Night had fallen, and the woods were pitch black, almost deathly still. Feeling her way from trunk to trunk, she ran forward with the last of her strength.
Voices drifted faintly from somewhere far off—they must have gone after the boy. But she understood that the demon would be dogging her steps, that he would not let her off so easily.
Every shuffling step sent a wave of agony through her whole body, and still she had to be careful. Teeth clenched, she lifted each foot lightly and set it down lightly—fast enough, gentle enough. Her hands were tucked quietly inside her wide sleeves, because the nails on both hands had been torn away, and she could not let blood drip onto the ground.
To a ninja, the faintest trace could be fatal.
The brutal training she had once endured could only do so much now. The torments of the past few days, exhaustion and hunger, had all come surging back during these tens of minutes of hard exertion. Her head swam, and she could see nothing at all ahead of her, which meant her eyesight was failing too. Before, in woods like these, she would have seen clearly enough.
Sometimes her hand found only empty air, and she staggered and pitched toward the ground. Then she could only dab at the earth with a sleeve, and a pain that went to the marrow shot up through her fingers.
And the truth was, she was still a child...
She wanted to sleep, wanted to rest—if she closed her eyes, all the pain would ease a little. But no matter how desperately she longed to sleep, she still could not close her eyes, even though everything before her was darkness...
At last, at some point, a faint glow came from ahead. She came out at the edge of the woods—and froze. Before her rolled a vast, mighty river, cutting across the land here, running through downtown Jianghai and on into the sea. A river this wide—even when her body had been whole, she could never have swum across it.
Behind her was still the woods. Standing there, she was suddenly at a loss. Where... am I supposed to go?
If she simply walked into the water, in her present condition, it would hurt terribly—but after that, everything would be over. Her training had told her that she must never give up her life while even half a hope remained. But if she turned back... she knew she would not get far...
She swayed in two unsteady circles, still undecided, when all at once a figure flashed out of the trees not far away, that katana in his hand—the very man she was hiding from.
Abruptly, she threw herself into a run for the riverbank.
With the last strength of her life—
Smack. The old man caught up, and the flat of the katana struck hard across her left calf. She staggered, on the verge of pitching onto the pebble-strewn bank. The old man was sure of it—and then saw that Tsukiike Kaoru still had strength left: her right leg braced hard, and she stumbled several more steps forward. Then her right leg was struck again. At last she went down on the riverbank.
"There's no way out now, Kaoru." Watching the girl struggle forward across the bank, the old man spoke softly. "Tell me the secret of Chisakura Senkan, and I'll treat your wounds and let you go."
The girl made no answer, only crawling stubbornly onward.
"Do you still not understand? The Tsukiike family is already in enormous danger!" the old man said heavily.
"The Tsukiike clan has crossed Pei Luojia. I know you've gone begging for Takamagahara's help, but what is Takamagahara worth these days? They call themselves Japan's oldest Evolver alliance—yet how many formidable Evolvers do they have now?
They can't even compare to China's Yanhuang Awakening! Pei Luojia is not like other organizations. If they need to, they can mobilize half the world's assassins.
Their Evolvers alone outnumber Takamagahara's many times over. Do you really think a pack of ill-mannered juniors like Ten'u Masanori can stand against Omoriki Sō's ambitions? At a time like this, the only ones who can help are Europe's Yūan Tenkin."
By the time he got that far, he seemed to have gone a little unhinged: "I am right. Only I can save the Tsukiike family—but first you have to help me win back the position of head of the house... It was mine to begin with!"
Had Jiaming heard this speech, he might have said the old man's judgment was correct. In his original life, the reason he had ever met Tsukiike Kaoru was that he had just gone undercover into the Tsukiike family. A few days after Tsukiike Kaoru's suicide, Pei Luojia had launched a hunt against the Tsukiike clan, and afterward most of Takamagahara's members had been wiped out by Pei Luojia's ability-user squads. If the Tsukiike family of that time had sought help from Europe's largest dark organization, Yūan Tenkin, while allying with Takamagahara, they truly could have held out for a while.
As for the later fighting between Pei Luojia and Gloom Lyre, and the fact that when Jiaming met the Fire Phoenix, Pei Luojia was locked in a savage war with China's Yanhuang Awakening—these... aren't even later developments yet, so we need not say more.
The old man's sudden bellow seemed to startle Tsukiike Kaoru. Then she whipped around and hurled a pebble at him. The old man dodged aside, and the flat of the blade smashed into the artery in the girl's neck; at once her body went limp and she sank into unconsciousness.
"I am right, I am right..." Facing the broad river, the old man murmured the words over and over. A long while passed before he hoisted the girl's body onto his shoulder and slowly walked back the way he had come.
Winter had all but arrived, and once the sun went down the dark came fast. Lights came on over the little square. On the second floor of that two-story building, Cao Jinghao was on the phone in one of the rooms.
"...I'm telling you, get him to sign it, now! Fine, fine, if he won't give up that patch of ground, forget it. Damn it, Monkey and the others still aren't back. They must have grabbed the boy, but Liu Huaisha's another matter—she's trained in martial arts since she was small, she's got a strong constitution, and she'd already been running ten minutes longer than us. She may well be long gone."
"But hardly any cars pass through here at night, and there's no phone. Even if she runs to town to call the cops, that'll take her an hour or two. Get it settled, quick. Just say his daughter's here and ate something that didn't sit right, that her stomach's killing her, but what can we do—I'm a gangster, how would I dare take her to a hospital... Once it's signed, it's ours. The rest of it—the haggling, the shooting—can wait till tomorrow! Fuck!"
He put down the phone and paced a few circles around the room. This Monkey was far too sloppy at his work. Even if he hadn't caught the girl, he could at least have caught the boy and gotten Dongfeng back. And he ought to phone in, at the very least—it wasn't as if he hadn't been issued a brick phone. He was always too stingy to make a call...
Fuming, he went out the door and stood on the second-floor balcony looking down. Most of the men had gone out searching, but there ought to be a few down there at least. He turned toward the room off to one side, where a handful of his underlings were playing cards.
"Erzi, where's Ah-Ming and the rest?"
"Oh, boss." One of the thugs put down his cards. "Ah-Ming and Ah-Cheng are on the main gate. Aren't Ah-Jian and Ah-Chuan right downstairs?"
"Downstairs?" Cao Jinghao looked out over the square, a vague bad feeling stirring in him. "There's not a soul down there. Something's wrong. Find Ah-Jian and Ah-Chuan. I'll call Monkey and see what's going on."
He went back into the room and rapidly dialed the number. He had just pressed the last key when several thunderous explosions went off. Startled, he pulled a handgun from the drawer, tucked it on him, and hurried out with the phone in his hand: "What was that? What's happening?"
His men had not yet gotten downstairs; they stood frozen on the balcony. Looking out, they saw that a small shed over by the square had been blown completely apart, flames roaring in the late-autumn night wind.
"Fuck, it's the garage. All our cars just got blown up."
"Who knows how many men Liu Zheng sent over. Ah-Ming and Ah-Cheng didn't even get a warning out."
"Grab your weapons..."
"Boss, get Monkey and the others back here, quick."
For a moment all was pandemonium; four or five men ran back inside to fetch their blades. Just then the call connected, and Cao Jinghao spoke into it: "Monkey, what the hell is going on with you lot? Never mind if you couldn't catch the girl—get back here right now, Liu Zheng is at our door..." There he stopped, and his whole body went rigid.
A blood-soaked human head rolled out from a corner of the little square, tumbling over and over. There, in the shadow just beyond the lights, stood a blurred figure, holding a brick phone up toward him.
"Hm. So this brick used to belong to a fellow called Monkey? What a pity—I'm afraid he won't be able to talk to you. Though when he was dying, he did seem to have a mind to give you a ring."
"Who... who are you..."
The instant he asked it, a chill rose in Cao Jinghao's heart, because he had already recognized the voice on the phone. It belonged to that kid called Gu Jiaming.
"Who am I... heh. Strictly speaking, it's more about what this little performance of mine represents. It's the style of a certain assassin very famous in the underworld: cut off your enemy's head and give them the greatest terror you can. Of course, you wouldn't know who he is... Actually, that no longer matters either..."