The rain had stopped. That left the mountain pass draped in cold, clinging mist that smelled of wet slate and crushed pine.
Sunset Path was a narrow, unpaved ledge carved into the granite spine of the western ridge, three miles from the safety of the Seventh Ward blast gates. To the left rose a sheer, upright cliff of damp stone. To the right, a three-hundred-foot drop plunged into the jagged boulders of the corpse drainage ravine.
Lin Ke walked in the center of the muddy track, his leather satchel of spirit stones slung across his chest.
Beside him, Shen Yue kept both hands buried in her sleeves, her breath coming in tight, rhythmic puffs. Behind them walked Meng Shan, carrying a massive, five-foot box-shaped slab of riveted spirit iron. A discarded fire baffle plate fitted with leather arm straps to serve as an improvised tower shield.
Fifty paces ahead. There, the path narrowed between two towering dark rock boulders, three silhouettes stepped out of the fog.
They wore black travel cloaks over dark iron chainmail, their faces masked with oiled silk scarves. Each bore a long, sheathed flying sword across their back, their spiritual auras uncoiling into the mist like hungry vipers.
All three were Qi Gathering Stage 3 Peak.
The lead guard—the scarred swordsman from the intake antechamber—stepped onto the center of the track. He didn’t draw his sword right away. He stood with arms folded, his cold eyes gleaming with sadistic amusement through the slits in his mask.
“Did you truly believe,” the scarred guard called out, his voice echoing flatly against the wet cliff face, “that an elder’s wooden mallet could protect you outside the pavilion gates?”
* * *
Lin Ke didn’t reply.
He didn’t scream for help. He didn’t try to negotiate.
While the guard was delivering his monologue, Lin Ke took advantage of the conversational window to fork twelve in a row test model threads.
The mist-shrouded pass froze in his mind.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran twelve variations of the guards’ assault doctrine.
They were trained hired blades running the traditional Tri-Star Formation. A classic triangle vector where the lead swordsman delivered a faster-than-sound frontal moving strike to pin the target. Meanwhile, the two flankers carried out sweeping lateral lunges to sever the limbs.
In simulations one through four, Meng Shan took the frontal strike. But the flankers bypassed the shield and decapitated Shen Yue.
In simulations five through nine, Lin Ke tried to counter the flankers with a palm blast. But the latency penalty of drawing heat Qi in real time left him exposed to a backup flying blade through the throat.
Then, in test model eleven, Lin Ke mapped the formation’s clockwork exact timing.
An exact timing flaw, Lin Ke observed with cold care.
The two flankers were fighting on wet, unpaved granite mud. To clear the lead swordsman’s backswing, their backup lunge was delayed by exactly forty-five split seconds to prevent their blades from crossing.
A forty-split-second window. In systems stonework, forty-five split seconds was an eternity.
Lin Ke collapsed the mental branches.
* * *
He pulled the iron metal pen from his sash. He pressed the sharp tip into his thumb callus until the blood welled up. Then he grounded his mind to reality.
“Branch checked: main.”
Without looking back, Lin Ke whispered the execution schema in a low, flat murmur:
“Meng Shan: hold point-three. Anchor low into bedrock. Absorb the frontal moving vector; don’t swing.”
Meng Shan’s jaw clicked. “Understood.”
“Shen Yue: don’t draw barriers yet,” Lin Ke continued, his gaze locked on the three swordsmen. “Wait for the flankers to clear the lead buffer. On my mark: mud-grip on the left, empty pocket-barrier on the right.”
Shen Yue swallowed the knot of bile in her throat. Her fingers locked onto two separate slips of magic charm paper inside her sleeves. “On your mark.”
Across the mist, the scarred guard saw that the three targets were not begging or running. His amusement soured into cold, ugly irritation.
“No tears?” the scarred man sneered, reaching over his right shoulder. “Good. Dying quietly saves time.”
SHING! SHING! SHING!
Three flying swords unseated from their sword sheaths all at once.
The three-foot steel blades ignited with blinding, gale-force green spiritual Qi, rising five feet into the air and aligning their needle points directly with Lin Ke’s throat.
The lead guard’s sword hand slashed downward.
“Die, nameless trash!”
With a shrieking sonic boom that shattered the damp silence of the ravine, the three flying swords cut through the twilight mist, speeding up toward Lin Ke at end-post speed.