The clatter of steel echoed in the small clearing. Blades clanked off one another as they hit the ground, only somewhat cushioned and sound muffled by the tufts of grass beneath them. Collapsing down onto her knees, Yue leaned forward onto her hands, head hanging low. Her long blonde hair obscured most, if not all of her face as she silently cried. One hand had balled itself around one of those same tufts of grass while the other shakily grasped a hold of one of her bladed fans. The other was behind her, being the source of the clattering moments earlier. Through blurred vision she looked down at the cloth pattern stitched low between the blades that made her weapon what it was.

Wisteria flowers.

Yue stared at her name sake, the meaning of her family name, and how that meaning meant nothing as long as she stayed on the ground like this. She was smart, but she wasn't spent. Just a little longer. Just a little further. Push forward even by the slightest increment. Stay ahead of her peers. They were her own words and the words of her parents echoing in unison as she pushed herself back onto her feet, turning around in the process to grab the other fan she had dropped. Inhaling and holding her breath for a few moments, Yue remained focused and waited for her exhale to finish before she would begin her dance.

There was an elegance to the way she was attempting to fight. Clear and precise pivots on her feet mixed with poetic movements and turns of her body while her arms reached out to slice with the blades of her fans. Turning on her heel once more, she slashed low before going on to spin one fan around like a disc, creating a pinwheel like effect with it as she lunged upwards as if to slice through her imaginary foe. This was where the mistake happened last time as the opposite fan then needed to be clasped shut into a singular, thick bladed weapon more used for bludgeoning. The intent was to clasp it shut and then immediately clack it open to slice horizontally.

Another clatter. Another dropped fan. Yue standing completely still and straight in the clearing.

I need to be strong. I need to be better. I can't let anyone show me up. I can't!

Quietly, she gathered fan and folded the both of them to put away. Cobalt eyes seemed more gray than blue in this moment as she moved to the edge of the clearing to sit against one of the many trees. Though steely eyed with a blank and flat affect face, Yue fondly remembered how she and her classmates would train in this very clearing and how she would always win against those in her year.

"But never anyone older. Average indeed."