“Now, I know I don’t have a great ear for names, but I’m pretty sure that sect leader back there wasn’t who you said she would be.”

The trio were walking back through the gates of Jiangshi.

“No, she was not. Lady Cui should be sect leader of the Marble Cloud. For Yin to be leader now?” Ren shook her head. “Something suspicious is going on.”

Jack frowned. “So we’re still thinking they were trying to obfuscate how many people they had? I’m still only counting eight cultivators.”

And he doubted his little bombing run was that successful. His drones were barely tray table sized. As a result, they hadn’t been carrying particularly heavy explosive payloads. Hell, half of them had been carrying incendiaries rather than flat explosives, in the hopes of causing as much confusion as possible.

“Even in the interest of perpetuating a deception, no sect leader would allow another to assume the mantle,” An said simply.

Ah, this was another ‘face’ thing.

“So you think those missing cultivators are, what, dead? Possibly in a tussle between siblings?” As he spoke, he glanced at the nervous and waiting rows of militiamen and women on the wall.

He could only pray they wouldn’t break when it finally came down to a real fight.

“Perhaps.” Ren allowed, albeit reluctantly. “Such a thing is not unheard of.”

“It’s not common either though.” An added, in a display that was about as close as he’d ever heard the cat-woman get to agreeing with Ren.

Which meant he was inclined to take their skepticism at face value – even if it surprised him. He’d half been expecting murder to be the number one way to get ahead around here. It seemed that wasn’t the case though.

“Alright,” he sighed. “Our plan accounted for the possibility of another group being in hiding anyway, so we’ll continue as if nothing has changed.”

Both women nodded and An darted away, presumably back to her position near the town center. Ren chose to hang back though.

She paused before speaking. “Why didn’t you say that you killed Men?”

“Why would I?” Jack turned to look at her. “I didn’t see anything to be gained from it.”

“It’s… the truth though?” Ren was flabbergasted. “And as a relative unknown, being known to have defeated the rising star of the Marble Cloud Sect would have been a not insubstantial boost to your reputation.”

“To who?” he asked. “A bunch of people that are hopefully going to be very dead soon?”

Ren frowned.

He shook his head. “By contrast, if I kill this lot, it might be enough to make the next group who come to shit in my porridge back down.”

Ren winced at the descriptor. “You didn’t want to scare them off?”

“Perhaps.” He shrugged. “As you said, I’m an unknown right now. Crushing a sect leader might give me some breathing room.”

She looked down at the ground. “Kill the head of one of the ten families, no matter how new to the post, and you will certainly have earned yourself that much. Even the Overseer of Ten Huo would be obligated to step carefully in her dealings with you.”

He grinned. “Good.”

Though as Ren turned to leave, he noticed something.

A woman had just popped up over the wall. She was clearly a cultivator. Even if her little display of acrobatics in scaling the wall hadn’t proven that, her choice of dress did.

How did she get so close? He wondered.

Even if the mines hadn’t been activated yet, the militia should have gunned her down.

“Ren, wait!” he called after the departing dog woman.

He didn’t stop to see if she obeyed, as he kept his focus on the strange goings on at the wall.

Befuddled – and not a little worried – he waited for some outcry from the men and women on the wall. There was none though. They continued as they were before, staring nervously out across the no man’s land between Jiangshi and the Marble Cloud Sect army.

Was this that ‘killing intent’ thing again? Leaving his people paralyzed?

But no. The members of the militia on the wall weren’t frozen. They were still moving around. It was nervous shuffling for the most part, but that still counted.

They definitely weren’t acting like people under the effects of a cultivator’s killing intent. And he’d certainly seen enough of it in the past two weeks to know what it looked like. More to the point, Ren would surely have sensed it.

No, something fucky was going on here.

“Do you see that?” he asked quietly.

Ren glanced around in confusion. “What, my lord?”

Huh…

As he watched, the ‘invisible’ woman hopped off the wall and started walking towards him. Her steps were measured, but unhurried. No one saw her though, as she tiptoed across the main street. She actually had to step around two men dragging supplies to avoid being bowled over.

She was a few meters from him when she slowly started to unsheathe her sword.

In response, Jack sent a neural command through his suit and felt something settle into his hand.

“My lord?”

He ignored Ren’s question, as he kept his gaze on the mystery woman, thankful for the featureless nature of his helmet. She didn’t seem to have realized that he could see her.

Though she had paused when he summoned the massive double barreled gun into his hand.

He didn’t aim it at her though. Instead, he turned away, back to Ren. Not that it made any difference on his cone of vision. His suit had read his intent and pivoted its internal sensors in the mystery woman’s direction.

“Ren, do you like my new gun?” he asked.

Perhaps if he wasn’t distracted, he might have cringed a bit at that line. Or how woodenly he’d delivered it. He couldn’t help it though. He wasn’t an actor.

“It’s… nice?” Ren – the ever polite merchant – responded, cocking her head at him.

“Good.” He muttered. “That’s good.”

The mystery woman had relaxed a bit when he turned away from her, and as he’d starting talking, she’d resumed walking.

She was barely three meters from him now.

Yeah, that’s close enough, he thought.

He squeezed the trigger, with the barrel of the gun tucked into the crook of his elbow – and coincidentally, pointed right at the interloper.

Which was part of why he’d needed her to get so close. It wouldn’t have been an ideal firing stance even if he’d been using a proper weapon, let alone the powder-based monstrosity in his hands.

Fortunately, recoil wasn’t much of a factor when you were clad in a space age mining suit. Nor was accuracy too much of an issue when your target was leisurely walking toward you.

Ren jumped as the gun in his hand went off.

Quite literally.

She skidded backward, drawing her sword in a motion so smooth it was practically art.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t looking at her.

Well, she wasn’t as tough as Men, he thought as the corpse of the mystery cultivator hit the ground with a wet slap.

His shot had hit her right in the face – and given the calibre he was working with – there wasn’t much left of it. Or anything above her neck, to be honest.

To her credit, she had tried to bolt in the literal microseconds between him pulling the trigger and… impact.

Which had likely contributed to her corpse doing a rather morbid backflip before it hit the ground in a rather dramatic fashion.

The response in the surrounding area was immediate as people jumped to attention, first in response to his gunshot, and then to the cultivator corpse that had seemingly materialized out of thin air.

“Assassin!” Ren shouted, her voice carting clearly over the alarmed shouting of the nearby militia.

“A very dead assassin,” Jack opined, calmly and clearly.

Those words, and his own lack of alarm, seemed to calm down everyone in the immediate vicinity as they realized that whatever danger existed had also been dealt with.

“It seems so,” Ren murmured, eyes flitting from the corpse to him. “If the presence of Lady Cui were not proof enough, this is. Something is rotten in the Marble Cloud Sect.”

“Why?”

And god was he happy that he could finally ask that question. Pretending to be a mysterious Hidden Master was fun, but pretending to be a clueless foreigner – who was also a Hidden Master – was significantly more convenient.

Ren eyed him in confusion, before a small smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

“Ahh, sometimes I forget you are not of the Empire.” She nudged the corpse with a silk slipper. “The Misty Step and other ‘shadow techniques’ like it, are shunned in the Empire. They would be useless against an instinctual cultivator and as such may only be used against other Imperial cultivators.”

She frowned. “Not in battles or duels where cultivators may sharpen themselves against one another - seeing a net gain for the Empire - but through cowardly surprise attacks, where neither side may gain any greater insight into their Dao.”

“Right.” Jack nodded along as if that made total sense to him.

“How did you see them?” she asked looking up.

“How did you not?”

Answer a question with a question. Obfuscate his lack of competence through metaphorical bullshit. That was the way of the Johansen. And fortunately for him, Ren took his complete lack of an answer exactly as he’d hoped, as her gaze turned contemplative.

Still, it was a pretty decent question. One he was slowly beginning to suspect he had an answer to, given his own ‘encounters’ with killing intent. Or lack thereof. Either that, or perhaps the video feeds in his suit were immune to whatever strange magic shit was going on?

He didn’t know, and as the radio in his ear barked to life, it seemed he didn’t have any longer to think on it.

“Get back to the reserve,” he instructed Ren, jolting her from her reverie. “It seems that our opponents know their assassin failed and have no intention of waiting the full hour they promised us. The mortal components of the Marble Cloud Sect have started to advance.”

“Those honorless dogs,” Ren hissed.

He resisted the urge to point out how racist that sounded in a world with literal dog people – and how Ren was one herself. Or how he wasn’t too honorable himself.

“I’d say this works out better for us anyway,” he said, glancing toward the walls, where his people were lining up their rifles. “Those mortals will be exhausted after marching all the way here. That hour would have given them some time to catch their second wind.”

Ren nodded, a look of illumination coming over her features as she stared at him. It seemed that the idea that the mortals approaching them would need rest had never occurred to her. Which, as much as anything else, had been why he’d been so insistent that Kang was put in charge of his almost entirely mortal army.

Ren departed, hopping over the rooftops of the nearby buildings in that bizarrely weightless fashion that cultivators seemed capable of sometimes using.

“Kang,” he called.

“Yes, my lord?” The man responded distractedly.

“See if we can’t blunt our foes’ enthusiasm.”

Jack could almost hear the smile that stole over the other man’s features.

“With pleasure, Overseer.”

Almost immediately, he heard shouts being bellowed out by his radio equipped sergeants on the walls.

“All militia! Aim!”

Hundreds of revolver-rifles came up as one as Jack started walking back up the stairs of the wall. As he reached the top, he looked across the parapet at the unwashed masses coming towards them. Nearly three thousand people, armed with little more than farming implements and without a shred of training.

Most had probably been farmers before they were leveed into the Marble Cloud Sect’s poor excuse for an army. Forced to leave their homes and march through corrupted animal infested lands, driven by a ruling class of superhumans that cared not if they lived or died, only that enough of them reached their destination.

He wondered how many of them had families waiting for them at home? How many of those families depended on the men across from him? How many orphans and widows would be made in the next few seconds?

Another man might have felt some guilt about that. About the fact that most of these people would die in no small part due to his actions. Actions that he had undertaken not in the name of some nebulous greater good, but sheer ego.

Jack was not most other men though. After all, it took a certain kind of callousness to want to be king – or whatever the local equivalent of that might be.

He supposed he’d find out.

Just as soon as he was done here.

Provided he survived.

“Fire,” he said.

All across the line, guns fired as one booming volley, forever changing the future of warfare in the Celestial Empire.

-------------------

Kang knew how this would go.

The conscripts would go first. That was how most conflicts started.

If this were a game of Xiangqi, then the militia were pawns in a very real sense. Disposable pieces, not intended to kill, but to act as a screen and a means to lure other more valuable pieces out of position. Where they would in turn be attacked by the more valuable pieces of their foe.

So it was that the militia formed the frontmost ranks of the army. And were the first exposed to the terrible new weaponry Master Johansen had created.

He’d known they were powerful. He had, after all, spent the previous winter seeing the previous iteration of his newest weapon used against corrupted beasts.

He had, however, never seen a gonne used against massed ranks of human beings. Let alone nearly 500 hundred of them, each capable of firing six times before needing to be reloaded.

The battlefield was a cacophony of noise as the front ranks of the enemy all but disintegrated under the massed fire of the Jiangshi militia. Such was the suddenness of the carnage that confusion, rather than fear, seemed to be the prevailing emotion amongst the enemy in those first few seconds.

Which he could well understand.

The enemy had been well out of bow range. A relatively small distance in the grand scheme of things, but for a soldier on a battlefield, it may as well have been an absolute.

Yet these gonnes had changed that. And now the enemy militia were paying for it.

After a few seconds of shooting, the captains within the army seemed to connect the crackle and smoke coming from the walls with the wave of death spreading through their army. And while the exact specifics of what was killing their people no doubt evaded them, the fact that they needed to respond was as ingrained a reflex as any other.

And for a mortal on the battlefield, there were only two real options.

Attack. Or retreat.

And with their own cultivators stood behind them, not yet committed to the fight, attack was the only real option available to them. From the enemy, horns sounded loud and proud, prompting the militia to charge.

Too early, Kang sighed. Much too early.

A charge was a far more delicate prospect than most realized. Never mind that some men would struggle to sprint two hundred meters without leaving themselves breathless when they actually reached the enemy, men also ran at different speeds. And a good charge relied on every man arriving at roughly the same time, creating a single resounding blow.

As it stood, the militia would break up and become a thousand pebbles pattering against the walls, rather than a single condensed hammer blow.

Though given we’re on a wall, I suppose it’s redundant, Kang thought as he watched the front most ranks of enemy come on, more falling by the second. They would have had to stop at the base of the wall anyway.

To either hoist ladders or wait for a cultivator to break down the gates – or the wall itself.

Still, it’s bad warcraft, he thought.

Worse still, the enemy charge was even more staggered by the fact that while some of the conscripts charged, others hesitated, unwilling to charge into what undoubtedly seemed to be certain death. Those cowards – or perhaps just realists - either formed an obstacle for those behind… or were trampled by their more dutiful kin.

Either way, it created chaos in the enemy ranks that quickly brought the whole charge to a halt as those who advanced faltered when they saw that not everyone was charging with them.

And all the while, the guns on the wall continued to fire.

The finger-sized bullets fell like rain upon the enemy, dropping more and more bodies to the ground with every passing second. Already the grass outside town was slick with pools of blood from the dead and dying that lay strewn across the uneven battlefield. The enemy were packed so tight that it was impossible to miss, with some shots penetrating multiple individuals before their momentum was spent.

It was all too much.

It took less than twenty seconds from the first shot being fired for the Marble Cloud Sect’s aborted charge to become a rout.

Kang could barely believe it as at first, he watched one or two individuals turn back - but in seconds that panic had spread through the entire force. They started to flee in any direction that wasn’t toward the town.

He had little doubt the cultivators of the Marble Cloud Sect were already trying to reassert order through careful applications of killing intent, but it would be useless. Just as one could learn to ignore the paralyzing effects of killing intent through exposure, sheer terror served too.

And though the cultivators were no doubt cutting down those who tried to flee, the fact remained that there were only eight of them. And it seemed the mortals would sooner try their chances with the cultivators than attempt to brave Jiangshi’s guns.

“Cease fire,” he called.

It took a few seconds for his order to be heeded, the heat of battle making his people sluggish to respond. He also didn’t need to look over the walls to know that there’d no doubt be the usual post-battle vomiting from first timers – which would in turn set off others.

He gripped the pistol at his belt. Regardless of the changes Master Johansen has wrought, I doubt that much has changed.

With this battle, he knew that warfare across the Celestial Empire was irrevocably changed.

He stared out across the field of dead, and off towards the rapidly disintegrating Marble Cloud Sect army. But as much as things change, they also stay the same.

------------------

“Advance now!”

Yin’s sudden shout seemed to snap her second out of her stupor.

“Pardon?” the woman asked dumbly, still spellbound by the… insanity they had just witnessed.

“Take our reserve guards and advance now! Before the militia completely quit the field.” Yin hissed as she gripped at the reins of her horse.

“The guards?” Her second shook her head. “My lady, we can stop these cowards. My people will keep them from fleeing too far.”

“Fool.” Yin shook her head as she gestured to the mass of humanity that was streaming off the battlefield. The only thing that was keeping the cowards from trying to flee toward them were the ranks of her personal guard forming a bulwark between her command unit and the rest of the army. “They’re totally broken. They fear whatever… that was more than us. If we intend to reach the walls without suffering the same fate, we need to move now!”

Her second wasn’t a fool. A little slow on the uptake perhaps, but realization came over her face as she saw what Yin was saying.

“Captain!” the woman shouted to the nearby mortal. “Instruct the guard to advance. Now!”

To their credit, the ranks of her personal guard did not hesitate. At least not much. Still, they made for a markedly different sight as they advanced as a single black armored square – in some cases, pushing the fleeing militia before them.

Satisfied, Yin looked around to the rank of her initiates, who were all staring nervously at the distant walls.

“Do not fear.” She instructed. “We need only get on the wall to render our foes’ new weapon moot.” She turned to her second. “You saw it right?”

She nodded. “They are using some kind of… repeating crossbow.”

Yin nodded, even as she frowned in distaste.

The bow. The weapon of savages and criminals.

“We need only get on the wall. Amongst them. The weapon is dangerous, certainly, but only as dangerous as the mortal wielding it.”

Realization seemed to form on the faces of her fellow cultivators. “Which means they aren’t dangerous at all outside of an open field.”

Yin nodded triumphantly.

“Exactly, so long as we can get amongst them, superior skill will see us victorious. Now move!”

Her people put haste to their steeds and charged – toward where the guards were already beginning to take fire from the distant wall.

Yin charged with them, fury smoldering in her heart.

These new weapons were powerful, of that there was no doubt – and the last thing this hidden master would do on this earth would be to tell her their secrets - but ultimately, they were still in the hands of mortals.

And that meant they would be no match for true cultivators.

She still had that thought in mind when she heard a click from beneath her feet. It would have been inaudible were it not for her enhanced senses, more than capable of filtering out the crude crackle coming from the walls. Then she heard another, from a meter or two away. Then another. And another.

Soon the clearing was filled with a deluge of clicking sounds.

“Wha-”

Then something exploded and her world became pain.

--------------------

Kang couldn’t believe it.

Five hundred guards. Nine cultivators on horseback.

All dead.

They had failed to even get within fifty meters of the wall.

The very ground had erupted as one – and when it happened, it was such a surprise that more than one member of the militia had fallen backward off the wall.

At least now I know why Master Johansen had us burying ‘plates’, he thought, staring out at the man who stood motionless on the wall.

Bodies lay strewn across the battlefield in a grizly tableau. Though to call what remained ‘bodies’ might have been an exaggeration. The massive explosion had left little beyond… parts.

Guards and cultivators alike had died without so much as clashing blades with the militia.

It was… inconceivable.

Was this… really it?

--------------

Her leg was missing. Something was in her guts. She couldn’t see.

Something had exploded beneath them. Which had set off more explosions.

She couldn’t hear anything.

Where were her people?

She knew not.

She did know that she was dying.

Was this the end?

She felt so cold.

All her plans come to nothing. She was going to die in some nowhere town.

Had she killed her sister for this? Her own flesh and blood?

No.

No.

She wouldn’t allow it! She had given too much!

Something inside her shifted. Not in her broken physical body. Something in her soul.

Her Dao.

And as if in response, she felt a pulse. Another still lived. Like her. So weak that she couldn’t feel it before, but it flared to life in response to her… burgeoning breakthrough.

She was evolving. Instinctive ki surging within her.

Buoyed along by the most basic instinct of all.

Survival!