Wang Dong was dead.
Shen Cong’s first kill.
The psychological response arrived as a mild wrongness in his chest, the kind that came from crossing a threshold you couldn’t uncross. He acknowledged it, held it for approximately two seconds, and filed it under things that are true now and don’t change the situation.
Zhang Tianshen’s headlight was getting brighter. The fight wasn’t over.
He moved back into the shadow of the broken wall.
Zhu Haifeng stood over Wang Dong’s body, looking at the bolt protruding from the forehead. The expression on his face was the same recalibration Shen Cong had seen when he’d delivered the shot — but processing it now with more time. Understanding that a bolt placed that precisely, on a running target, in low light, wasn’t luck and wasn’t normal. Understanding that the person who’d done it was still somewhere in the dark.
Understanding that he was operating alongside something considerably more capable than he’d assessed.
He didn’t have time to do much with that understanding, because Zhang Tianshen’s motorcycle came around the broken roadway and the man dismounted already shouting.
The confrontation between Zhu Haifeng and Zhang Tianshen was the kind of fight that happened between people who genuinely hated each other — no tactical economy, no reserve, just sustained offensive pressure from both sides. Zhu Haifeng had a bone-gold long spear. Zhang Tianshen had a bone-gold iron mallet. The weapons made contact repeatedly in the first thirty seconds.
Shen Cong watched from the shadows and tried twice to find a shot at Zhang Tianshen.
The problem: both combatants were moving fast and occupying the same approximate position at irregular intervals. The shot that had killed Wang Dong had been clean because Wang Dong was running in a fixed direction at a predictable pace. This was two bodies in constant angular change relative to each other. A bolt that missed Zhang Tianshen was a bolt that potentially hit Zhu Haifeng.
He shifted his target class.
Zhang Tianshen’s people — the ones with firearms, the ones who were landing effective hits on the Shadows members — were considerably more tractable targeting problems. They moved with purpose but not with evolved-person speed or unpredictability. They occupied positions for meaningful durations.
He loaded a standard bolt — not fang-tipped, no need for Activity enhancement against unarmored targets — and started working through the Dragon Slayer formation.
The bald man Dawei, the one he’d assessed during the afternoon’s tax collection, was trying to reach Zhang Tianshen’s position with a gun in hand. Shen Cong put a bolt in his chest as he crossed an open section of road. Dawei went down hard.
He reloaded. Another Dragon Slayer moving toward the exit routes. Another bolt.
Then another, as someone tried to circle behind the Shadows’ position.
He was systematic about it. Firearms and effective melee combatants first. People who represented active threats to Zhu Haifeng’s operation or to the follow-on objective of preventing any word reaching Wu Wenjun. Everyone who ran got a bolt before they made it to the road junction.
Not everyone died immediately. Several fell and didn’t get up. Several fell and made sounds. He noted the sounds and moved on.
Zhang Tianshen caught a deep cut across his forearm from Zhu Haifeng’s spear. Then another hit to his side. The blood loss was affecting his movement — the particular way enhanced bodies compensated for pain but couldn’t compensate for volume depletion, the legs getting heavier, the strike speed dropping.
He took stock of the field, shouted for his people to run, and used the adrenaline spike from seeing Dawei go down to get two more hits in on Zhu Haifeng — scoring lines across Zhu Haifeng’s chest before being driven back.
Then he dropped.
Not dead. Not yet. The combined blood loss had taken him to the ground.
The remaining Dragon Slayer members who tried to exit the engagement area found bolts waiting for them. Shen Cong had positioned himself to cover the two most likely exit routes when the fight began, a calculation he’d made while following the column to the engagement site.
The last person who made it onto a motorcycle got twenty meters before the bolt found him.
Half an hour from first contact to last movement.
The Shadows had seven or eight functional members still standing. The rest had taken casualties during the engagement — ten dead, several wounded.
The Dragon Slayers had no one standing. Most were dead or close to it, the remainder wounded and disarmed and being held by what was left of the Shadows.
Zhang Tianshen was pinned to the road by Zhu Haifeng’s bone-gold spear through his midsection. Alive. The particular quality of alive that had more outgoing than incoming.
Zhu Haifeng stood over him, pressing a hand against the wounds on his own chest, visibly working through the physical cost of the engagement.
“You never thought someone would put you here,” he said.
Zhang Tianshen coughed blood. Whatever he said in response was the kind of thing people said in his position — something between defiance and accounting — and the words weren’t the point. The point was that Zhu Haifeng had been chasing this specific outcome for long enough that arriving at it had its own emotional weight, separate from the tactical question of what came next.
Shen Cong stood back and let Zhu Haifeng have the moment.
He was running the follow-on calculation.
Wu Wenjun — Dragon Slayer number two, currently wounded at Sanhe Village, unable to walk. The original plan had been to prevent any runner from reaching the village with warning. He’d covered the exit routes. No one had gotten through.
Which meant Wu Wenjun was still at Sanhe Village, probably unaware that his faction no longer existed, and unable to move quickly when he found out.
And at Sanhe Village, according to what Zhu Haifeng had told him, there were also women who had been brought there against their will.
He noted both facts and waited for Zhu Haifeng to finish.
(End of Chapter 68)