Mu and Hong looked at each other, and silently divided the tasks. Mu held out his hands non-threateningly, his tone gentle but respectful as he approached the woman.

“Okay, we're willing to help. But first will you let my colleague help you, while you tell me who ‘he’ is and who he's planning to kill?”

The woman nodded uncertainly, her nervousness growing as the Confucian scholar produced a medical kit out of thin air. He kneeled down beside her and began using his Emergency Noodle Shop Repair Technique, Human Form. (There were some really weird noodle shops out there, designed and frequented by some equally weird people.)

Her eyes widened as Hong’s yellowy, noodle-scented qi spread over her body, flowing from fingers held a modest and acceptable distance away (remember, propriety is the root of all virtue). Mu watched her unusual reaction and shook his head in amusement. Rustics.

“Are you… are you magicians?” She asked breathlessly. Mu, who knew enough of Western customs to understand what she was getting at, nodded.

“Indeed we are, and very powerful ones. So you can feel free to tell us exactly who you are so concerned about - I guarantee you that we’ll be able to handle him.”

“No, you won’t be able to… well, perhaps. Maybe, if you’re careful, you can,” she said, sounding more as if she was talking to herself than to the two cultivators. The two of them waited patiently, giving her the space she needed to think. She suddenly looked up at Mu, tears filling her eyes.

“Only you must promise me to be careful. Take everything I am about to say with the utmost seriousness - and, for Heaven’s sake, listen.”

Mu swallowed, his breath catching in his throat. This was it. This was the moment, the moment he’d been waiting for. The moment he’d been working for. The moment… to show Hong he knew how to listen. Not daring to speak, he gave a slight nod.

“I’m not from here,” the woman said. Mu pretended to be surprised. Hong gave him a look, one side of his mouth quirking up in the slightest of smiles.

“I’m from far away, from a land far to the west. I had a group of… fellows I did everything with, because we went to sch- work together. The latter. We did our work together. Well one day, my… fellows… and I were undertaking a journey together when we were hit by a horrible, uh, monster. I lost consciousness, and when I woke up I was in a small village from my favo- well, nevermind. I thought I was alone, and was going along with the pl- whims of my rescuers, who were very concerned, you know. But then two days ago I encountered one of my clas- fellows.

“Every cl- workplace contains that one quiet kid. Kind of nerdy, sits at the back… where he does his work… doesn’t really talk to anyone - certainly not to girls - constantly reading mang- oes. Mangoes. He was obsessed with divinatory fruits.”

“A tragically commonplace affliction,” Hong observed affably. In spite of himself Mu burst into laughter. The woman looked a little confused - was it actually a common affliction? - but decided to continue her narration.

“He had changed. He’d always been strange, but when I found him again he had gone off the deep end - he'd gathered a gang of thugs with promises of being the world's strongest and forcing others to give them face through certain secret methods known only to himself.”

Hong nodded in agreement, as he finished healing her. “Ah yes, the birth story of any good sect master.”

“Sect master? He’s a violent gang leader.”

“That’s what I said.”

The woman gave him a strange look as she tested her arm and confirmed it was in working condition.

“Thank you for employing your magic for my humble self. But to finish my story: he gathered up all the riffraff in the county, equipped them with his, uhhh, secret methods, and vowed to storm the baron’s house with them and supplant him.”

“…Is that all?” Mu asked, momentarily forgetting himself. “A horrible tragedy, to be sure, going off and randomly murdering someone like that, but it wouldn’t actually make him leader of the region. It would just make him a murderer.”

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The woman hung her head, looking miserable. “He means to kill the king.”

Mu frowned, trying to picture a gang of bandits from the backwoods assassinating his majesty the emperor, until he remembered the region was autonomous and had its own monarch. Then he just laughed.

Hong gave him the side eye, then addressed the woman politely. “Ignore my colleague. He knows too much about our nation’s political organisation for his own good. You need not worry about your acquaintance killing the king; we will stop him beforehand with our… magic.”

The woman looked delighted by this, until a horrible thought occurred to her. She gazed at the pair of cultivators worriedly.

“Oh, but you can’t fight him directly!”

“Whyever not?”

She seemed to struggle to think of a way to phrase what she wanted to say. “You see, his secret methods- they have- he’s designed- a stick - the Boom Boom Stick - that, when you point it at someone, it makes a BOOM sound… and they drop dead.”

Hong frowned. “Like a gun?”

“Yes! Like a- wait, what?”

“A gun,” Hong repeated. Her jaw dropped.

“Y-you- how? How do you know what that is?”

Mu let a chuckle escape him, and murmured something about Boom Boom Sticks.

“Why wouldn’t I know anything about firearms?” Hong asked, his confusion genuine. “I could understand the question if it were some obscure piece of transmigrator technology that nobody needs - say, a rocket to space, or a social media platform - but everyone knows about guns, even if most people aren’t stupid enough to use them.”

“Everyone…? But I don’t recall reading about any guns in The Baron’s Son is too Cute!” She observed in abject surprise, putting her now healed hand up to her lips.

“That’s hardly outside of expectations. The prophetic dreams of transmigrators rarely seem to include anything outside the vision given to them in the form of the ‘plot.’”

At last the woman’s thoughts, which had been limping through the woods, caught up with her. She gasped. “Wait, how did you know I was a transmigrator?!”

Hong gave an elaborate gesture to Mu, who scratched his cheek nervously. “Well it was kind of obvious, wasn’t it? First you come from a mysterious land to the west, but don’t tell us its name, as if we have no access to maps. As to the rest of the story: you and your classmates - how old are you, anyways?”

“Eighteen, turning nineteen in three weeks.”

“Right, well you and your class were driving along, when all of a sudden you were broadsided by a hideous monster-”

“Probably a truck,” Hong cut in. Mu snorted.

“No way. Nobody would ever blaspheme the great god Truck-kun, sender of the spirits of the stars, by comparing him to a monster.”

The woman stayed silent, sinking into the background.

“At any rate, you and your classmates were struck by a something or other, and you ended up in a fantasy world. You thought it was the world of The Baron’s Son is too Cute!, a prophecy given to you by Truck-kun shortly before your demise, and set about sedu- courting the son of the baron.”

“Hey, he’s cool. And aloof. And generous with his money,” the woman said, affronted, hands on her hips. Mu waved his hands in defeat.

“The rest of the story, of course, needs no narration; yours has done more than enough.” Mu said, deciding to give her some face.

“So then you know about the existence of transmigrators,” the woman murmured, “so… if I had said who I was, would the others have believed me?”

“No. Who’s to say they know what a transmigrator is, properly speaking? Perhaps they know you’re a fallen god, but perhaps they think you’re a demon. Or maybe they’ll even think that you’re just a completely normal person. You never know - there’s a lot of weird ideas out there,” Mu observed sagely. The woman looked baffled.

“Ignore him. Now, where did you say this was occurring?” Hong asked. The woman snapped to attention, then gave them the location of the city ruled by the baron. Neither of the two cultivators had ever heard of it, which admittedly was hardly surprising given that it was such a rural and out of the way place. Nor was this particularly unusual; the Great Xuan was large enough for entire regions to be outside of their knowledge.

Their journey to the town was uneventful and unworthy of remark; their arrival in town, however, was not. It was marked by smoke and gunfire, and a high pitched scream from the woman as she watched a man - her man - the baron’s son, and aloof protagonist of The Baron’s Son is too Cute! - collapse, a bullet in his chest.

Her classmate turned to face them, swinging the pistol about in his hand.

“Well well well, Geraldine, I’m glad you decided to finally join us,” he sneered, as a dozen armed ruffians stepped out of the shadows, each one toting a firearm. “It makes it so much easier if we don’t have to find you.”

His goons surrounded the party of three, guns trained at their heads.

Geraldine, the woman, raised her hands in the air. So this was it, she thought to herself, as the baron’s son bled out on the ground and the townspeople ran off screaming. This was the end.

And then Hong strode forwards.

The guns opened fire.