Book 3: Chapter 39: Smugglers Standing as Knights |
Meng Li crouched on a ridge overlooking the northern river docks and watched her foxkin ruin everything.
The plan had been simple.
Elegant, even.
She'd spent multiple days scouting the smuggler warehouses that Manager Li, an old man with a loose tongue, had apparently made common knowledge to anyone with coin and ears. The warehouses sat in a cluster of rotting timber and stolen iron plating near the river's bend, hidden behind a tannery whose stench could strip paint from a wall at forty paces.
Outside of the city and made to be the perfect cover.
Minimal foot traffic after dark.
Two guards at the main approach, four on the roofline, and a handful of cultivators inside whose Qi signatures barely registered against the ambient noise of the city’s slums outside.
Her foxkin would infiltrate from the river side. The rabbitkin would hold the perimeter. She would observe from elevation as the party she ran with would dominate and conquer this piece of land. Turning the smugglers to her agents and finally gather some information about the single figure that had been the only thing she could think about for nearly two years now.
It was a clean plan for a clean operation.
Meng Li's left eye twitched.
She watched from behind a curtain of her own tails as the warehouse erupted into chaos below. Her twelve foxkin poured through the shattered entrance in a wave of white robes and vertical pupils, moving with the predatory grace of spirit beasts who had learned to wear clothes ten minutes ago and still hadn't fully committed to the concept of doors. Three of them went through windows. One went through a wall. The copper-haired one, her strongest, had apparently decided that the structural integrity of the building was a suggestion rather than a requirement.
The smugglers inside responded faster than she expected.
Much faster.
The first foxkin through the door caught a spear shaft across the jaw that sent him spinning into a stack of crates. The second ducked under a blade that would have taken her head and rolled into a kick that connected with nothing because her target had already repositioned. The rest hit a wall of bodies that shouldn't have been there.
Meng Li's tails went rigid.
Where did they all come from?
She had gathered the information roughly four days ago and had let the rumors and noise fall silent in that time span so she could take over the place without anyone suspecting anything or connecting it back to her foxkin asking about the smugglers from Manager Li.
And now everything was different? How was that possible?
What had happened?
The warehouse had held maybe fifteen Qi signatures when she'd scouted it. All of them low-tier cultivators running a smuggling operation for the Merchant Emperor's, a dastardly name she intended to punish them for, supply chain. Nothing that should have troubled twelve foxkin who had been eating her failed lemon cakes for months and ascending the coils of immortality on a diet of Qi-dense pastry.
Except there weren't fifteen people in that warehouse anymore.
There were sixty, maybe seventy.
They poured from side rooms, trapdoors in the floor, and even from a tunnel entrance hidden behind a false wall that three of her foxkin had just crashed through. Armed, armoured, coordinated, and fighting with a discipline that made Meng Li's stomach do multiple flips in fear that her little pups would get killed.
They moved in formations.
Actual formations.
Pairs covering each other's flanks, rotating fresh fighters to the front while exhausted ones fell back, channelling Qi in overlapping fields that created pockets of resistance her foxkin couldn't simply overwhelm with raw power.
And every single one of them wore the same thing.
Pale red cloth tied around their arms, waists, foreheads, thighs, and even some that used it like a cape. Sashes, bands, strips of fabric in varying states of quality and cleanliness, all bearing the same symbol stitched or painted or, in one memorable case, drawn in what appeared to be charcoal.
Meng Li squinted.
Is that a mushroom? Why would smugglers wear fat mushrooms?
She looked harder for a few moments and could not see anything in the image at all. It was, by all accounts so far… a fat mushroom as their sigil.
Every fighter in the warehouse wore it.
Meng Li watched as her foxkin were losing ground.
Not because the smugglers were stronger. Individually, each one of her spirit beasts outclassed any a few of the humans below combined. Her copper-haired strongest could have torn through the lot of them like wet paper if she'd let him off the leash.
They were losing ground because the humans wouldn't stop coming.
Every time a foxkin dropped one, two more filled the gap. Every time a formation broke, it reformed within seconds. Every time one of her people created an opening, someone sealed it before they could exploit it. The smugglers fought like people who had been recently drilled a thousand times and said drills were still fresh on their memory and carved into their bodies. The kind of drilling that stripped away flourish and left nothing except the willingness to take a hit so your partner could land one.
Meng Li's tails curled tighter around her frame.
These aren't smugglers. These are soldiers.
A crash drew her attention to the eastern perimeter where her rabbitkin were supposed to be holding the line.
The two broad-shouldered figures stood exactly where she'd placed them. Arms at their sides and feet planted. Red eyes watching the chaos unfold through the warehouse's shattered windows, yet neither one had moved or made an attempt engaged. Neither one showed any indication that they intended to do anything other than stand there and observe the proceedings with serene detachment.
A smuggler sprinted past them, bleeding from a cut on his arm, heading for the river in a flanking attempt.
The female rabbitkin watched him go.
The male rabbitkin scratched his ear.
The smuggler vanished into the darkness.
Meng Li's jaw clenched hard enough to make her molars creak.
I fed them the best cakes, the absolute best. They're stronger than every foxkin combined and they won't even—
A shout from below snapped her focus back to the warehouse.
The copper-haired foxkin had cornered a cluster of the red-banded fighters near the back wall. Six of them, pressed together, spears and blades forming a bristling hedge of steel that kept him at arm's length. His white robes were torn at the shoulder and a bruise darkened his jaw where the first spear shaft had connected. His vertical pupils burned with frustrated fury.
He snarled and lunged.
The six fighters didn't scatter.
They braced their spears at an angle. Qi flared in a unified pulse that created a barrier of overlapping energy fields. The copper-haired foxkin hit it and bounced. Not hard, not dramatically, just enough to arrest his momentum and force him to reset. By the time he recovered his footing, the formation had tightened and two fresh fighters had joined from the flanks.
Then a dozen more joined soon after.
Meng Li had seen enough.
She dropped from the ridge, sixty feet of empty air that her Qi caught and converted into a controlled descent that brought her boots to the cobblestones outside the warehouse without a sound. Her tails fanned behind her, nine of them, each one longer than she was tall, silver-white fur catching the moonlight and throwing it back in sheets that turned the dark alley into something bright and cold and very, very wrong.
Ice and frost crept from every step she took.
It spread across the cobblestones in fractal patterns that raced ahead of her, climbing walls, coating the iron plates bolted to the warehouse exterior, crawling up the doorframe and across the threshold. The temperature plummeted and everyone’s breath became visible. The moisture in the air crystallised into tiny motes that hung suspended like frozen stars.
She walked through the shattered entrance and the fighting dead stop.
Every foxkin froze mid-strike.
Every smuggler froze mid-defence.
Blades hung in the air between bodies that had forgotten how to complete their swings.
Qi signatures guttered and compressed as her spiritual pressure rolled through the warehouse like a tide of liquid nitrogen, pressing down on every living thing within its reach.
Sixty-odd fighters that had stood against her pups, and wore fat mushrooms as a banner, hit their knees.
Some of them at least.
Meng Li's eyes narrowed behind the curtain of her tails.
Not all of them knelt. A dozen remained standing. Shaking, sweating, trembling, veins standing out on their necks and foreheads, and legs rattled so hard their armour clanged against their bodies. Teeth clenched and eyes bulging. Knees locked through sheer force of will against a pressure that should have flattened them without resistance.
They fought it.
They fought her spiritual pressure.
Meng Li stopped walking.
"Such a strange sight," she said as she surveyed the dozens of kneeling humans who refused to fully submit. Ice crept from every step she took, her tails obscuring her face. "Insects bothering to fight back? What gives you such… motivations, I wonder."
The strongest of them stood near the back wall. Blue cape over mismatched armour, a spear in both hands that shook so violently the shaft blurred. His scar bisected his left eyebrow and continued down to his jaw. Broad-shouldered, thick-necked, locked jaw, and radiating a cultivation base that hummed beneath his skin in a deep blue corona that was currently being crushed flat against his body by her pressure.
He picked his head up.
The tendons in his neck stood out like bridge cables. Sweat poured down his face in rivers that froze the instant they dripped from his chin, forming tiny icicles that clinked against his chest plate. His eyes were bloodshot, capillaries bursting under the strain, but they found hers through the curtain of tails and held.
"W-We serve the Red Demon." His voice came out in fragments, each word torn from his throat against the weight pressing down on his lungs. "Your intent and spiritual pressure… is stronger…" He gasped then drew a breath that cost him visible effort. "...but nowhere as close to how terrifying our master could be."
Meng Li's tails parted.
Her face emerged from behind the silver-white fur and she stared at the scarred man with an expression that cycled through three states in rapid succession.
The Red Demon.
Her mind raced through every piece of intelligence she'd gathered since arriving on this planet. Every name, title, reputation, and rumour that had filtered through Zi Zhen's networks before the old bag of bones vanished. Every whisper her foxkin had picked up during their brief, disastrous attempt at scouting the city's outskirts.
No Red Demon existed in any of those reports.
No Red Demon had been mentioned by Zi Zhen, by Peng Du's intelligence apparatus before it went dark, or by any of the dozen information sources she'd tapped into during her months of hiding in the mountain cavern.
Another Calamity? Impossible. The Ancient changed the world's gateway when he forced the planet to ascend. Nothing gets through anymore without his knowledge. Nothing.
Unless it had been here before the ascension.
Unless it had been hiding.
Unless he allowed it.
Unless—
"Show me this Red Demon, then." Meng Li took a step forward and the ice surged ahead of her, climbing the scarred man's boots and freezing the leather stiff. "Let me be the judge—"
"Not available."
Meng Li stopped and blinked at him.
The word hung in the frozen air between them.
Two syllables that carried the absolute, unshakeable conviction of a man who had been given an order and intended to follow it regardless of the nine-tailed fox ascendant currently turning his warehouse into a glacier.
"What?" Meng Li stared.
The scarred man's spear shook harder. His blue corona flickered as he struggled to keep conscious. His knees bent half an inch before he locked them straight through what had to be pure, distilled stubbornness. "O-Our Red Demon isn't available right now." He swallowed. The sound was audible across the warehouse. "Come back tomorrow."
Meng Li stared at him with an open mouth.
All nine of her tails went still. Frozen in their fanned position behind her like a peacock display that had encountered a system error and crashed mid-presentation. The ice stopped spreading. The spiritual pressure held at its current level, neither increasing nor decreasing, suspended in the same state of bewildered paralysis that had seized its owner. And Meng Li continued to stare, unable to fully understand what the idiot had just told her.
Come back tomorrow.
He just told me to come back tomorrow.
I am Meng Li. Daughter of the Nine-Tailed Fox Sovereign. Ascendant of the Upper Realms. I could freeze this entire planet into a solid block of ice and shatter it into powder with a flick of my wrist. I could erase every person in this warehouse from existence so thoroughly that the universe itself would forget they had names.
And this man just told me to come back tomorrow.
Like I'm a customer at a closed shop.
Meng Li closed her eyes as a large migraine started showing its hideous head.
The copper-haired foxkin, still frozen mid-lunge near the back wall, turned his vertical pupils toward her. His expression asked a question that his locked muscles couldn't voice. Do we kill them now, or…?
Meng Li's left eye twitched.
She looked at the scarred man, his shaking spear, frozen boots, bloodshot eyes that refused to drop, blue cape that had gone stiff with frost, and the pale red sash tied around his waist bearing a crooked fat mushroom that might have looked like a hammer if you had a generous understanding of art.
She looked at the dozen others still standing. Each one trembling and bleeding from minor wounds her foxkin had inflicted, and not one of them had broken. Their Qi signatures were pathetic. Bottom-tier cultivators who should have been face-down on the stone the instant her pressure touched them. Yet they stood because someone had apparently terrified them so thoroughly that a nine-tailed fox ascendant ranked below that person on their internal hierarchy of things to be afraid of.
What kind of demon inspires this level of loyalty in common thugs?
"Tomorrow?" she asked.
I can’t believe I’m actually going to do this.
The scarred man nodded once and his knees finally buckled and he dropped, catching himself on his spear shaft, one knee on the frozen stone, head bowed.
His blue corona died completely and he finally fell unconscious, yet never falling face forward.
Slumped in that position like some knight of honor instead of a smuggler.
Meng Li turned on her heel.
Ice cracked beneath her boots as she walked back toward the shattered entrance. Her foxkin peeled away from their frozen positions and fell into formation behind her, white robes torn and dirty, vertical pupils darting between their mistress and the humans they'd been fighting moments ago. The copper-haired one nursed his bruised jaw. Two others limped. A fourth had lost a sleeve entirely and was trying to hold the remnants of his robe together with one hand.
The rabbitkin joined from the perimeter, clean, unruffled, unbothered, and utterly useless.
Meng Li stepped into the forest.
The moonlight caught her tails as they fanned and then compressed behind her.
She made it twelve paces before she stopped and looked back over her shoulder at the warehouse.
Frost still coated every surface. Her spiritual pressure lingered in the air like perfume, heavy and cold. Through the shattered doorway, she could see the scarred man being pulled upright by the rest of the smugglers… No. The Soldiers. His people were already moving around him, checking wounded, reforming lines, attending to injured brothers and sisters, and tying fresh pale red sashes over torn ones.
They're reorganising. I just hit them with the spiritual pressure of an Upper Realm ascendant and they're reorganising like it was a drill.
Who trains gang members like this?
Who terrifies them enough that I'm the lesser threat?
Meng Li's wringing intensified inside her sleeves.
The True Calamity? No. He doesn't operate through proxies. He sits invisible to senses as the world arranges itself around him. This is something else. Someone else.
Someone who calls themselves the Red Demon and isn't available.
I’ll come back tomorrow and they better be here.
"Lady Meng Li?" The copper-haired foxkin stepped closer. "Shall we return and—"
She started walking. "No. We come back tomorrow."