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One against thirty-one. That was no small problem.
Luo Wei had been a taekwondo expert in her previous life, but this life had kept her too busy to train. The explosive muscle power just wasn't there anymore.
Magic was an option, but she could only fire the Flame Curse thirteen times before she ran dry, and these people moved fast. She'd be lucky to land half her shots.
Go back for reinforcements?
She could. But she couldn't run to Troy every time something went wrong. She needed to be able to handle herself. She needed to be able to finish a job on her own.
There was also the small problem of explaining why she'd flown out in the dead of night to hunt down Sek raiders.
Troy knew she could fly. She knew Troy knew she could fly. But Troy didn't know that she knew he knew she could fly.
That unspoken balance suited her just fine. The moment someone said it out loud, a lot of things between them would suddenly need answers neither of them were ready to give.
Luo Wei's mind raced. Thirty-one targets. How did she take them all out?
A gun would have been ideal, but this world was still stuck in the cold-weapons era. Infrastructure too primitive, precision parts impossible to manufacture.
She ran a mental inventory. One magic wand. One Turtle Shell. Two daggers. A black robe. A pouch of jewelry.
Direct confrontation was off the table. That left ambush.
She drew a dagger and melted into the shadow behind a rock, waiting.
These men had been drinking heavily. Sooner or later, someone would have to get up. When they did, she'd peel them off one by one and put a blade across their throats.
Twenty minutes passed.
Finally, a man heaved himself to his feet, hitching up his clothes like he had somewhere to be.
Her chance.
Luo Wei tightened her grip on the dagger, tracking him with her eyes, watching to see which direction he'd walk.
Three seconds later...
Miscalculation.
The man didn't go anywhere. He turned around right there by the fire, lifted his clothes, and handled his business in full view of everyone.
Luo Wei stared.
She'd nearly forgotten , nobles of this era thought nothing of relieving themselves next to the dining table. What had she expected from a camp full of raiders?
Still, about fifteen minutes later, she got her opening. And it came from the most unpleasant source imaginable.
One of the men had been squatting beside the fire eating while simultaneously evacuating, but he'd had too much to drink and the results were explosive. The spray caught the man crouching behind him — who had been hunting for a wine jar on the ground — square in the face.
Shouting erupted.
Luo Wei listened carefully. From the argument, she pulled out one very useful piece of information: the smell was so catastrophic that the whole camp turned on the offender. They beat him bloody and shoved him away from the fire, ordering him to take his business somewhere far away.
He stumbled off into the dark, trousers still around his knees, completely alone.
Luo Wei looked at him. Then at the dagger in her hand.
Kill or don't kill. That was the question.
If she killed him, she felt her blade would be permanently soiled.
If she didn't... no. She couldn't leave any of them breathing.
She gritted her teeth and followed.
The first kill went smoothly. He was too drunk for his senses to be worth much. While he was still squatting on the ground afterward, fumbling around for a scraping stick, Luo Wei clamped her left hand over his mouth and pressed her right across his throat in a single firm motion.
Blood hit her palm in a hot rush. The warmth spread through her hand, then the cold took it , the wind leeched the heat away almost instantly, and the liquid on her fingertips crystallized into red slivers of ice.
She eased the body onto the ground and pulled out a cloth to clean the blade.
The blood had dried into a thin red crust at the tip, almost like a coat of lacquer. The cloth smeared it but couldn't lift it. She worked at it with her fingernail until the frozen blood flaked free.
Now she just had to wait. Either someone else would wander out to relieve themselves, or they'd notice a man was missing and send someone to check. Either way, she'd get another shot.
Ten minutes passed.
Miscalculation, again.
They were too drunk to count heads. Not one of them noticed they were short a man.
Luo Wei crouched in the dark until her hands and feet went numb, and nobody came.
Then a shriek cut through the night.
The barbarians weren't full. They'd dragged another female captive out of the grass, laughing about how women and children were the most tender, already reaching for sharpened sticks to skewer her with.
Screaming and laughter. Wound together like a joke told at a funeral.
Luo Wei's brows pulled together, the inverted curves of them sharp as butterfly knives.
Letting these things draw breath for one more second was on her.
Her gaze dropped to the ground. Rock fragments everywhere, scattered across the ice-cold earth.
An idea clicked into place.
An egg dropped from the height of a twenty-five-story building could kill a person. An iron nail from eighteen stories up would punch through a skull. Stone would lose some velocity to air resistance on the way down, but with enough altitude, the impact force would be more than sufficient.
Luo Wei gathered dozens of pounds of loose stone in the folds of her skirt, spread her wings, and drove herself upward into the dark.
It was a crude method. Hard to aim in the air, easy to miss. She'd have to be careful about the captive.
Wind screamed past her as she climbed.
She ran the numbers in her head. Height. Air resistance. Wind direction. Terminal velocity approximation. Estimated impact force at point of contact.
At a hundred meters up, she pulled out a goose-egg-sized chunk of rock and lined up on the flat stretch of glacial sand on the far side of the fire , open ground, away from the captive.
The higher the drop, the wider the margin of error. She needed a calibration shot first.
She let it go.
THOOM!
The stone punched into the beach twenty meters from the Sek campfire. Sand and grit fountained up several meters into the air.
"Who's there!"
The drinking stopped. Men snatched up stone axes and spun toward the sound, firelight catching the whites of their eyes.
"What happened?"
"No idea — doesn't sound like a wolf."
The men who'd been readying the skewer for the captive paused and turned, sticks still in hand. "Someone out there?"
A cold gust rolled through the camp. Several men blinked, more sober than they'd been a moment ago.
The Sek chieftain drew a machete. "Leave a few to watch the livestock. Everyone else, with me."
They scrambled up from the ground, yanked burning brands from the fire, and charged toward the beach in a pack.
Their torches lit them up perfectly.
Luo Wei watched them pour into the open ground she'd already chosen. Then she reached into her skirt, grabbed a fistful of rocks, and started throwing.
Stone after stone dropped from a hundred meters up. Large chunks. Small shards. A hailstorm of them.
The Sek chieftain's head came up. His ears caught something , a sound, high above, growing louder.
"Move! RUN!"
Too late.
The rocks came down in a dense curtain. Impacts tore across the group in rapid succession , wet, heavy sounds, blood spraying in the torchlight, men going down. Within seconds, the screaming started.
Sharp edges punched through flesh. One man took a direct hit to the back of the skull and dropped without a sound. Others had shoulders caved in and collapsed to the ground, scrabbling frantically in every direction.
The chieftain's eyes blazed with fury. He swung his blade in a wild arc, knocking rocks aside, bellowing over the chaos. "Scatter! Scatter! Kill the fires! Use your weapons to block!"
These were men who lived by killing. Their reaction speed was something else entirely. They didn't understand why rocks were falling from the sky, but within moments stone axes were raised overhead and bodies were sprinting in every direction, dispersing across the beach.
The stones in Luo Wei's skirt were almost gone. The casualties below were still under half.
Her accuracy wasn't good enough.
She wasn't bothered. This was already better than she'd planned for.
She hadn't dropped the rocks to finish them. She'd dropped them to scatter them.
And now they were scattered.
Not one of them was going to make it out.
Luo Wei released the last stone, pulled out her magic wand, folded her wings, and dove.
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