[”Escape…”]

Our saving grace, if it could be called as such, was that the noose thrown around our necks was a wide spanning one.

It wasn’t a piercing stab as much as it was the sweeping scythe of a grim reaper.

Around us, more red skulls flickered to life, hovering ominously over the heads of confused bystanders. Even more were illuminating the floor below. The death mark didn’t discriminate between the guilty and the hapless, and in the chaos of the moment, no one realized the true weight of the curse that’d been placed upon them. The shouting, the panic—it was a feverish din of voices trying to make sense of why the soldiers had trapped them in this burning prison. Why weren’t they being let outside? Why were they being held back while the entire building threatened to collapse around them?

But confusion turned to horror in an instant.

One of the soldiers moved. Not like a man, but like something pulled on unseen strings, jerky and fluid all at once. He sprang to the second floor railing in a single, predatory leap, perching like a gargoyle overlooking its prey on the landing. His armor gleamed unnaturally even in the flickering firelight, a dark and dreadful thing.

One moment he was still, and the next, his fingers were buried in the neck of a marked man, the head ripped clean off before the victim even had time to scream. Blood sprayed in an arc, glistening against the firelight.

For a moment, I struggled to register what I was seeing, yet somehow, it was the sound that got me first. The wet, awful snap of bone and sinew giving way, followed by the dull thud as the body crumpled to the floor.

Had I not yanked Mei back a half-second earlier, that would’ve been one of us.

Then the real screaming started. The crowd erupted into chaos, the panic spilling over like water breaching a dam. People fought for their lives, tripping over one another in their haste to retreat from the perched soldier, uncaring who fell or who got pushed closer to the encroaching flames.

Not everyone, though.

One man stepped forward.

He was large, with a belly like a wine cask and a neck thick as a bull’s. Sweat and soot streaked his face, and the ash clinging to his naked arms made him look more like an overworked cook than a warrior. But when he moved—ah, when he moved—you could see it. The fluid grace of a seasoned wulin warrior, every motion precise and deliberate.

With a righteous yell, he spun low, his foot arcing high toward the soldier in a wide sweep meant to cripple.

It would’ve been beautiful.

Would’ve been.

The armored figure slid off its perch like oil from a jar, impossibly quick. It ducked even lower, bending its joints unnaturally, almost grotesquely, before springing upward with the force of a whip cracking the air.

Five gauntleted fingers burst from the man’s back, punching through muscle, fat, and bone as if he were nothing more than wet paper. The robust figure staggered, his attack dissolving into a gurgling cough.

Then, like a marionette with its strings cut, he crumpled to the ground.

The soldier stood there, still and silent, his hand dripping crimson.

There was no flourish, no show of brutality. Only the terrifying efficiency of someone—or something—that didn’t consider the act remarkable.

On the floor below, the rest of the soldiers were already moving. Not like men bound by duty or honor, but like hunting dogs unleashed into a pen of lambs. Targeting the marked. Ripping them apart.

I yanked Mei back with a force that surprised even me, pulling her into the press of bodies clawing and shoving to escape the bloody spectacle. The thick smoke was creeping closer, swirling and curling in the air like a living thing, turning the chaos into a hazy fever dream.

Even so, I caught the flicker of another holographic death mark fading into nothing nearby. Another life snuffed out. Another red skull gone.

"Those are not of any level we can handle!" I yelled into Mei’s ear, gripping her arm tighter as I felt her resisting, her lithe frame tensing against my hold.

Mei Faolang was many things, but a warrior wasn’t one of them—not yet, not at this point in the story.

“You’re just going to run away?” her voice was sharp, her anger unmistakable. It burned in her eyes as she turned toward me, fierce and unyielding. But that anger wasn’t for me.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It wasn’t even for the panicked bodies that barreled into us, nearly knocking us to the ground.

It was for everything else—the chaos, the flames, the screams rising from every corner of the pavilion. Everything she had worked for, everything she had built, her home, was being reduced to ash before her very eyes. Her blade glinted in the haze, raised before I’d even noticed, but it was the stubborn set of her jaw that worried me more.

I understood her. I could see it in the way her knuckles whitened around the blade, the way her shoulders trembled just enough to betray her composure. This wasn’t just smoke and fire for her—it was loss.

But I didn’t have the luxury of sympathy.

At the corner of my vision, the faint shimmer of a blue screen threatened to flare into focus. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said.

He who stands on top...

“Not running,” I said firmly, my voice cutting through the chaos like the snap of a whip. It was as much for her as it was for the screen. “Finding Nao.”

The last thing I needed was to get dragged into some unwinnable battle. I could still see the timer, a faint, mocking presence in the corner of my vision:

00:53:21...

Mei hesitated, her gaze darting between me and the chaos unfolding around us. More death marks were flickering out by the second. Five at a time as a heavy beam came crashing down from the floor above, splitting through the air with a deafening roar before smashing into the ground. It tore through the floor with a deafening quake, dragging screaming silhouettes into the darkness below.

For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath.

The smoke parted briefly, giving a glimpse of our hectic surroudnings, and in that brief stillness, my eyes locked onto two figures.

Bi Han had joined us upon the landing, his movements fluid yet relentless, like the river in flood. He was locked in a ferocious battle with the armored soldier, a dance of death that made everything else feel like a shadow play.

But even unarmed, wielding nothing but its gauntleted fingers, the soldier was relentless. Each of Bi Han’s strikes landed with a force that made the air hum, yet the figure remained undeterred. Strikes that blurred with unnatural speed, each one a near miss, each one cutting closer than the last.

As much as I wanted to look away, I couldn’t.

Mei didn’t look away either. Not until a Qi-enforced yelled slammed into us.

“Run!” Bi Han roared, sharp and commanding, the single word cutting through the chaos. He didn’t look back as he said it, his focus entirely on the armored soldier before him. I didn’t have to guess who it was meant for.

Mei’s hand tightened in mine, her stubbornness like iron, but I felt her waver—just for a moment. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

Before she could reconsider, before she could throw herself into a hopeless battle out of pride or revenge, I yanked her forward—straight through the smoldering hole in the floor.

The drop wasn’t far, maybe eight feet, but it wasn’t kind. There was no graceful landing to be had, no acrobat’s roll to soften the blow. The wreckage below had turned the floor into a deathtrap, a jagged mess of burning timber and still-twitching bodies.

We hit hard.

I slammed ribs-first against the charred beam, pain flaring through my chest as I barely managed to avoid breaking my ankle on the bloated corpse of the fat martial artist from earlier. Mei crashed into me a heartbeat later, the impact forcing a ragged cough from my lungs.

The taste of smoke and blood filled my mouth, and for a moment, everything became too much.

Detached PoV flickered, the trait at the edge of my vision blinking dangerously.

The blood. The stench of charred flesh. The creak of the collapsing building, the distant, echoing screams that seemed to come from everywhere at once. My ribs screamed, my head spun, and my breath caught in the scalding air.

I felt the panic creeping up on me, a wave of suffocating terror threatening to drag me under. My pulse thundered in my ears, drowning out the noise of the world around me.

And then, like a drowning man breaking the surface of the water, it snapped back into place.

The trait returned, fainter and more fragile than before, but there. A screen hovered, translucent and weak, but still legible. I clung to it like a lifeline.

I’ll take anything I can get at this point, I thought as I rolled off the burning beam, my chest heaving. Every breath was a struggle, every movement slow and deliberate, but I didn’t let go of Mei’s wrist.

“We need to move,” I rasped, my voice raw and cracked as I tried to blink the blur from my eyes. The air was thick with smoke, and every breath felt like sandpaper scraping the inside of my lungs. There were too few death marks down here, I realized. Too few glowing skulls hovering above the heads of the damned.

If one of the soldiers found us, we’d be dead in an instant.

Whether Mei fully grasped the situation or just wanted to escape the spreading flames, she didn’t argue. There was no way back up, anyway. She cast a single glance towards a second floor where death was still clashing, and then at our dim surroundings where firelight painting the shadows like phantoms.

“This way,” she said, her voice low but steady.

I followed without a second thought, the urgency in her step pulling me along before I could argue. Too late, I realized we’d just left the last death marks behind. Now, there were only hers and mine, illuminating our surroundings.

They were like beacons, I realized to an ominous feeling settling in my stomach. Flashing neon signs that screamed Here we are! Come and get us!

And someone must’ve been listening.

We hadn’t taken more than a dozen scrambling steps down the hallway when the wall to our right exploded in a shower of dust and splinters.

I stumbled back, coughing and raising an arm to shield my face as shards of wood rained down around us. Mei froze, her blade already in hand as a hulking silhouette staggered through the jagged hole.

Outlined by the burning night outside—the sound of battle and chaos ringing even louder over the town outside—the figure loomed, grotesque and wrong. Its murky eyes swept the dim hallway, landing squarely on us.

It wasn’t one of the soldiers.

But I wasn’t sure that made it any better.

Warning! Hostile entity detected

No shit.

Its slack jaws fell open, and the sound that escaped was less a roar and more a hollow, guttural howl. It rattled in its chest like wind scraping through dead branches, and I couldn’t tell if the creature was even breathing.

There was no hesitation, no pause for thought. It simply charged.