Napier calmly impaled a Fist who had tripped and fallen, then turned his 
attention to a new antagonist, a
formidable character skilled with a real sword. The duel between Western and 
Eastern martial arts moved back and forth across the lobby floor, the two 
combatants staring directly into one another's eyes and trying to intuit the 
other's thoughts and emotional state. The actual thrusts and parries and 
ripostes, when they came, were too rapid to be understood. The Fist's style was 
quite beautiful to watch, involving many slow movements that looked like the 
stretching of large felines at the zoo. Napier's style was almost perfectly 
boring: He moved about in a crabbed stance, watched his opponent calmly, and 
apparently did a lot of deep thinking.