When the end-of-class bell rang, Jiaming flopped down on his desk and started to doze.
He never got to bed early, and he still had to get up before dawn. For a kid, that really was hard on the body—but his mind had already formed the habit, so when there was nothing to do he would reflexively zone out and nap, making up for the rest he'd lost.
He hadn't given a second thought to the mother and daughter hunted in the predawn dark that morning. True, after he finished off the killer, both the woman and the little girl had pleaded with him in English for help—but he simply acted as though he hadn't understood, and left under cover of night. He doubted two people who had just barely survived would manage to recognize him anyway.
But when he, Lingjing and Huaisha ran up to that grassy slope in the morning, the dozen-plus corpses found in the woods and on the slope had already caused an enormous stir. In fact, Jiaming had recognized the killer the moment he first laid eyes on him: a hitman belonging to Pei Luojia's Asian branch, code name A-Qi.
In his original life, even after Jiaming had formally earned assassin status at seventeen, this man had still been alive—a crazed, bloodthirsty sort, utterly flamboyant in everything he did.
And it was precisely because of that flamboyance that Pei Luojia's rating of him had never climbed past a B-plus, though in terms of raw strength he was already at A-rank level.
Killing a mad dog of a killer was a small thing; the problem was that Pei Luojia would certainly look into it. There was no real chance the trail would lead to him, but he couldn't help feeling a little uneasy all the same. Besides, as he'd been slipping away in the dark, the little girl's small, tearful "help, help me..." had actually sounded rather pleasant... I really am a pervert... he thought.
He was in the same school as Lingjing and Huaisha, but the three of them weren't actually in the same class. Xinghui Middle School had three classes to a grade: as a rule, outstanding students like Lingjing went into Class One, mediocre students like Jiaming into Class Two, and troublemakers who fought all day long like Huaisha naturally landed in Class Three. It was exactly because the three of them were split up this way that Jiaming had free time to zone out and rest—though between classes, Lingjing and Huaisha still often came over to find him.
The classroom was a chaotic racket. He had only been lying there a short while when his desk was suddenly smacked hard, scaring him bolt upright. A closer look—it was those fellows who had cornered Huaisha in the dead-end alley yesterday, and the fat one in the lead had a gauze patch taped over his nose and mouth that made him look rather comical. Jiaming couldn't help laughing, and said around a yawn, "Are you looking for Shasha? She's in the next class over."
"Fuck off and die, you little shit—I'm here for you today!" Seeing that this kid actually dared laugh at him, the fat boy let out a roar, and every student playing around in the classroom instantly went quiet. The fat boy swept a glance around, felt a small twinge of nerves, then grabbed Jiaming by the collar and hauled him up. "You're coming with me."
Wearing the lazy, sleep-deprived look of someone who hadn't gotten nearly enough rest, Jiaming followed them out meekly.
The truth was, it wasn't that these boys hadn't wanted to go after Liu Huaisha—it was just that that girl was too ferocious. She carried a bat around all day long and fought like she was out for blood, and at school there was no way to pull off something like that. So they had set their sights first on Jiaming, who was said to be on the soft side.
The five of them jostled and shoved Jiaming out of the classroom, cursing the whole way—things like: "You were pretty damn cocky yesterday."
"How come you're not so brave today?"
"Got the guts to try that again?"
The first-year classrooms were on the ground floor. The five of them pushed the silently enduring Jiaming along, hunting for a spot where nobody was around; along the way, students playing nearby whispered and pointed, mostly speculating about why Gu Jiaming—such a thoroughly honest kid—would have gone and offended this bunch of punk high schoolers. But as they passed the Class One classroom, a girl came charging out with a shout.
"What do you think you're doing!"
A fresh, lovely face, two pigtails tied at the back of her head, a pale blue floral-print dress: Ye Lingjing, Class One's class monitor, came flying out like a warrior maiden, and when she reached for Jiaming's hand, two of them blocked her off.
"Who are you to him? Mind your own business!" The two high schoolers jabbed their fingers at Lingjing.
"I will not!" The little girl who was usually so gentle and sweet showed not the slightest intention of backing down; she shoved one boy's hand away. "Let him go, or I'm telling the teacher!"
An amused smile crossed Jiaming's face, and the high schoolers laughed mockingly too: "Hah, she says she's telling the teacher..."
Before the mockery was even out of their mouths, while the boys' heads were turned, Lingjing snapped out a kick at the shin of the high schooler in front of her and shoved hard with both hands, sending the other boy tumbling into the lawn beside them.
She trained at martial arts every day—showy moves with no real bite, in Jiaming's eyes, and she was such a dainty, pretty little thing—but her strength was far greater than an ordinary girl's. The student who had landed on the lawn was fine, but the other, kicked in the shin by Lingjing's little red leather boots, staggered a few steps and dropped, clutching his leg and howling.
You really do pick up bad habits from the company you keep... Jiaming laughed to himself. The shinbone was the most fragile spot on the human leg—a fighting trick Huaisha had taught Lingjing when she had nothing better to do.
The middle schoolers playing and resting all over the lawn had noticed what was happening the moment Jiaming was led out, and now that a fight had broken out, students near and far turned to look.
Seeing that the demure-looking Lingjing should be the first to go off, the fat boy in the lead hesitated a beat, then charged—but he had barely taken one step when Jiaming's left leg lifted, ever so slightly, and with a "bang" the fat boy went down flat.
He fell so fast that this time there was nothing fake about it: a full face-first slam into the ground.
When he raised his head, his eyes were swimming with tears and his face was plastered with blades of grass, and blood was running again from the nostril that had taken Jiaming's sucker punch yesterday, soaking the gauze between his nose and mouth red.
Fights between kids have no real technique to them. Seeing how things stood, the two remaining students shoved Jiaming with all their might. They stood a full head taller than Jiaming and Lingjing, so naturally they felt no fear—but Jiaming dodged aside with a show of clumsy panic, letting one boy's shove slide off him, and the boy, thrown off balance by his own effort, crashed straight into his companion. The two of them were about to charge again when they saw a girl come bursting out of a nearby classroom. It was Liu Huaisha.
In the blue-and-white Xinghui uniform, looking like a forthright tomboy, Liu Huaisha came tearing over, swinging that bat of hers, more than a meter long. The sheer momentum of it made the two high schoolers freeze for a moment, and even Jiaming was a little stunned. Is this girl trying to kill someone?
"Liu Huaisha! Gu Jiaming! Ye Lingjing! What do you three think you're doing!?"
Just then a thunderous roar went up—the middle school division's discipline director had finally caught on to what was happening and came charging down from upstairs. At the teacher's bellow, the high schoolers immediately began scrambling to run, but Liu Huaisha looked as if she had no intention of letting them off; seeing how close she was, she whipped out a savage swing—and Jiaming hurried to stop her.
"Jiaming, get out of the way... ah..."
"Shasha, don't... mm..."
With a "bang," the two children slammed into each other and went flying, landing flat on the ground together—Jiaming on the bottom, Huaisha sprawled on top of him. The teacher's voice came closer and closer. The three high schoolers burst out of the crowd first, followed by the fat boy with blood streaming from his nose and the sidekick limping on one leg. When the two on the ground scrambled up, both of them were clutching their mouths.
With that fall, their lips had very nearly met; both of them had taken a solid knock. Ignoring the yelling discipline director, the girl, cheeks faintly pink, brandished her bat and shouted, "Why did you have to go and block me!"
Jiaming shrugged and lowered the hand covering his mouth; blood was seeping from his lip. He rolled his eyes. "Split my lip..."
"Serves you right!" Huaisha shouted. "I split mine too!"
"Are you two okay?" Seeing blood seeping from both her good friends' mouths, good-girl Ye Lingjing paid no mind to the discipline director still bellowing on beside them and crouched down at once to check their cuts—and then the discipline director's roar shook the whole campus.
"You—you—the three of you will be the death of me! Liu Huaisha! You actually dared to hit people at school with a baseball bat! And Ye Lingjing and Gu Jiaming, you two even joined in! You... I want the three of you standing on the lawn as punishment all morning long! I want the whole school to see the three of you! Tomorrow you'll write me three letters of self-criticism and hand them in—I'm going to announce it to the whole school-school-school-school—"
And so, when the class bell rang, the three of them were left standing all alone on the lawn in front of the teaching building, and any student who so much as glanced out a window could admire their heroic bearing.
"Damn it, that bald bastard actually dared yell at me—give me a few years and I'll find someone to smash up his whole family..."
So Liu Huaisha voiced her resentment toward the bald discipline director. The man had actually dared confiscate her bat... No matter; she had several more at home. Tomorrow she'd bring a sturdier one!
"Are your mouths okay?" Lingjing asked worriedly, and got a whole heap of eye-rolls from Huaisha, all aimed at Jiaming.
"Lingjing, you'd better keep a close eye on your boyfriend. He just stole my first kiss right in front of everybody, you know."
Having said it, Huaisha, for all her pretense of brazenness, couldn't help blushing. Lingjing gave a little scoff, but her face was flooded with red.
Huaisha ran around with gangsters all day and her mouth had never had any taboos; Lingjing had once cried in a rage over a single line—"you're Jiaming's wife"—but after the three of them had mixed together long enough, they'd gradually grown used to such talk.
Still, they were thirteen- and fourteen-year-old kids after all, and there were so many people watching just then. After a moment she smiled, quick and clever: "Now look—you two have gone and ruined my good-girl reputation completely."
It had been more than a semester since they entered middle school. The three of them were always together, but this was the first time since elementary school that they had fought in public like this. After a moment, Jiaming, who had been silent all along, yawned.
"Mm, standing around like this is really boring. I think... we should skip class."
The moment the words left his mouth, both girls' eyes lit up.