutations and even made guesses as to what that range would be. Thus it also limited the number of actions and movements Martial Artist would have down to a bunch. Hypothetically, the most efficient ones.

Hopefully, even.

Martial Arts was a thing with an end goal, after all. And while people occasionally tacked on things to go along with, like “being beautiful”, “giving authority” and in this world even “giving legitimacy”, the most base purpose that all Martial Arts had to at least pay lip service to was this:

Defeating an opponent.

For a human being, that opponent would be, in almost every single case, another human being. That meant dealing with four limbs, two arms and two legs. That meant dealing with a thinking being, who could decide to not go along with your game. That meant going against hands and fingers, which could hold weapons. That meant going against the extreme limits of a bipedal form, which sacrificed stability for diversity of movement.

By cutting itself off, by shortening its scope, did Martial Arts widen their depth.

That was all to say that, when Lingyin charged at Jun like the most compact pig train ever, he, like his Guards, found himself with limited choices.

Unlike his men, however, Jun had the opportunity to consider those choices.

“Hey!” the Spirit Boar whined as Jun lowered himself until he was almost squatting down. He extended his hands in front of him as the Sow came upon him and slapped his hands away with her snout.

But that was fine since he was aiming for her shoulders anyway.

Her cute little tusks, her snout and her head flailed at the air without finding purchase as she made Jun’s feet dig two parallel trenches into the ground. Despite the strength and power she could bring to bear, she was thankfully not so fast that Jun’s hands slipped past her shoulders.

Eventually, the bone and sinew organic train could not depend on her inertia to keep pushing against Jun. They slowed down, the muscles in the Spirit Boar’s legs still managing to overcome the friction that Jun’s boots made with the earth, but there was no danger of her launching him into the air with her charge.

“Stop pushing away, coward!” she snarled as she bit at the arms holding her torso, successfully making Jun snatch them back. Without being able to control the distance between their bodies, Lynguin bore under his feet with her snout and tried to displace him into her head.

Because, apparently, she could still launch Jun into the air with just the strength of her neck and back muscles.

Not that Jun planned to allow her to.

“Stop squirming!” Lingyin demanded as Jun put a hand on the side of her head and pushed her snout of the way, circling into her sudden blind spot. But as fast as he was at doing this, the Spirit Boar was even faster when turning around.

“Then stop moving,” Jun shot back as he stretched to grab her front leg, but had to abort the motion as Lingyin snapped her mouth at it. Which, really, just gave him the chance to put his hands on the other side of her snout.

And use her inertia to push her head the other way.

Jun circled into her blind side like this a couple of times before the Spirit Board became incensed and, upon circling to face him again, used the motion of her circling to launch herself at Jun’s waist.

“Try and move out of the way of this!” Lingyin relished even as her head made contact with Jun’s stomach.

“Ok,” Jun did just that.

Like Lingyin had been doing, he turned around his own axis. Literally, he took a step back and thus took out the center of his stomach out of the way of the Boar’s thrust.

“H-hey, hey, what!” Lingyin gasped as she passed by Jun and, not seeing any reason not to, Jun circled his arms around her waist and hugged her body to his chest.

Hmm, yep, about 140 pounds.

“Let go of me!” the Spirit Boar in his arms flailed with her legs, trying to smack her head and tusks against the side of his body as she trashed. It made holding on to her hard and, little by little, she started to slip.

But that was fine.

“Ah-ha!” Lingyin triumphantly crowed as her little hooves touched the ground.

The problem was that Jun’s arms were still encircled around her waist.

“Really? Let go already!” she seethed with annoyance as Jun knelt by her side. Her back legs kicked off like an ornery horse but, as he was, Lingyin could not find the angle where those found purchase. She started swinging her head where Jun’s arm were, but as close as he was hogging her all she could do was nip at his arms.

Now, if he’d been wearing the upper part of his dress, she would have surely caught on to his sleeves and made all of this hard work pointless.

But it was widely known that, in wrestling, a lack of clothes conferred an advantage.

Technically speaking, this Art that Jun practiced was called “Subduing Scholar Fist”. Because all of his ancestors would be damned if the martial art they practiced didn’t sound ostentatious. More specifically, it was the grappling parts of the Scholar Fist. Grappling was sort of universal across martial arts in that every single one had at least a few parts that concerned it, with some being better or worse at it, but the Scholar Fist attempted to be a “Universal” school by including stuff involving weapons too.

Which was a bit pointless to Jun because the Yan family arts already concerned themselves with weapons. As things stood, the wrestling portions of it were the only ones that Jun found interesting enough to really learn.

Fortunately for Jun, this was fine as he didn’t think he could have found a good way to punch or kick an animal that walked on four legs even if he had been good at striking.

“Oh, you truly think this is going to be enough?” Lingyin huffed as she stopped trying to grab his arm with her mouth and instead went for his legs. Splaying them out of the way of her snout gave him a stable base, but it took her away from his center. That meant that she was able to slip out of his hands.

And put her little tusks under his stomach.

“Take this!” she said as she kicked her head back, intending to, once again, throw him above her.

However, Jun instead let go of one of his hands and slipped past her head, letting his back fall at the side of her body.

With his other arm still wrapped under her stomach.

“W-what?” she again gasped as Jun rotated his torso to the left and hoisted her past his chest, sitting up as he slammed her on the ground on the other side of his body.

Her right front and back hooves managed to catch the ground, but they weren’t enough to stabilize her fall. They buckled as she was forced to hop,and that gave Jun the opportunity to take a deep breath.

And tackle her side.

“You are being really annoying,” she growled as her legs kicked at the air as Jun rolled her onto her back.

“Never fought against anyone that you just couldn’t throw around like a bag of rice?” Jun found himself chuckling.

“Never found a human that could make a good simile of a tick,” she grunted before she took a deep breath herself.

And then kicked off against the ground with just her head and her rump.

Jun then found himself precipitating on the toes of a single foot as, not only did she raise both of them off the ground, she did it with enough power to almost catapult her body over his. As Jun wasn’t willing to let go of her, this just meant she almost sailed on a nice arc over his head.

Honestly, it came as a surprise to him that he managed to hold on to that.

“This is not fair,” Lingyin flailed at the air as Jun managed to stabilize himself, “You humans aren’t supposed to be this strong!”

“Hah!” the peanut gallery laughed with disdain as they took relish in the sight of their boarish bully being helpless, “Shows what you know. The Young Master is, as he said, a Yan son.”

“They are different than what you and we are.” Jun was apparently upholding not only the boar but also his men’s classicism. At least it wasy doing wonders for their morale.

“I am not like you servants,” Lingyin seethed as she took a deep breath and Jun readied himself for another full-powered buckle.

Instead, she brought her back feet against her stomach hard enough for her to flip in his grasp.

Which put her front hooves against Jun’s chest.

“I am free!” she gushed with glee as she pushed off hard enough to make Jun grunt, “See? This was only a matter of time!”

“Not the ground and not the air?” Jun mused as he rubbed at his chest. Those kicks had hurt, “It seems I’ll have to try another grip.”

“As if you’ll get the chance,” Lingyin started furrowing the ground again, “You surprised me with your ape magnetism, Young Master! But when I slipped out of your hands, so did your chances.”

Jun paused, “You know what magnetism is?”

That also brought the boar short, “Indeed? It’s when you rub your fur vicariously and have straw stick to it for a while because of it, is it not?”

“How…do you know that?” Jun frowned. Surprisingly, this world had knowledge of things no world stuck in a perpetual technological stasis like this one should. Then again, Cultivators could and did explore all sorts of things.

But how would a Spirit Beast know?

“Hmm,” Lingyin thought about it, putting a hoove to her lips as she thought about it, “Mayhaps I heard it in passing? Peasants say a lot of unpleasant or useless things when they don’t think anyone is watching.”

“Hey!” Jun’s two village guides complained.

“Right…” Jun trailed off before he asked how peasants could know what magnetism was. But then, them knowing about it was already more plausible than a wild beast knowing about it. Given how these things went, they probably would have heard it from a traveling scholar, who in turn heard it from a Cultivator or something like that.

So he shook his head, “Well, it doesn’t matter. Sadly for you, this Young Master now knows the best way to beat you.”

“Oh?” she replied, a challenge in her voice.

“And it won’t even take me more than a single move,” Jun freely declared. There was always the chance that what he was about to do would absolutely fail, but then that was true of everything. The main thing was that there were only a limited amount of ways Lingyin could take advantage of his failure if he did.

Jun liked his chances.

“Hah, the cheek!” Lingyin kicked off from the ground and, under three steps, regained the momentum that she had shown at the beginning of the fight. The momentum with which she had trounced five grown men.

Unfortunately for her, Jun finally decided upon a name for what he was going to do.

Throughout this whole fight, he had been practicing his True-ish Breathing when he could but, aside from bolstering his endurance, it was a bit hard to rely on it.

He only enjoyed the effects of it when he filled himself as much as he could and when he exhaled it. That added an additional complication of being “out of tempo” that he wondered if other people had to deal with. As it was, it wasn’t an instinctual thing yet and thinking about one's moves as you did them slowed you down far too much.

But now he had the right framing. Now he had the right state of mind. The air was in his lungs, and he filled himself as much as he could. He felt the colors of the day become sharper, the details of his ungulate opponent become clearer, and now only had to but exhale to put all of that feeling into action.

But this time, he went a step further.

He vocalized what he was doing.

“Boar Tackle!” Jun pushed all the air out of his lungs in one heated breath as his words went out into the world, somehow shaping what he did as they did. He had no time to analyze as he rose from a squat so low his knees were almost touching the dirt, and kicked off against the ground from the angle that it would least deform.

He didn’t quite match Lingyin for power.

But his speed certainly surpassed her.

The Spirit Boar’s eyes widened with shock as Jun was upon her, his hands going further than they had last time, and cupped the armpits of her front legs. His arms were straight and did not buckle as a small heavy boar collided with a full-grown man. Instead of impacting Jun with her head and tusks, her body was instead forced above Jun.

She felt weightless in Jun’s grasp as her body threatened to be launched into the air like she had done to so many men. This was a redirection of both their tackles and, as the one receiving them, it was only natural that she would be the one to fly.

But that would have just extended this fight.

Grabbing her legs before she could fly out of his grasp, Jun harshly yanked her back into his shoulders.

“Fuck!” the usually well-spoken sow screamed in pain as her back was put on top of Jun's, her stomach pressed against his right shoulder with an arm circled just before her back legs, and her head nestled into his other shoulder.

Jun’s remaining arm kept it there.

“How about it?” Jun started sweating as his head felt a bit lightheaded in the aftermath of that True-ish move, “Ready to give up?”

“N-never!” Lingyin grunted as she tried to kick off his back again.

So Jun simply craned her back over his own, her lack of leverage telling as she grunted in pain, “How about now?”

“Do your worst!” she blustered even in that position.

So Jun sighed.

“One of you,” he casually said to an audience ready to kiss his feet, “Can this Young Master get a 30 count?”

“Certainly!” they all shouted and, as one, started counting, “One, two, three-”

“...I am seriously going to lose this way,” Lingyin despondently said when they got to fifteen. No matter how she trashed, kicked or flailed, she could gain no purchase on anything that would change her position.

Or fate.

“You could just give up now and save yourself the humiliation,” Jun said as his men ferociously continued their count.

“20!”

“Fine, fine,” Lingyin breathed and went still.

“You win.”

“YES!” the village guides and Jun’s bodyguards threw their hands into the air and, despite the social difference and the antipathy they had previously been building, hugged each other, “The Young Master wins! The Demon is banished!”

“I am Spirit Boar, not a demonic one!” Lingyin grunted as Jun put her into the ground.

He also brushed the dirt from her back.

“So I guess this is it,” Lingyin mumbled as Jun managed to get her into presentable form. She oinked some appreciation at that.

“This is it,” Jun agreed as he started pulling the top part of his tunic onto his limbs, “You’ll serve this Young Master now, as we agreed, yes?”

“I am a sow of my word!” she rounded on him, “I said I would do it and so I will!”

“Besides-” as fast as she rounded on him, she went quiet. Looking at his face once, before looking away, “It’s not like you are weak or bad looking. This Lingyin could certainly do worse.”

“Well, since this is resolved,” Jun raised an eyebrow at that but he supposed there were worse ways to come to terms with serving him, “How about we go back now?”

“I have a feeling my Guard Captain might need us.”

—--------------------------------------

“Do you really have to leave this quickly, Young Master?” Fen Tao, the village chief, asked him once Jun got back, “After binding the Lingyin beast, it would seem untoward of us to not at least offer you some rest.”

It took a mere 30 minutes to get back into the village from where they were, the worth of the village guides finally self-evident for once. Jun’s new Spirit Beast walked alongside him, doing a good job of dealing with the digs the bodyguards threw at her and quite simply just ignoring the existence of the villagers. It made sense to Jun, as the Sow was going to have to be around his bodyguards.

But, hmm, what exactly could he have her do? Something meaningful, ideally, but the usual reasons for anyone to keep a pig around were for their meat or for their ability to dispose of unwanted by-products that a human dwelling produced. Obviously, the first option defeated the bother he went through to bind her to his service and he didn’t think she would be alright with being a glorified garbage disposal.

Maybe he could say she was a pet?

Well, he’d have to figure something out.

“This Young Master is afraid that, though a mere two days, there are still other things vying for his time,” Jun respectfully said, “It wouldn’t do to hold off on things.”

“It is truly a pity that the Yan lord must shoulder so many responsibilities,” the village chief sighed, but without the proper amount of sadness the words should have merited. Point in fact, the old woman had not stopped smiling since Jun came back.

Truth be told, he was planning on staying at least one night before leaving, if only because traveling on the road was a bit trying. Sleeping on a mat was preferable to sleeping on the cushioned benches of his carriage after having traveled in it for so long.

One look at Jianjun, however, made it rather hard to choose anything else.

When they came back, his Guard Captain immediately came out of the Village Chief’s house, his armor, clothing, tools and weapons already donned and in position. Perhaps that didn’t sound strange to people who’d never had to lug all that equipment around, but absolutely no one bore the weight of a helmet in their head if they didn’t have to.

Jianjun was more than ready to leave.

And the expression on his face…

Even as he greeted Jun in a proper way and offered to help in whatever way he could, he wasn’t really staring at him, not really. His eyes were in a far-off place.

And when the Village Chief came out, the man stiffened.

Heaven willing, this would be enough to keep Jianjun from egging on Jun’s family to take him more seriously.

But the way he was looking into the distance worried Jun.

Lingyin snorted, “A man as strong as the Young Master would also, obviously, be attentive to the matters of his house. Or would this sow be erring by assuming that the people of this village wouldn’t extend the Young Master the same consideration that they would the newly married in their village?”

While marital duty didn’t rank particularly high in society, it was considered rather rude to keep newlyweds away from each other. Concubines weren’t wives, but the same considerations could be stretched to them, a little. As it was, it was a legitimate enough reason to not have to stay around.

Jun gave Lingyin a look of appreciation for having come up with it.

The Spirit Sow held on to it for a second before she looked away. Rather shy, wasn’t she?

“It is truly a sad day when I am being lectured about proprietary by a thief and despoiler,” Fen drily noted, which got her an unimpressed look from the Boar, “But yes, it would be unbecoming of me to stand in the Young Masters way any longer. Is there naught else that we may do for the Young Lord?”

“This Young Master will have a letter sent if he can think of anything,” Jun replied.

The carriage was once again hitched to its horses, and the men had refilled their storages of food and water. The horses had gotten a few hours of rest and food and were indifferent about leaving the place.

The same could not be said of Jianjun.

“Had a nice time, Guard Captain?” one of the guards sneered once they were sufficiently away from the village. The cobbled road went through a sea of trees again and what breeze blew through here also made the leaves rustle.

It would be night in a few hours more, but even that much time would make for significant travel.

“No,” Jianjun said in a tone completely devoid of any feeling. When they left the town, Jun’s guard captain relaxed.

But he didn’t stop looking off into the distance.

“For an honorable and stalwart Captain, you sound as though you had a bad time,” one of the other guards rolled his eyes.

Jun was considering jumping in before his men could really get going with their venting. Not because Jianjun couldn’t handle it, but because, so far, he hadn’t even bothered.

But then things got weird.

“The Village Chief fucked me,” all of a sudden, the Guard Captain said in the same monotone that he had been using all along. It was rather unnerving, if Jun was going to be honest. The men seemed to think so too, because they all shut up in the aftermath of that confession.

But, of course, Jun’s men wouldn’t be his men if they had anything approaching sense.

“Figures he’d be playing around with peasants while we were getting trampled,” one of them grumbled.

“Figures he’d be fucking grannies,” another one said, making Jianjun’s eyebrows tremble for the first time in a while, as he turned his head to stare the last man who had spoken straight in the eye.

The guard went white as he did not like what he found there.

“Did I just hear you say that I fucked the Village Chief?” Jianjun asked in a high-pitched tone, the sheer incredulity in it almost a physical presence, “Did I hear you right?”

“I-I was just saying stupid things, guard captain, this guardsman apologies for any insult he might have given,” the guard swallowed and hid his head behind a fist-to-palm martial salute. But he had already set free this calamity.

“No, no, since you are all so keen to talk about it, we’ll talk about it!” Jianjun laughed and he sounded more than a little bit deranged, “You said I fucked her, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“It was but a jest?” the guard tried again but Jianjun rounded on him.

“Oh no, you want to know the juicy precious truth,” he was being maniacal now, and Jun’s hand started itching for his spear, “Well, I’ll tell you the truth!”

“I didn’t fuck village chief. The village chief fucked ME!”

And just like that, the air went from being intimidating all the way to being extremely awkward.

Socially awkward.

Somehow, this was worse.

“W-what’s the difference?” one of the bodyguards nervously asked.

“I am glad you asked!” Jianjun smiled and there was no mirth behind it, “You see, this Jianjun did not do any penetrating whatsoever. No, that’s not what Fen Tao is into.”

“She…gave you head?” one of the guards tried.

“She put things in my ass,” Jianjin looked the guards square in the eye and the shame, the embarrassment was so palpable that everyone there squirmed in their seats.

Even Jun, who was looking at the proceedings from the ceiling hole in his carriage, shivered at the sheer discomfort this whole conversation had degenerated into.

Point in fact, he was about to do what his men couldn’t and run away from this conversation by locking himself in his carriage.

“Any other questions?” Jianjun offered, the smile in his face at odds with his eyes.

Lingyin raised her hoof.

Jun practically willed himself to drop into the room of his carriage so that he could lunge for the door and open it just in time to slap Lingyin’s hoove down.

“No,” Jun hissed, “We are NOT asking any questions!”

Then, to make sure, he pulled her into the carriage.