The lead assassin moved with the silent, hungry speed of a hunting hound.
He closed the twenty paces in less than two seconds. His wool-wrapped boots splashed through the sulfur gutters without making a sound louder than a rising trout. His eight-inch poisoned blade was aimed directly at Tie Shan’s left main thigh blood vessel, intending to sever the massive vessel and let the giant bleed out before he could swing his pry-bar.
Tie Shan didn’t retreat.
The young giant stood his ground on the narrow stone ledge. It waited until the killer’s blade was six inches from his thigh.
With a speed that defied his massive bulk, Tie Shan brought his iron pry-bar sweeping upward in a short, brutal arc.
He didn’t strike the assassin’s blade. He struck the assassin’s lead wrist from beneath.
CRACK.
The sound of shattering wrist bones was muffled by the roar of the distant water vents. The poisoned dagger flew out of the killer’s destroyed hand, spinning into the dark water. Meanwhile, the assassin shrieked. It grabbed his broken wrist as Tie Shan’s left shoulder slammed into his chest like an iron battering ram, throwing him ten feet into the drainage ditch.
The second assassin, younger and more agile, vaulted over his falling friend.
He didn’t attack Tie Shan. He recognized Lin Tao as the true target of the contract, his blade darting toward Lin Tao’s throat in a straight, poisonous thrust.
Lin Tao stood on the edge of the western shale shelf.
Through his left eye, the assassin’s movement was mapped in precise, sharp-angled vectors:
The shale ledge beneath the assassin’s boots was covered in a tiny layer of wet stone slime. The friction multiplier was about zero point three. Enough for a trained martial artist to maintain his footing during a forward lunge.
Lin Tao didn’t draw a weapon.
The assassin planted his right boot to drive his blade home. Then, Lin Tao tapped the corner of the shale shelf with the plumb-tip of his iron land-mapper’s metal pen.
He didn’t channel Qi. He targeted the surface roughness metadata of the stone at the exact heartbeat the Sovereign Engine recalculated the terrain mesh.
The friction multiplier dropped from 0.3 to 0.00.
The wet shale instantly became more slippery than polished ice coated in hot whale oil.
The assassin’s right boot lost all physical traction. His foot shot forward as if kicked by an invisible horse. His hips twisted wildly. And his forward driving force, instead of driving the poisoned blade into Lin Tao’s throat, carried his entire body out over the open edge of the shelf.
The killer’s eyes bulged in pure, blank horror as his blade sliced through empty air three inches above Lin Tao’s shoulder.
He tried to scream, but the air caught in his throat as gravity took hold.
He tumbled off the narrow shelf. He plunged thirty feet straight down into the abandoned upright air-flow shaft. The very shaft where the overseers had thrown Tie Shan’s murdered brother three years ago.
A wet, sickening crunch echoed from the deep blackness below, followed by total silence.
The fall into the air-flow shaft took exactly two point four seconds. In a dark, upright metal tube three hundred feet deep, there were no handholds, no ledges, and no water at the bottom to break a man’s descent.
The second assassin’s scream began as a sharp, desperate shriek of panic. But his speed sped up toward end-post speed. Then, the sound was stretched and distorted by the sound deep ring of the shaft. It echoed up like the wail of a trapped flute.
Then came the impact. A dull, heavy, shaking thud that shook through the bedrock like a dropped sack of wet flour. It was followed by the faint clatter of his iron dagger bouncing off the bottom stones.
The drift fell silent again, save for the steady dripping of warm sulfur water from the ceiling.
The third assassin halted dead in his tracks.
He stood twenty feet away in the middle of the drift. His poisoned dagger shook in his hand, his eyes darting from Tie Shan’s bloody iron pry-bar to Lin Tao’s calm, unblinking face.
He had watched his leader get his wrist crushed in one second, and his partner vanish into the bottomless deep pit without Lin Tao even raising a fist.
“Demons,” the third assassin gasped, his voice cracking with terror. “You’re not slaves... You’re nether-devils...”
The man turned on his heels, dropping his poisoned dagger into the mud. Then he sprinted back down the haulage track toward the elevator shaft as if all the hounds of hell were snapping at his heels.
Tie Shan stepped into the drainage ditch, his heavy boots kicking the fallen leader onto his back.
With practiced, dispassionate smooth speed, the young giant pinned the assassin’s chest with one heavy boot, seized the man’s uninjured left arm, and lashed both wrists behind his back using three feet of the ultra-high-pulling spider-silk cord from Lin Tao’s spatial ring. He tore a strip of muddy burlap from the killer’s tunic and shoved it deep into the assassin’s mouth, choking off any screams that might echo up the shaft.
The killer’s eyes were wide with terror, his chest heaving. He realized that the mute brute was not merely strong. He moved with the cold, ruthless discipline of an experienced military butcher.
As he ran, a small leather pouch slipped from his belt. He splashed into the shallow water of the drainage gutter.
Tie Shan took two heavy steps forward, his boots sloshing through the water. Then it scooped the leather pouch from the mud.
He handed it to Lin Tao.
“He dropped this,” Tie Shan said, his breathing steady, his eyes dark and cold.
Lin Tao opened the pouch. Inside was a handful of raw silver nuggets and a folded square of stiff yellow parchment. It was sealed with a distinctive disc of scarlet beeswax.
Lin Tao held the parchment up to the lantern light.
Stamping the red wax was the personal mark of an iron heavy club crossed with an ear of barley. The official signed name seal of Overseer Hu.