Blown to Smithereens
As though a typhoon had swept through and raged its fill, every last house lay smashed to pieces—not a single building left standing whole.
"Wow... how come there isn't so much as a single damn rat?"
"Isn't that odd, sir? I suppose they all up and moved away together?"
There wasn't a soul in sight—no people, let alone livestock or any small animal. And the village was anything but small; sitting right at the gateway into Nanman, it had been a settlement of considerable size, at that...
"Abandoning a village this big to go flocking off somewhere else in a body—doesn't that strike you as odd?"
Clatter-
"Leaving every last dish and belonging behind, no less?"
I asked, picking up the bowl I'd just stumbled over. Not that Dang Giyeong would have any way of knowing. He simply wore a blank look, tilting his head this way and that, muttering over and over about how strange it all was.
Thwack-
"Y-you... demon!!!"
A little brat hiding inside one of the half-collapsed houses suddenly hurled a stone at me with a shriek.
"A demon? Me...?"
Thwack- Thud thud-
Before I knew it, more little ones had popped out from behind the first, and they kept on pelting me with stones...
"Ha... unreal."
"Young Master, they're only children. Please, compose yourself!"
WHAM-
A loud crack rang out across the ruined village.
"There... now, will you tell me how this village came to be like this?"
Leaving Dang Giyeong behind me—clutching his shin, dragging himself through the dust with his entire body—I crouched down in front of the children and spoke.
"Young Master, I only said it just in case..."
"Just in case my ass. The way your eyes darted over just now, you looked like you thought I was about to rough them up or something."
"Well....."
"What? You think I'm some murderous lunatic about to devour innocent children?"
At those words the children went white as sheets, but I paid it no mind, turning my head back toward them with an easy grin.
"Hm? What's with all the long faces?"
Even at my perfectly innocent smile, the little ones simply trembled, too frightened to speak...
"Are you, by any chance... from the Sichuan Dang Clan?"
I wore plain black martial dress, but Dang Giyeong had the character for Dang blazoned shamelessly across his back. Perhaps that was what she'd spotted—the eldest of the bunch...
Though "eldest" meant little; she couldn't have been more than ten or so. A little girl asked me, cautiously:
"Yep. Your big brother here is from the Sichuan Dang Clan. So how about it—can you tell me what happened?"
"Mister... you see, it's just that....."
"B-big sis!"
"It's all right. You've seen the Dang Clan folk around a few times yourself, haven't you? Just ask them for help."
"That's it. Tell this big brother everything."
"So you see, Mister..."
And the little one began, carefully, to unspool what had befallen her village.
KRRRAKA-BOOM- KRAKA-BOOM-
It was a day of lightning and thunder, with rain coming down in curtains. It poured so hard that even the path a few steps ahead blurred from view, and the villagers who had stepped out on errands all hurried back and shut themselves inside their homes.
She had been standing by the front door, glancing anxiously this way and that, waiting for her father to come home...
"Lin-ah, get inside already! What are you doing out here?"
"Yes, Uncle..."
Just as she, soaked through to the bone, turned at her uncle's shout to head back in—
Squelch- Squelch- Squelch- Squelch-
At the mouth of the village, figures dressed in black, Central Plains–style garb came striding in, their footsteps beating through the mud.
"Who are you people...!!!"
Shiiiiing-
The uncle from next door, who had been standing at the entrance, called out to them—and the man at the very front drew his sword and cut him down in the space of a breath.
"KYAAAAAAAH!!!"
Her scream rang out through the village, torn across the deluge hammering down as if the storm itself had come to call.
Swish-
At a single nod from the man who had butchered a human being so casually, the fiends behind him drew their blades as one. And along the length of those swords rippled a black sword qi, the kind that crawls up a viewer's spine unbidden...
"Hold on a moment, kiddo... you're saying the sword qi was black?"
"Yes....."
Mid-story, I turned my head to glance at Dang Giyeong.
"I'd say the odds point to Demonic Cult bastards, wouldn't you, sir?"
"Right?"
"But Young Master, this time I really have broken my—"
I am not, I should say, a man who judges by color—sorting strangers into bad guys, very bad guys, and kill-on-sight guys purely by the shade of their qi. Look no further than myself or my sister Murin: different bloodlines, the both of us, and yet we draw the same dark-crimson sword qi. But that is because we trained in arts so lofty they were deemed divine techniques.
In the first place, at the level of mere sword qi, whatever color shows tends to be no more than a pale blue or a faint red. Only the loftier arts bleed through with a hue all their own, deep and unmistakable—the Dang Clan's deep crimson, Shaolin's gleaming gold, bright as their own shaved heads...
And apart from that handful of signature arts, for a mere Peak Realm master to wield black sword qi could mean only one thing...
"Demonic qi, then."
What in the world were the bastards holed up in Xinjiang doing, crawling all the way out here? What could they possibly hope to scavenge this far from home? I sighed, sweeping my hair back.
"Haah... so those men are the ones who left the village in this state?"
"Huh? Ah... no, that's not it, Mister....."
When the men in black martial dress had begun cutting down villagers without warning, the village's fighting men had risen to meet them in kind...
"Haah... haah....."
"Elder!!!"
The one mercy was that none of those fiends ranked high enough to project blade energy; the village bled plenty, but in the end it drove them out. Though it cost the life of one old man—the village's spiritual mainstay.
He had held the village safe, burning out his innate true qi to do it...
"Haah... you must... go after them....."
Having spoken words far beyond a young girl's understanding, he closed his eyes.
The day after the raid, the sun beat down without a cloud, as if the rain had never fallen, and the village held its funerals.
"Sob... hic..."
"My son... how could you go on ahead and leave your old mother behind....."
"My darling... sob....."
The villagers' anguished wails echoed through the streets.
"We'll be off, then."
Once the funerals were done, several of the village's grown men headed out beyond its bounds. The young girl had no way of knowing where they were going.
Several days later, the men who should have come home never did. Instead, warriors of another tribe arrived. And in overwhelming numbers, at that...
"Hm... leave the little brats. Drag off everyone else."
The moment those words left the mouth of a man dressed so gaudily that anyone could tell he was the chief, the warriors behind him lunged all at once.
"KYAAAAH!!!"
"Why are you doing this?!!"
"Silence. Kill any who resist and load up the bodies."
"GUWAAAAAAH!!!"
So they set the whole village ablaze and hauled everyone off to who knows where—everyone, that is, except her and the children younger than she was.
"Lin-ah! Survive, no matter what it takes!!!"
All of it swallowed up together with her mother's last scream-rent cry...
"Huh... so that's how you kids ended up the only ones left?"
"Yes..."
With her story told to the end, I clutched my aching head and muttered.
"The Demonic Cult bastards slithering all the way down here is dizzying enough—and now there's infighting within Nanman on top of it?"
"Well... don't you find quite a few things about it less than convincing, sir?"
Heaven knew when he'd crawled over. Dang Giyeong—leaving a long skid mark across the ground behind him—planted himself at my side to answer, and I nodded along.
"That much is true, but... tsk....."
Sharp as she was, that little girl was barely ten. And since she could only tell it all through a child's eyes, her account was full of gaps—like a sponge riddled with holes, whole chunks of it simply missing.
In any case, it seemed the only way to know more was to go and see for ourselves. I clicked my tongue and looked the children over...
Grrrowl-
They were an utter sight—filthy, bedraggled, and audibly starving after days without food—so I smiled and lowered myself to their eye level once more.
"How about coming along with big brother for now? Finding your parents looks like it'll take some time, so while we search, I'll take you somewhere safe."
But to my regret, the children only stared at me with terror-stricken faces, shaking their heads so hard I thought they'd wobble loose...
"Haah... fine. Stay here and starve, then. Du-sik, let's go."
I kicked myself up off the ground—
"M-Mister! Please take us with you. Please..."
"Big sis!"
"Quiet!"
The oldest-looking little one—shrewd at reading the room, at least—had latched onto my trouser leg as she spoke, so I gave a nod in answer.
"Good. You can keep up, can't you?"
"Yes!"
Grrrroowl-
All the while, the little ones' bellies kept blaring like alarm clocks getting slapped, so I turned to Dang Giyeong.
"Du-sik, dig out some food first. We'll feed them a bit, then move out."
"As you say, sir."
"Wow..... Thank you for the food!"
Just how long had they gone without eating, that even that tasteless excuse for jerky set their eyes rolling back, all of them gnawing away with such earnest devotion...
Leaving the children to their industrious biting, tearing, and chewing, I called Dang Giyeong aside.
"Strange, isn't it?"
"Yes. Strange indeed, sir."
"One tribe striking another, fine—I can swallow that. But the children on our side were raided too, remember."
"Precisely. But with no clue who they are or where they roost, we came out to investigate in the first place, haven't we?"
"Besides, the jungle's being outright wrong lately... there's certainly something festering behind all this."
"Shall we send word for reinforcements?"
"Cry for help over nothing and we'd only rack up more bodies. For now, we investigate on our own—and if it turns out to be beyond us, it's a matter Father will have to see to in person anyway..."
"Then you mean to leave the children at the branch in Yunnan for the time being?"
"Yeah... by the way, that little brat keeps calling me 'Mister.' Tsk... I don't care for it."
At that, Dang Giyeong gave a scornful snort.
"You ought to be thanking your stars anyone calls you 'Mister' at all. Under normal circumstances, you'd be old enough to be called 'Grandpa' and then some."
WHACK-
And so Dang Giyeong, true to form, earned himself a fresh beating for his runaway mouth.