Signal in Lungmen's lower city had always been terrible.
At the end of the day, that was because when Lungmen had first been built, the only thing its founders cared about was the convenience of the upper classes. The lives of those in the lower districts had never entered the equation.
Even after eight years under Wei Yenwu's rule, that still had not improved. So the moment Ch'en Hui-chieh and Talulah's guards entered the lower city, they were completely cut off from everyone back in the upper city.
"Miss Swire's and Miss Lin Yuhsia's guards are way too negligent. They didn't even notice their young ladies had already slipped out. If we hadn't still been here, wouldn't the young misses have come to a place as chaotic as the lower city completely on their own?"
One of the guards could not help but grumble.
At first, they had assumed that with Swire and Lin Yuhsia involved, there was a ninety-percent chance a whole crowd of bodyguards was tailing the girls anyway, so there was nothing to worry about.
Who would have thought that once they got onto the inter-district rail, they would realize—damn it—the only ones who had followed them were the four of them.
The guards were not overly worried, though.
They had all been personally selected and raised by Wei Yenwu. After the losses Wei Yenwu had suffered in his battle with Koschei eight years ago, these men had been trained by a former Yan Imperial Guard himself, under a simplified version of the Imperial Guard training regimen, into elite shadow guards.
They did not have the uniform equipment of the true Imperial Guards, and so they were destined never to reach the standard their teacher once had. But against ordinary street thugs, the difference was absolute.
"It's getting late. Stay alert. Teacher didn't order us to force the young ladies back because he trusts us. We absolutely cannot betray that trust."
"Yes, sir!" x3
The guard leading them had, the moment he realized there was a problem, contacted his teacher—the leader of all these shadow guards—and asked whether they should bring the four children back by force.
The answer he got was simple:
There was no need to interfere.
What this Feline guard likely never imagined was that after he passed the message up, his teacher immediately handed the matter to his own superior—
Wei Yenwu.
The dragon-headed man had merely glanced at the message.
"I know."
Just as most guards did not believe there was any real danger in Lungmen, Wei Yenwu had the same confidence in the city under his rule. He simply did not believe that a group of children, surrounded by a cluster of guards, could possibly come to harm. In all of Lungmen, aside from himself and the Rat King, there was no one who could silently eliminate more than a dozen well-trained bodyguards.
Lungmen would never permit a third force like that to exist.
The former Yan Imperial Guard who relayed the message probably never imagined that after it reached Wei Yenwu, Wei Yenwu would read only the first line—
Miss Ch'en Hui-chieh and Miss Talulah have slipped out. Miss Swire and Miss Lin Yuhsia are accompanying them.
—and then tuck the note beneath a stack of documents and go straight back to handling Lungmen's affairs.
If Wei Yenwu had kept reading, he would have seen the line explaining that Swire's and Lin Yuhsia's guards had not followed them. Had he done so, he might well have made a different decision.
And it was because of that same overconfidence that when Swire and Lin Yuhsia—both themselves supposed to be under protection—also ran into the lower city, their own guards only realized it far too late.
"You're saying the young miss isn't at your lady's house?"
"The other young ladies aren't there either?"
"Then where did they go?"
"..."
The moment the guards realized they had lost the people they were supposed to be protecting due to sheer carelessness, they first searched the nearby area. After piecing together the girls' trail, they hurried toward Lungmen's lower city. Only after descending from the inter-district rail and completely losing all trace of them did the guards finally realize the sky had fallen.
So they frantically contacted their superiors.
The man on the other end almost fainted with rage. A bunch of supposedly professional bodyguards had spent their days idly strolling behind a group of children, never encountering any real danger, until life had grown so comfortable that they lost all vigilance. They had failed to notice, at the very first moment, that the ones they were supposed to protect had gone missing.
And now, with one lapse, the children were gone.
The employees from the private security companies might at worst get fired and sued for damages. But the bodyguards from the underworld suspected that if anything happened to their young miss, they probably would not live to see tomorrow's sunrise.
"Find them! Send people out to find them right now!"
Their superior's furious roar came crackling through the communicator.
If they had possessed the standing to contact Wei Yenwu directly, they could have gotten firsthand information from the capable guards still shadowing the four girls.
But what right did they have to contact Wei Yenwu?
Swire's grandfather and Lin Yuhsia's father certainly did. But by the time the消息 reached them through the chain below, four full hours had already passed since the girls left school, went home, and then snuck out again.
The time was now eleven at night.
Several guards crouched atop one of the lower city's old tenement buildings, looking down from above at the little girls playing and bickering below. From their vantage point, they could see the street ahead clearly.
Pools of water collected in potholes reflected the dim streetlamps. The bluestone road wound forward beneath the press of old houses on either side. There were no pedestrians in sight, only insects circling the halo of the lamps with a faint, nearly inaudible buzz.
Then a few pairs of little leather shoes stepped into the street.
"I told you it was impossible to find Ch'en Hui-chieh's uncle this late at night."
Swire looked at the completely deserted street and complained.
"Let's hurry to the city wall. I heard from the butler at home that every time Lungmen docks, the dockworkers keep working day and night. There'll definitely be more people there than here!"
"Char-siu Cat, are you scared?"
"I am not scared!"
The moment Ch'en Hui-chieh called her by that nickname, Swire puffed up like an angry cat and shouted back.
"You're the scared one, you loser dragon!"
"I am not scared!"
Just as Ch'en Hui-chieh and Swire were about to start fighting, Talulah and Lin Yuhsia grabbed them from either side and pulled them apart.
"Stop arguing!"
As the oldest of the four, Talulah assumed the tone of a tiny adult.
"It's not safe walking around at night. Let's hurry to somewhere with more people. If Little Ch'en still wants to find her uncle, we can come back after it gets light."
"Hmph!" x2
Ch'en Hui-chieh and Swire glared at each other, folded their arms, and sharply turned their heads away in opposite directions.
But neither of them objected to Talulah's words.
It had already been close to ten when they arrived in the lower city. In an era with very little entertainment, once it was past ten at night, aside from certain red-light districts still open for business, normal old residential streets were already shut down. Shops were closed. Homes were dark. Who, with a wife, children, and a warm bed at home, would wander the streets for no reason at that hour?
Public safety in Lungmen's lower city was nothing like the upper city.
No matter how bold the girls were, once they entered a place with no one around, they inevitably started to show the fear proper to children their age.
"There won't be any cabs at this hour."
"How long do we have to walk?"
"Maybe an hour? Maybe two?"
"But why? Aren't we already in the lower city?"
"The lower city is huge."
Walking in front, Lin Yuhsia answered softly. She had walked the streets of the lower city with her father more than once, and was thoroughly familiar with the area, so she neither felt afraid nor thought the journey difficult.
Lungmen was a city of several million people. A city that large naturally covered an enormous area, and the lower city alone occupied fully two-thirds of the urban district.
After getting off the inter-district rail, they had first taken a cab to Fulao Street, their target destination, then spent nearly half an hour wandering around it looking for Ch'en Hui-chieh's uncle. Having failed, their trip finally returned to its original purpose:
To reach the city walls of Sector 6.
Then suddenly, Lin Yuhsia, who was leading them, stopped dead.
One after another, the others bumped into the person in front of them, nearly knocking Lin Yuhsia flat on the ground.
"Lin Yuhsia, why did you stop all of a sudden?"
"I bumped my nose!"
"Loser dragon, your tail almost tripped me!"
"..."
Listening to the noisy complaints from behind her, Lin Yuhsia lowered her little head.
It was Talulah who leaned forward to look.
"Someone's blocking the road!"
"Bad guys?"
"Or is it the police? We should hide! If they spot us, they'll definitely drag us back home."
That last bit came especially from Swire.
And when the men blocking the road heard her, they laughed.
"Little girl, at a time like this, you should be praying we are Lungmen police."
"Ura. Looks like luck is on our side."
"We thought we'd have to keep waiting longer. We wouldn't dare make a move in Lungmen's upper city."
"..."
As the men spoke one after another, the smiles gradually vanished from the girls' faces.
"B-Beatrix, hurry... hurry and call for help!"
Lin Yuhsia's body trembled. Her teeth were already chattering. The moment these men appeared, she understood that they were absolutely not ordinary street thugs.
She had grown up around gangs. How could she not know what ordinary lowlifes felt like?
With her keen sense of smell, she could even pick up the faint scent of blood hanging in the air.
These men had killed people.
And not just one or two.
When she used to walk the lower city alleys with her father, she remembered him saying that as long as she was in Lungmen, and as long as he was by her side, she never needed to fear anyone.
But if she was ever alone and met one particular kind of person, then she had to avoid them from as far away as possible.
The Zalak had exceptionally sharp senses of smell.
They could detect many scents others never noticed.
Some scents lingered for a week, a month, or even longer.
For example—
blood.
Street gang punks sometimes beat each other bloody, sure, but at most they only carried traces of a handful of people's blood.
The blood-reek clinging to the men in front of them, though—
tens? Hundreds?
These Ursus men felt like demons that had crawled out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
"Grab them!"
The instant the leader gave the order, Lin Yuhsia felt a hand seize her wrist.
"Run!"
Talulah's voice rang out through the dark alley—
and then was drowned out in an instant.
BOOM—!
Fire from an explosion suddenly flooded their vision with light. The shockwave shattered the glass along half the street in a single instant, frightening the girls into crouching down on the spot.
Then came another voice, hoarse from straining itself raw:
"Run!"
That second shout finally jolted the children back to their senses. They scrambled to their feet and fled in panic the way they had come, leaving behind a man who had just fallen from the sky, his face twisted with pain and fury.
Wei Jiu braced his half-burned body—the right side charred black by the blast—and glared furiously at the Ursus men before him.
"Standard-issue Originium bombs. How did you get those into Lungmen?"
The moment those Ursus men appeared before Ch'en Hui-chieh and the others, Wei Jiu had already ordered everyone to stay on guard. But never in his wildest imagination had he expected them to be so insane as to use high-powered Originium bombs in a residential district.
When the explosion went off, he could almost hear the anguished cries of innocent civilians being jolted awake in terror.
But the only answer he got was the shrill scream of something cutting through the air.
Whumm—!
The sound came first—but even faster than the sound itself, what filled Wei Jiu's vision was the blood-red javelin flying straight at him.
A standard-issue Ursus military throwing spear?
Wei Jiu's pupils shrank to pinpoints. He had already realized that this group was no ordinary batch of kidnappers. But even so, he had never expected them to bring out such unmistakable weapons.
And as someone assigned to routine protective detail, all he really had on hand for proper combat was a small round shield and a short blade.
His round shield knocked the javelin aside, but there was not the slightest trace of joy on his face.
Because a towering Ursus man had already followed right behind the spear and appeared in front of him.
With gear and a fighting style this distinctive, Wei Jiu instantly understood who he was facing.
"You're an elite vanguard from the Ursus regular army!"
Wei Jiu practically ground the words out through clenched teeth. The elite vanguards of Ursus were among the empire's finest troops, second only to the Shieldguards.
Why would such a person appear in Lungmen?
"No. You're wrong."
The Ursus man with the scar across his face spoke calmly.
"I'm not an elite vanguard. I'm a battle-hardened elite vanguard. Like those Shieldguards, I was once one of the pillars of the Empire."
"Yes," the man added with a sigh, "once."
Even as he spoke, the fist wrapped in tiger-knuckle rings smashed into Wei Jiu's round shield.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
One punch.
Two punches.
Three.
Until Wei Jiu's body started to sway unsteadily.
"I've seen Yan's Imperial Guards fight before, on that frozen land. Your movements are very much like theirs."
"But only like them."
"If it were really one of them standing in front of me, I would run. I'd flee this place without hesitation."
"But you?"
"You're nowhere close."
...
-------
My : pat*eon*com/RuneA
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