83. The Night of Seven Scratches

By the following evening, the Coiling Dragon Sect was prepared for siege. Jun’s defensive board hangs from the storehouse wall. Proper wood now, with channels carved for the pebbles that mark each approach lane. One token sits near the rear vent; small, painted with dark circles around its eyes.

“Is that meant to be the leader?” Wei Chen asks.

“Until proven otherwise,” Jun says.

The board is not the same as last night’s chalk and stones. The lanes are labelled. The fallback routes are marked. A red pebble sits alone near the kitchen smoke path. That is the place they cannot let it reach twice. Lian has set three new formation flags around the storehouse perimeter, each tuned to pulse rather than strike. Her hands are steadier than yesterday. Mei Lin has seeded shallow channels along the drainage ditch and storehouse approach with water to shape. To be ice when she needs it to be ice.

“One pot strike for woodpile,” Mei Lin tells the servants in the windows. “Two for roofline. Continuous if it enters the kitchen.”

“Continuous banging ruins pots,” Old Chen says from the kitchen doorway.

“Bang the pot.”

“I will bang the beast!“

“Bang the pot first.”

Old Chen retreats into the kitchen. The ladle going through the handle is audible from across the courtyard.

Wei Chen walks the center of the courtyard before the last light goes. He is not holding a position, but rather watching where the lanes compress, where the basket teams can be called, where a burst of speed would matter and where it would not. Last night, his first instinct every time the creature moved was to go after it. He had moved twice without thinking and been wrong both times, costing them the chance to capture the ringleader.

Tonight, he has already made the decision to stay.

Unless Jun calls it.

“The crow will come first,” Jun says from the board. “It drops pebbles into the courtyard near the formation flags. Small impacts. It’s trying to trigger false pulses and exhaust Lian’s concentration before the main push.”

“I can manage false pulses,” Lian says, but she does not sound confident.

“I know. Let the first two trigger. Don’t correct them. Save it for when the raccoons move.”

Lian glances at Wei Chen. He nods.

The third bell rings.

‘They’ve arrived.’

The crow arrives exactly as Jun predicted. It lands on the southern wall, drops a pebble, waits. The nearest formation flag pulses. Lian’s jaw tightens but she keeps her hands still. A second pebble. Another pulse, a little stronger than the first. Then the crow simply sits, waiting, and the courtyard holds its breath.

Then the drainage ditch erupts.

Wild dogs, lean and winter-hungry, charge along the ditch approach in a ragged line. They are fast, but the angle is too obvious. Mei Lin sees it before anyone speaks. Two fingers rise. Water pours from the seeded channels in a silent sheet across the packed earth. The first dog hits the slick ground, legs going in four directions at once. The second crashes into the first. The third skids sideways. All of them scramble back into the dark in offended yelps.

“Woodpile,” Jun says.

Wei Chen is already looking there.

Two groups of raccoons emerge. One draws toward the bait station near the stacked logs. The other angles for the shadow beneath the storehouse steps; the approach that worked on the second night, the blind spot in Lian’s old configuration.

It is not a blind spot anymore.

“Lian.”

She drives a pulse through the flag nearest the storehouse steps. Pale light blooms low across the ground, not bright enough to startle, sharp enough to make the raccoons check their footing. The second group veers. The first group commits to the bait lane. Song Li watches his basket. The raccoon darts left, feints right, commits to the gap beneath the cart.

Song Li waits.

He brings the basket down when the creature’s weight is fully committed. The thump echoes across the courtyard. The basket rattles, then holds.

Song Li stares at it. “I caught one. I CAUGHT ONE!”

The raccoon beside his foot steals the bait and runs. Song Li looks down. Then the pot banging starts. Continuous. Old Chen is hitting the wok hard enough that Wei Chen feels it in his back teeth.

Jun looks at the board. His voice does not change. “Kitchen smoke path. The real push is now.”

This is the moment Wei Chen has been waiting to misread. Last night, he moved toward the kitchen immediately. Left the center. Left the lanes uncovered. The creature exploited the gap in under three breaths.

He stays.

“Lian. Roofline east.”

“I have it!”

Wei Chen grips his sword tighter, but does not move. He trusts Jun to call the lanes. He trusts Lian’s flags to hold the eastern approach. He trusts Mei Lin to keep the drainage ditch closed. He stands at the center of the courtyard, listening to Old Chen wage war on the other side of a kitchen door.

Inside the kitchen, Old Chen is not losing. He stands between the smoke vent and the meat chest. Wok lid in one hand. Wooden spoon in the other. The creature that drops from the vent is small and bright-eyed, a white crescent across its face, clever paws already reaching.

“I have stretched thin stew until ten bowls became twenty,” Old Chen tells it. “I have fed stray children and watched disciples pretend they weren’t hungry and given them extra anyway.”

The raccoon’s paws flex. Old Chen raises the wok lid.

“You won’t take my kitchen.”

The raccoon lunges. Old Chen swings the lid, misses, catches its retreat with the wooden spoon hard enough to rattle every jar on the shelf. The creature grabs a strip of meat, turns for the pantry door–

And finds two crossed ladles, a cleaver through the handle, and a stool beneath the latch.

The only way out is the way it came in.

Old Chen hurls the wok lid at the smoke vent. It clips the edge with a ringing crash. The creature twists through anyway, but upward, onto the roof and into the open, exactly where the others need it.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The Masked Raccoon bursts onto the storehouse roof in the moonlight. White crescent. Strip of meat clenched in its mouth. Its qi is weak, but the formation stutters around it.

“It wants the woodpile wall! Same exit as the third night.”

Lian drives a pulse through the eastern flag. Light cuts across the old path toward the kitchen beam. The raccoon changes direction mid-leap and comes down on a support strut near the eaves.

“I can’t target it! It has some sort of ability that interrupts the formation!”

That is when Mei Lin moves. She pulls from the drainage channel; water that has been sitting in the shadow of the eastern wall all evening, cold and ready, and draws it up along the roofline tiles in a thin moving sheet. It reaches the raccoon’s landing zone a breath before its paws do.

“Now,” Wei Chen says.