Chapter 7 | Assassinations in the Meadows

The preparations took eleven minutes of dedicated focus that made his head feel like it was splitting open.

Calid knew the duration because he counted his own heartbeats to keep his mind from breaking the concentration due to the pain he was suffering. This body’s resting pulse was a steady sixty-two beats per minute, which was either a testament to Shao Wen’s decades of cardiovascular discipline or evidence that the man’s heart simply hadn’t received the memo about the evening’s events.

The armour matrix was not finished.

He wanted to be clear about that, even if only to himself.

What he had assembled in those eleven minutes was to a proper armour matrix what a lean-to made of sticks was to a cathedral. It was structurally adjacent, spiritually unrelated, and likely to collapse if you looked at it with any real expectation.

But it was something.

A few curved nodes at the major joints, shoulders, hips, knees, connected by spiralling channels that let the ambient Qi circulate in lazy loops through the structure. The inner shell hugged his meridian map like a second skin, reinforcing the scaffolding he’d already built. The middle layer was barely a sketch, a suggestion of force distribution that would spread maybe forty percent of an impact across the matrix instead of letting it concentrate at the point of contact.

The outer layer didn’t exist yet.

He’d get to it, probably.

If he survived the next twenty minutes.

He flexed his fingers and felt the difference immediately.

The scaffolding alone had made his hands stop trembling. The partial armour matrix made them feel like they belonged to him, as though the borrowed muscles had finally accepted a new tenant and were cautiously willing to cooperate on matters of mutual survival. His grip strength had perhaps doubled, which meant it had gone from “’elderly academic’ to ‘elderly academic who occasionally opened his own jars.’

His legs were better and the knees held without negotiation, the spine straightened without complaint, and when he took a step toward the cave entrance, the movement was smooth enough that Liang Hao’s eyes widened.

“Elder, you—”

“Stay here. Do not leave this cave or make any sounds. If I am not back within the time it takes you to count to five thousand, take the others and go south until you find water. Follow the water downstream.”

Liang Hao mimed words before he finally settled on a couple. “Five thousand?”

“Count slowly.”

Calid pushed through the moss curtain and stepped into the forest.

The night had deepened since they’d found the cave. The fires to the north had settled into a sullen, persistent glow that painted the underside of the canopy in shades of dying ember, and the smoke had thickened enough to give the air texture. The trees stood their patiently, indifferent to the fact that the world around them had recently undergone significant editorial revision.

Calid stood very still and listened.

The Qi scaffolding on his skin acted as a sensory net, picking up disturbances in the ambient flow the way a spider’s web picked up vibrations. The four demonic signatures were closer now, perhaps two hundred yards out, moving in a staggered line that covered a front of roughly sixty yards. Professional spacing, the kind of formation that said we’ve done this before and we were good at it then and we’re better at it now.

They were sweeping east to west, which meant they’d pass within fifty yards of the cave entrance in a couple minutes at most.

Calid considered his options.

Option one was to confront them directly. Four mid-stage Qi Condensation cultivators against one crippled elder with an untested partial armour matrix and a working relationship with the local energy that had graduated from ‘first date with a nun’ to ‘second date where you discover she has strong opinions about astrology… still a nun.’

Option two was to hide. The cave was reasonably concealed, the moss curtain blocked line of sight, and if the sweep line passed without detecting them, the problem solved itself, temporarily. Until the next sweep, or the one after that, or until one of the unconscious students groaned at the wrong moment.

It was no option at all, but he gave it a curious look just in case he was missing something important.

Calid was not.

Option three was to not let them reach the cave at all.

Calid chose option three, because it was the only one that didn’t rely on luck, and luck was a resource he had exhausted somewhere around the point where a cat had walked across his life’s work and he was blasted through, what he suspected, dimensional barriers that should not have been capable of doing so.

He moved into the trees.

The partial armour matrix changed everything about how the body moved.

Where before each step had been a negotiation between intent and capability, now the Qi-reinforced joints responded with something approaching obedience. His feet found purchase on the pine-needle floor without sliding. His knees absorbed the uneven terrain without buckling. His spine stayed aligned through turns and dips that would have sent him sprawling ten minutes ago.

And he was dead silent in it all.

He was still slow by cultivator standards.

A healthy Qi Condensation practitioner could have outrun him at a sprint. But he was quiet, because five hundred and seventy-four years of working in libraries had given him an instinctive understanding of how to move through a space without disturbing it, and the Qi scaffolding dampened his footfalls to near-silence by cushioning each impact before it reached the ground in a wide cone much similar to an elephants padded foot.

The first signature was the leftmost, the trailing edge of the sweep line. Separated from the nearest companion by twenty yards of dark forest and thick undergrowth.

Calid circled wide, using the trees as cover, and came up behind the figure from the southeast.

The demonic cultivator was a woman that was young. She moved with the fluid grace that marked Qi-enhanced musculature. Her eyes swept the forest in steady arcs, and the dark Qi around her hands maintained a low, ready state, not active techniques, just the ambient hum of someone prepared to kill at short notice.

She was good at her job it seemed. Disciplined and alert.

She was also looking in the wrong direction.

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Calid built the matrix six feet behind her.

A compression matrix, tight, focused, and aimed at the base of her skull. He’d refined the design since the clearing, the nodes were curved to match the Qi’s flow preference, the focal point was narrower, and the compression ratio was better by perhaps fifteen percent, which was the difference between ‘shove’ and ‘hammer.’

He released it.

The compressed Qi struck the back of her head with a sound like a hand clapping a melon. Her eyes rolled up, knees folded, and she dropped into the pine needles with the boneless finality of someone who had been very thoroughly switched off.

Calid had another matrix to catch her body.

She didn’t make a sound louder than the rustle of her robes settling.

Calid checked the other three signatures. No change in movement pattern or alarm. The forest was full of small sounds, settling branches, distant crackling, the occasional pop of superheated sap from the fires, and one more soft thump had been absorbed into the general ambience of a world having a very bad night.

He moved to the second.

This one was male and heavyset, carrying a blade that he held low and ready in a grip that suggested familiarity. He was the closest to the first, twenty yards to the right, and he was moving slightly faster than the others, which meant he was either eager, impatient, or both, and either way it meant he was paying more attention to the ground ahead of him than the ground behind.

Calid built three matrices this time.

The first was a Qi dispersal web targeted and deployed a foot in front of the man’s path. When the cultivator stepped into it, his passive Qi reinforcement flickered, just for a heartbeat. Long enough for his enhanced senses to stutter and his reflexes to hiccup.

The compression matrix hit him in the temple during that heartbeat.

He went down sideways, catching a low branch on the way, which slowed his fall enough that he landed almost gently.

Silently with the help of the third matrix that caught his weight.

Two down. Two more to go, Calid.

Calid’s chest was burning. The shattered core fragments had shifted during the exertion, and the familiar grinding pain was back, accompanied by a new sensation, a hot, wet feeling in his lower chest that suggested the fragments were cutting things they shouldn’t be cutting.

The taste of blood flooded his mouth which was strange to him considering he should have died from blood loss by this point.