If you're still accepting prompts - Nie Huaisang wielding a tessen (Japanese war fan) instead of a sword and surprising everyone by actually being both skilled and /extremely/ effective with it?
Nie Huaisang had a tried and true method of dealing with thieves: he surrendered at once and gave them all the money he had in his pockets.
He didn’t mind it. He never took too much money with him as he walked, and the Nie sect, however diminished under his ‘head-shaking’ leadership, wasn’t so poor as to be concerned over a few pieces of silver. They never asked for anything absurd like his clothing, presumably realizing they’d never be able to sell it, though one clever one had demanded his boots. A little awkward on the way back, but still fine.
This? This was not fine.
“The fan is the last gift I have from someone important to me,” he said stiffly, his fingers wrapped tightly around it. “The craftmanship isn’t anything special, either. What does it benefit you to take it? I’ve already given you all the rest. Leave me this.”
The leader thief – there were three all together – laughed in his face. “That you don’t want to give it up is reason enough,” he said. “Now hand over the stupid fan.”
It wasn’t a stupid fan.
It was Dage’s fan, the one his brother had made for him with his own hands, worked on for nearly a year to prepare it as a gift for the day Nie Huaisang finally formed his golden core. It really wasn’t any good as a fan: too heavy, sides thick with metal as if his brother had accidentally forgotten halfway through that he wasn’t forging a saber; the lacquered paper was expensive but of completely the wrong heft to be any good at being a fan; the landscape painting on it (Qinghe, of course) just barely good enough to be considered trite and hackneyed. But it was his brother’s gift to him, the only one that survived the burning, and that had been a fluke, had happened only because he hadn’t appreciated it back then, had shoved it behind a book so he wouldn’t have to look at, had preferred the delicate gifts of Jin Guangyao…
“I’m not giving it to you.”
The thief laughed, stepped forward; he held his knife casually, having thoroughly discounted Nie Huaisang as a threat long ago. “You don’t have a choice. Now give it –”
The saber is a straightforward weapon.
Considered more brutal than the sword, it uses its heavy weight to pierce armor that can withstand a sword; that same weight also means that the techniques to wield it are often less intricate than the sword dancing preferred by gentlemen cultivators. The founder of the Nie sect hadn’t even had a proper saber, but only a butcher’s cleaver; despite that, he’d cultivated very nearly to immortality on the same basic principle: lift up high, bring down hard, chop. Repeat until done.
The fact was that Nie Huaisang hated saber training, but it was equally true that he wasn’t very good at avoiding it. The techniques his brother taught him through force are carved into his bones, written into his muscles, burned into his brain.
He lifted the fan and brought it down, his fingers wrapped around the bottom edge as if it were a saber’s hilt. Up, and then down, and then again.
Again and again.
It wasn’t anything impressive, but like that long-ago Nie ancestor, it did the trick.
Some time later, Nie Huaisang stopped, reaching up indifferently to wipe the blood off his face with his sleeve. The three lumps of flesh and bone in front of him no longer resembled human figures.
A burning talisman, hidden in his sleeve pocket, was enough to disperse them into ash.
He didn’t bother to pick up his money, leaving it for the street children to find – let them root around in the ashes with their grubby fingers, let it be stepped on by the passerby let the local cats use it as place to piss and shit. Let that be the final legacy of the three thieves who didn’t know when to stop.
Let that be the end of anyone who disrespected his dage.
