Lin Tian lowered his arm. The crossbow’s sear relaxed with a faint click.
He’d aimed for the pipe’s corroded joint, ready to bury the patrol under collapsing scrap. His mind caught the flaw in that plan before his finger finished the motion.
A collapse that size generates a shockwave loud enough to trip the compound’s acoustic arrays. Gu Hai would know within seconds. He needed silence, not spectacle — a dead patrol was useful, a compound-wide alert was a death sentence.
He needed to hunt like something that left no trace at all.
Through the overlay, he watched the new patrol enter the corridor. Not standard sentries this time — a coordinated four-man execution squad, moving in a tight diamond formation, steel plating humming with defensive runes.
Cultivators scanned for Qi fluctuations, for auras, for the things spiritual senses were built to catch. He was running on none of that. Pure kinetic force from his [Primordial Yang-Tyrant Body], invisible to every sense they had.
[System Scan Initiated: Analyzing Elite 4-Man Patrol...]
[Target A : Qi Gathering Level 6. Flaw: Left eye vision impaired by an old, festering scar. Blind spot degree increased by 15%.]
[Target B : Qi Gathering Level 5. Flaw: Spirit-armor joint at the right knee is heavily rusted from subterranean moisture. Mobility compromised.]
[Target C : Qi Gathering Level 5. Flaw: Elevated heart rate. High psychological anxiety detected.]
[Target D (Rear Guard): Qi Gathering Level 6. Veteran status. Highly disciplined auditory reflexes.]
Four lines of corrupted code. He started moving.
He crawled upside down along the ceiling beams, matching the patrol’s pace exactly, waiting for a stretch of corridor where the floating lights had burned out. Whoever maintained those lights down here clearly didn’t prioritize this stretch — a gift he had no intention of wasting.
The moment they crossed into full dark, he dropped.
Not a free fall. He’d wrapped beast tendon around the beam above, lowering himself in total silence, stopping two feet behind Target D.
Before the veteran could register the shift in air pressure, Lin Tian’s hand clamped over his mouth. His other arm snapped forward, the wrist-blade driving straight up through the gap at the base of the skull.
The guard went limp instantly. Lin Tian used the tendon’s tension to haul the body up into the rafters, out of sight, tucking it behind a beam wide enough to hide the shape completely.
Below, Target C felt the absence before he understood it. The rear guard’s footsteps had gone quiet.
"Captain." His whisper carried real fear. "Guard is gone."
"What?" Target A spun, halberd raised, flaring his senses across the corridor. "Impossible. No Qi fluctuation. Who’s there?!"
They were hunting for a cultivator. Nothing about their training had prepared them to hunt for anything else, and that gap was the whole reason this plan worked at all.
Guard’s neck stayed exposed while he looked backward, spooked enough to forget his own formation discipline for a critical half-second.
Thwip.
A toxic bolt buried into his throat. His hands flew up, knees buckling, voice already gone before he could even manage a proper scream.
Lin Tian dropped from the ceiling and caught the body before the armor hit stone, lowering it down without a sound.
Two guards left. Guardsfinally caught the rustle of cloth and turned to find both comrades gone and a hooded figure crouched in the gloom, utterly still.
"Demonic assassin!" Guard thrust his halberd forward while second guard raised a spirit boltgun, both men reacting on pure instinct now instead of any coherent plan.
Fast, but not fast enough against physics stacked on top of a Yang-Tyrant Body built specifically for exactly this kind of exchange.
Lin Tian kicked a loose gear across the floor toward guard’s blind side. The clatter pulled his swing wide on instinct, exactly as the flaw analysis had predicted it would.
In that half-second gap, Lin Tian slid low across the wet stone, bypassing first guard entirely and closing on second guard before the boltgun could track him.
As the weapon swung to follow, his wrist-blade sparked against metal, slicing clean through the rusted knee joint that had been flagged minutes earlier.
Tendons severed instantly. Secand guard collapsed sideways with a muffled groan, weapon clattering uselessly from his grip.
"DIE!" Guard realized the trick too late, reversing his halberd’s swing toward Lin Tian’s skull in a furious overhead arc that carried every ounce of his remaining strength.
Lin Tian didn’t retreat. He planted a boot on second guard’s falling chest, launching himself into the air, flipping clean over the halberd’s sweep with barely a hand’s width to spare.
Inverted above second guard’s stunned face, he raised his forearm.
Thwip.
The last bolt went straight into the unarmored eye socket at point-blank range. Toxin hit the brain instantly. The captain’s body locked rigid and crashed backward, halberd clattering from lifeless fingers.
Lin Tian landed beside the crawling guard, who was dragging himself across the floor on ruined tendons, still trying to reach an alarm rune he’d never get close enough to trigger.
He stepped onto the man’s back, pinning him flat against the stone.
One clean thrust through the gap in his back armor ended it before the guard could get out a single word.
Total time elapsed: 5.2 seconds.
Silence returned, broken only by water dripping somewhere overhead in a slow, indifferent rhythm.
He stood, breathing even, surveying four dead elite guards without a single spiritual fluctuation to mark how any of it had happened. No alarm. No shout carried far enough to matter. Nothing but bodies and silence.
[System Notification: Elite 4-Man Patrol eliminated. Stealth integrity: 100%.]
He wiped the blade clean on the captain’s cloak and retracted it into its housing. To cultivators raised on flashy techniques, this kind of quiet, mechanical efficiency would read as something closer to a nightmare than a fight — the kind of thing that didn’t announce itself before it was already over.
He crouched and pulled a rune-engraved clearance token off the dead captain’s belt, turning it over once in his palm. High enough rank to matter, based on the engraving pattern alone.
Firewalls down. A faint smile crossed his face in the dark. Time to reach the mainframe.
The path ahead sat clear now. He melted back into the shadows and pushed forward, toward the inner sanctum where Gu Hai and the ledger were waiting, four fewer obstacles standing between him and both.
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