Insomniac Player

The formation attendant spun and collapsed beside a broken pillar.

Mei Lian moved before anyone else could even flinch. She crossed the clearing in three steps, caught him under the arms, and dragged him behind a cargo chest as a second arrow buried itself in the exact spot his head had occupied a second earlier.

"Poisoned." She glanced at the blackening wound once and didn’t need to say more than that.

Panic tore through the travelers. Merchants lunged for their cargo. The elderly couple hauled their pack animal toward the stream. Four spear disciples snapped into a rough circle, each one facing a different direction, none of them agreeing on where the actual threat stood.

Damien crouched low behind a cedar root, and fear settled cold beneath his ribs while his mind kept working anyway, counting angles even while his hands shook slightly. Two arrows, two different directions, the first from the northern wall and the second from the east. Neither had gone for Mei Lian, though the boot tracks he’d already spotted made her the reason anyone was here at all.

They want the group scared and stuck in place, he realized. The real attack hasn’t started yet.

"Heads down," he said.

Nobody listened.

He rose just far enough for the Rakshasa mask to clear the cargo chest. "Those who mistake panic for movement die tired."

The nearest merchant dropped flat instantly. The rest followed with surprising speed.

He ducked back down. Earthling’s actually useful, he admitted to himself. Annoying. But useful.

Mei Lian snapped off the arrow shaft and pressed two fingers into the wound. Silver light crawled beneath the attendant’s skin, and the blackening slowed under her touch.

"I can stabilize him." She kept working as she talked. "I can’t carry him and fight at the same time. They don’t want him, though. That much I’m certain of."

"How comforting," Damien muttered, eyes already back on the trees.

Something moved where nothing should have. A cedar branch bent with no wind behind it. Mist parted around a human shape near the stream. A flash of metal vanished above the western slope before he could get a clean look at it.

Three archers, at minimum. And at least six more people crouched closer to the ground. The soft-soled boot prints had told him that much, along with the small breaks in the moss that gave away where each person had shifted their weight while waiting. The attackers had wrapped the clearing on every side, leaving the southern ravine looking conveniently open.

He picked up a fallen metal bowl and angled its curved surface until it caught a reflection of that southern exit.

A thin wire crossed the path at ankle height. Leaves hid a shallow pit behind it.

Of course they trapped the only obvious way out.

One of the spear disciples crawled toward him, broad-shouldered, a scar splitting his lower lip, carrying more anger than plan. "Senior," he whispered, "give the order. We charge north, break their archers before they can regroup."

Damien studied the steep, wet northern wall, then the man’s pale brown uniform. "You’ll climb wet stone while people shoot arrows at you."

The disciple hesitated. "When you put it that way."

"Reality doesn’t improve because I phrase it gently."

The man lowered his head. "Then what’s your plan?"

I really wish people would stop assuming this mask came bundled with one, Damien thought, and looked around the clearing for something that could actually work.

Cargo lay scattered everywhere. Metal bowls. Rolled fabric. Bundles of dried red root. Clay jars sealed with lamp oil. A length of rope still tied to the pack animal’s harness.

The stream cut toward a narrow gap under the eastern wall, most of it disappearing beneath a shelf of stone before continuing somewhere on the other side. Water had carved that channel over who knew how many years. Whether a person could actually squeeze through it was a separate question entirely.

"What’s under that stone?" he asked the elderly man nearby.

The man squinted toward the water. "An old irrigation passage, most likely. These mountains are riddled with abandoned channels."

"Wide enough for people?"

"For the thin ones among us." His eyes drifted to the pack animal. "Not for Bluebell."

Bluebell clicked furiously at the insult, and right on cue, the first attacker stepped into view.

Grey clothing, no visible sect emblem, a cloth mask across the lower half of his face, a curved blade resting easy in one hand.

"Leave the black medicine case." His voice carried across the whole clearing. "The rest of you can walk away."

Every head turned toward Mei Lian.

Her face went perfectly still. "You redirected a public transit formation for my delivery?"

"Leave the case."

"You could’ve filed a requisition form instead."

The man actually looked confused for a second. Damien liked her a little more for that.

Five more grey figures stepped out from among the cedars. The archers stayed hidden, wherever they were.

"Prepare to charge," the scarred disciple whispered.

"Prepare to lose loudly," Damien answered.

He crawled to the nearest merchant and pointed at the fabric rolls. "How fast does that burn?"

"Ember silk. It smokes, but it resists actual flame."

Better than I hoped.

He laid out instructions fast. Two merchants unrolled the fabric behind the cargo chests. Another crushed the dried red root and scattered it over the top, releasing a bitter scent sharp enough to sting his eyes even through the mask. The spear disciples stacked crates into a wall facing north, building exactly the kind of desperate, obvious defense he wanted the attackers to see.

Behind that wall, the old couple cut Bluebell’s harness free. The animal would never fit through the water channel, but it could run like nothing else on this hillside.

Mei Lian checked the eastern passage herself. "It narrows badly after twenty paces."

"Can the injured fit through?"

"If we drag them."

"Then start now."

She glanced at him. "What about the animal?"

He pressed a jar of lamp oil into its owner’s hands. "She takes the southern exit."

The old man understood immediately.

The moment the attackers advanced, a merchant set the crushed root alight. The ember silk refused to catch, but thick red smoke rolled out over the false barricade anyway. Men started coughing. The hidden archers lost their line of sight entirely.

Bluebell exploded out of the smoke toward the south, dragging empty cloth and three strings of metal bowls behind her, and the noise she made was genuinely magnificent.

Arrows chased after her. The trapped southern path collapsed under her first leap, but her six legs cleared the gap anyway, and she vanished down the ravine trailing that ringing chorus of bowls like an entire approaching army.

The attackers shouted, scrambling to react. Damien’s whole group slipped into the eastern water channel while everyone’s attention chased the noise.

Cold water climbed to his knees. The ceiling dropped low enough to scrape the taller merchants’ backs raw. Mei Lian and two disciples dragged the attendant along on a sheet of amber silk while the rest passed cargo hand to hand down the line.

Damien held back near the rear. He tied a thin cord between two submerged rocks, balanced loose stones above it, and poured what was left of the crushed root straight into the current. Anyone rushing through would trip the cord, knock the stones loose, and catch a face full of burning powder for their trouble.

Won’t stop a determined cultivator. Might buy three seconds. Three seconds mattered. But something about the shape of these attackers had bothered him since the second arrow landed. They didn’t feel overwhelming, not for a place stacked with Level 2000 monsters casually walking its streets. They felt about as strong as he was, which for Murim, was genuinely strange.

The first pursuer entered the channel just as Damien started to fall back. The man stepped clean over the submerged cord. Experienced, then. He clocked the loose stones next and adjusted around them too. More experienced than that, apparently.

So much for the trap.

The pursuer carried a short handle linked to a hooked blade by a black chain. He swung once, and the hook skimmed the wall, curled around Damien’s raised arm, and yanked tight against his cloak. Damien stumbled backward, footing gone in the ankle-deep water.

Fear locked his hands for a second. No room to dodge in this channel. No John standing between him and the blade this time.

Exactly what I asked for, he thought, bitter about it.

The pursuer yanked the chain hard. Damien let the pull carry him forward instead of fighting it, stepped into the motion, and drew the First Blood Dagger from beneath his cloak in the same breath.

The edge caught the chain, and metal snapped clean.

The man’s eyes went wide. Damien carried the same motion straight across his weapon hand. Blood hit the water. The handle dropped from fingers that had gone suddenly numb.

He could have driven the dagger straight into the man’s throat right then. His arm refused to do it, and part of him was grateful for that refusal.

The pursuer recovered fast and slammed a palm toward Damien’s chest. Damien ducked under it, felt the pressure tear through the back of his hood, and drove a kick into the man’s already-injured wrist against the wall.

The pursuer hissed and pulled back half a step.

His attention skipped straight past the mask and the hair entirely and landed on the dagger instead.

"That edge." Something shifted behind his eyes. "A tutorial relic."

Damien backed toward the narrowing channel. The rest of the group had almost reached the far opening.

The man cradled his bleeding hand, recognition breaking across his face all at once. "What generation are you?"