Dr. Song was nothing if not efficient. Through Brother Mad Dog's connections he soon managed to meet Wuchang in person, and he learned exactly what kind of fix Wuchang was in now.
"Dr. Song, right now I badly need my master's guidance. I've settled on a date for the trade, but I don't have the slightest confidence in it..."
Dr. Song understood Wuchang's pain. To face the pressure of Huang'e's entire military alone, and to have come this far—that was no small thing. He offered a couple of words of comfort, then, after the two of them exchanged comm codes, Dr. Song left.
That night Boss Pan spiked a high fever from his fracture, which of course gave Dr. Song an excuse to get into the cell. The guards knew Dr. Song well, and it never crossed their minds that he would betray the army, so nobody bothered to keep an eye on the two of them.
When Lane had heard Dr. Song's report, he spent only ten minutes thinking it over before making up his mind. "Wuchang has to go. He goes right now—no trade, and no more contact with Ye Tian. From now on he wanders the wide world on his own, and he must not even think about revenge..."
"Why?" Pike and Eileen asked in unison.
His face full of grief and outrage, Lane looked around at all of them and said in a low voice, "The Second Princess of Three Seas Star has arrived. Do you really think Ye Tian would lose face in front of the princess? To people like that, a future career matters more than human lives. Now I finally understand why Ye Tian takes no bribes, why he's been sweeping the city clean—and why he massacred those miners. He was clearing the ground ahead of the princess's inspection..."
"Why? Why does one princess's inspection mean killing all those people? We're no threat to the princess!" Wild Bull was so angry his eyes blazed.
"No... no reason... The Horsehead Star Ring has no... no crown prince, only two princesses... If one dies, there's no one left to fight over the succession..." Boss Pan, burning with a severe fever, spoke. As expected of a man of noble birth—one sentence and he tore the fog away.
Lane clawed at his own hair and said viciously, "Two tigers can't share one mountain. Both princesses are outstanding—either one could take the throne without anything going wrong. And the more that's true, the more savagely they fight. I'm certain there's a whole fleet escorting her in space right now. As for Huang'e, this planet has always been famous for its chaos. To be safe, Ye Tian and his kind can only go by one rule: better to kill a thousand by mistake than let one slip through..."
So that was the logic of politicians: for a possibility, a mere probability, they could already start killing. Were human lives—and lives on Huang'e especially—really worth anything?
"There's nothing to analyze here. Once Ye Tian has the crystal, he'll have a hundred ways to kill us. He can rig it on the ground, in the ocean, aboard the ship—he could pull something during the space fold itself. Killing us would be nothing to him."
Lane didn't want to say any more. He shook his head. "Better that Wuchang lives than that we all die together. He's a kid with miracles following him around—maybe one day he really can avenge us all. Go on, tell him all of this, word for word. And if he still counts me as his master, tell him to leave at once..."
The cell fell silent. Dr. Song couldn't bear the stifling atmosphere; he turned and ran. Once he was back home on the surface, he hurried onto an encrypted channel to Wuchang and repeated Lane's words exactly.
"Ye Tian... fuck you and eight generations of your ancestors..." A wolf-like howl echoed through the mine tunnel. The brutal reality left Wuchang with nothing to grasp.
That very night Wuchang crept back to the gate of the military base and watched the whole night through, and he found no gap in the defenses anywhere. A rescue by force was already impossible.
As the sky gradually brightened, Huang'e City came alive again. The cheapest thing on this planet was hatred; though the bloodstains from the massacre had not yet been scrubbed clean, plenty of common folk had already chosen to forget it. The people of Huang'e never troubled themselves over things they couldn't change.
At Huang'e City's most famous Rainbow Market, more and more people were out picking through the stalls, and among the crowd a woman both conspicuous and inconspicuous was choosing crystal crafts, a specialty of Huang'e.
Conspicuous and inconspicuous are not, in fact, a contradiction. The girl wore a hooded cloak that covered her exquisitely beautiful face entirely, leaving only a pair of big, bright eyes showing; clearly the girl truly meant to keep a low profile.
Unfortunately, if you want to keep a low profile, couldn't you at least have put on an ordinary cloak? A mithril rose that big glittering on the back of the cloak—how could anyone not notice you? Just look at that stitching—top grade. Could an ordinary person own something like that?
Countless eyes in the market drifted toward the girl, intentionally or not: there were sharpers who made their living skinning customers, pickpockets working the crowd, and even slavers and the madam of a brothel. Every one of them would have loved to bite a piece off a pretty girl like that, but none of them dared, because the man following a few meters behind her was plainly not someone to cross.
The beauty was, of course, Ye Mei, and the middle-aged man was her Uncle Gu Bai. Ye Mei, that willful princess, could rage at any of her subordinates and could even have them put to death, but Ye Mei knew her Uncle Gu Bai simply did not buy any of it. Sometimes she wondered whether, if she truly did sentence Gu Bai to death, the soldiers would carry the order out.
"Oh, why make it so complicated? If I told Uncle Gu Bai to die, I believe he'd die gladly. His loyalty to me is absolutely beyond question."
Wandering the market, Ye Mei soon forgot those annoying thoughts; her entire attention was fixed on the crystal crafts displayed in the shops. Every year Huang'e produced great quantities of flawed crystal—crystal too irregularly shaped to use in engines—and it was made into all sorts of exquisite crafts and jewelry and exported to every planet in the Horsehead Star Ring, where it was always a hot seller.
Women are born unable to resist such shiny things; the moment she saw these crystal pieces she was rooted to the spot.
Just as Ye Mei was lost in the crystal's entrancing gleam, disaster struck out of nowhere. A shop close beside her exploded violently, and a gray figure shot toward the princess like an arrow, and with it a cold flash of light that breathed death.
"Enemy attack—assassins!" Around the smoke and dust of the blast, a dozen swift-running figures suddenly appeared, charging at the blast point from every direction.
The one closest to the princess was still Centurion Gu Bai. This calm, cool-headed warrior did not hesitate for an instant; he kicked off with both feet and launched himself at the attacker like a cannonball.
"Not while I'm here, you won't!" With that shout, Gu Bai caught the gleaming short blade on the alloy bracer on his arm. After the clear ring of the impact, both sides had taken each other's measure.
"A fourth-dan martial artist? With that little skill you dare show off in front of me?" Gu Bai said.
"Heh heh. Centurion Gu Bai? Seventh-dan strength really is formidable—but I'm not afraid of you." The voice was unbearably shrill; the whole market felt their heads splitting, and even the dozen men of Gu Bai's detail, not far off, wore expressions of agony.
"You're an Outlier? With the rare sonic talent?" This time Gu Bai put away every trace of disdain. "Protect the lady. No one else interfere." With that, his figure flickered and he went straight at the assassin.
In that moment the two became a pair of afterimages, colliding back and forth across the chaos of the market, the clash of metal ringing out from time to time, along with the assassin's horrifying shrieks.
By then Gu Bai's men had finally arrived. They formed a small defensive formation and slowly withdrew the princess toward the Governor's Mansion of Huang'e City. From the northern sky came the familiar whine of land vehicles—Ye Tian's rapid response force was evidently doing its duty.
The princess, ringed by her guards, was by now thoroughly excited. Her eyes were wide, fixed on every detail of the battlefield; she seemed not in the least afraid and very much on the verge of cheering.
"Princess, please keep your head down. It's too dangerous here, and the fighting is so bloody—you'd best not watch." The subordinate's advice was sound, for the duel between the two experts was already catching innocent bystanders: clerks crushed one after another under the smashed shops, civilians struck by the sonic attack going out of their minds.
"Who asked you? When we get back, report yourself for a hundred lashes." Ye Mei glared at him, then went back to excitedly studying the chaos in front of her.
Just then a gunshot rang out, and an energy beam grazed past the princess's hair, smashing the pink butterfly hairpin to pieces.
"Look out!" The soldier who had just been scolded leaped up to shield the princess with his body, but the dense beams that followed soon riddled him like a sieve.
This was the second wave. The assassin had only been meant to tie Gu Bai down; what was actually aimed at the princess was that storm of fire.
"Light shields—formation!" At the squad leader's command, the strange bracers on the soldiers' arms gave off a creamy white glow, and one energy shield after another appeared out of thin air, sealing the princess in tight.
"Run, Princess! The energy shields will only hold five minutes—any later and it'll be too late..." But before the squad leader could even finish, the next horror had already begun.
Right beside them, near a collapsed storefront, four or five corpses lay on the ground—and in that instant one of those bodies came alive and charged the defensive formation like a maddened tiger.
"Tiger Break—Triple Nail Fist!" A fist as big as a peck measure slammed with the sound of wind and thunder into the dead center of a shield. Sure enough, that kind of defensive shield was weak against blunt force; after three punches the soldier was spitting blood, his bones snapped.
A whole squad of soldiers, every one of them at third-dan martial artist level—and even so they could not stop the power of Tiger Break's movement. Too fast. Far too fast.
The one charging in was Wuchang. How this madman had gotten word that the princess was traveling incognito, nobody knew; he had been lying in wait in that shop since early on, and at the most chaotic moment he played the oriole swooping down on the mantis.
Truth be told, Wuchang's fighting strength was only a bit above third dan, while every soldier facing him had third-dan power; outnumbered as he was, by rights there should have been no room for him to pull off a sneak attack. But what these soldiers lost to was the uncanny Tiger Break movement—plainly a third-dan martial artist, yet his movement technique had already reached the speed of a sixth dan.
"Screw you!" Wuchang blasted a soldier away with one punch, and in the next instant a gleaming short blade was laid across the beautiful princess's neck.
"All of you, fucking stop, or I'll drag us both down together—" As he spoke, a red glow flashed across the gleaming blade, and flames flickered into being.
"Holy shit!" Even Gu Bai, who had sprung clear of the fight, was furious. "Another Outlier? And a fucking fire-type?"
Wuchang held the princess and began to back away slowly, still threatening as he went: "Stay away from me, all of you—get lost..."