Jack would be the first to admit that he wasn’t really a fan of the local fashion. Too colorful. Too many robes. And that was the stuff intended for women. The stuff intended for men could get downright comical.

With that said, he could admit that he held a certain level of affection for a local thing called dressing gowns.

They were big. They were warm. And he felt like a badass when he strutted around in one while cradling a cup of tea – which would ideally have been coffee but they didn’t have that here so he made do.

And that feeling of badassery only continued to swell as he stared down at a mask wearing cultivator that had literally sunk into the floor outside of his room.

Or rather, they’d sunk into a mass of microbots that was positioned underneath a wafer-thin plastic sheet that was designed to look like a floor.

And it was – whenever he walked over it. His microbots would spill out of his pants, slide through the carefully positioned grates to either side of the hallway, and act as a bridge beneath the plastic.

When they were absent, the hallway was one big punji trap. When he was present and wasn’t expecting visitors his microbots functioned like a giant flytrap.

Or quicksand, he thought as he watched the woman beneath him struggle amidst the mass of chittering machines.

It was rather pointless to struggle. She had nothing to push off while she was submerged in the mass. All she was doing was tiring herself.

“Is this common?” An asked as she grumpily stomped out of his room to join him.

It was pretty clear that she wasn’t too pleased about her first ‘meeting’ with him after so long being interrupted by the woman below them. Personally, Jack was happy for the opportunity to catch his breath. An was a lot less enthusiastic about the BDSM routine than Ren was. As a result, they’d been going at it the ‘natural’ way.

Naturally, that meant that by the end of the first hour he was starting to bruise. Because, as incredible as the experience was – An was basically a battle scarred goddess – there was no denying that some fruits weren’t meant for mortal men.

Hell, the only reason he could keep up at all was his augmentations and his abuse of a small cocktail of drugs.

“Truthfully, no.” Jack responded as the assassin finally went still, staring up at them blankly. “This is new.”

And he could well guess what had prompted it.

The only question was who had sent them. Because the list of possible candidates was long, with the only group he could reliably rule out being the Instinctives.

The person below him was far too human looking for that.

He was just considering asking her a few questions in return for not being mulched from the neck down when Ren marched through the doors opposite him, flanked by a small honor guard of militia members.

Notably, not the same ones who were supposed to be on watch tonight.

“You said you had a problem.” Ren said, taking in the situation. “But I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised to see you have it well in hand.”

“Are my guards alive?” he asked without preamble.

While he didn’t have any in the hallway leading to his room, he did have a small checkpoint with six of them posted through the double doors beyond it.

He was pleasantly surprised to note that Ren didn’t seem surprised by his question. More curiously resigned. As if he’d just been in a hover car crash and his first question had been whether or not his antique pog collection was still intact.

“Alive, but battered,” she said.

“Good,” Jack said looking down at the silent and very still assassin. “I figure that buys you an extra hour of life. Now tell me who sent you?”

He wasn’t really expecting a response so he wasn’t disappointed when the eyes behind the porcelain mask continued to simply stare up at him fearfully, but silently.

“Right,” he muttered.

There was a slight gasp as the assassin’s head sank below the black chittering mass. They would live. He’d left an air pocket. He just didn’t want them hearing the rest of this conversation.

“A very effective technique,” An repeated, deliberately staying far back from the ‘pool’ that lay between himself, her and Ren. “May I ask if the beast will grow further? Or produce offspring?”

“No and no,” Jack responded.

His life would be a lot easier if he could just use a mountain of microbots to solve all his problems. Unfortunately, the neural interface had some very finite limits to it. If he tried to control too many of the machines at once, he was liable to fry his gray matter.

And not even the thing’s evolution into some sort of… proto-AI seemed to have changed that.

“A shame,” the cat girl muttered with a forlorn sigh.

Jack glanced up, just as Elwin, Lin and Huang stepped through the doors, the two mortal women accompanied by four bodyguards each. Clearly, the latter two had gotten the all-clear from the group that had accompanied Ren.

Elwin had likely just arrived and marched in without a care in the world. A state of affairs that was backed up by the fact that her guards slash watchers were nowhere to be seen.

“So Ren, Huang, any idea who sent this young woman to ruin my evening?” he asked as he elevated the top half of the assassin out of the muck for just a few seconds before plunging them back down.

The question seemed to jar Huang out of her unabashed staring at An.

“Unfortunately no,” the former magistrate said after a brief cough. “The, uh, mask this one is wearing is a Wu Lian mask. Officially outlawed of course, but I’m sure just about every sect in the city has a few in storage somewhere. Certainly, I saw enough of them over the course of my tenure as Magistrate.”

“People tried to assassinate you?”

“Oh yes.” Huang said, genuine confusion in her tone, as if he’d just asked if the sky was blue. “At this level of politics, the occasional assassination attempt is to be expected. Of course, usually those aimed at me came from people who had nothing left to lose, but that still meant I received one every other year or so.”

Jack frowned. The more he heard about this job the more it sounded like the sort of high level politicking between megacorps that he used to read about in the news back home.

“Right, so a Wu Lian mask?” he asked.

“It’s a mask that cannot be removed without also removing the face of the person wearing it,” Ren interjected, drawing a frown from the former Magistrate at being interrupted.

“That’s… hardcore.” Jack whistled as he looked down into the pit. “And also not a problem for me.”

He didn’t need to remove the mask to be able to get a scan of the face beneath it.

“Truly?” Ren asked, surprised. “I suppose such is to be expected of the Craftsmen of Ten Huo.”

Jack smiled at the reminder of the latest title he had received. As of his last count he had Dragon-Slayer, Hidden Master of Ten Huo and Craftsmen of Ten Huo.

He had a feeling that the last one was actually intended to be a snub perpetuated by his political enemies. After all, craftsman was pretty much two distinct words for weak in the local tongue.

Which showed what the locals knew. Now that he was set to be Magistrate, he could really kick the local industry into high gear.

Food. Factories. Roads. Trains. Communication. Centralization. Standardization.

Those were the things Empires were made of.

“Alright, so if I could get you an image of their face, could you identify which sect they came from?” he asked.

Ren and Huang nodded, though it was the former that spoke first. “The city is not so full of cultivators that one could slip through my notice. I make it a point of at least being able to put a name to any face I might encounter.” She paused. “And even if I cannot, I can find someone who can before daybreak.”

Jack grinned.

“Alright.” He turned to the Imperial Princess. “Huang, if you successfully managed to identify who sent an assassin your way, what would you do to them?”

She didn’t hesitate with her answer – and while he had a feeling he’d already sort of known what she was going to say, it was gratifying to hear it from the dragon’s-lips all the same.

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

It wasn’t hard to transport his guest into the scanner. He’d basically just rolled them into his workshop in a giant ball of microbots.

Keeping them still wasn’t difficult either. Predominantly because they were dead by the time he’d had them re-emerge so he could stick them full of enough sedatives to knock out a rhino.

A poisoned tooth.

Hardcore, he repeated to himself. Though I really should have already known that, given the whole ‘face removing’ mask thing.

The gentle humming of the scanner going to work was his only answer. The rest of his… harem were out and about doing their own thing. Even Huang. The woman was being given a tour of Lin’s ‘engineering department’.

Which was still more or less just An and a few lower level craftsmen that she’d managed to tempt away from other dead end work or find amongst the refugee population. Unfortunately, it seemed that for all Lin’s talent, she was still just a mortal with no real standing outside of his organization. If he was actually going to get some real talent working on solving problems he couldn’t, Jack was going to need to do some of the headhunting himself.

“So, are you going to do anything about this?” he asked the only other person present.

Without so much as a sound, Yating seemed to appear out of nothing on a nearby console.

“You know, it never stops surprising me when you manage to do that,” the Rooster stated. “One day you’ll have to tell me how.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“So presumptuous.” Yating giggled. “You were much more polite on our first meeting.”

Jack shrugged. “During our first meeting I was mostly trying to avoid being turned into a smear on the carpets by an angry diety.”

Now he knew the chicken needed him. So he could afford to let some of his… inner Jack out.

“Oh, I’m not complaining. It’s actually a little refreshing. I mean the constant bowing and kowtowing is fun and all, but it can grow a little tiresome. Variety is nice, you know.”

Unbidden, Jack’s thoughts leapt to Lin.

“I get it,” he said slowly.

“I’m sure you do. You’ve built quite a little cult of personality here.”

Jack’s fingers danced across the tablet in his hand with a deftness that was rather at odds with his size. “And you’re avoiding my question.”

“I would have thought you’d be used to that by now?” Even Yating spoke, his hands wandered idly over the keyboard of the console he was sitting on – fruitlessly, given that Jack had long since turned off the machine’s inputs using his neural interface.

The miner turned, staring the Rooster dead in the eyes. “Ice cream cake.”

The divinity twitched.

“Pardon?”

The human turned his attention back to the miniaturized MRI machine that was currently scanning a corpse. “Quit dancing around the topic and I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.”

“I, uh… ok?”

It was actually rather amusing to see the incredibly powerful entity be caught so flat footed by his proposal. It was all rather gratifying to know that Jack was beginning to get a handle on the immortal’s personality.

Novelty was the Rooster’s weakness. While Jack wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that the being was desperate for anything new, the possibility of it was usually enough to catch his attention in a very real and tangible way.

Which was a very useful lever to have on a being that otherwise as flighty as the wind and as terrifying as a hurricane.

“I think I would do more harm than good by intervening here,” Yating said with slowly.

Jack paused. “Elaborate, please. Remember that I’m not from around here.”

“No, I suppose you’re not.” The immortal cocked his head. “What I mean is that this first attack is a probe by your enemies as much as a genuine attempt to remove you from the board. While I’m sure that cultivator was a reasonable valuable and difficult to replace asset for whomever sent them, I doubt they seriously expected them to succeed in their task.”

The rooster hopped off the console, strolling across the room to poke at an assembly arm – while it was in the process of piecing together a set of tank tracks. “If I intervene though, I’m willing to bet that your enemies will begin to wonder if perhaps that assassin got closer than you feel comfortable. So much so that you needed me to cover for your… weakness.”

Yating turned around. “And given that my whole reason for elevating you over Shui relates to your ability to project strength to my enemies, I refuse to partake of any action that might make you look weak.”

Jack scoffed, even if he could see the logic of it. “Even if that results in me getting shanked in my sleep tomorrow?”

Yating shrugged. “Given the strength of the enemies we’re up against, if you’re incapable of fending off a few angry sect leaders in your home city, I think I might be better off with you getting shanked tomorrow. It’ll give me extra time to start preparing my apology for Fishy for my little… act of rebellion.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “You’re an incredibly shitty partner.”

Yating grinned and shrugged.

Still, as the miner turned back to his scans, he had to admit that the immortal had a point. Before he made any more plans for the future, he needed to get his affairs in order here.

That meant squishing the rebels and malcontents that were still in the city.

Fortunately, Jack thought. I already had a plan to do just that. This latest fracas just means I’ve got to expand it a little.

He was about to say as much when the Divinity twitched again.

“I have to go,” they said without preamble, a deadly seriousness in their voice.

“What?”

The Rooster wasn’t even looking at him, his gaze was on something off in the distance, beyond the walls of Jack’s workshop. “The Empress has made her move. One of my… siblings is approaching the borders. Likely to investigate you, the Red Death and my ‘disappearance’. They’ll reach the easternmost fortress of Jiangshi in hours.”

Jack swallowed. That wasn’t great.

However, neither was having Yating out of the city. Unreliable or not, it was nice to know that the Divinity was in his corner.

Unfortunately, he didn’t get a say in what the Rooster planned to do, because between one eye blink and the next, they were gone.

“Yating?” Jack called. “Yating?”

Nothing. His scans were coming up empty too.

The Rooster was gone.

And Jack was once more proverbially on his own.

“Shit,” the miner muttered.

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

“Does this seem conveniently timed to anyone else?” Jack asked. "We get a 'request' for a meeting with the council mere hours after Yating gets called away for something?"

He marched towards the palace with An and Ren on either side and Elwin trailing irritably behind. Huang had, curiously, decided not to come.

She was still with Lin doing… something.

Then again, I suppose coming here would probably be bittersweet, he thought as he stared up at the great double doors of the Imperial Palace.

Though to call it the Imperial Palace still was false advertising at this point. The surprisingly subdued black and whites of the various Imperial flags and tapestries had long since been removed, to be replaced with a riot of colors from a host of different sects. Each one seemed more ostentatios than the last, as if each was battling for prominence in the viewer’s eye.

The same went for the many guards strewn about the place. To give the Sect their due, the mortal guardsmen positioned at checkpoints across the area looked every bit of professional as the Crimson Guard they had replaced.

He also couldn’t help but note that each carried a revolver rifle, which was a step below the bolt actions carried by his own troops, but a league above the muzzle loading blueprints he’d supplied to the sects. And the only people he’d supplied them to were the old Crimson Guard.

Which likely meant the weapons he was now seeing had literally been taking from the cold dead hands of the previous owners.

The whole thing served as a swift reminder of what would happen to him if he fucked up here. This was a den of vipers he was walking into and not a one of them would hesitate to swarm him if he showed even a hint of weakness.

So I suppose it’s better to start strong, he thought.

Fortunately, he hadn’t come alone.

His ever present squad of bodyguards marched in perfect lockstep behind him as he marched up the stairs of the palace.

They weren’t what drew the eye of every guardsmen present though.

No, that privilege was reserved for the massive crawler that marched along behind them, the sounds of its mighty footfalls translating up through the concrete floor in a way that not even Jack’s own armored suit could match.

It was a rare model. One of only two variants brought along by An that was still equipped with a cannon mount. Apparently, she hadn’t had time to retrofit the last two of the thirty odd machines she’d brought along before she’d decided that the Jiangshi militia needed to march to reinforce Ten Huo – and Jack specifically.

Fortunately, that small oversight worked in Jack’s favor now as he stared up at the great double doors of the Palace. Made of some kind of heavy wood and inlaid with some of the finest carving the miner had ever seen in person, the man could still see hints of damage here and there from when the Palace had fallen under siege barely a week ago.

Whoever had been set to fixing it had still done an excellent job though.

Seems a shame to waste all that work, he thought.

Still, needs must.

“Fire,” he said simply.

The doors to the palace exploded violently as the crawler’s cannon spoke with the force of a hurricane, sending shards of wood lancing through the air as a cannonball the size of a man’s torso sailed through the double doors, blowing the entrance to the Palace wide open.

“Ladies,” Jack gestured before him in the stunned silence that followed.