The gutters of the Cross-Bazaar ran ankle-deep with muddy, cold autumn water.
Pouring rain swept across the slate roofs of Cloudford Town, muffling all surrounding sound beneath a nonstop, thundering roar. Water cascaded from the curved roof edges in heavy sheets, curtaining the narrow alleys in grey, liquid darkness.
Ten feet above the muddy street, Pei Jing moved along the wet clay ridge of an apothecary roof.
His feet made no sound.
Under the influence of his Tier 3 Python Tendon Whip, his body leverage had fully decoupled from the clumsy, heel-striking gait of ordinary men. His toes touched the slippery glazed tiles. Then, his Achilles tendons and plantar muscle tissue absorbed the descent with high-pressure softness. It drained away striking force through his core without cracking a single fired tile.
He paused behind the stone chimney of a dye shop. He pulled his dark wool hood down to his brow.
Below him, moving south along the narrow apothecary lane, was a six-man patrol from the Black Tiger Gang.
They were an active search squad, tasked with maintaining the outer edge blockade around the Pei Clan sector.
At their front marched Squad Leader Meng, known along the wharves as “Iron Bull.” Meng was thirty-five years old, standing six feet tall, with a thick neck and heavy shoulders conditioned by six years of Flesh Forging. He wore a double-layered cuirass of boiled buffalo rawhide, heavy with brass studs across the chest bone. Then he carried a twenty-pound iron-spiked heavy club resting casually against his shoulder.
Behind Meng walked four dock cutthroats armed with curved boat gaffs and iron truncheons.
At the rear of the file, five paces behind the others, walked a wiry river scout wearing a sleeveless hemp vest. Around the scout’s neck hung a curved brass boatswain’s whistle, polished bright, ready to summon thirty reinforcements stationed at the nearby grain exchange.
The patrol moved with sloppy, arrogant confidence.
Two of the cutthroats were laughing, their voices muffled by the pouring rain, sometimes kicking the closed wooden shutters of shuttered herb shops to terrify the trembling shopkeepers hiding inside.
Pei Jing didn’t look at the leaders first.
His eyes settled on the rear scout with the brass whistle.
In urban warfare, the priority target was never the most heavily armored combatant. It was the comms hub. A squad of six was a manageable tactical unit. A squad that successfully signaled its reserve became an uncontrollable encirclement.
Pei Jing raised his right forearm. He pointed the black rawhide wrist guard through a gap between two dripping roof tiles.
The distance was twelve yards.
Wind speed: fifteen miles per hour from the northwest.
Rain intensity: heavy, causing two inches of downward high-speed drift.
Pei Jing didn’t aim for the balance point. A heavy buffalo-hide vest could deflect or slow down a six-inch steel needle, preventing systemic absorption of the toxin.
He aimed for the unprotected triangle of the neck. The left neck-artery notch, two inches beneath the angle of the jaw.
He released the internal trigger gearwork with a micro-flexion of his wrist extensor.
Tink.
The spring-steel gearwork in the wrist guard released with a faint, metal snap, fully drowned out by the thundering rain on the roof.
The six-inch carbon-steel needle whistled through the downpour, a silent streak of dark, non-shiny metal.
The three-sided chisel tip, coated in the sticky, black resin of wolf-bile and aconite, struck the rear scout directly in the soft hollow behind his left side neck muscle.
The needle pierced three inches deep, puncturing the internal neck-vein.
The scout’s head jerked sideways.
His hands didn’t rise to the brass whistle around his neck.
The packed aconite neurotoxin entered the brain breath flow within three heartbeats. The sodium ion channels in his heart and phrenic nerves locked in permanent depolarizing block.
His eyes rolled back into his head, his jaw slackening, his knees turning to water.
He collapsed forward into the flooded gutter without a cry, his body sinking into the muddy torrent with no more sound than a bundle of wet rags falling from a cart.
The second rear cutthroat, walking two paces ahead, didn’t even turn his head. He continued splashing forward, muttering a complaint about the cold.
Pei Jing stepped off the roof ridge.
He didn’t jump with a wild, flailing leap.
He stepped off the roof edge into empty air, his body lined up along a true upright axis. As he fell through the twelve-foot drop, his right hand reached over his left shoulder. He drew the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber from its sheath.
The dark oiled linen had been removed. The twenty-two pounds of folded hard dark metal steel entered the night naked and hungry.
THUD.
Pei Jing landed in the muddy alleyway four feet behind the second cutthroat.
His knees bent, absorbing the impact with fluid tendon stretch, splashing water barely two inches into the air.
Before the splash subsided, the Cloud-Splitter struck.
Gale Saber: Cleaving the Riverbank.
Pei Jing didn’t waste energy on a full overhead swing.
He used the short-radius turning force of his core. He delivered a level waist chop. The flared four-inch chisel head sliced through the second cutthroat’s kidneys, cut his lower-back spine, and sliced clean through his leather belt.
The cutthroat was dead before his torso separated from his pelvis.
Both halves of the corpse collapsed into the flooded gutter, dark bright red blood blossoming into the grey torrent like blooming ink flowers.
The sound of the falling body finally alerted the front of the patrol.
Squad Leader Meng stopped, turning his massive shoulders. “Hey, what are you dogs slipping on back there—”
The words died in Meng’s throat.
Through the curtain of pouring rain, ten paces away, stood a lone figure in a dark, dripping wool cloak.
Beneath the shadow of the hood, two cold, dark eyes stared back at him. And in the youth’s hands was a three-foot slab of velvet-grey steel, three inches of its edge dripping with dark crimson foam that washed away in the rain.
“Enemy!” Meng roared, his voice cracking with animal shock. “Cut him down! Sound the whistle!”
The leftover two cutthroats spun around, raising their iron-banded truncheons.
One of them looked back for the rear scout, shouting in panic: “The scout is dead! He’s dead in the ditch!”
“I’m the clerk,” Pei Jing said.
He stepped forward.
He didn’t rush. His stride was the measured, clockwork advance of a headsman stepping onto a scaffold.
Meng roared with fury, stepping forward into the mud. He raised his twenty-pound iron-spiked heavy club with both hands. He swung it in a devastating slanted downward smash aimed to cave in Pei Jing’s left shoulder.
Meng was a Flesh Forging veteran. His swing carried over eight hundred pounds of brute force, enough to shatter a horse’s ribs.
Pei Jing didn’t retreat.
He stepped inside the arc of the heavy club.
His left foot drove into the wet cobblestones, his hip bones locking with iron-hard balance.
He raised the Cloud-Splitter in a two-handed rising slanted block. It caught Meng’s heavy club directly on the heavy tiny hard dark metal spine.
CLANG!
The crash sounded like a church bell struck by a sledgehammer.
A shower of orange sparks erupted between the two weapons. It hissed wildly as the raindrops struck the hot metal.
Meng’s twenty-pound spiked club bounced off the hard dark metal spine as if it had struck solid mountain stone. The huge bone-shaking rebound shot back down the wooden handle, shattering the skin of Meng’s palms and tearing the grip tendons in both his wrists.
Meng’s eyes bulged with terror. “What... What kind of iron is that?”
The Cloud-Splitter had absorbed the full impact without flexing a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch.
Pei Jing didn’t give him time to recover.
His right hip snapped forward. The spinning driving force of the block was redirected into a clean, dropping upright cleave.
SHING-CRACK.
The twenty-two-pound hard dark metal blade dropped onto Meng’s right shoulder. There, the neck joined the collar bone.
The high-carbon martensite edge sliced through the double-layered boiled buffalo cuirass as if it were oiled paper. It sliced through the right collar bone, split the first three ribs, cut through the heart and heart sac. Then it split through the lower left flank, exiting below the ribs.
Meng stood split in two for half a heartbeat.
Then, his massive frame collapsed sideways into the mud, his organs spilling into the rushing gutter water.
The leftover two cutthroats stared at their split leader in pure, pure horror.
Their weapons slipped from their trembling fingers, splashing into the mud.
“Devil!” one of them shrieked, his voice turning into a high-pitched, feminine scream. “He’s a mountain demon! Run!”
Both men turned and bolted down the alleyway toward the bazaar square. Their boots splashed wildly through the water.
They ran twenty paces.
CRUNCH-SHRIEK!
A chorus of painful howls tore through the rain.
Before dropping from the roof, Pei Jing had thrown five four-pointed forged iron caltrops across the exit of the narrow alley.
In their blind, panic-stricken flight, both cutthroats had stepped directly onto the two-inch barbed steel points.
The hardened iron spikes pierced clean through their straw sandals, driving deep into the soft plantar muscle tissue of their arches and shattering the calcaneus bones.
Both men collapsed face-first into the mud. They clawed at their impaled feet. It screamed in primal agony as blood spurted from their torn soles into the flood.
Pei Jing walked up behind them.
He didn’t strike them with his blade.
He extended his right foot, delivering two short, precise heel stamps to the sides of their neck spines, knocking them unconscious with bone-shaking shock.
The alley fell silent, save for the unceasing roar of the rain.
Pei Jing knelt beside the split corpse of Squad Leader Meng.
With cold, efficient fingers, he searched the dead man’s pouches:
Four silver coins: country mint, eighty percent purity.
Three brass daggers: standard dock cutlass blades.
And inside an oiled leather parcel tied to Meng’s inner vest, a damp parchment scroll.
Pei Jing unrolled the scroll beneath the shelter of his cloak.
It was the Black Tiger Gang’s master working roster. Mapping out thirty-two active patrol paths, five fortified food checkpoints, and the main deployment schedule for the East Stone Bridge blockade at dawn.
The entire defensive stonework of the gang lay exposed in black ink.
In his vision, the monospace ledger lit up with crisp, stone-grey runes:
Pei Jing rolled the map into his bamboo tube, wiped the blood from the Cloud-Splitter using Meng’s torn silk neckerchief. Then he drew the Black Mountain Whetstone from his pouch. He passed the wet dark rock down the twenty-two-pound blade’s chisel point three times, smoothing a speck of bone grease from the edge before sheathing the heavy weapon.
He stepped back into the shadows of the roof edges, vanishing once more into the storm.