The bronze alarm gong in the town center began to toll twenty minutes after midnight.
CLANG... CLANG... CLANG...
The heavy, rhythmic strikes boomed through the pouring rain, echoing off the wet brick walls of Cloudford Town. Shouts erupted from the north wharves as torches flickered into life, moving like clusters of angry fireflies through the dark lanes.
Behind the town slaughterhouses, the air smelled of stale pig blood, wet offal, and rotting animal fat.
The butcher’s alley was fifty yards long and barely five feet wide. It was flanked on both sides by twelve-foot walls of blackened kiln brick. The ground was an unpaved quagmire of clay, animal dung, and standing rainwater that pooled six inches deep in the ruts left by meat carts.
At the western end of the alley stood a heavy oak gate, bolted shut with a rusted iron chain.
Pei Jing stood before the locked gate.
He had removed his dark wool cloak. He wrapped it securely around his bamboo map tube. Then he tucked it into a dry niche beneath the roof edge of the slaughterhouse roof.
He stood in his sleeveless vest, the cold autumn rain lashing his bare forearms. In his hands, the twenty-two-pound Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber rested with its chisel tip pointing toward the mud, the dark hard dark metal steel drinking the rain without a glimmer.
From the eastern entrance of the alley, twenty paces away, the yellow glare of pine torches pushed back the darkness.
Twenty men poured into the narrow lane.
They were led by two of Hu Biao’s senior lieutenants: “Iron Shoulder” Han, a squat, barrel-chested brawler whose upper back muscle muscles bulged like leather sacks from years of carrying river timber, and “Viper” Zhang, a tall, lanky cutthroat with a scarred eye, wielding a five-foot iron-banded boarding spear.
Behind them were eighteen cutthroats armed with gaff hooks, cleavers, and heavy oak cudgels.
“He’s trapped!” Viper Zhang yelled, raising his torch high, the rain hissing against the burning pitch. “The gate is locked! He ran into the dead end!”
Iron Shoulder Han stepped forward, his boots sinking into the mud. He hefted a thirty-pound iron sledgehammer in his right hand, his teeth bared in an ugly, triumphant grin.
“The third son,” Han growled, spitting into the puddle. “You killed Meng. You broke Mountain Pig’s arm. But in an alley, you have nowhere to run. Gang Leader Hu offered thirty gold leaves for your ears, boy. Tonight, I buy a brothel on the North Wharf!”
Pei Jing didn’t answer.
He didn’t adjust his footing. He simply watched the twenty men advance.
The tactical layout was an accountant’s dream.
Five feet of width.
A human shoulder span was twenty inches. In a five-foot passage, only two men could walk abreast without their elbows colliding. To swing a thirty-pound sledgehammer or an iron boarding spear needed at least four feet of clearance on either side.
In this alley, eighteen of the twenty men were dead capital. They couldn’t engage. They could only push forward into the backs of their leaders. It packed their own ranks into a helpless, choking column.
“Spears forward! Crush him against the gate!” Viper Zhang screamed.
The front rank of eight men surged forward through the mud, their iron-shod boots tearing through the brown slurry.
They took four strides.
Then came the reckoning.
CRUNCH.
AHHHHHHHHH!
The cutthroat on the left shrieked as his foot came down into six inches of solid, muddy water.
Beneath the surface of the mud lay fifteen four-pointed forged iron caltrops, scattered by Pei Jing two minutes earlier.
A two-inch barbed steel spike pierced through the cutthroat’s straw sandal, drove through the thick callous of his heel. Then it cracked into his calcaneus bone. The man’s leg buckled instantly. His knee plunged into the mud, where a second caltrop drove two inches deep into his knee tendon.
Beside him, two more men stepped on the iron barbs at the same time.
Snap-shriek!
One cutthroat took a spike clean through the arch of his right foot, severing the plantaris tendon. Another slipped, falling backward into the mud with his open palm landing directly onto an upturned spike.
The scream that erupted from the narrow lane was ear-splitting.
The charging front rank collapsed into a tangled heap of screaming, bleeding men, thrashing in the flooded mud, driving the barbed spikes deeper into their own flesh with every movement.
“Hold! Hold your feet!” Viper Zhang screamed from behind, trying to arrest his driving force.
It was too late.
The cutthroats behind them, driven by panic and forward driving force, shoved into the leaders, trampling the fallen men into the mud and driving more boots onto the hidden caltrops.
The column was fully numbed.
Pei Jing stepped forward.
He didn’t walk. He engaged the Python Tendon Stance.
His bare toes dug through the mud, finding purchase on the solid clay bedrock beneath. His balance point sat four inches lower than normal, his Achilles tendons functioning as high-pressure shock absorbers that propelled him forward across the mud without a fraction of an inch of slip.
He moved across the surface of the water like a water spider skimming a pond.
The Cloud-Splitter struck.
Gale Saber: Second Form—Sweeping the Reeds.
Pei Jing didn’t target their heads or chests.
In a narrow alley packed with struggling bodies, high strikes risked catching the blade in the brick walls.
He struck at waist level.
The twenty-two-pound hard dark metal blade whistled through the rain in a tight, level arc of pure cutting devastation.
SHING-CRACK-THUD.
The flared four-inch chisel head sliced through Viper Zhang’s five-foot boarding spear. It snapped the ash-wood shaft like a dry twig.
The driving force continued unbroken.
The blade sliced through the boiled leather of Zhang’s cuirass, split through both his floating ribs, cut his belly main heart artery. Then it exited his left flank, spraying dark bright red blood across the wet brick wall.
Zhang didn’t even have time to scream. His torso collapsed sideways into the mud. His torch splashed into the puddle and dying with a sharp, choking sizzle.
Iron Shoulder Han roared in terror. He swung his thirty-pound sledgehammer in a desperate, one-handed downward smash.
Pei Jing didn’t block with the flat.
He stepped inside Han’s guard with a sudden, fluid popped joint of his left shoulder.
The heavy sledgehammer whistled through empty air where Pei Jing’s head had been a heartbeat earlier, crashing into the mud with a dull thump.
Before Han could pull the hammer back, Pei Jing’s right arm snapped forward.
Clack.
Pei Jing’s left shoulder popped cleanly back into its socket, locking his moving chain into rigid posture.
The butt of the Cloud-Splitter’s eight-sided iron handle knob. It was backed by twenty-two pounds of steel and the full turning force of his core, struck Iron Shoulder Han directly between the eyes.
CRACK.
The sound profile was the sickening snap of an unbaked clay pot shattered by an iron mallet.
The frontal bone of Han’s skull caved inward by half an inch. The man’s eyes rolled up, his legs went limp. His massive, barrel-chested body collapsed flat into the mud like a felled ox, dead before his face hit the water.
Two leaders dead in six seconds.
The leftover sixteen cutthroats looked at the two corpses, then looked at the sixteen-foot pile of their own comrades writhing and screaming on the caltrops.
Then they looked up at Pei Jing.
The youth stood four feet away in the darkness, the rain washing streams of bright red blood down the twin fullers of his velvet-grey blade.
His breathing was fully silent. His pulse remained at forty-eight beats per minute.
“Liabilities accounted for,” Pei Jing said into the rain.
The sixteen men broke.
It wasn’t a retreat. It was an animal rout.
Men threw down their gaffs, threw down their cleavers. Then they clawed at the brick walls in blind, sobbing panic, scrambling over the screaming wounded to escape back into the main street.
“Run! The monster is killing everyone!”
“He isn’t human! He’s an iron demon!”
Their wild footsteps splashed away into the storm. Their screams faded into the distant tolling of the alarm gong.
The alley fell silent.
Only the muffled groans of the four wounded cutthroats impaled on the caltrops remained. Their faces were pressed into the bloody mud.
Pei Jing didn’t pursue the survivors.
Chasing routing infantry through unmapped streets was an inefficient waste of energy that increased the risk of backup ambushes.
He walked over to a stone water spout protruding from the slaughterhouse wall, where fresh rainwater gushed from the roof gutters.
He held the Cloud-Splitter under the stream.
Splash.
The water washed away the blood, the bone fragments, and the greasy pig fat. That left the hard dark metal steel clean, dark, and smooth as jade.
He drew the Black Mountain Whetstone from his belt pouch.
He checked the twenty-eight-degree chisel edge under the dim light of a fallen torch.
Zero nicks. Zero rolling. The high-carbon martensite edge was intact.
He gave the edge five slow, measured stropping passes across the polished dark rock face of the whetstone:
Shhh-clink. Shhh-clink.
In his vision, the monospace ledger lit up with crisp, golden runes:
Pei Jing wiped the blade dry with a scrap of clean linen, slid the Cloud-Splitter into its back sheath. Then he retrieved his cloak from beneath the roof edge.
He looked toward the northern docks. There, the torchlight was concentrating like a swarm of hornets around the gang stronghold.
The outer defenses were collapsing.
Now came the specialist.