Shawn watched in slow motion as a wall of flames shot towards him. Using a trick he learned from his time as a fly, he used what little Qi he had regenerated to create a gust of wind perpendicular to his body. For a fraction of a second, the wind diverted the flames away from him, but another surge of flame pushed forward ignoring his defensive measure.
His shoulders sagged as he ran out of Qi and the blazing hot fire brushed up against him. Just before he was consumed by the flame, Lin roughly threw him backward. He sailed through the air like a rag doll and crashed headfirst into a table. Chule screamed in an unknown language as he blurred past him, his mechanical arm crackling dangerously. As the flames rushed towards him, his vision faded to black, the impact against the table enough to knock out his exhausted self.
He groggily opened his eyes and patted down his body, he was surprisingly alive. He also somehow had made it out of the explosion with relatively minor injuries. His left arm had suffered minor burns and his head hurt, but other than that he was fine.
“What happened,” Shawn said as he sat up.
“Chule blocked the blast,” Peng said from above him. Shawn's aching mind struggled to piece together what had happened. It had all happened too fast, the memory was a blur. Lin had thrown him all the way across the room into the table Peng was sitting at. The impact had knocked him out. A shot of panic shot through Shawn as he didn't immediately see Lin. Was she okay?
Shawn stumbled forward in confusion, his mild concussion making it hard for him to think clearly. A giant metal ball rattled ominously at the epicenter of the explosion. It glowed red hot and steam wafted off of it.
Lin stopped him before he could get a close look at the ball. “It can still explode, Chule hasn’t neutralized all the fire yet, don’t get too close.” A weight lifted off his shoulders as he saw that Lin had escaped the explosion unscathed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, it hurt more when you punched me in the gut.” Shawn laughed. “Thanks for saving me. I owe you one.” Lin nodded.
From next to the ball Chule grunted in exertion. Shawn’s eyes widened in shock as he noticed, his mechanical arm was missing.
“I’ve gotten rusty," Chule muttered. Like a liquid, the metal ball flowed into Chule’s hand and condensed into a small square. Where the metal ball had once stood the floor was burnt away, all that remained was a pile of ash, the bomber's only remains.
Chule coughed to gain everyone's attention. “Is anyone hurt?” The crowd grumbled for a moment, but no one came forward. Chule really had managed to block the explosion. The stories of him being an ex-member of the sect must have been true.
“Today we have been attacked. Today the enemy came to our home with the intent to destroy us. But they failed, we’re still standing." The crowd nodded in agreement.
"That’s the last mistake they will ever make. Tomorrow we will bring the fight to them. Our revenge will be short, but vicious. Nothing will survive our wrath. By the time we are done with them there, names will be erased from the history books. Sleep well tonight because tomorrow we fight.“ The crowd roared in excitement. Weapons were drawn and the Scorpion's Den prepared for battle.
Even Shawn was somewhat swept up in the energy of the crowd and he found himself overcome with anger. The Crimson Lotus Gang had crossed every line he had drawn, wronged him at every opportunity. Three times now there members had almost killed him. They were an existential threat to his survival, he wouldn’t be safe as long as they existed. Before, he was content to let someone else take care of them, but now he wouldn’t be satisfied till he confirmed firsthand that they were erased.
Lin tapped him on the shoulder an unreadable expression on her face. “Meet me in the tavern at 6 in the morning.” She disappeared into the crowd before he could respond.
Shawn climbed the stairs and went to bed, not even bothering to change out of his clothes. For the first night in a long time in a week, he slept for more than four hours. He woke up feeling refreshed and his wounds from last night had almost completely healed. Additionally, injuries and ailments that he didn't even know he had disappeared, making him feel like a new man. His increased stats were really showing their worth.
He splashed his face with water and walked downstairs to the tavern, wondering why Lin wanted to meet so early in the morning. He was never a morning person, he always preferred to wake up later and laze about in bed. He exited the stairwell to find Lin and Tian sitting together at a table. Tian motioned for him to come and join them.
“We are attacking the Crimson Lotus Gang's main moon leaf production center. Are you in,” Lin said as soon as he sat down?
“Of course, I’ll help you. You saved my life. But why me, I’m not that strong, isn’t there someone stronger you’d rather have help you.”
“You’re stronger than you think. Besides, you don’t actually have to fight anyone. All you have to do is watch the cameras and tell us where the guards are. Are you in?”
Shawn hesitated for a moment before nodding. If both Tian and Lin were there it should be safe enough. “Good there’s no time to waste, follow me,” Lin said and led them to the garage. They all hopped into a flying car and before he knew it, they were high in the sky flying above the cityscape.
“So, do we have an actual plan or are we just busting down the front door,” Shawn said.
"Of course, we have a plan, we are going to blow a hole in the side of the building, to gain direct access to the control room. Once we take control of that room, you’ll stay there and unlock doors for us remotely.” She handed him a hands-free headset and a small duffel bag. “You’ll also be in charge of watching the cameras to make sure someone doesn’t sneak up on us.”
“Sounds easy enough.” He watched his fair share of youtube videos, so he felt he was adequately prepared to stare at computer screens. He opened the bag and saw a dark cloak and a white mask. “What’s with the outfit,” he asked.
“It’s to protect your identity, you don’t want anyone to recognize you after what we’re about to do.” Lin put on a matching outfit in the passenger seat of the car.
“Plus, they look cool,” Tian added.
“That’s the building we are hitting. It’s one of the locations the Crimson Lotus protects most heavily,” Lin pointed to a windowless tall building made out of a material he didn’t recognize. The material glinted in the sun like metal, but it was stacked like it was a brick. All in all, the building cut an opposing sight, dominating the local skyline.
“That’s why we're getting in and out quickly, there are too many guards in the place for us to fight by ourselves.” He unzipped his duffle bag, revealing that it was filled with explosives. “We’ll destroy their moon leaf production equipment and be gone before they realize we were there.”
Shawn put on the outfit, donning the mask last. It was surprisingly non-intrusive, not limiting his vision in the slightest. “How do I look,” Shawn asked?
“Good,” Tian said as he shot him a thumbs up.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Like you shouldn’t be allowed near children,” Lin said at the same time.
“Thanks.” Tian parked the car in a structure about a mile away from the building they were targeting. Shawn and Lin waited outside of the car while Tian changed.
“If you see any white powder in the building don’t breathe it in,” Lin said. Shawn nodded. “Moon leaf was originally a plant used as a tool to advance the users' cultivation base by altering their mental state. However, companies figured out they could sell more of the product moon leaf if they added an addictive hallucinogenic substance to the mix. Cujo, is the drug that the they most commonly mix in with moon leaf. If you breathe too much of it you’ll have a heart attack.”
Shawn tensed, he didn't want to get near a drug that could kill him if he inhaled it. His mother had always told him to stay away from them. However, a cold analytical part of his mind noted the genius of their strategy. If cultivation pills all had components in them to build an addiction in the user, the companies would make much more money.
Of course, once the users were hooked they could put less actual moon leaf into the pills, and instead put more Cujo into it, making it more dangerous and addictive. From what he had seen of the people taking the drug, he doubted the Crimson Lotus put much if any actual moon leaf into the pill.
"Don’t scare him, he’ll be nowhere near anything dangerous,” Tian said as he exited the car, his blond hair completely hidden by the outfit. "All you have to do is watch the cameras, you'll be perfectly safe." Tian patted him on the back to reassure him.
Tian led them through a winding route of alleyways before they reached their destination. They stood in an alley next to the building, hidden from detection. Tian wasn't lying when he said the building was heavily defended. Armed guards, wielding swords and axes patrolled the perimeter of the building. With his enhanced perception he could even catch a glimpse of a camera posted on top of the building.
They waited for a moment in the alley, going over their plan one last time.
The guard responsible for watching their side of the building walked through the front doors, leaving it undefended for a moment. “Are you guys ready? We have only a minute till the new guard comes out here,” he said. Shawn and Lin nodded.
“Let’s do this,” Tian said as he threw a rock behind his back without looking. It curved through the air in a perfect arc and destroyed the camera monitoring the side of the building.
Blood red Qi pooled in Lin’s hands as she leaped into the air, cutting a hole into the side of the building twenty feet into the air. Despite the destructive nature of her attack, it was completely silent. Shawn’s mouth hung open as she crawled through the hole she had created.
They waited in suspense for a moment before Lin turned on her headset and told them the coast was clear to go up. Tian nodded and gracefully jumped into the hole.
Shawn reinforced his body with Qi and prepared to jump. However he hesitated, intellectually he knew he could make the jump. With [Qi Enhancement] activated he was more than ten times as powerful as the average human on Earth. The jump should be doable, but he was still scared of trying.
“You coming?” Lin’s voice rang through his headset.
Flexing his muscles, he jumped twenty feet into the air with moderate difficulty and entered the building. He immediately stopped cycling his Qi through his body. He had to save his energy for emergencies. Their plan had sounded well thought out, but he had watched enough movies to know that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
As soon as he entered the room, Lin placed the circle of material she had cut from the wall back in its place, sealing the hole in the wall. "Nobody should notice as long as they don't look too closely," she said, standing over three dead bodies.
Shawn nodded as he cautiously stepped over the corpses, careful to avoid the rivers of blood dying the ground red.
The room was quite normal looking for being part of an evil gang's lair, consisting of a table and a row of computer screens. Of course, the three bodies dying on the ground red weren’t normal, but in the darkroom, they were easy to ignore if he focused on the computer screen.
Shawn pressed the buttons on the keyboard, taking a moment to familiarize himself with the controls for the cameras. “Are you sure you can work that thing,” Tian said?
Shawn nodded, the controls were rather simple, only requiring him to use the arrow keys to cycle through what the camera showed on the main screen. “Go fast, the room is starting to smell.” They nodded and snuck out the door.
With only dead bodies as company, he tracked their progress through the camera system, guiding them on the path of least resistance. Though he set them on the path with the least amount of guards, they still got into a few fights. They all ended quickly, the random mooks patrolling the building were no match for Lin and Tian.
After each fight, they would hide the bodies in an empty room, Shawn then would then remotely lock the door from the control room. In this way, they managed to avoid detection by the guards. Which was surprising considering the sheer amount of them in the building. The Crimson Lotus seemed to favor quantity over quality.
Perhaps, he was judging them too harshly. The building hadn't ever been directly attacked, they had no reason to be vigilant. Some of the guards took their slacking a bit too far though, cycling through the cameras, he could see that some of the guards had entirely abandoned their posts and played cards together in the breakroom.
"Which way do we go," Lin asked?
Shawn cycled through the cameras quickly feeling like a professional hacker. If he was being honest, his job was quite easy. A literal child would probably be able to do it, he had only had to intervene a couple times.
"Turn right and then go up the stairs. There's a guard outside the stairwell, but his back is turned." Shawn's forehead creased as he watched Lin easily eliminated the guard. Things were going too well, a morbid part of himself expected things to go wrong at any moment.
Shawn idly flipped through the cameras as Tian and Lin planted explosives in a room that looked something like a meth lab. His heart skipped a beat as he watched a guard lazily walk past a large pool of blood on the ground. If he had looked down, their cover would have been blown.
Shawn sighed as he sunk down deeper into the chair, it was hard to feel bad for these people anymore. They were drug dealers, getting innocent people hooked on their predatory product. He was doing a public service by helping getting rid of them.
Tian and Lin blurred through the mostly empty corridors, moving at their maximum speed. It had only been a minute since they had left the control room, but they had almost finished planting all their bombs.
In the corner of his eye, he saw a tiger walk out of a hidden compartment in the wall on the first floor. He rubbed his eyes and looked back to confirm that he wasn’t seeing things. “Guys there may be a problem. There’s a tiger the size of a car wandering around on the first floor,” he said, pressing a button on his headset to transmit the audio.
“That shouldn’t be a problem, according to the blueprints of the building, there isn’t anything important on the first floor,” Tian said, screams of pain echoing in the background.
Shawn peered through the gap in the wall the tiger had crawled out of, it was hard to tell with all the pixelation, but he thought he saw rows of crates at the bottom of a stairwell. “I’m not sure, I think they have a secret stash of moon leaf hidden beneath the first floor.”
“The blueprint didn’t say the building had a basement, but that would make sense. We’ll check it out on the way out.”
Shawn continued to watch Lin and Tian plant bombs through the camera, any opposition they faced was quickly and quietly taken care of. Somehow, no alarms had gone off yet, they were still undetected.
Shawn unlocked a door from his team and glanced back at the cameras. In the time he had looked away, a man had climbed the stairs and entered the second floor. To make matters worse the man walked down the hallway directly towards where he was located.
A knock rang out on the door. “Open up buddy, I got you some coffee,” a man said, his voice muffled by the door. Shawn swore under his breath. After hearing no response, the man pulled out a keychain from his pocket and began to fiddle with the lock.
"You two will be on your own for a minute, I got company,” he said into the microphone as he placed the headset onto the desk, not wanting to damage it in his upcoming scuffle.
He grabbed a knife off a dead body on the ground and activated [Qi Enhancement]. His muscles surged with power and he knew he was ready. This time he wouldn’t be pushed around. This time he would be the aggressor. As soon as the door cracked open, he rushed forward and tackled the man to the ground. Using his enhanced strength, the man didn't stand a chance. Shawn pushed down on him, stopping him from getting up. Shawn stabbed downward repeatedly with his knife, cutting into the man.
Exactly two seconds later the man stilled underneath him. Deactivating [Qi Enhancement], he dragged the body into the camera room leaving a trail of bright red blood. His method of hiding the body wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, but he didn’t have time to be more thorough. A trail of blood was more discreet than a dead body.
“I’m back, did I miss anything,” he said as he put the headset back on.
“No, we’re on our way down to check out the basement, do you know how to get into it,” Lin said.
“I found a keychain, maybe one of the keys on it would get you into the basement.” The door swung open seconds after the words left his mouth and the cloaked forms of Tian and Lin stepped inside.
Shawn tossed the keychain to her. “Get ready to leave, we’ll only be a minute.” Shawn nodded.