Chapter 86: Life Is a Fickle Thing

TL: LittlePeach

Boss Ruixing gripped the shotgun tight in both hands.

"It seems today is the day I die. And on the boss's birthday, of all days.... What a cruel coincidence."

"F-Father? What are you saying? What on earth are you planning to do?!"

"Yangyang. Stay hidden here, quietly. Once they've made certain of my death, they won't want to spill any more meaningless blood."

It seemed he meant to walk out and die by his own choice, so that his only daughter, Lu Yangyang, wouldn't be caught in the crossfire.

After all, Jin Weiliang's only real target was Boss Ruixing himself.

"I ask you both to stay here and watch over my daughter. Once I'm dead, they'll have no reason to keep up the slaughter and make enemies of you."

Was it grim resolve, that if he had to go, he'd at least take one travel companion along?

There was even a hollow serenity about him, the kind peculiar to an old man facing death.

"F-Father...."

"Take care of my daughter."

But I saw things differently.

I stepped in close and blocked Ruixing's path as he made for the door.

"I'll go first."

"You mustn't, sir, you are not a man who should be dragged into the Chongqing Society's family feud."

"Let me be perfectly clear. Even if we all sit here hiding, odds are we get dragged in one way or another. Boss Yang Mi-ryeong will be taken as a hostage to trade for Jin Hao, Miss Lu Yangyang will become a shackle around the Aboveground Faction's neck, and I'll die a dog's death at their hands."

"Why would they kill you, sir?"

"Before I came here, I racked up a fair bit of bad blood with the Husheng Gang, one way and another."

I searched the two sprawled corpses and gathered up whatever else looked useful.

Rummage, rustle, pat, pat.

Beside me, Yang Mi-ryeong called out, puzzled.

"...What are you looking for so hard?"

"No, nothing."

Somehow, the one thing I wanted was nowhere to be found.

How did these clowns manage not to carry a single grenade between them?

Cooking a grenade into the room before you breach is the ABC of tactical movement.

'They don't even have the basics down.'

And this was the Chongqing Society's frontline muscle?

The future of the Triads looked bright indeed.

Anyway.

I swapped a spare magazine into the pistol, then pulled an in-ear radio from a corpse's belt and tried it in my ear.

Kssht, ksshht.

Maybe the impact of the fall had knocked the tuning loose; both units gave off nothing but faint static.

There was no time to fine-tune the frequency now.

"Just give me ten minutes. I'll be back within ten."

"Ten minutes? You mean I should launch the counterattack in ten minutes?"

"No. I mean I'll clean them all up and be back in this room in ten minutes."

Boss Ruixing's mouth fell open, his face saying this was madness.

To an old veteran who'd survived every kind of storm, my brazen declaration must have sounded like pure fantasy.

"If we all just sit here hiding, we die anyway. So wait ten minutes. That's all I ask."

"...."

"I'm the man who took out a dozen North Korean assassination-squad members and brought Jin Hao home. Surely you don't doubt my skills?"

At my declaration, Ruixing closed his mouth.

Then he nodded in silence.

Whether he believed me or not, he had nothing to lose; ten minutes was hardly too much to wait.

"...Will you take this?"

He held out the Benelli M4.

I was itching to try it, but there's no using an ox-slaughtering gun for a chicken-killing job.

"A pistol will do."

"Honestly...."

Leaving Boss Ruixing behind, I turned to Yang Mi-ryeong and held out the spare pistol.

As it happened, it was a Glock 17, the sidearm our black agents favor.

"Here. Take one."

Click, clack.

Yang Mi-ryeong took the pistol and expertly checked the magazine and the chamber.

The practiced ease of a former NIS black agent.

"What are you planning to do?"

"I just told you. I'll be back in ten minutes."

Yang Mi-ryeong bit down on her lip.

Did I look like a man walking to his death?

"...I'm sorry. I never thought something like this would happen after coming all this way."

"Nothing new to me. I went through something similar a few days ago."

That wasn't just something I said to put her at ease.

Only days ago, I'd set the Shanyuan Society and the Hongmen Society at each other's throats and run wild across a battlefield far rawer than this one.

However she took my assurance, Yang Mi-ryeong caught hold of my sleeve, her face full of hesitation.

"Before you go, please, tell me your real name."

She lifted her head slowly, gazing at me with tender eyes.

At that desperate look, my lips started moving on their own, and then a dry laugh escaped me.

'She really won't let me drop my guard, right to the end.'

Just like my grandmother always said, pretty women are all foxes.

I'd nearly fallen for those mournful eyes and spilled my entire identity on the spot.

"Not telling."

"But...."

"I told you, I'm not going out there to die. See you in ten minutes. I promise."

For an instant, Yang Mi-ryeong's eyes sharpened with reproach.

But then she nodded, her expression resolute, as if she'd chosen to believe me.

There was no more time to waste.

"Lock the door after I'm gone."

Whoosh.

I set the flashlight I'd been holding on the floor and threw myself through the open door.

Into the pitch dark; then, click.

A moment later, the door locked behind my back.

In the corridor, untouched by even a sliver of moonlight, the darkness spread deep and still, like staring down into a well.

'Let's see, then.'

I was leaning against the door, tapping at the radio's dial to find the frequency, when...

Ksshht.

- This is Alpha. Confirmed Boss Ruixing is not in his room.

The line finally connected.

The radio traffic was in full clamor; they were turning the mansion inside out, room by room.

- This is Charlie. Gunshots on the third floor just now.

- Who went up?

- Hotel team.

- Hotel, respond. Did you engage?

Alpha, Charlie, Hotel.

They were calling each other by the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Two-man teams from Alpha through Hotel, which meant at least sixteen men had stormed the place.

- Hotel team, respond.

- ....

Which meant the ones I'd just dealt with must have been Hotel team.

I didn't rush to answer the radio; I kept my silence.

And they drew their conclusion, cold and quick.

- Hotel team is off comms. Second-floor entry teams, move up to three and confirm contact.

- This is Bravo, moving in now.

- This is Charlie, copy that.

Thump, thud-thud!

Hurried footsteps came pounding up the stairs from below.

The raiders raced up the spiral staircase.

Flashlight beams swept in every direction, sketching out the mansion's contours.

I stood in the middle of the corridor and waited, good as gold, for them to poke their heads onto the third floor.

Thud!

One of them, panting hard from the climb, appeared at the end of the corridor.

"This is Charlie. Point man, moving i...."

Bang!

I pulled the trigger without hesitation, and he tumbled to the floor, head snapped hard to the side.

The man right behind him, aghast, whipped his flashlight toward me.

Blam!

His head dropped too, and he pitched face-first into the floor.

"Th-this is Bravo! Contact!"

- Enemy position confirmed! All units, move to the third floor!

With Charlie team down in an instant, Bravo team, holding the rear, froze in terror halfway up the stairs.

One of them shone his flashlight up the staircase, and his eyes went round.

No wonder, given that I was standing blankly in the middle of the corridor without a scrap of cover.

Bang!

"Guh!"

I shot down Bravo team's rear man, and the one crouched in front of him, eyes rolling wild, was a heartbeat from spraying fire at me.

Crack!

"Gurk!"

Rule number one of engagement in the dark is audacity.

And no one alive was more audacious than a man who sought out death's door all on his own and shoved his head in first.

Crash-thud!

A kick to the jaw laid him flat, and his body went tumbling down the stairs.

Bang!

I put one bullet in him, and the man's corpse rolled a good long way down the steps.

Somehow I'd taken out four men in seconds without catching a single bullet.

'I haven't even been keeping in practice lately. Old habits are a frightening thing.'

Maybe it was the darkness, too thick to see an inch ahead.

The tactical-movement habits I'd drilled into myself back before I knew how tough my body really was were still etched into me, whole and intact.

- Charlie, respond.

- ....

- Bravo, respond!

- ....

After the gunfire, urgent voices came crackling over the radio.

I listened in quietly.

- Hold, hold! All units, hold position and keep your weapons trained on the third floor!

Their commander radioed frantically, halting his men where they stood.

Four of his men dead in a single exchange; he'd sensed that something about this was going very wrong.

Thump, thud!

The clamor of footsteps stopped dead, and silence hung for a while.

"...Ruixing! Come out, now!"

A voice thundered up from below the stairs.

Maybe it was the dark, but he'd apparently mistaken me for Boss Ruixing.

"Surrender quietly and I'll be merciful; you're the only one who has to die!"

"...."

"But keep thrashing around up there, and I'll drag that daughter of yours in and make you watch with your own two eyes while we tear her to shreds!"

The sheer viciousness of it drew a dry laugh out of me.

It was a threat savage enough that, had I actually been Boss Ruixing, I might have seriously considered walking down those stairs to surrender.

"We're holding your men in this mansion hostage! Are you going to get every last one of your followers killed?!"

True or not, they'd apparently taken the mansion's staff hostage.

I kept an ear on the radio, hoping to overhear whatever they might be plotting, but they stayed silent even over the air.

'Fastest way would be to go down and check for myself.'

If there really were hostages, I wanted to bring them out alive if I could.

But even if I went down, telling enemy from hostage in darkness like this would be no easy thing.

Thunk.

Leaning out to peer down the stairwell, I caught my foot lightly on a sprawled corpse.

'Oh.'

And in that instant, a brilliant idea flashed through my mind.

*****

Hu Yuansheng waited for a resigned Ruixing to come down the stairs.

The Boss Ruixing he knew doted on his only daughter, Lu Yangyang, and was the kind of man who would gladly throw away his own life to protect her.

'Fine, I'll let you live. Though you'll die watching with your own two eyes while your daughter gets passed around under us as a plaything.'

He was muttering those dark thoughts to himself, licking his lips as he watched the stairs to the third floor, when it happened.

Whoosh, THUD!

"Wh-what the?!"

In that instant, something heavy plummeted straight down the open center of the spiral staircase and slammed into the floor.

It was the moment the Husheng Gang men hiding pressed against the banisters aimed their flashlights down as one.

"...."

Silence was the only possible response.

Because what lay revealed in the ring of a dozen beams was the corpse of one of their own, a Husheng Gang Charlie team man who'd entered the third floor only minutes before.

Before anyone could even gasp, whoosh!

Another shadow shot out from the third floor, slicing through the air.

THUD!

Onto the first-floor landing, already crowded with flashlight beams and a dozen pairs of eyes, another corpse flopped down, folding over the first like a bundle of laundry.

"...."

Grind, gnash.

At a provocation this outrageous by anyone's standards, the Husheng Gang men began grinding their teeth, every last one.

Hu Yuansheng, unable to bear it any longer, roared.

"Fuck this! All units, open fire!"

"Ruixing, you fucking son of a bitch!"

"Light it all up! Don't spare the ammo!"

Ratatatatat!

Muzzles flared out of the darkness, spitting fire up at the floors above in unison.

Not that the deafening hail of bullets made the slightest difference.

Whoosh, thud!

"Knock it off, you asshole!"

Heedless of the gunfire, another body dropped from the third floor.

There was no time left to check faces.

Venom-mad, the Husheng Gang men yanked their triggers as if determined to empty every magazine they'd brought.

"Keep firing!"

"Crawl out here, now! Ruixing, you fucker!"

Crash-shatter!

Kra-ka-ka-crack!

Hu Yuansheng, too, poured on the fire, swapping magazines in a frenzy.

With this much lead in the air, even someone hiding deep down the corridor had to be swallowing screams from the ricochets by now.

He was inching up the stairs a step at a time, peering toward the third floor, when...

"More! Shoot everything!"

Ratatatat.

It didn't take long for Hu Yuansheng to sense something was off.

The gunfire that had been loud enough to deafen him was, at some point, noticeably thinning out.

Bang, bang!

The sound of someone firing clean, single shots, one crisp round at a time, brushed past his ears.

"Full auto, not single shots! I said don't spare the ammo!"

And somehow, with every single shot that rang out, the storm of gunfire withered a little more.

Then, at some point while he was seating a fresh magazine, the gunfire stopped entirely.

"What are you all doing?! Quit standing there like idiots and keep shooting!"

He bellowed and whipped his head around. That was the moment.

Hukk.

Hu Yuansheng sucked in a breath before he knew what he was doing.

"Y-you...."

Because in the pitch-black darkness, an unidentified man drenched head to toe in blood was quietly leveling a pistol at him.

Twitch, twitch.

"Khah... hrgh...."

"Hkk... nngh."

His men, the ones who'd been blasting away so furiously, now lay writhing across the stairs in gruesome shapes, ambushed without anyone ever noticing when.

A scene straight out of a horror movie.

"Hostages, my ass. You didn't leave a single soul alive."

"Wh-what?"

The blood-soaked man looked Hu Yuansheng up and down and wet his lips with his tongue.

The corner of his mouth twisted upward.

"Long arms, long legs. You must be Hu Yuansheng."

"Wh-who the hell are you?!"

"Your little brother didn't warn you to watch out for me?"

"...."

"Don't see him around, though. Off at the hospital getting that jaw fixed, I take it?"

Hu Yuansheng's eyes flew wide in horror.

His slack mouth worked, and he was just about to force out some kind of sound.

Blam!

"Ghak!"

"Life is a fickle thing, like they say. That busted jaw is the only reason your brother gets to keep his thread of life."

With a hole blown clean through his head, Hu Yuansheng's body tilted slowly, then dropped over the banister into empty air.

THUD!

His long-limbed body sprawled in a miserable heap atop the layered corpses of his men.

*****

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