Assassins Show Up, and All of Them Die (2)
Crack!
The impact came through heavy and solid, and the give of breaking bone traveled up into my hand. Every time I landed a blow, I poured internal energy into the torso so the organs inside would tear.
They were wicked assassins anyway—trash who had killed people by the handful as if it were nothing. Think of the organization lurking behind them, and there was no saving these men, nor any hope they might repent. I felt no hesitation in my hands.
Clang!
They seemed to think I meant to rescue the spy caught in the silver-thread net. They didn't even bother with the usual line—surrender if you want the spy to live—and simply drew their daggers in silence, setting the blades to the spy's throat. I ignored them outright and shattered the jaw of the assassin rushing me from nearby.
Get dragged into a hostage game once, and it's over. At a time like this, better to charge in and act like a madman who means to kill.
And that was what I did. I paid them no mind and kept beating assassins down, so they drove the daggers into flesh to show the threat was no empty bluff. I still cared about nothing but pounding the assassins to death, and before long they couldn't even threaten me anymore. Kill the spy on a hasty guess, and they would lose the information they were after.
Crack!
So I kicked the shins of the assassins who came at me without pause, snapped the bones, and crushed the skulls of the ones who fell with my knee. It was a slaughter. The man I had been in the modern world might have been different, but Yeon Cheongha of this murim world had no frail habit of half-heartedly holding back or showing mercy. Even when a strike would kill or leave a man crippled, he did not hesitate.
Or maybe my own soul was the same as his all along, and I simply never knew it, because I'd never had cause to beat anyone down.
I stopped.
My hand had been flowing like water toward the next opponent when it halted—not from conscience. I could not let them see the secret art worn into my body, the Pure Heart Glazed Art, so I was deliberately throwing clumsy fists, forcing the movements I knew by heart to come out wrong.
"Ngh!"
I tried to step the footwork wrong on purpose as well, and foot and fist shot forward together. The motion turned so sloppy that I nearly took a hit from assassins far beneath me.
My identity cannot be exposed.
Master and my junior sister could be put in danger. Without meaning to, instinct reached for the footwork my master had taught me and tried to drive fist and kick home with precision, to put them down properly. I refused to let the art surface. I threw my punches the way a drunk swings at random, deliberately breaking the forms.
Crack!
Even so, one punch was enough to break both of an assassin's arms, leave him with internal injuries, and drop him to the ground.
"Ha..."
The Yeon Cheongha of before had been unable to use the Pure Heart Glazed Art because he had already lost master and junior sister both, and no one remained to him. I could not use it for the opposite reason—because they were all still alive, and I had to keep them that way.
Ironic. In the phrasing of this place, I suppose you'd call it a contradiction.
Every time I swung, the mnemonic of the Pure Heart Glazed Art rose to my lips on instinct. In the end I gave up on fists altogether. I spread my fingers as if I were a beast raking claws, used internal energy only to support the motion, and began to move with an animal's speed. Copy a human stride and a human way of fighting, and the art would come out of me. So I deliberately mimicked a beast's gait and a beast's attacks, and started tearing them apart.
Swish. Swish.
Cargo was stacked all over the port. Before their encirclement could close, I kicked off a wall of freight, leapt, and raked the face of the man in front of me until blood and flesh flew. A bloody melee of one against thirty broke out, and I alone hunted them like a wild beast without so much as panting. The assassins did not fall into confusion, but they were no match for me.
Easier than the novel made it sound.
The black-clad assassins' martial arts were nothing remarkable. Even the old Yeon Cheongha—drinking every day, neglecting his training, his sense for battle gone dull—had dealt with them. I, who had tempered myself day after day alongside my junior sister, was never going to be pushed into a crisis by men like these. I simply hunted them, one-sided.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
I am not thinking. Because there are no thoughts in my head.
Move the body, and merely breathing would set the Pure Heart Glazed Art in motion, so I emptied my mind on purpose, packed it full of idle noise, and swung my arms. I didn't even need to sort the enemy out in my head. The killing intent they carried, and the faint reek of blood, were enough. Swing arms and legs on instinct, and men like these were well within reach.
Thud!
I dropped the one blocking the way, and the killing intent closing in around me vanished. Only then did I come back to myself. While a few of them spent their lives pinning my feet, the rest were dragging the net that held the spy, about to leap into the river.
Fleeing underwater?
They weren't spies... no. Come to think of it, their role was much the same as a spy's.
Splash. Splash.
For people jumping in, the sounds were absurdly small. They went under, and last of all the assassin who looked like the leader—hauling the net behind him—glared at me, then leapt into the water without delay.
Splash!
He could quiet his own entry, but not the spy bound in the net. A sizable ripple burst, and water flew. The leader fled without a backward glance. The assassins who had gone in ahead waited beneath the surface, killing intent pouring off them, for me to follow.
This didn't happen in the novel.
Against an enemy you cannot beat, you run. For assassins who were no orthodox martial artists, it was the obvious choice. I, grown used to the way the story went, had assumed they would fight to the death. I had not expected a tactical retreat.
Tch!
At this rate I would lose what I had charged in for, and the novel's plot would fall to pieces. Left with no choice, and unwilling to leave witnesses, I decided to use my lightness art.
Water-Surface Flight... Hm. I managed it on a pond. Out here, it would be hard, wouldn't it?
I had succeeded at running across lotus leaves spread over a still pond. Running over bare, flowing water was another matter. Fortunately, this river had something I could step on right now. I would not have to worry about sinking, and I resolved to finish the ones who remained.
Flash!
Sprint without the lightness art, without a thought in my head, and I would simply fall in and flail. So this, at least, I could not avoid: I used martial arts, picked out each waiting head with my energy sense—the assassins holding their breath underwater, waiting for me to enter—and leapt into the river.
If you meant to intercept me, not diving deep was your mistake.
Stomp!
I launched from the pier and brought my foot down on the head of the nearest assassin lying in wait. He had been reading the situation about a chi—roughly a foot—beneath the surface. The moment I hit the water he lit up and swung his weapon, only for my strike to land dead on his skull. His head caved into the shape of a footprint, and blood burst from his nose.
Splash!
The sound of my other foot kicking off the surface made them all look up at me from underwater and fix my position. I already knew exactly where each of them waited beneath the surface. I set my angle in midair and brought a heel down on a head.
Crunch!
You might think a grown man stomped underwater would only sink a little. Send qi down with the blow, and a vibration with it, and that is a different story. Turn the head and dodge the strike all you like—let a thread of internal energy out through the foot, and the shockwave cannot be escaped. Blood sprays from all seven apertures, and what remains is a corpse.
Flash—splash! Flash—!
The first two were the difficult part. After that I knew where they were and how to take them, and the rest was nothing hard.
Splash!
I crossed them like stepping-stones sunk just under the surface, crushing heads underfoot as I flew toward the two who looked like leaders. One swam beneath the water with the net tied at his waist, greedy as a fish, and I ran along above him in pursuit. It was a sight fine enough that I almost regretted the lack of a witness.
The instant I launched into the air and dove at him, he did not miss it. He thrust an arm out of the water and aimed a hidden weapon, timing it for the exact dead point at the top of my arc—the breath where my movement in the air would halt. The leader loosed the projectile there.
So he really is the leader.
I was no fool either. The moment I saw the hidden weapon, I was already drawing the internal power of my whole body to turn in midair, and I dropped at once by using the Thousand-Catty Weight.
If the art were merely a matter of increasing one's weight, the speed of the fall would be the same and the projectile would hit me. In truth, the Thousand-Catty Weight works by using internal energy to haul one's own body toward the ground. I let the hidden weapon skim just over my head and flew in at the leader.
BOOM!!
A pillar of water shot into the sky. The leader, waiting at the surface to land a second strike, folded at the waist and was dragged all the way to the riverbed.
Bubbles...!
I had kicked him dead over the lungs, so the breath he had been holding burst out of him. Just before he sank to the bottom of the Yangtze, he seemed to want to take me with him. He reached into his robes for something.
Poison? Or else...
He flinched.
Groping at his chest, searching, he rummaged through his robes with panicked eyes and found nothing. At the last he tried to swing even a dagger, but I drove the Thousand-Catty Weight harder still and slammed him into the riverbed, and every chance to strike back was gone.
Crunch!
I felt my sole put a crack through his spine, and I kicked upward—this time not with the Thousand-Catty Weight, but with the lightness art that made the body light.
Bubbles...
The last of the air went up, mixed with the leader's blood, and he died full of bitter resentment.
"Pwah!!"
It occurred to me, belatedly, that I could not swim. I didn't know about Yeon Cheongha, but the way my body locked up the moment I entered the water suggested he couldn't either.
If I can run on water, what use is swimming, I want to say... and yet right now I couldn't regret it more.
"Nngh..."
I should have gone back to the port, but the current swept me along. I dog-paddled in desperation, and only after I had left the port and drifted a little past the city of Sichuan did I finally reach the bank and catch my breath.
"Hah... hahh..."
Alone, I could simply have used Water-Surface Flight to return. I was only just able to kick off the water and run, though. I could hardly move while carrying, on my back, a person who had swallowed half the river.
Squelch.
The net woven of keen silver thread had cinched the body tight, so the thick clothes hung in shredded strips, and the white skin hidden beneath was marked here and there with cuts from the thread. The dagger wounds from the threats were still seeping blood. The bleeding was severe, and a long soak in cold water had brought on hypothermia besides; the lips had gone blue.
Unconscious, and still the hand is clenched tight... what's being hidden?
Whether from the cold of blood loss or the cold of leaving the river, she shivered, and as her hand opened, a long object fell from inside it.
"Hm?"
A round iron sphere, with a fuse stuck to the top. Small enough to hide in the robes—but the shape of the fuse, and a faint, sharp reek almost like urine, told me at once what it was.
"A bomb."
In this world, they were commonly called thunderclap pellets. Judging by the leader's final moments, and by the fact that she had vanished from this place with no trace of an abduction left behind, in the original she must have stolen the bomb from him and blown herself up alongside them midway through the kidnapping.
"Ha..."
So this was where she had been fated to die. Leave her even here, and she would meet the same death as in the original. Only the result—death—would be the same. This time, traces of the dead would remain on this spot, and the Sagacious Strategist would soon find the marks her older sister had left. She would not carry out the plan that used the protagonist as bait.
"Save someone once, and you're expected to see it through to the end, is that it."
I sighed, and still I lifted her onto my back. Even in clothes soaked through with river water, she was so light it felt unreal.
"My junior sister is going to scold me for this."