咬定牙齒 He Sets His Teeth
那怪那肯容情，咬定牙齒，與八戒交鋒。那老龍才定了神思，領龍子、龍孫各執槍刀，齊來攻取。八戒見事體不諧，虛幌一鈀，撤身便走。那老龍帥眾追來。須臾，攛出水中，都到潭面上翻騰。那怪那肯容情，咬定牙齿，与八戒交锋。那老龙才定了神思，领龙子、龙孙各执枪刀，齐来攻取。八戒见事体不谐，虚幌一钯，撤身便走。那老龙帅众追来。须臾，撺出水中，都到潭面上翻腾。
逐句解 Line by line
As if the fiend would show any mercy! He set his teeth and closed with Eight Rules.
The two 那 in this segment take opposite readings and both are supplied by position. The first is the deictic nà; the second is nǎ, rhetorical — how should he be willing — and it is only the second interrogative 那 so far, against forty-six deictics. pypinyin gives the deictic at both of the two.
The old dragon had only just collected his wits; he led out dragon sons and dragon grandsons, each with spear or blade, and they came on all together to the attack.
龍子 takes 子 at zǐ, the full noun-morpheme, where pypinyin supplies the neutral suffix — the same correction the quatrain needed a few passages back. 才 is the temporal only-just, and it says that the household has been at a standstill since the rake came through the door.
Eight Rules saw the thing was going badly, made a feint with the rake, turned his body and ran.
鈀 stands at pá by the corpus-wide ruling. 一鈀 takes 一 at yì, and the value holds either way here: the base gives 鈀 a dipping tone and the ruling gives it a rising one, and 一 is yì before both. 虛幌 is a feint, a swing made empty on purpose.
The old dragon led the company after him.
帥 stands at shuài by the corpus-wide ruling, used verbally, to lead. A short narrator's clause of seven graphs, and it stands alone not because of its length but because a narrator's clause is not a quotation-closing tail at all.
In a moment they shot up out of the water, and all of them came tumbling about on the surface of the pool.
都 is dōu, the totalising adverb, where pypinyin supplies dū, a capital city. 中 at 水中 is zhōng. 攛 is to shoot upward suddenly, and the whole household arrives at the surface in one graph.
The retreat is deliberate and it works. Eight Rules sees the odds — the son-in-law in front, the old dragon and the whole armed family behind — makes an empty swing to buy a step, and runs. The novel calls it 虛幌, a feint, so that there is no question of it being panic.
What it produces is the thing the plan needed. Everyone in the palace follows him, and in the space of one thirteen-graph sentence the entire dragon household is out of the water and on the open surface of the pool, where somebody is waiting for them.
The second 那 in the first segment is worth a moment. The graph runs to eighty occurrences in this chapter and so far only two are not the pointing word; this is the second of them. 那肯容情 is not that-fiend-was-unwilling but a rhetorical question — as if he would show mercy.