My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 112: Five Against the Concealment
The scarred woman moved first, her free hand flashing through a short series of seals before Li Fan's eyes had finished tracking the motion. The four men moved with her in the same instant, not simultaneously but in a sequence drilled deep enough to feel like instinct — two coming high, blades already carrying a faint edge of metal-attribute qi that cut the air with a thin, whistling note, while the other two dropped low and slammed open palms flat against the packed earth.
The ground beneath Li Fan's feet answered them, the packed dirt turning slick and grasping in the span of a single breath, a crude earth-attribute binding technique meant to root him in place before the blades ever reached him. A trained formation. Coordinated pressure meant to collapse a single defender from multiple angles at once, the exact tactic Li Fan had read about in Wei Baishan's old military texts and never once expected to face on an ordinary street three doors from a noodle stall.
He didn't wait for the ground to finish taking hold. Origin Flow carried a thread of qi down through his meridians and into the soles of his feet, and he drove it outward all at once, shattering the softened earth beneath him into dry, scattering clods before the binding could properly close around his ankles. He stepped directly into the gap between the two low attackers as the ground gave way, using the narrow space they'd inadvertently left him to put one of the high attackers between himself and the other three, if only for a single crucial instant.
The nearest low attacker's blade caught him along the hip anyway, a shallow cut opening through his robe and into the skin beneath, the wound cold and distant rather than immediately painful. His own blade answered before the man had finished his follow-through, Origin Severance finding the structural weakness in his overextended reach — not a spell to unweave here, only flesh, balance, and the qi-pathway running taut through an overcommitted knee. A short cut behind the joint, delivered with none of the wasted motion a less disciplined swordsman would have needed, and the man's leg buckled beneath him, his cultivation stuttering visibly as he went down, his blade skittering away across the packed earth.
Four remained, and they'd already adjusted, the two high attackers converging on Li Fan's new position while the second low attacker circled wide, a small glass vial already loosened from his sleeve rather than repeating his fallen partner's mistake. The scarred woman's voice cut through the street's sudden violence, sharp and precise. "He fights economical. No wasted qi. Force him to spend more than he wants to."
They knew that about him. Li Fan filed the detail with the same cold clarity he gave everything else in this fight, understanding, even mid-combat, that whoever had briefed this team had studied him closely enough to identify his fighting philosophy in advance. That wasn't the work of a hasty ambush. That was the work of genuine surveillance, stretched across weeks or months he'd never once detected.
The two high attackers crossed their blades and swept them apart in a single motion, sending two low, humming arcs of metal-attribute qi tearing across the cobblestones toward him from opposite angles, close enough together that avoiding one meant stepping directly into the other's path.
Li Fan didn't try to clear both. He hardened the muscle along his forearm with a thin layer of body-tempering qi and let the near arc catch it rather than his throat, the edge opening a deep line across the skin in exchange for the half second the block bought him. He drove forward through the pain rather than away from it, closing the distance while the second arc passed harmlessly behind him, and drove Returning Edge into the nearer attacker's exposed ribs, qi withdrawn to a single compressed point at his blade's tip a half instant before impact.
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The strike folded the man over with a sharp crack of breaking bone, the force of it throwing him backward hard enough to crash through the low wooden counter of the noodle stall behind him in a spray of splintered planks and spilled broth. Not dead. Down, and finished with this fight regardless.
Three left, and the fight's shape had changed now, the scarred woman finally stepping forward herself rather than merely directing, her blade carrying a steady core of blue-white qi along its edge that the others' plain steel had lacked. Core Condensation. The pressure rolling off her pressed against Li Fan's own senses the instant she moved, heavy enough that the blood running down his forearm slowed and thickened before it could properly drip.
"You've cost me two men already," she said, circling now with the remaining low attacker at her flank, "for a target the family only wanted questioned, not killed. I'd rather not report a corpse. Yield, and we'll discuss terms your old craftsman friend never needs to hear about."
"You already threatened him once tonight," Li Fan said, breath coming harder now than his pride wanted to admit, blood running warm along his forearm and hip both. "I don't negotiate with people who use an old man's life as a bargaining chip."
She closed the distance before he'd finished speaking, and Li Fan understood within the first exchange that she outmatched him in raw cultivation, her blade moving with a speed and precision his own Peak Qi Sea reserves strained hard to match. He gave ground for the first time that fight, three careful steps back that cost him nothing but distance, reading her attacks with the same trained eye that had once caught an assassin's feint by its weight shift alone.
The pattern revealed itself on her fourth strike — a habit rather than a flaw exactly, her weight settling a fraction earlier onto her back foot each time she drew a fresh pulse of qi up from her dantian before committing to the blow, the same tell every fighter carried somewhere if a patient enough opponent watched long enough to find it. Li Fan let her fifth strike come without retreating this time, absorbed the shock of her blade against his own with a turned parry that jarred the bones of his whole arm, and used the half breath her own recovery required to drive Origin Severance directly at the seam where her stance's weight had betrayed her.
The cut caught her outer thigh rather than anything vital, but it was enough to disrupt the fresh pulse of qi she'd just drawn up, the backlash running raw through her own meridians. Her leg buckled, her guard dropped for the single instant Li Fan needed, and he ended it the way he ended most things now, with the shortest possible line between his blade and the place her defense had opened — a controlled strike with the flat of the pommel to her shoulder that dropped her weapon rather than her life, judgment holding even now, even bleeding, even furious.
The last low attacker fled the instant his commander went down, vanishing into the dark street's side alley before Li Fan's exhausted body could have caught him even if pursuit had seemed wise. Li Fan let him go, and stood alone amid four fallen bodies in a street gone suddenly, unnervingly silent, his own breath ragged, blood soaking through his robe at hip and forearm both, his legs trembling with an exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical injury alone.
He'd won. He understood plainly, standing there in the aftermath, that winning had cost him considerably more than the wounds themselves accounted for. They'd studied him. Known his fighting style, his economy, his preference for minimal force, closely enough to build a formation specifically designed to exploit it. Whatever the Jiang family actually wanted, they'd invested real time and real resources into understanding exactly who they were dealing with, and Li Fan had just spent the last of his careful anonymity proving, decisively, that the investment hadn't been wasted.
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