Book 4: Chapter 49: The Need of the Moment
Sen resisted the urge to roll his eyes and darted into a narrow space between buildings. It wasn’t even really wide enough to qualify as an alley, but it was big enough for him to fit and wrap himself up in shadows. Then, he climbed the wall and rolled over the edge of the roof. He waited there as people frantically searched the alley below. Sen had grown increasingly tired of this nonsense. Ever since he’d killed the four cultivators in the park, the Shadow Eagle Claw Syndicate had been making attempts on his life. They ranged from the serious to the stupid, but they were all aggravating. There was a part of him that was tempted to simply kill them all, but the very idea made him feel tired. On the other hand, he thought, these people aren’t any better than bandits on the road. If I keep letting them go without consequences, any harm they do from here on out is at least partially on my hands.
Sen tried to weigh the karmic consequences. Was killing them worse than letting them go? Would their cumulative harm over the course of their lives ultimately be a greater karmic debt than the karma he would accrue by ending them now? As always, the truth of Karma was beyond him or likely anyone to fully measure. He could only make the best choices with the knowledge and insight he possessed. On balance, anyone willing to try to murder someone on nothing but orders was probably a terrible person. More to the point, they would try to murder him if they got the chance. His ability to escape didn’t make them any less guilty of their intention to murder him. With a little huff of resignation, Sen cycled for earth qi and let it slowly filter into the stone of the buildings. With a wave of Sen’s hand, the people in the narrow alley below were pierced with dozens of narrow, razor-edged spikes of stone that they could not avoid or flee from.
He extended his senses just long enough to confirm that no one had survived. He absently used wind qi to retrieve anything of value from them before he sank their bodies into the ground and sealed them in rock. He let his head drop back against the roof and took a breath.
“You’re not as sneaky as you think you are,” said Sen.
When no answer was forthcoming, Sen threw a small pebble at the woman hiding a roof over from him. It landed less than an inch from her foot.
“Yes,” said Sen. “You.”
He heard a sharp intake of breath before the woman stood up.
“How did you know?” she demanded.
“I never didn’t know,” said Sen, opting to keep the answer obscure and as frustrating as possible.
“You killed them,” she said.
“Yeah. I’m going to kill you too,” said Sen from his sprawled-out position.
He supposed he couldn’t look any less threatening. Of course, not looking like a threat and not being a threat were wholly different propositions.
“You weren’t killing everyone before.”
“You all clearly didn’t appreciate that mercy. You kept coming. So, now, I’m just going to kill all of you.”
“You’re going to kill everyone we send after you?”
“No. You don’t understand.”
Sen heard the woman’s feet shuffle a little. “I don’t understand what?”
“I’m not going to kill everyone you send. I’m going to kill everyone in your ridiculous little group. Eventually, one of you will tell me who made you my problem to begin with. Whoever gives up that information, I might let them live. Is that going to be you?”
Sen grabbed the crossbow bolt out of the air without even looking. Sen looked over the woman who was standing there with the crossbow hanging limply from her hands.
“How?”
Sen slowly got up and examined the bolt. There was a residue on the blade. He shook his head. He didn’t know precisely what the poison was, but he was a poor candidate for poison under the best of circumstances. His body cultivation had fundamentally altered all of the normal processes that allow poison to work. Beyond that, with his alchemical knowledge and experience, he suspected he had a better-than-average chance of finding a fix before whatever it was killed him. He doubted the same was true for the woman who had fired the crossbow. A flick of his wrist buried the bolt in the woman’s stomach. While she was staring in horror at the projectile that was feeding poison into her body, Sen had cleared the distance from one rooftop to the next. He batted the crossbow out of the woman’s hands, shattering it into about a dozen pieces.
She reached for something on her belt, so Sen kicked her legs out from under her. When she kept fumbling for something on it, Sen realized that she must have the antidote. It made sense. The last thing an assassin would want is to die from their own poisons. Sen used his wind qi to rip the belt off the woman and deposit it in his hand. She stared at the belt for a stunned second and then lunged toward it. Sen backhanded her. She stared up at him in shock, blood dripping from a split lip. There were a dozen small vials arrayed on the belt. Sen pulled one out at random and incinerated it.
“Stop!” the woman screamed, before doubling over and clutching at her stomach.
Sen couldn’t tell if it was the crossbow bolt or the poison. He decided that it was probably both. He waited until she’d recovered enough that she could look up at him again. He picked another vial off the belt and bounced it in his hand.
“You’re a core formation cultivator, so you can probably survive whatever damage the bolt did. Assuming, of course, that you can get the antidote.”
“What do you want?” she asked in a gasp.
Sen ignored her. “I’m assuming that the antidote is hard to get or hard to make. Otherwise, your best bet would have simply been jumping off the building and making a run for it. So, that poison must work pretty quick, be excruciatingly painful, or both.”
The woman curled up around her stomach, while her breathing came in short, ragged bursts.
Sen continued. “I’m guessing it’s both.”
“What do you want?”
Sen waited until she looked at him again before he incinerated the vial in his hand. Her eyes never left his hand as he plucked a third vial from the belt.
“You’re going to tell me everything about your organization. How it’s structured. Who’s in charge. Where you keep things. Everything.”
“I’ll be dead before we get through all of that.”
Sen destroyed the third vial and plucked another one from the belt. “You’re assuming that I care if you die. I don’t. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, there will just be more lackeys tomorrow. In short, right now, the only person on this roof who cares if you die is you. So, I suggest you talk quickly.”
The woman’s words came haltingly at first, like she was having to force them out. As the pain from the poison ramped up, though, the words started pouring out of her. The only interruptions came when she spasmed in pain and seemed to lose track of everything else in the world. Sen encouraged the outpouring of speech by occasionally destroying another vial. He’d figured out which one was the antidote based on small changes in her expression every time his hand got near it or hovered over it. Still, she didn’t know that he knew, so it worked pretty well as an encouragement. Sen learned a lot in a very short period of time, even if it was a struggle for him to maintain his indifferent demeanor. He didn’t usually go in for torture and, whatever he might have thought at first, the amount of pain that the woman was in amounted to torture.
When it got bad enough that the woman simply couldn’t string sentences together anymore, Sen dropped the belt onto her. She fumbled at it until she got the right vial and tipped it into her mouth. Sen understood how such things worked well enough to know that she wasn’t going to be useful again for a while. Instead, he crouched down next to her. He waited until she met his gaze with her bloodshot eyes.
“I don’t want you to mistake this for mercy. You’re going to take a message back to your masters for me. Pack up and leave. The Slovenly Chicken Foot Gang is done in this city, one way or the other. If they make me do it, I’m adopting a scorched earth policy. As for you, if you think what you just went through was bad, I have things lying around that would make that seem like a restful nap. If I ever see you again, I’ll make you eat one of those things. Then, I’ll hang your blackened, rotting corpse from a wall as a warning to everyone you know and love. Do you understand me?”
The woman was shaking, and Sen didn’t think that it had anything to do with the residual poison. He gave her a smile that would offer no comfort.
“You can just nod,” he said.
The woman’s head started bobbing up and down so fast that it looked almost comical. Sen stood up and walked over to the edge of the roof. As he was getting ready to make the leap back to ground level, the woman worked up the nerve to speak.
“Who are you? Who are you really?”
Sen paused. He’d been resisting it for a while, but the world had a way of making you do things you didn’t want to do, become things you didn’t want to become. Sen decided this was just one more of those things. However much he tried to resist it, he kept finding himself drawn into situations that called for him to be something, if not precisely better, than more than Lu Sen could be on his own. He kept needing to be the kind of larger-than-life person that only existed in a story. He supposed that it was convenient that he had just such a story right at hand. It wasn’t really relevant that he was learning to hate that persona as much as he hated killing. It was the need of the moment.
“Judgment’s Gale,” said Sen, and then dropped from the roof.
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