Where Winds Meet Finally Lets You Fight With Your Fists

Hidden Mountain pushes Where Winds Meet into its 2.0 era on July 23, 2026, and the headline combat addition is a weapon that trades the game’s usual cold steel for fists. Gauntlets are the first weapon in the game built around striking with your hands rather than swinging steel, and one of the most anticipated additions in the update. The confusing part is the martial art attached to it: Bamboocut Kite shares a name with two styles already in the game, and neither of those uses Gauntlets at all. Here’s what the weapon actually does, how the style is put together, and what’s worth doing before the update lands.

What Gauntlets bring to close-range combat

Gauntlets are built for pressure at ultra-close range. Where the game’s blades and polearms lean on reach and timing, this weapon leans on raw impact — lightning-fast combo strings, heavy hit feedback on every connect, and explosive burst damage when a string lands clean.

Bamboocut Kite pairs Gauntlets with the Rope Dart

Bamboocut Kite is not a Gauntlets-only style. It is a two-weapon martial art that combines Gauntlets with a Rope Dart, and the whole point of the pairing is that neither half covers the fight on its own. The Gauntlets handle everything inside punching range. The Rope Dart handles everything that isn’t.

The intended loop is a constant swap between the two. You use the Rope Dart’s reach to control space and pull yourself back into range, then dump combo pressure with the Gauntlets once you’re on top of the target, then disengage on the tether when the fight turns. Against the mechanical bosses Hidden Mountain is stacked with — enemies you’re meant to read and pick apart rather than out-muscle — that ability to leave and re-enter a threat range on demand matters more than pure damage output.

How Bamboocut Kite differs from Dust and Wind

The Bamboocut name has been on two earlier styles, and both of them predate Gauntlets entirely. Bamboocut – Dust arrived with Version 1.4: Home Afar on March 6, 2026 as an Umbrella and Rope Dart path, while Bamboocut – Wind is a Twinblades and Rope Dart melee DPS setup. The shared thread across all three is the Rope Dart, not the primary weapon.

That difference makes older Bamboocut build guides useless for Kite. A Dust loadout is designed around how an Umbrella trades in a fight, so its skill priorities, Inner Way choices and combo routing simply don’t map onto a fist weapon. Treat Kite as a new style that happens to share a family name.

Where Gauntlets fit into Hidden Mountain

Hidden Mountain is a vertical region rather than a flat one, with exploration depth running past 2,000 meters across 4 main areas and 14 sub-regions, from underground caverns and underwater Mohist ruins up to a clockwork city suspended in the clouds. The new Mohist Hill sect sits at the center of it, built around engineering and mechanisms instead of traditional martial training.

Combat there is themed to match. Over 10 new bosses arrive with the region, and the clockwork ones are the reason a mobile, reach-flexible style is worth building. Changeless Heart – Zhang Wanshi fights through puppet formations, the mechanical Rosy-Faced Swordsworn turns hanging wires into strikes, and World Bosses like the paired Ci & Cuo and the Ironheart Centipede — multi-leg strikes plus toxic mist — punish anyone who just stands in front of them swinging. These are fights about reading structural movements and hitting weak points, which is the kind of encounter a Gauntlets and Rope Dart pairing is shaped for.

Prep to do before Hidden Mountain goes live

Stockpile Martial Art and Mystic upgrade materials

The faster you can pour resources into a fresh style, the sooner it’s usable in the new region’s boss fights.

Finish the Hexi main story

The main storyline resumes in Hidden Mountain, so clear Hexi first if you want to progress through the new chapter without backtracking.

Plan the build around Gauntlets and Rope Dart

Sketch your Inner Way and skill priorities for a two-weapon melee path rather than adapting an existing Bamboocut loadout.

What isn’t public yet about Gauntlets and Bamboocut Kite

The exact unlock route for Gauntlets and Bamboocut Kite hasn’t been laid out, and neither have skill costs, damage coefficients, or final build recommendations — any stat sheet circulating before July 23 is subject to change at launch. There’s also a wrinkle in the weapon’s history: some earlier patch summaries list a Gauntlet as arriving with Version 1.7: The Imperial Palace on May 28, 2026, while 2.0 materials present Gauntlets as brand new for Hidden Mountain.

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