People who can keep their heads at a life-or-death moment are always few, and people who can keep their heads and still size up the situation clearly are rarer still. That was exactly how it was in the Ration Center now. Most of the men there were ordinary miners; even if Wild Bull had a few hired thugs under him, they were only for show — nothing like the desperadoes in Coyote Seven's pay.
These illiterate miners, the sort who followed whatever the crowd did, saw one man surrender, and right behind him came a second and a third; in no time at all every man in the room had squatted down.
By now Boss Pan was frantic too. "Damn it, you idiots, can't you hear the voice out there? Isn't that Poison Wasp Adu? This is Coyote Seven's scheme — do you really think he'll let any of you go?" Unfortunately, no matter how he shouted, not one miner in the hall listened to him.
He was just drawing breath to curse them again when an energy beam grazed his arm and opened a long gash.
Wuchang seized hold of him. "Is there a way out? Does the Ration Center have a back door?"
"There is, over by the cold storage. There's a hidden passage under the floor that runs into the mine," said Eileen, pistol in hand.
There was no time to hesitate. Wuchang knew the enemy must have come prepared, and if they didn't run now they were finished. "Anyone who wants to come with us, get over here and form up..." Unfortunately, not a single person answered him.
"Forget it, there's no helping that now. Pike, you support Wild Bull. A Yun, look after Lane. Eileen, stay right on my heels." Supporting the wounded Boss Pan, Wuchang was the first to charge into the cold storage.
Wuchang, Lane, Smith Pan, Pike, Eileen, Wild Bull and A Yun — the seven of them climbed one after another into the tunnel inside the cold storage and slipped down into the world below.
The moment they were underground, another violent explosion went off, and dust filled the shaking mine tunnel.
"W-series grenades. These ears of mine don't lie. Looks like Seven means to wipe out every last one of us," Lane said viciously.
"Never mind that for now. Who knows this place? We have to get out of here right away," Wuchang said.
"Go south. If Seven's behind this, the south is the only place that might still be safe," said Boss Pan, gritting his teeth against the pain.
"Then that's what we do. Pike, you take the lead."
By this time the fighting above ground had wound down. Of the more than a hundred miners, a full seventy-odd had died in the clash, and the thirty who were left were nearly out of their minds with terror at the bloodshed before them.
The room was full of corpses, the floor strewn with chunks of meat, dark red blood spattered everywhere — the entire Ration Center had become a slaughterhouse.
Poison Wasp Adu walked through the room, well pleased, reporting in over the communicator built into his mask.
"Smooth as could be. Ten minutes, all wrapped up."
"Hm? Say that again — Smith Pan got away? And Wuchang and the rest ran off with him? Useless..."
On the other end of the line, Seven's voice was savagely furious. The whole point of this surprise raid had been to kill off every one of these key people; with no wronged party left alive to make a fuss, Mine B1313 could go up for auction as a matter of course, and once it entered the auction process, Mine Supervisor Roda would have no end of ways to get the pit for himself.
But that idiot Adu had actually let all the key figures slip away, and Seven's plan was about to come apart before his eyes.
"Never mind the miners. Keep three with glib tongues — I have a use for them. Kill the rest, then take your men after them at once. Even if they run into the cannibal tribes' territory, you are not to let them go."
"Bring me the men if they're alive, and the bodies if they're dead..."
Poison Wasp Adu listened to that voice cracking like thunder in his ear and did not dare drag his feet; he shot his men a look. A dense burst of gunfire followed, and amid the flat, heavy reports high-energy rounds were poured into the crowd. Of the thirty-odd miners, every one but the three chosen was killed there in the hall.
Adu patted the three survivors' ashen faces. "Remember — whatever Lord Seven tells you to say, you say it. That's your only way to live." How would the three dare disobey? They nodded and nodded.
Down in the mine tunnels, meanwhile, beneath the faint glow of helmet lamps, Wuchang and his group were pushing south with Pike in the lead. The further south they went, the closer they came to the cannibal tribes' land, but they had no choice. The weapons Seven had used in the attack said it plainly: this raid had been planned for a long time.
Pike might have been a veteran miner of long experience, but the southern tunnels were unfamiliar ground to him too. After all, no one was willing to risk contact with the cannibals just to come out here and mine crystal.
Where men seldom went, treasure was plentiful. Along the way Wuchang alone spotted three crystals worth mining, but time was short and none of them dared stop; they could only press on and leave them behind.
Behind them, Adu was advancing south as well, his several dozen men split into five columns. Who knew what high-tech gear they carried, but those five columns were quietly closing in on Wuchang's group in what looked very much like an encirclement.
On one side, fugitives carrying their wounded; on the other, professional killers who had come fully prepared. Such a gap in strength soon showed itself in the chase, and in barely more than an hour the sharp-sensed Wuchang felt the danger.
"We're in trouble. There's pursuit coming from the north — a lot of them, and fast," Wuchang said in a low voice, lying flat with his ear to the ground.
"What do we do? Wild Bull and Boss Pan are both hurt. We're already going as fast as we can," Eileen said anxiously.
Wuchang pulled off his mining pack and shoved it at Gopher Pike. "You keep moving. Follow the plan you just laid out — wait for me where Mine Tunnel 46 crosses Mine Tunnel 23. I'll stay behind and hold them up for you."
"Are you out of your mind?" said old Lane. "You, alone, and you can't even work a gun. You're staying behind to throw your life away?"
Wuchang shook his head. "I haven't had my fill of living yet. Relax, I won't be dying that quickly. Don't you know your own apprentice by now? Do I look like the sort who goes soft in the head the moment his blood is up?"
With that, Wuchang left the others and headed back north the way they had come.
In the dark tunnel, helmet lamps flickered this way and that, and the walkie-talkies crackled with reports and chatter. Six of Seven's thugs, assault rifles in hand, were moving toward the assigned point on Adu's orders.
Killers were only human; they feared the savage cannibals too, and the further south they went, the less sure of themselves they felt. Apart from gripping their assault rifles tighter, they had no other way to drive off the fear.
Just as they were advancing in silence, a big pitch-black hand reached down out of the darkness at the top of the tunnel and clamped onto the throat of the last killer in line. The arm flexed slightly, there came a crisp crack, and his cervical vertebra was crushed outright.
In these tunnels, there was no one but Wuchang who could snap a neck one-handed. The crafty bastard had hung himself from the rock wall on the strength of his fingertips alone, perfectly still, like a gecko.
These killers had never dreamed that a man could attack like that — it flatly broke the laws of physics! How could he ignore gravity? Could he be one of those legendary cyborgs, with an anti-gravity device installed in him?
Whatever the killers were thinking, Wuchang's surprise attack worked beautifully. Taken completely off guard, they had no time to react. In a tunnel that narrow they could only bunch up in a tight single file, and in that wretched formation their assault rifles were useless.
Wuchang came on like a fierce tiger, beginning his attack at the tail of the enemy squad. Before the second-to-last killer could even turn around, a Triple Nail Fist had already landed on the center of his back.
The Nail Fist of Dragon-Tiger Rush was fearsome stuff: Wuchang poured all the Dragon-Tiger strength in his body into a single point and struck the same spot three times in two seconds. No flesh-and-blood body could stand up to that kind of brutal assault.
The killer who took the blow spewed a mouthful of blood that instantly stained the inside of his breathing mask red, and his whole body flew off its feet, knocking down a whole swath of the men ahead of him.
Wuchang struck with utter ruthlessness, his Nail Fists flying at the enemy like wind, and before the men could level their assault rifles they were swallowed up in hand-to-hand fighting.
Hand-to-hand, and nothing but hand-to-hand. In a narrow mine tunnel, you could be carrying a light-energy cannon and it would do you no good; once a martial artist got in close, an ordinary soldier turned to garbage on the spot.
Fists like meteors, legs like wind — Dragon-Tiger strength surged through Wuchang's bones and muscles, and its berserk force made the enemy feel they were facing a piece of heavy construction machinery. Often before a finger could pull a trigger, a Nail Fist had already shattered the man's skull.
Four of the six killers died in the space of a breath, and the two left were struck dumb. Professional killers kept by Seven though they were, they had never seen such a savage way of killing — blowing a man's head apart with a bare fist?
"No — stay back..." The terrified killer fired on instinct, and the glare of the high-energy rounds lit up the whole tunnel.
Unfortunately for him, Wuchang had already predicted the bullets' path from the angle of their arms. Slippery as a fish, he twisted aside and was on them in a flash; two dull thuds later, the killers were on their knees coughing blood, a deep, livid fist print stamped over each of their hearts.
Wuchang looked at the wreckage strewn across the ground, pressed his palms together, and said, "Amitabha. Master, I've failed you — I've broken the precept..." In that moment he half understood why his master had never shaved his head for him. So Master saw the towering battle-lust in my heart all along.
"The time has not come. You do not yet qualify to leave the world." That was the line his master said most often. Seven times Wuchang had begged his master to shave his head and ordain him, and seven times the only answer he got was that one sentence.
He was still recalling his master's face and voice when a voice suddenly crackled from the walkie-talkie on one of the corpses.
"Poison Fang squad, Poison Fang squad, answer if you hear me..."
"Poison Fang, what's going on with you lot? Why does the radar show you all stopped? Why have you halted?"
"Fuck, say something — are you all dead?"
Poison Wasp Adu's furious cursing came through the walkie-talkie. Wuchang knew the killers' identification data had to be stored in Adu's terminal computer — that was how the man commanded his people.
Wuchang picked up the still-chattering walkie-talkie and spoke in a voice full of menace.
"Adu, is it? This is Wuchang. These precious men of yours have already died at the cannibals' hands. Sooner or later you'll end up the same as them..." With that he pressed down lightly with his fingers, and the walkie-talkie's mouthpiece was crushed to bits.
The burst of noise that came suddenly out of the receiver made Adu's eardrums ache. "Fuck!" He slammed the walkie-talkie to the ground and cursed at the top of his lungs. "That damned Wuchang, spouting bullshit about cannibals." You bastard, if you'd met the cannibals they'd have eaten you first. Then he glanced around at his men.
"Don't listen to his crap. I've never once seen a man escape the cannibals alive. That brat's lying for sure. We keep pushing..."
With that, Adu walked at the very front of the column and continued deeper into the mine. But anyone with sharp eyes could tell that many of the men in that squad now had a flicker of fear in their gaze, and some were even trembling.
The cannibals — the miners' forbidden subject — really should not have been brought up at a moment like that.