The rear loading doors swung inward on rusted iron pintles.
Eight figures slipped into the cavernous darkness of the South River Grain Depot, their wet oilcloth cloaks trailing river water across the dry pine floorboards. Outside, the thunderstorm let loose another ground-shaking roar, rattling the heavy slate roof and shaking dust from the cedar roof beams thirty feet above.
The river air swept through the doorway, carrying the freezing scent of churning mud and ice floes.
The last man—a wiry cutthroat with a short recurve bow slung across his chest—pulled the heavy doors shut behind them. That left them unlatched to ensure a rapid escape route back to the flatboat. He tested the door handles with his wet fingers, ensuring that the leaves would swing freely. Just then, the signal to retreat was given.
In the center of the loading bay, Scarface Qian crouched beside an overturned grain barrel.
The scarred leader unhooked an iron strike-a-light from his belt. He took a strip of dry, charred punk-cloth, pressed it against a shard of dark mountain flint. Then he struck down with the iron striker.
Chink. Chink.
A shower of orange sparks flared in the dark. A spark caught the charred cloth, glowing red.
Scarface Qian blew gently on the ember, then touched it to the sulfur-soaked linen wrapping of his four-foot wooden torch.
FWOOSH.
A brilliant, yellow-orange flame erupted into the gloom, sputtering with the sharp, choking stench of burning brimstone and boiled coal pitch.
The sudden flare lit up the warehouse in harsh, leaping amber light.
The four hundred sacks of coarse millet and flour rose on either side like the sheer canyon walls of Mount Cang, their rough burlap stamped with the faded red ink mark of the Pei Clan second branch. The ceiling above was a deep pit of pitch-black shadows. There, the massive twelve-inch cedar roof beams vanished into gloom.
The seven cutthroats fanned out into the loading bay.
Two of them carried heavy clay pot jars sealed with pitch. Each jar held three gallons of raw rock petroleum mixed with boiled lard, designed to stick to timber planks and resist water bucket dousing.
“Move fast,” Scarface Qian rasped, his scarred mouth twisting as he spat a wad of yellow thick spit onto the floor. “Two jars of pitch down the center hall. Douse the flour sacks first. When wheat flour atomizes in a draft, it explodes like gunpowder.”
Iron Calf, the second-in-command, hoisted a pitch jar onto his shoulder with a grunt. His butcher knife shone in his belt.
“The watchman’s hut was empty, boss,” Iron Calf chuckled in a low growl. “Those second branch cowards took one look at the storm and ran back to their mothers. They probably left the ledger open on the desk.”
“Shut your maw,” Qian snapped, raising the sulfur torch high to inspect the aisle. “Set the jars, light the fuses. We’re back on the river before the town watch finishes their midnight wine.”
He turned to hand the burning torch to Iron Calf.
He never completed the turn.
Thirty feet above their heads, Pei Jing stepped off the cedar tie beam.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t issue a martial proclamation.
He fell along the upright descent line like a line weight of solid iron.
At ten feet above the floorboards, his left hand seized the dangling hemp slip-rope. They clamped the three-ply cord with his thick, horn-hard palm. The friction smoked against his skin, decelerating his seventy-nine-two-pound mass from eight meters per second down to two meters per second in six inches of travel.
He released the rope.
He landed on the balls of his bare feet three paces behind Scarface Qian.
His knees bent forty-five degrees. His deep muscle-sheath lattice and cross-woven leg cables absorbed the upright impulse with near-zero sound report. The pine floorboards gave only a muted, dull creak. A sound fully wiped out by a crashing wave of overhead thunder.
Before his heels touched the timber, his right hand moved.
Gale Saber: Form One, True-Plane Horizontal Cleave.
The three-foot mountain saber cleared its pigskin sword sheath in forty-two split seconds. The sheep fat on the blade prevented all metal rasp.
Powered by the explosive unwinding of his broad back muscles and the full moving torque of Flesh Forging Tier 3, the thirty-six-inch high-carbon blade sped up to twenty-eight meters per second.
The blade whistled through a level arc thirty-four inches above the floor.
SHIIIK.
The sound was clean, crisp, and razor-sharp. The sound signed name of high-carbon steel parting soft tissue without bone drag.
The polished edge entered the left side of Scarface Qian’s neck, slipping between the third and fourth neck bones. The blade cut the main neck blood vessels, the internal neck-vein veins. The main spine nerve in one-tenth of a split second.
The saber completed its level crescent, stopping dead in Pei Jing’s right hand. He was locked in place by the locked-muscle contraction of his chest muscles.
Scarface Qian’s head detached from his shoulders.
The cut head rotated in mid-air. Its eyes still was wide with feral cruelty, its mouth still shaped around the word wine.
The burning sulfur torch slipped from the leader’s dying fingers, tumbling toward the floorboards.
If the burning sulfur head struck the dry cedar planks, the pool of melted pitch would ignite the surrounding grain dust within four seconds.
Pei Jing’s left hand shot forward like a striking viper.
His bare fingers clamped around the falling torch handle three inches above the burning sulfur wrapping.
A globule of boiling, liquid pitch dripped onto the back of his left hand. It burned at three hundred degrees.
Pei Jing didn’t flinch. His Tier 5 rhino-leather skin didn’t blister. The dense, cross-linked tough outer skin absorbed the heat flux, the boiling pitch cooling and hardening harmlessly against his slate-grey outer skin like wax on stone.
Scarface Qian’s headless torso remained upright for two full heartbeats, bright red blood fountaining into the gloom, before collapsing forward onto its knees with a sodden, heavy thud.
The cut head struck the pine floor, rolling three feet to bump against Iron Calf’s muddy boots.
Silence seized the loading bay.
The seven surviving cutthroats froze in place, their weapons half-drawn. Their eyes were locked on the cut head resting between their feet in the flickering yellow torchlight. Blood seeped through the floorboards, dripping into the swollen river below.
Pei Jing took one step forward.
His left leg whipped back, his heel slamming into the timber leaf of the rear loading door.
BANG.
The heavy four-foot door slammed shut against its cedar frame.
Pei Jing’s right heel kicked upward, catching the iron sliding latch and driving the one-inch bolt home with a final, unbending sound report:
CLANG.
The warehouse was sealed.
Before the raiders could recover from their sense shock, Pei Jing inverted the sulfur torch in his left hand. He drove the burning flaming head directly into an open tub of wet river sand beside the grain scales.
HISSS.
The fire was snuffed instantly.
The yellow light vanished.
Total, choking pitch darkness crashed down upon the warehouse aisle. That left only the relentless roar of the storm outside and the stench of hot blood, wet wool, and sulfur smoke.
“Boss!” one of the bowmen shrieked in the dark, his voice cracking into high-pitched hysteria. “Boss! Where did he go? Who’s there?”
The panic spread like an open flame across a dry oil slick. Boots scrambled in the dark. An iron crowbar clattered against a flour sack. Someone drew a butcher cleaver with a trembling, scraping rasp against leather.
“Form up!” Iron Calf bellowed, his voice choked with terror. “Backs to the sacks! Backs to the sacks! He’s just one man!”
Click. Shhh.
The sound of iron shifting in the dark was small, cold, and precise.
To the seven raiders, the darkness was an iron-hard wall of terror, blinding their dilated pupils. They could see only the fading purple after-images of the put out sulfur torch.
To Pei Jing, whose Trapper’s Sight processed heat gradients and sound echoes, the seven men were glowing targets in a narrow shooting gallery. He heard the rapid, shallow panting of their lungs. He tracked the heat signed names of their faces streaming against the cold bags of grain.
His floating sight screen activated in razor-sharp monospace:
Pei Jing didn’t speak.
He didn’t announce his name. He didn’t threaten them with clan revenge.
In an audit of fraudulent assets, the liquidator didn’t engage in verbal debate with bad debts.
He simply started the write-off.
He stepped forward into the narrow central aisle between the ten-foot stacks of grain. His bare feet moved across the dry pine planks with zero sound. It slid forward heel-to-toe along the shadows. He glided between the burlap sacks. Then, his right thumb touched the Black Mountain Whetstone riding in his sash, checking the edge’s bite against the dark stone memory in his muscle before raising his guard. His left forearm rose thirty degrees, the horn release tab resting lightly against the heel of his palm, primed to launch six inches of high-carbon steel into the first man who stepped into the draft.