SHADOWS OF THE VALLEY
Chapter 1: The Man from Nowhere
Date: March 12, 1936
Location: A nameless valley, 20 li west of Yan'an, Shaanxi Province
The cold was a thief. It stole into the seams of Li Fan's anachronistic multicam uniform, leached the warmth from his bones, and tried to pilfer the very resolve from his heart. He lay in a shallow scrape on the wind-scoured ridge, the coarse yellow earth of the Loess Plateau gritty against his cheek. Below him, the valley unfolded like a rumpled, dusty blanket, dotted with stubborn patches of winter-dead grass and clusters of skeletal birch trees. A thin ribbon of a river—the Yan River, he'd deduced—glinted dully in the weak afternoon sun.
One week, he thought, the mantra running on a loop alongside his tactical assessments. One week since the light, the noise, the feeling of being pulled through a sieve, and waking up here. 1936. Shaanxi.
His high-tech gear—the compact assault rifle, the PVS-31 night vision goggles, the encrypted radio—were now artifacts from a future unborn, as useless in this context as a moon rock. Their power cells were dead, their advanced composites just strange, heavy junk. All he had left were his knives, his wits, and the indelible software of his mind: eight years of People's Liberation Army Special Operations training, hard-wired into muscle memory and thought process.
His immediate problem was more pressing than temporal displacement. It was the column of men snaking along the valley floor. About thirty of them. They moved with the weary, loose disorder of a local militia, not a regular army unit. Their clothes were a motley collection of padded blue jackets, sheepskin vests, and faded grey uniforms. They carried an assortment of Mausers, Hanyang 88s, and a few Nambu pistols. One man had a legitimate light machine gun—a ZB-26, Li Fan noted professionally—carried like a sacred relic.
They were chasing a smaller group. Five figures, scrambling up the northern slope of the valley towards Li Fan's position. They were younger, desperate, using the terrain with a nascent instinct. But they were slow, clumsy, and leaving a trail a blind man could follow.
Li Fan's modern ethics screamed at him to stay hidden, to observe, to not contaminate the timeline. His soldier's heart counted the odds. Thirty versus five. An execution, not a fight. The larger group's leader, a bulky man with a Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" in his fist, was herding them like prey, his laughter echoing faintly up the slopes.
Damn it.
The decision wasn't heroic; it was tactical. He needed assets, eyes, local knowledge. These five desperate souls were a potential resource. A starting point. The bullies below were a clear and present danger. The equation, in his special forces calculus, solved itself.
He moved. Not down the slope, but laterally along the ridge, keeping the crest between him and the valley. His movement was a study in controlled efficiency: low crouch, balanced weight, eyes scanning ahead and to his flanks. He covered two hundred meters in silence, his breath a faint mist in the cold air. He intercepted the five fugitives' projected path just as they crested the ridge, gasping and staggering.
They froze, eyes wide with a new terror. He was a phantom to them: his pixelated camouflage was like nothing they'd ever seen, his gear webbing alien, his face smeared with dirt and a focused lethality that was unmistakable. One of them, a boy no older than seventeen, fumbled with an ancient revolver.
"Don't," Li Fan said, his voice low but carrying the whip-crack of command. He pointed a gloved finger at the boy, then down at the pursuing militia now beginning the ascent. "They are the problem. I am not. Get down, shut up, and do exactly what I say if you want to see sunset."
Their leader, a man in his mid-twenties with intelligent eyes set in a gaunt face, hesitated for only a second. He nodded sharply, shoving the boy down. "Do as he says!"
Li Fan ignored them for a moment, his full attention on the enemy. The militia was overconfident, bunched up, noisy. The ridge provided a perfect defilade position. He had the high ground, the sun at his back, and the element of surprise. But he had five untrained, panicky civilians behind him.
"You," he hissed at the leader. "Name?"
"Zhao Quan."
"Zhao Quan. These men listen to you?"
"Yes."
"Good. You are now my second-in-command. Tell them not to shoot unless I am dead and overrun. Understand? Their job is to stay flat and watch."
Zhao Quan blinked, the strange title 'second-in-command' hanging in the air, but he relayed the order in a frantic whisper.
Li Fan turned back. The lead elements of the militia were seventy meters downslope. He hefted a rock the size of his fist, judged the wind—a slight breeze from the north—and hurled it in a high arc. It landed with a loud crack in a patch of scrub thirty meters to the east of the militia's line of advance.
Every head swiveled towards the sound. The man with the Broomhandle, their commander, barked orders, pointing.
Wrong direction.
Li Fan selected his first target. Not the commander. The machine gunner. The ZB-26 was the only force multiplier they had. The man was struggling up the slope, the gun's bipod catching on brush. Li Fan's hand went to his combat knife. He gauged the distance, fifty-five meters. Too far for a reliable throw in this wind. He needed him closer.
He let them come. Forty meters. They were starting to pant, their focus on the scrub where the rock had landed. Thirty meters. The machine gunner paused, setting the gun down to adjust his sling.
Now.
Li Fan rose to one knee, a smooth, unhurried motion. He didn't yell. He didn't brandish his knife. He simply made himself visible. For three long seconds, the militia stared, confused by this apparition.
The commander recovered first, raising his Mauser. "Fire!"
The shot went wide. The chaos Li Fan needed erupted. The militia, startled, fired a ragged volley. Bullets zipped through the air overhead or kicked up dirt ten meters short. They were shooting uphill, unbraced, adrenaline destroying their already poor marksmanship.
Li Fan moved during their reloading frenzy. He broke right in a low sprint, vanishing behind a fold in the terrain. He circled, his boots soundless on the hard earth. He emerged twenty meters west of his original position, now level with the militia's flank. They were still focused on the empty scrape.
The machine gunner was hissing at his number two to feed the belt. Li Fan was fifteen meters away, downwind. He palmed a smaller, sharper throwing knife. He drew, aimed, and released in one fluid motion. The blade spun twice in the air and buried itself to the hilt in the gunner's throat with a sickening thunk. The man gagged, collapsing over his weapon.
Panic, real and visceral, shot through the militia. Their key weapon was down, and they hadn't seen where the attack came from.
"Ambush! Ambush!" the commander screamed, firing wildly into the brush.
Li Fan closed the distance. He was among them like a shadow. He disarmed a man swinging a rifle butt at him with a brutal wrist lock, snapped a kick into another's knee, and drove his elbow into a third's solar plexus. It was close-quarters brutality, efficient and silent. He used their bodies as shields, their confusion as his weapon.
The commander, sensing the tide turning, turned to run. Li Fan didn't chase him. He scooped up the fallen ZB-26, checked the feed—a 20-round box magazine—with a practiced hand, worked the charging handle, and shouldered it. It was familiar, a weapon of this era, solid and reliable.
A single, aimed burst of three rounds kicked up dust at the commander's feet. "Next one finds your spine!" Li Fan shouted, his voice echoing in the sudden, shocked silence. "Drop your weapons! Now!"
The remaining militiamen, seeing their leader frozen, their machine gun in the hands of this demon, complied. Weapons clattered to the ground.
Li Fan kept the light machine gun trained on them. "Zhao Quan! Bring your men down. Secure them."
The next ten minutes were a blur of activity under Li Fan's terse commands. Zhao Quan and his four companions, their fear now mixed with awe, efficiently bound the militiamen's hands with their own belts and scarves. They collected the weapons, forming a tidy pile. The commander, a man named Hu, glared with impotent fury.
Li Fan interrogated him briefly. They were a local "protection detail" for a minor warlord, shakedown artists preying on refugees and small villages. Zhao Quan's group were deserters from a spent Kuomintang unit, trying to get home to Shanxi, and had refused to pay a "toll."
"Your 'protection' is over," Li Fan said, his tone final. He made a quick decision. He couldn't take prisoners. He wouldn't execute them in cold blood. "You will walk north. You will not look back. If I see any of you south of this valley again, I will not be so lenient." He punctuated his point by firing a short burst from the ZB-26 into the hillside above their heads. They scrambled away, stumbling in their bonds.
Silence returned to the ridge, deeper now. The five young men stood around Li Fan, staring at him, at the pile of guns, at the body of the machine gunner.
Li Fan exhaled, the professional detachment settling over him again. He looked at his new… recruits. Zhao Quan, steady but shell-shocked. The boy with the revolver, who introduced himself as Chen Rui, his hands still shaking. A wiry, sharp-eyed man named Liu Feng who had watched the entire engagement with a scavenger's intensity. The other two, Wang and Bao, were solid but unremarkable.
"Gather round," Li Fan said, squatting by the weapon pile. They knelt around him, a primitive council of war. "My name is Li Fan. I am a soldier. You just became soldiers too. Not by choice, perhaps. But it's done."
"Who… who are you with? The Red Army? The Kuomintang?" Liu Feng asked, his eyes shrewd.
"I am with myself," Li Fan said. "And now, with you. That militia will be back, with friends. Your choices are few. You can scatter, and likely be hunted down. You can try your original plan, and likely starve or be caught by someone worse. Or," he paused, meeting each of their eyes, "you can learn. You can become something they cannot hunt. You can become shadows in this valley."
Zhao Quan rubbed his face. "Learn what?"
"How to move without being seen. How to fight thirty men with five and win. How to survive." Li Fan picked up a Hanyang 88, its long barrel and bolt action archaic to him. "This starts now. Lesson one: accountability. We are a unit. Liu Feng, you have an eye for detail. You are responsible for inventorying all captured equipment: weapons, ammunition, food, tools. Report to me in one hour. Chen Rui," the boy jumped. "You showed the instinct to fight, but not the discipline. You are responsible for ensuring our perimeter is clean—no spent casings, no traces of our stay. Wang, Bao, you will assist Zhao Quan in preparing a defensive position for the night, there, on that reverse slope. Questions?"
There were none, only bewildered nods. The hierarchy, however alien, was established. Orders were given. They had a purpose.
As they set to work, Li Fan climbed back to the ridge, watching the vast, ancient landscape swallow the fleeing militiamen. The sun was beginning to dip, painting the loess hills in shades of ochre and gold.
A platoon, he thought. Five men. It's a start. A damn small one.
He thought of the decades of bloodshed to come: the full-scale war with Japan, the civil war. He couldn't stop the tide of history. But perhaps, on this small patch of earth, with these few men, he could bend its flow. He could teach them to be sharper, smarter, harder to kill. He could build not an army, but a lever. A special forces company, born a century too early.
From below, he heard Liu Feng's voice, already taking charge: "—count each cartridge twice! And that bayonet is not a digging tool, Chen Rui!"
A ghost of a smile touched Li Fan's lips. The first mistake. The first lesson. The shadows in the valley were beginning to gather.
End chapter 1