Li Yanqing's body hit the stone with a dull thud. Blood dripped from Wu Hao's saber. He lifted it, not even watching as more blood welled up from Li Yanqing and dyed the stone red. Then he flicked the saber to the side, red droplets splashing away out of sight to clean his saber slightly.

  Wu Hao blinked slightly in the light. He'd adapted slightly to the darkness, relying on his qi sense, and now with his other sight having to adjust, his aim was impaired slightly. The light of the lantern trailed sideways slightly in his vision, like strokes from a painter's brush. He shook his head.

  "You killed him," Zhu Yelin said, sounding horrified. Fear blasted through his qi. Whatever was left of his confidence had cracked, like the surface of a frozen lake under a heavy impact. His hands trembled on his saber, and his Bloodbound Saber Art collapsed.

  It was true. Wu Hao had killed Li Yanqing.

  He said nothing, felt nothing. It was just a death, wasn't it? He'd died thousands of times, been killed without remorse dozens of times, had killed without remorse before.

  He looked again at the corpse, already cooling, and thought to himself that it was a problem solved.

  There was a flash of pink qi as something in Li Yanqing's core stirred, detached itself, and flew towards Wu Hao. He tried to dodge but he was too late, and it attached itself to Wu Hao's hand, burrowing into his skin.

  "Fuck," he murmured.

  Instead of speaking, Wu Hao gripped his saber tight again. His qi roared, deeper this time, sounding in his ears like the victorious roar of a tiger ready to hunt.

  "You're next," he told Zhu Yelin.

  The other boy's eyes widened, all the more so when Wu Hao blasted himself forward again, qi marshalling forward as it coursed through his veins. He could feel it burn along his meridians as he readied himself for another strike, and he sent it flooding through the edge of his saber as he flew.

  "Storm-Cutting Saber Art," he said, then landed and pounced at Zhu Yelin with his saber extended. "Lightning Bolt!"

  Zhu Yelin let loose a wild yell and swung his saber in a blind panic, but he'd put neither thought nor qi into his swing. It flailed uselessly and Zhu Yelin's feet crunched as he tried to step backwards and stepped into a pile of broken lantern-glass.

  Wu Hao's saber sailed over the other boy's head, the attempt to cut his throat foiled as Zhu Yelin's ungraceful stumble accidentally managed to carry him away from danger and into a relative safety. Cursing under his breath, Wu Hao forced his saber down, but he'd used up qi on that stab and he couldn't marshal it again that soon.

  Scrabbling back on hands and feet, Zhu Yelin's saber clanged loudly to the stone as he stared into Wu Hao's saber, a plea for mercy on his lips before it firmed into a stubborn grimace.

  And then Shan Kong's saber smashed into Wu Hao's arm, carving out a part of the flesh of his upper left arm. The teeth buzzsawed into him, biting down on his flesh and something that felt deeper still. Blood spurted from the wound and Wu Hao spun from the blow, missing Zhu Yelin by just enough that the edge of his saber carved a cut just above his eyebrow.

  Pivoting on one foot with the blow, Wu Hao pushed himself away on reflex. The pain bloomed red-hot in his arm and he shifted his saber in mid-air, feeling his left arm sag away. When he landed near another lantern, he hissed as the blood ran in thick rivulets from his arm.

  More than the pain, he figured the teeth must have cut a tendon or something like it. He couldn't move his fingers as well as he should have.

  Not a debilitating wound, but it was close. A fitting warning against overconfidence. Wu Hao slunk back, putting distance between himself and the other two.

  Shan Kong was breathing hard, pale fingers clutching at his saber. Zhu Yelin's eyes darted between Wu Hao and the corpse of Li Yanqing, and Wu Hao saw his feelings well up into a riot of dark colours.

  Then the dam broke. Uttering a howl of fear, Zhu Yelin threw down his saber, turned, and poured all of his qi into running away.

  That left him and Shan Kong, but the other had more or less kept his head about him, unfortunately. He stared at Zhu Yelin with an expression of disgust, which he then turned on Wu Hao. The next moment, he disappeared into a swirl of qi, and Wu Hao tore off into hot pursuit, sliding his saber back into its sheathe on the second attempt.

  Lanterns flashed by as he punched himself forward, an arrow landing onto to fire itself again. He nearly smashed into a lit lantern, avoiding its heavy stone edge from eviscerating him by a more narrow margin than he was comfortable with, and then spent more of his qi and his precious time hunkering down, propelling himself high above the lanterns, managing a stumbled landing on top of the roofs.

  Then he continued. In the darkness above he could see nothing except vague shapes, even with the moonlight above, and he could see more than Shan Kong could. His panting sounded loud in his ears and his arm ached horribly. He tried to clench it to his side, but twitches in the muscle kept firing lances of pain all up his spine that crashed into his head and made him dizzy.

  This, he realized abruptly, was what he'd been made for. Or rather, what Father had made the deathsworn for. Relentless killers who would accept any injury to fulfill Father's orders. Wu Hao tore across the rooftops with heavy, loping footsteps that whispered over the tile, keeping track of Zhu Yelin and Shan Kong as they ran for safety.

  It was a route that Wu Hao didn't recognize, but he didn't have to. He and Shan Kong both knew that if the pair reached the guards, they were safe.

  Fortunate for him that they'd been so smart as to pick a location for their duel that made this trek as long as it could be. After all, they were the ones who'd thought that he'd be running.

  Wu Hao catapulted himself forward again, drawing up almost head-to-head with Shan Kong, who was clearly starting to tire. His steps had begun to slow, his qi had begun to flag, his breath had begun to rasp.

  A good target, but Wu Hao restrained himself for just a litte longer. Instead, he fixed his eyes on Zhu Yelin. He glowed in the distance, an angry red dot of qi that kept growing closer and closer. He really should've learned a movement technique, Wu Hao thought, and felt a giddy sort of irony at the thought.

  Three more leaps and he reached the end of a long roof, scrabbling up its sides with another leap. Above them, the moon shone. Zhu Yelin panted for breath like a dog, and Wu Hao felt another wave of dizziness hit him that he tried to ignore. Behind them Shan Kong began to draw closer, still trying to reunite.

  With his one functional hand, Wu Hao drew a knife from his belt mid-leap, charging it with just enough qi to activate the array that he'd etched into its surface. He'd messed up the pattern and he had no clue what it might do. Possibly nothing.

  Wu Hao's feet skidded to an abrupt stop on a roof, fighting against his momentum to get a steady position to aim from. He charged his knife with qi, drew a breath, and then threw it between heartbeats. It flashed forward, catching the light of a lantern as it flew, and the thudded into the back of Zhu Yelin's head.

  It fizzled, the qi sparking as it tried to do something. Zhu Yelin took another, quivering step, and then his legs gave way and he fell to the ground. Breathing heavily, he tried to claw himself forward just a little more, touched at the base of a lantern with deadening, numb fingers, and then even that stopped.

  Zhu Yelin was dead. Wu Hao felt his qi evaporate into nothingness, the core cracking now that there was no will to keep it coherent.

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  Heaving a shuddering breath of exhaustion, Wu Hao whirled around. While he'd been busy with Zhu Yelin, Shan Kong had fled in a different direction, and he was running for his life. Wu Hao caught a single glimpse of him, dashing between the cover afforded to him by one building and another, running into an alley.

  In the distance, a light swayed idly.

  A guard patrol.

  "Fuck!" Wu Hao said, fist clenching. His other arm didn't even respond to his commands anymore, his feet were bleeding from the punishment he'd put them through, and his saber was half-dangling from its sheathe. That pink thread was still wrapped tightly around his arm, waving softly in the wind.

  Still, he had to try.

  Grimacing he forced more qi into his makeshift movement technique. Tiles clattered as he launched himself again, feeling his feet bleed as the repeated strain of qi detonations became far too much to bear. Everything hurt.

  Wu Hao pulled the final knife from his belt. This was it, then.

  Shan Kong had already begun to shout, and the lantern had swayed towards him immediately. There were four guards, and Wu Hao saw his chances sink lower and lower. Soon they would be zero.

  Still flying up from his last jump, he charged his last knife with qi and threw it at the mess of qi that he saw as Shan Kong. Shan Kong reached the circle of light of the lanterns with a shout of delight, unaware of the knife flying directly at him.

  Wu Hao didn't land so much as smash into the next roof, feet failing to keep him upright as his knees buckled from the impact. He went into a roll, nearly tottering off the side of the building entirely before he managed to stop himself from falling.

  And, from his new perspective hanging single-handed from the rooftop, he watched with deadened eyes as the knife was caught in a gloved hand.

  A guard had intervened to save Shan Kong after all.

  He hadn't made it.

  Wu Hao looked into the eyes of the guard who'd intercepted the final knife and grimaced in recognition.

  It was the same man who he'd seen this same day, the one who'd come along with his wife and child, who'd gotten along with the gardener. Wu Hao hesitated for a moment more, but then he shook his head.

  Maybe he could kill the guards. One, perhaps even now. Two, at the best of times. Three? Four? And if he could - where would that leave him, then? Would he continue killing until Shan Guoxi came after him personally?

  Wu Hao had made, he reflected, two mistakes. The first was killing at all, and the second was not killing them all.

  When the guard's eyes swept across the rooftops, Wu Hao made a split-second decision and punched qi to the bottoms of his feet, then detonated it. In a swirl of qi he'd thrown himself backwards, and in a few more he'd made his way down from the rooftops.

  No one chased him yet, but the thread began a soft, consistent pull on his mind. Telling him to stand there like a man and face his pursuers, it crooned.

  His reservoir of qi ached with its near-emptiness, and his lungs, his feet, his chest hurt. He didn't bother cataloguing his injuries, but instead just fled as fast as he could, using qi whenever he could to spur himself to make the trek quicker. In the darkness he nearly lost his way and saw a guard patrol's handheld lanterns approach from the distance, but then he limped on into the dark and dodged that patrol.

  He pushed qi to his feet to launch himself across the final roof that he'd be dropping down from, aiming for a section of roof that he hadn't pushed himself off from. The qi detonated, and he allowed himself a momentary relaxation. Nearly back to his room, where he had traps and the like to -

  Something lit up in the distance, a light as if from a lantern held up high, a firework born on qi to drive it up into the sky. It exploded in silence.

  The pink cord around his arm suddenly tightened and pulled. Not physically, but emotionally, it burst forward with a pulse of qi that sent foreign emotions crashing into his mind. Pain, fear, exhaustion, and a dizzying other array of emotions all burst forth, and something in his mind felt like it might give.

  With the sudden jolt pulling his attention away, his attempt at a jump instead sent him smashing, face first, into the nearby wall. He came crashing down like a bag of wet cement, blasting himself into the ground. Bones cracked, skin tore, and this time the pain was entirely his own.

  Wu Hao tried to raise himself, struggling up to try and get back to his feet, but he barely even managed to turn around. He couldn't feel his legs anymore, and with one of his arms dangling limply to the side he had all of a single limb left under his control.

  Eyes squeezed tight, rasping desperate breaths, he stared upwards as the man who'd launched the signal came closer in a blur of movement that took him alongside Wu Hao's own route across the rooftops. He managed an elegant landing instead of Wu Hao's own abrupt crash, though.

  Shan Guoxi stared down at Wu Hao. His qi raged within him, twice the weight of Shan Kong's own, with similar scents of oil and seawater. It swamped the area until Wu Hao could smell nothing else.

  "Boy," Shan Guoxi said. "You've caused me a lot of trouble."

  Wu Hao wheezed a laugh, then lisped out a breathy "Fuck you."

  Shan Guoxi's qi spun with anger. "Peasant scum. You think you're a genius, huh?"

  He drew his saber, a fancy construction that nonetheless betrayed that the man who wielded it was familiar with the act of massacre. Its gilded handle and its well-polished sheen couldn't hide that this was a weapon meant for war, for slaughter.

  "Here's a secret," Shan Guoxi said. "You're only a genius as long as you're alive. When you're dead, you're just a could-have-been."

  Wu Hao's working arm had dragged itself slowly across his belly, trying to find if he had one of his knives left. All of them had been thrown or shattered, though. There was nothing for it but to simply prop his back up against the wall, try to raise his saber, and wait for the killing blow.

  "I am a genius," Wu Hao said, and believed it. "And, starting from tonight, I'll be in your son's nightmares."

  "Just for that," Shan Guoxi said icily, "I'll make your suffering last longer."

  Shan Guoxi harrumphed coldly, and then began to gather qi from his entire body. It drew from everything, an invisible weight that Wu Hao could feel being ripped from the air and forced into smaller, tighter loops around Shan Guoxi's saber, coating it entirely and forming deep currents that extended past the blade to form a saber at least twice as large, wickedly sharp, carved from water.

  Wu Hao's saber technique and Shan Kong's saber techniques had had in common a sort of noise, but Shan Guoxi's saber was entirely quiet. It glided smoothly through the air, bobbing slightly in time with movements from something beyond even Wu Hao's sight.

  Huh, Wu Hao thought, mildly impressed. A Heaven-tier art. Shan Guoxi gripped the saber with both hands, and then almost slowly swung it across Wu Hao's body.

  "Racing Current Saber Art," Shan Guoxi declared. "Yangtze Gorge."

  Wu Hao could only scream in return until even that faded and, excruciatingly slowly, he finally died.