“You should stay inside for this,” said Sen as he stood from the table.
“Why?” asked Lo Meifeng.
“Because whatever trouble is out there, it’s not here for you. No point in dragging you into my problems any deeper.”
“Oh,” said Lo Meifeng. “I don’t plan to get involved. I just plan on watching.”
Sen gave her a look. “Watching?”
“Well, I have to assume that someone has made some catastrophic misjudgment about you. It should be entertaining to watch you correct that.”
“Suit yourself,” said Sen as he walked over to the door and stepped outside onto the porch.
Sen hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect when he walked out the door, so he wasn’t really surprised by what he saw. Chan Yu Ming was standing out in the street, flanked by half a dozen people. A swift scan revealed them to all be middle core formation or higher, although there were no nascent soul cultivators in the mix. Sen gave them all a thoughtful look. There was one incredibly bulky man who had an eager, arrogant expression on his face as if he was certain that Sen’s reputation was all talk and no action. The others looked warier, ever nervous, but Sen let his gaze settle on the face of Chan Yu Ming. She was glaring at him, her fists clenched at her side.
“Did you really think you could come back here and not have to face me?” she demanded.
“Don’t you mean you and your six friends?” asked Sen his tone indifferent.
“I know what you can do. I’m not stupid enough to fight you alone.”
Sen let his eyes sweep over the people Chan Yu Ming had hired, cajoled, or otherwise convinced to come with her on this little mission. He lifted an eyebrow.
“Apparently, you are, if this is the best you could do. I suggest you go home, think this through, and find some more people.”
“You are nothing!” bellowed the bulky guy. “I am…”
Sen chose that moment to move. He activated his qinggong technique, all but ignored the intervening distance, and smoothly drove his fist through the huge man’s chest. Sen was back where he started before anyone could blink. The sound of the bulky man collapsing to the ground drew the attention of Chan Yu Ming and the other people standing with her. They stared at the gaping bloody hole in the man’s torso, then turned to stare at Sen’s arm. The arm in question was covered to the elbow in the man’s blood. Sen waited until they were all focused on him before he flicked his arm and used a bit of air qi to send the blood in a spray that landed at the feet of the assembled cultivators. They all took a step back, looking pale and shaken. Sen unleashed his killing intent on the five lackeys. Two dropped to their knees, one ran away, and the last two started screaming in naked terror. While all of that was going on, Sen never looked away from Chan Yu Ming.
Sen debated if he should kill the cultivators. They had come to kill him. It would send a clear message. Then again, aside from the one he’d already killed, none of the others had seemed all that invested in the fight. It looked more like Chan Yu Ming had called in some favors and maybe hired a mercenary or two. This wasn’t some organization that he needed to leave terrified. They were just individuals. Killing them wouldn’t serve any purpose other than expressing his annoyance at them for bothering him. That might make him feel a little better, but it wasn’t a good enough reason for them all to die. He withdrew his killing intent.
“Leave. Now,” Sen commanded.
The two semi-coherent cultivators seized the ones who had been screaming and dragged them at speed, no longer interested in anything that had to do with Sen. He watched them for long enough that he was sure they weren’t going to double back before he started walking toward Chan Yu Ming. She didn’t precisely flinch when he looked at her, but her whole body leaned back like she’d been caught in a powerful wind. The closer he got to her, the wider her eyes grew. He stopped closing the distance when he stepped outside of the active formations. Sen gave her an expectant look.
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“Well?” he asked. “I assume you came here to fight. Shall we take it beyond the city walls? I’m not interested in killing a bunch of civilians just so you can get this out of your system.”
“You murdered my father!” she screamed at him.
“No. I didn’t. But make no mistake,” said Sen, his voice and expression going devoid of any human emotion, “I would have slit his throat without a second thought because he had it coming, and you know it.”
The noise that Chan Yu Ming made was less a human scream than a howl of animal fury. She charged at Sen, drawing her jian and slashing at him with it. There had been a time when the pair had been more or less evenly matched, assuming Sen stuck purely to swordsmanship. Since his advancement in both body cultivation and solidifying a new layer to his core, that balance had shifted dramatically in his favor. That was something that he was happy about because Sen didn’t want to kill her. He’d had some time to think about how she might see things. While Sen didn’t have parents, he did have Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho. He had heard stories about them. While none of them had done things that compared in sheer disgusting awfulness to what Chan Yu Ming’s father had done, they had all left rivers of corpses in their wake.
Given how many mistakes Sen himself had made, he had to assume that they had all made mistakes in their early days, killed people they shouldn’t have, and left more than one loved one with a thirst for vengeance. Their ascent to the heights of the nascent soul stage had insulated them in all practical ways from anyone actually taking that vengeance. Yet, Sen had still considered how he would have felt if someone did manage to kill one of them. He’d asked himself if he would care why they’d done it. The answer was no. He wouldn’t care why. He wouldn’t even ask why. He’d just start planning his own vengeance. Sen recognized that these were the exact patterns that created blood feuds, but he also knew he wouldn’t care about that either. If someone took Master Feng, Uncle Kho, or Auntie Caihong from him, there would be no peace. If it took a hundred years, or a thousand, he would hunt them down. Knowing those things about himself, he couldn’t bring himself to hold Chan Yu Ming’s rage against her. He wouldn’t just let her kill him, but he wasn’t going to deprive her of life if he could avoid it. And, he could avoid it.
All of that time he’d spent focusing on unarmed combat served him well as he stepped, slid, bent, and twisted out of the way of Chan Yu Ming’s attacks. He never struck back, just moved himself out of the way, his hands calmly clasped behind his back. Sometimes she missed by inches and sometimes by barely a hair, but she always missed. Sen watched the frustration mounting in her face as she realized that her hard-won skills with the jian weren’t enough to even wound him, let alone kill him. The attacks became wilder, less controlled, and less effective as she tried to replace skill with speed and brute force. He felt her qi swirl and adopted a similar defensive stance.
She tried to split him open with water blades or run him through with hardened water spears. He deflected the attacks, taking care to drive them down into the street, up into the air, or into the defensive formations protecting Lo Meifeng’s home. While she might not care at the moment, Sen knew Chan Yu Ming well enough to know that she would care a great deal afterward if she killed innocents in her bid to kill him. She was driven by fury at him, not indifference toward life. The failure of those attacks to reach him seemed to drive the woman to the point of true madness.
“Why won’t you fight me, you bastard!”
She threw herself at him, abandoning any pretense of defense, and putting it all into a thrust meant to drive the blade through his heart. Realizing that he needed to put a stop to this fight before Chan Yu Ming did something that he couldn’t protect the innocents from, he stood his ground. As the jian lanced toward his heart, he reached out and grabbed the blade, stopping its forward momentum between one heartbeat and the next. He used his enhanced speed to seize her hand and pull it away from the hilt of the sword. While she wouldn’t have had time to even realize it, Sen knew her forward motion would have slid her unprotected hand along the razor edge of the blade. Instead, her body crashed against his and was thrown back.
She lay on the ground in a daze for a second or two before her senses came back to her. She looked around with wild eyes for her jian before she saw it still grasped in Sen’s immutable grip. For a moment, she simply gazed up at the blade in disbelief before she seemed to collapse in on herself, a look of utter despair on her face. While Sen was well aware that his skills with other people were lopsided, at best, even he knew that there was nothing that he could do in that moment that wouldn’t make it worse. As he looked on, helpless, Chan Yu Ming broke down into sobs of anguish and grief that Sen suspected had been held at bay since the day her father died. He felt it as Lo Meifeng came to stand next to him. He looked over at her. Lo Meifeng’s attention was on the princess and the expression she wore wasn’t compassionate, but he thought he saw a little understanding there. He silently held out the jian. Lo Meifeng plucked the blade from his hand.
“Go find something to do,” she told him. “I’ll see to this.”