Tang Pidi launched himself from the ground and, while still airborne, kicked the Sword Sect disciple squarely away.

A dull *thud* sounded from the man’s body, followed by a low grunt. He had not been struck by a blade, but it was Tang Pidi’s kick — and the man’s ribcage was almost certainly caved in.

That single thud was sufficient explanation for his fate. Tang Pidi did not spare him a second glance.

He seized the loose warhorse and charged forward. Halfway there, he caught up with Yu Hongyi. He leaned from the saddle and reached out one hand. “Up.”

On instinct, Yu Hongyi extended her hand. Tang Pidi’s grip closed around it, and with a single surge of force, she was hauled off the ground.

In the moment Yu Hongyi was swinging up through the air, Tang Pidi’s own body left the saddle — he vacated the seat for her.

In the next instant, he dropped from the horse’s back, and in two strides caught up with Shang Qingzhu. Without a word, he grabbed Shang Qingzhu by the belt and flung him forward.

Yu Hongyi, already in the saddle, reacted instantly — she caught Shang Qingzhu as he came sailing toward her, and both of them rode on together.

“General — what about you?!” Shang Qingzhu called out, voice urgent.

Tang Pidi turned around, utterly unbothered. “I’ll just take another one.”

Just like that. As though stealing another horse were the most trivial thing imaginable.

An oncoming warhorse charged at him. Tang Pidi stepped clear of the rider’s blade, and in the same motion seized the man’s arm and yanked him clean off the saddle. The man hit the ground shrieking and tumbled away.

The horse had already blown past Tang Pidi — but Tang Pidi reached out and grabbed its tail. Using the momentum of the still-galloping animal, he flew upward.

Even as he rose through the air, he turned and deflected two incoming arrows with his free hand, then settled smoothly into the saddle.

The two Senior Officers looked back and saw all of this. Both of them were openly stunned, eyes wider than eggs.

Neither of them had ever worked with Tang Pidi on anything before, and their knowledge of the Great General’s ferocity had been secondhand. Now, seeing it with their own eyes, they understood that the stories had not been exaggerated at all — if anything, they wondered whether the stories had been quietly understated.

Tang Pidi, now on his new horse, needed no warm-up. The animal too seemed to understand something had changed — it snorted twice and launched forward with surprising pride in its gait.

How this ordinary horse managed to convey such pride was a mystery to anyone watching. Yet somehow it did.

Two horses, three riders, riding back toward the small stand of trees.

The pursuers were not willing to let them go so easily — they had not caught their quarry, and they had lost over a dozen of their own. Giving up now would be deeply humiliating.

From one side, a horse emerged that was clearly no ordinary animal — tall and powerful, its coat gleaming. On its back, Blood Floating Tower’s Holy General Wang Huan reached over his shoulder and unhooked the great iron-sinewed bow from his back.

Wang Huan was the one among the four Holy Generals who had not come from the jianghu.

The others all had roots there. Liao Tinglou was the finest young talent of the Xiong Hu Sect, second in strength only to the Sect Master himself — able to go out on his own and found a sect if he chose. The Holy General Gao Wukan was the strongest of the four; he had been the Master of the Xinghang Sect in Yanzhou, barely three or four years older than Liao Tingrou yet a whole generation his senior by lineage. The Holy General Nie Zuo was a lone wanderer of the Yanzhou jianghu — a man who had once wanted nothing to do with others. Yet to save Xu Suqing, he had joined forces with the rest of them; in the battle in Yanzhou years ago, he had killed the most men of any of them. His strength exceeded Liao Tingrou’s, making Liao Tingrou the weakest of the four.

Wang Huan’s uniqueness came from being a former soldier of the Chu border army — originally a fifth-rank General.

When Xu Suqing and the others broke out of Yanzhou, it was Wang Huan who had helped them through. The passes were closed — without someone on the inside opening the way, even a group of martial powerhouses could not simply force their way through a fortified border gate.

Wang Huan had been well-known in the northern Chu border armies, though his rank was never high. He had been the champion of what would be the last martial examination in Chu’s history. By nature he was introverted and poor at navigating the social currents of officialdom, and so his career had stagnated. Assigned to the frontier, he had accumulated battle merit year after year with no promotions — his achievements consistently claimed by others. Later, after offending a superior, he was transferred to a small border outpost as its commander.

That happened to be the very outpost that Xu Suqing’s group passed through during their flight north from Yanzhou.

Wang Huan had long admired Xu Suqing’s name and the chivalric reputation attached to it, and beyond that, he harbored deep resentment toward the Chu court. So when he learned of Xu Suqing’s situation, he simply let them through.

Afterward, one of his men pointed out that once Yanzhou’s Military Commissioner Zhou Shiren’s pursuers arrived, every soldier at the border post would be used as a scapegoat. Better to rebel outright than to die as someone else’s excuse — at least that way they kept their lives.

So Wang Huan brought his three hundred or so garrison soldiers, took everything in the armory, abandoned the border post, and rode north after Xu Suqing.

Perhaps because of all those years of humiliation at the frontier, once Wang Huan reached the northern wastes, he was the first among them to undergo a complete change in character. Where he had once been quiet and steady, he became a killing machine — and a merciless one at that. When others led raids on desert tribes and secured enough plunder, they generally spared the men. Wang Huan did not. Even when the haul was already substantial, he would still order every male of the tribe killed, regardless of age.

Now, watching that Ning officer kill his way through the men and seize another horse, Wang Huan’s fury was unbearable.

What he saw in that man was an echo of the generals he had known in his Chu days — and hated.

He unslung the great bow, took the briefest aim, and loosed.

By this point in his life, Tang Pidi’s combat instincts were sharper than perhaps any other man in the Central Plains.

He never sat upright in the saddle during a charge — he pressed his body forward and low, turning to look behind him at intervals.

He had spotted Wang Huan the moment the man broke from the grass on that diagonal. When he saw the enormous bow on the rider’s back, Tang Pidi added a measure of extra caution.

When the arrow left the bowstring, Tang Pidi did not immediately dodge — because he had already seen that Shang Qingzhu and Yu Hongyi were directly in his path ahead.

If he stepped aside, the arrow might pass right through both of them. They were shielded by him, and by the time they noticed and tried to react, it would be too late.

So Tang Pidi, in the instant the arrow reached him, brought his saber up in a precise flick.

Had he simply deflected the arrow, Wang Huan, riding hard behind, would not have been stricken with sudden alarm.

What was alarming was the angle — an impossibly precise angling of the blade. The arrow was not deflected; it was caught and sent spinning in the air.

Tang Pidi’s second stroke came in flat, the flat of the blade smacking the arrow’s tail. Struck with tremendous force, the arrow shot forward like a bolt.

Wang Huan’s eyes went wide. He had no time — he threw himself flat against the horse’s neck. The arrow skimmed past the back of his skull.

He escaped. But the Blood Floating Tower bandit behind him did not. The arrow struck the left eye socket, drove through, and came out the back of the skull.

The single exchange left Wang Huan badly shaken.

Martial artists of great ability all carry a kind of pride — they do not easily bow to anyone, and they do not easily fear anyone. But this one encounter had sent real fear threading through Wang Huan.

At the moment Wang Huan instinctively eased his pursuit, the Holy General Nie Zuo burst from another direction.

This man was a jianghu wanderer. The more chaotic the era, the more dangerous the jianghu — and Nie Zuo had carved out a reputation of his own in it, alone. That alone spoke to his strength.

Earlier, watching two Black Wu Sword Sect disciples get killed had actually pleased Nie Zuo quite a bit.

Now he charged in — partly to rescue the situation, partly to show up the Sword Sect’s Grand Swordmaster who had been watching all of this. He wanted to demonstrate that the Black Wu’s people were nothing compared to Blood Floating Tower.

When he saw Tang Pidi split the arrow with one blade stroke, Nie Zuo felt an immediate tightening in his gut.

But he was already close. To pull up or veer away now would look cowardly.

So with a shout, Nie Zuo launched more than ten throwing knives at once, scattering them in a spread toward Tang Pidi.

Tang Pidi glanced ahead. His own personal guard was charging out to receive them — so the edge of his mouth curled slightly.

He shouted a warning to Shang Qingzhu and Yu Hongyi to peel aside, and launched himself upright from the saddle.

The throwing knives were far more precisely aimed than the arrows before — as Tang Pidi rose, several blades sliced through the saddle beneath him, and more struck the horse itself.

With Tang Pidi airborne, the reins were still in his grip — and that created an effect that made the eye go a little blurred.

He appeared to hang in the air for an instant, carried forward on the horse’s momentum, floating.

In the moment that even Nie Zuo had to resist the urge to rub his eyes, Tang Pidi released the reins.

Before the dying horse could collapse, both feet found the animal’s haunches and pushed off.

Flipping through the air, Tang Pidi’s saber came down — and Nie Zuo, terrified, leaped from the saddle on one side.

The blade struck the empty saddle. Tang Pidi’s other hand shot out, grabbed the horse’s mane, and used that grip to swing himself around.

In the next instant, Tang Pidi’s second stroke swept horizontal, straight for Nie Zuo’s neck. Nie Zuo had only just landed — and now the second cut arrived. He flipped backward again to escape, and kept flipping without stopping.

At that moment, a second iron-sinewed arrow came streaking in — loosed to save Nie Zuo.

Tang Pidi did not even turn his head. His right hand brought the saber sweeping upward — a clang as it batted the iron-sinewed arrow out of the sky.

The psychological blow to Wang Huan continued to compound.

And there was more, because Tang Pidi’s personal guard had arrived. A hundred and some riders — but the momentum of their charge felt like ten thousand.

Tang Pidi waited until his guard was nearly upon him, glanced at the reins offered, and swung into the saddle. Then he held out his hand.

“Spear.”

He was asking for a spear.

Some distance away, Shang Qingzhu and Yu Hongyi — now screened by the guard — both exhaled at the same time.

The pursuers numbered at least six or seven hundred, perhaps more. Among them were serious martial artists, and even Sword Sect disciples from the Black Wu. Though the guard was barely a hundred strong, these two thought: *this is the Great General’s own personal guard.* Getting out should not be an issue.

They were still thinking that when they saw Tang Pidi reach out and accept the iron spear that was passed to him.

And then they saw the guard beginning to lower their visors.

In that moment, Yu Hongyi and Shang Qingzhu looked at each other — at the exact same instant.

Tang Pidi in the saddle, one hand taking the iron spear, the other reaching for his helmet.

The moment the helmet settled onto his head, something seemed to shift in the very air of the northern plain.

Cold northern wind?

*Hush. The Great General has bared his spearhead.*

In the next instant, every soldier in the guard lowered their visors simultaneously. Bodies leaned slightly forward. Every spear began to level.

“You still have not pulled back? You dare press the pursuit?”

Tang Pidi shifted his weight forward and dug in his heels. “Charge!”

*”HUH!”*

A hundred riders and more — surging forward together.

—