In this world, very few people could compel Fang Zhuhou to draw his sword.
In this world, what could compel Fang Zhuhou to draw his sword was perhaps simply being outnumbered.
Four fighters, hand-picked specifically to counter him — and still they could not stop this single stroke.
The intelligence report had stated that Fang Zhuhou in close quarters was all but invincible, with almost no openings to exploit.
The earliest record of this had come from the fourth greatest warrior in the land, who had attempted to assassinate the Emperor inside the palace and been frightened away by Fang Zhuhou — after which he never dared set foot in Daxing again.
The same report had advised that the only way to counter Fang Zhuhou was with long-reach weapons, denying his sword its effective range.
And so the Four Manifestations disciples had come.
Their weapons were unconventional and unpredictable, and since they had first begun operating together, not a single target had ever escaped them.
The intelligence was sound. But people have their weaknesses, and the Four Manifestations disciples, undefeated until now, had grown arrogant.
Fang Zhuhou’s sword had passed through the spinning vortex of the whip like a meteor streaking through a black void — a void that should have swallowed it, yet the meteor tore free by sheer force.
The blade had passed, but the sword light remained hanging in the air. That alone told everything about the speed of this strike.
A thin line of red marked Lesser Yang’s forehead. His expression stiffened for a moment — it seemed that in that instant his mind had not yet entirely unraveled, for he could still roll his eyes upward, trying to see where the wound was.
But in the next breath, Lesser Yang’s knees buckled with a thud, and he pitched forward.
The wound looked so slight — and yet once he lay face-down on the ground, one could see that the hair at the back of his head was already soaked through with blood.
By this point, Fang Zhuhou had already withdrawn to a distance of one zhang.
This seemed counterintuitive — his greatest advantage was close-quarters combat, where within sword range he was in his own domain, his own world. And yet here he was, retreating to one zhang — the ideal range of a long whip.
The moment his feet touched down, a whip thrust at him like a spear, driving straight for his throat with uncanny speed.
Fang Zhuhou had no choice but to retreat another step. The whip followed like a shadow — and yet at that moment, the corner of Fang Zhuhou’s mouth curved upward.
He had always been a man of somewhat rigid character — but then, who could spend time around Li Chi and remain entirely unaffected?
Even the most rigid person, after enough time in Li Chi’s company, would develop a certain… let’s call it unconventionality. More precisely, a tendency toward the unorthodox.
He had retreated to that one-zhang distance deliberately, because it was the optimal striking range for a long whip — and he had already calculated that for his opponent.
At this distance, any opponent would be unable to resist attacking, because both the range and the positioning were simply too perfect. Even if Fang Zhuhou himself had been in their place, he would have found it impossible to hold back.
This one-zhang distance was his bait.
The whip came for him, he stepped back once more, and so the one striking — Elder Yin — reflexively advanced one step. It was a wholly instinctive reaction.
For those who train in martial arts, the stronger the fighter, the faster the coordination between mind and body. Response time narrows to almost nothing.
Think, and move. It is inevitable.
In that exact moment, Fang Zhuhou bent low and drove his sword down into the ground — not aiming at any person, but at the long whip that had just fallen to the floor.
Lesser Yang was dead, and his whip had dropped. Fang Zhuhou’s blade pinned the whip to the earth, then flicked it upward and drew it back toward himself. The whip was caught at its tip, so what returned to him was the handle — forged from solid bronze, perhaps a foot in length.
Everything had been within Fang Zhuhou’s calculations — yet even a man like him could not predict every variable with perfect precision.
For instance: he had used the sword to flip the whip up and reel it back, adjusting his force and angle with the intention of having the whip spring back and strike Elder Yin at the back of the skull.
Unfortunately, the whip’s handle was solid bronze — too heavy to spring back and curve as high as he had intended.
So instead of catching her at the back of the head, the bronze handle came swinging back and drove hard into Elder Yin’s backside, striking directly on the tailbone with impeccable accuracy.
People have no tails — but they do have a tailbone. Is that not something?
When full force strikes directly upon the tailbone, the peculiar agony of it is something only those who have experienced it can truly comprehend.
Elder Yin let out a cry of pain and involuntarily reached backward with her hand.
Fang Zhuhou himself had not expected this outcome — but he was not the man to let a moment pass unexploited.
In the instant Elder Yin’s attention broke, Fang Zhuhou stepped forward in one long stride, his sword thrusting toward her throat.
At that same instant, Elder Yang’s whip came swinging in — the tip honed to a razor point like a spear head, lethal on contact.
But Fang Zhuhou had been waiting for one of the others to move. His calculations extended beyond Elder Yin alone.
What is combat intelligence?
Fang Zhuhou pulled Armor Breaker back and held it alongside his neck — the whip tip struck the flat of the blade with a clear ring of metal on metal.
This confirmed it: the tip of this person’s whip also concealed some manner of metalwork bound within — likely something similar to the iron spikes used by the Tingwei’s constables.
While blocking the whip, Fang Zhuhou raised his foot and clamped down on the whip shaft. He stepped back, left hand catching hold of it.
He stepped back, and his left hand swung the whip outward.
This was Lesser Yang’s whip — the one that had originally been loaded with sharpened bronze coins. Gripping it bare-handed would normally have been impossible.
But earlier, when Fang Zhuhou had used his sword to coil and reel the whip back, Armor Breaker’s cutting edge had sheared off more than half of the coins.
Fang Zhuhou seized the whip and cracked it horizontally — it wrapped around Elder Yin’s calves, and with a powerful pull she was yanked off her feet.
But the force with which Fang Zhuhou pulled was tremendous, and Elder Yin was dragged bodily toward him — screaming as she was hauled across the ground. The woman, though somewhat along in years, was actually quite attractive — yet no matter how attractive a person may be, being dragged across the ground while screaming has a way of changing that.
She was dragged and hauled across the floor, and Fang Zhuhou brought Armor Breaker down in a hard thrust.
With a dull sound, the blade drove clean through Elder Yin’s forehead and buried its tip into the earth beneath.
Elder Yin was pinned to the ground. Her screaming stopped instantly.
Having killed two, Fang Zhuhou was no longer at any disadvantage. If the four of them working together had not managed to kill him, the two remaining certainly had no hope.
Elder Yang and Lesser Yin exchanged a glance — and ran.
Fang Zhuhou crouched down to pick up the whip. This time he gripped the handle — solid bronze, cold and hard to the touch. He reflected that having this bronze rod come slamming down squarely on a tailbone must have been quite painful indeed.
Had it been even a fraction of an inch off, a little lower and inward… well. No need to dwell on that.
He swung the whip out. It traveled low and fast along the ground like a creature skimming the earth, then at the far end, it suddenly reared up — like a viper lifting the front half of its body.
There were still a few bronze coins left on it. They swept across Elder Yang’s backside in a single stroke, slicing his robes clean open.
He was still sprinting at full speed — long gown split, trousers split. For a brief moment something pale was visible, and then almost immediately something red.
If the coins had still all been there, the flesh of his entire backside could have been shredded into ribbons.
But by now, both Elder Yang and Lesser Yin were too frightened to even think of turning back to fight. They gritted their teeth and kept sprinting.
Fang Zhuhou pushed off with one foot and launched himself forward in pursuit, closing the distance in an instant.
*Repay in kind.*
The whip cracked out again, this time with even greater force.
Master Fang was supremely skilled — but supremely skilled did not mean omnipotent. There was some margin for error when using an unfamiliar whip for the first time: a moment ago, he had aimed for the back of Elder Yang’s skull and struck the tailbone instead.
This time, he still aimed for Elder Yang’s skull — but the whip had its own ideas, or perhaps it had its own sense of precision.
This stroke landed not at the back of Elder Yang’s head, but somewhere significantly further south and further inward.
This strike landed squarely on Elder Yang’s most masculine attribute. Elder Yang let out a sound — not the sharp and wretched wail of before, but a drawn-out sound, high and keen and elongated.
Elder Yang crumpled to the ground in agony, unable to make another sound. Lesser Yin glanced back and saw it happen — and dared not attempt a rescue, pressing forward even faster instead.
Fang Zhuhou swept past overhead without breaking his movement, his sword dipping down once in mid-air — and the still-howling Elder Yang fell silent.
The sword tip entered through the back of his skull. One strike, certain kill.
Three kills. Fang Zhuhou had struck through the head every single time.
At his level, at his strength, he understood more clearly than anyone the critical importance of a decisive finish. There was no deliberate cruelty, no slashing at inconsequential spots to torment them — killing was killing. What need was there for all that theatrical flourish?
All three kills had been piercing blows through the skull — leaving absolutely no possibility of the enemy striking back.
Lesser Yin was perhaps the weakest of the four — but she was also the hardest to kill.
Because her weapon was different from the others. While the three had used long whips, she used a flying rope. Though Fang Zhuhou had severed the coiled head of it, the skills that hands had mastered could not be cut away, and for escape those skills proved far more effective.
The flying rope swung out, looping around a tree branch, and with one smooth swing Lesser Yin landed on a rooftop across the way. She cast the rope again, hooking a persimmon tree at the side of a courtyard, pulled and swung — and vaulted onto the roof in front.
One had to admit that this technique had something genuinely impressive about it.
In the next instant, Lesser Yin jumped straight down from the roof ridge into the courtyard below — but rather than running straight through the gate, she slipped sideways into a building.
She pressed up against the back window and peered through, hoping to draw Fang Zhuhou past her so that he would think she had already moved on.
*Thud.*
A hand came reaching in through the window from outside, closed around Lesser Yin’s throat, and seized her.
Then another *thud*, and without any ability to resist, Lesser Yin was pulled out through the window by Fang Zhuhou.
*Crack…*
There was no tenderness, no mercy. Even though this woman was genuinely beautiful, and even though the moment she was pulled outside she looked heartbreakingly pitiful.
The longsword still drove through her forehead. The tip still emerged from the back of her skull.
Fang Zhuhou looked down at the body, his expression still as calm as ever.
No pride. No lingering fear.
He simply thought, carefully, that if the enemy’s intelligence had not been two years out of date, this encounter might truly have been a close thing.
Two years — for a man like Fang Zhuhou, even a single small step forward was a height that others could spend their entire lives never reaching.
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