11. There Are Always Surrenderists

There Are Always Surrenderists

I pulled the knife out.

I had not sensed it until after it pierced my skin.

Fortunately, it only went in an inch or two before lodging in muscle and failing to go any deeper.

Of course it hurt. But the wound healed.

And the ornate steel knife crumbled into ash in my hand.

It was like that movie I had seen when I was ten. The one with the orcs.

“Seriously? Could you try being a little creative?” I shouted at the still-invisible attacker.

Cheng Rui and Chi Li stood back to back. Red flames burned in both of the red-haired girl’s hands, and an orange dome of light formed around the two of them.

My new senses and my regeneration both warned me that a bit of foreign matter remained in the wound. It hurt almost as much as being stabbed in the first place.

“You do know everyone has seen that movie, right?”

Then I used Near-Object Manipulation to pull the foreign object out and Strength Modulation to dampen my own durability, tearing free the tiny shard of blade still lodged inside me.

Twelve figures dropped from the ceiling.

Their screams were high and sharp enough to shame banshees.

Two landed on the shield surrounding Chi Li. The first turned to ash in an instant. The second had both arms burned almost to the shoulders, but that did not stop it from lunging at the red-haired girl the moment the magical shield vanished. It kicked her to the ground and opened a mouth full of sharklike teeth.

Somehow, Cheng Rui’s turret was back in his hands in the blink of an eye. Electricity flickered over it, and in an instant it shot through the chest of a figure that looked like a boy.

Then Cheng Rui screamed.

Blood sprayed from his side as an invisible blade cut him open.

The remaining figures tried to swarm me.

At first glance, they looked like completely ordinary people, aside from the screaming and the fact that they had just fallen from the ceiling. They even wore normal clothes, which most monsters did not.

They looked so ordinary that, although my senses noticed them, I had not taken them seriously at all.

Up close, however, I saw that their eyes were hollow black pools without pupils or irises, filled with a hatred so intense it seemed made of tar, hissing not physically but spiritually, corroding like acid.

So I punched as fast as I could.

Like the shadow Chi Li had called a Black Hand, if they were hit hard enough, they burst into clouds of black miasma.

Unlike the shadow, they did not regenerate. Or if they did, it was too slow to matter in a fight.

“I’m going to make you pay for this, Yue Xiao!” the red-haired girl snarled, standing protectively beside Cheng Rui’s curled, trembling body.

“I’ll roast you over a fire and peel your skin off piece by piece!”

With her fury, the flames rose, forming fireballs that shot toward every shadow, every hint of movement.

“You’ll have to find me first, little girl.”

A dry, middle-aged man’s voice echoed around us.

“But by then, you obnoxious brats will all be dead, and I’ll receive the reward I deserve.”

A knife flew through the air, unseen and unheard, yet somehow still catching my attention.

Before I could even decide how to react, it passed through Chi Li’s back.

Then through her chest.

Then bit into the concrete floor with a dry crack like a gunshot.

Instead of spraying blood and entrails the way a normal person would, Chi Li vanished. A jet of flame erupted from an empty spot beside where she had first stood, following the knife’s path back toward its source.

The entire exchange took less than a second, so fast it would have been almost impossible to believe—if both sides had been ordinary humans.

But with superpowers involved, everything seemed to slow down, as if carefully arranged.

“You know, I almost want to thank you brats,” the old man’s voice came again from every direction. “If you hadn’t killed a Black Hand, I’d never have had this opportunity to earn that position and all the power that comes with it.”

“What power? The power to be a dog for a mad immortal from another world?” Chi Li spat venom and fireballs, but neither seemed to hit their target. “Do you really think your new master can conquer Earth alone?”

“Why not? He has many powers that can ignore conventional weapons and tools and bring modern nations to their knees.”

More knives flashed through the air. Two burned against Chi Li’s reformed shield. Three stabbed toward my legs. The layer of kinetic repulsion over my skin bounced them away the instant they touched me, without me needing to move.

“He only needs advisers to tell him how to use those tools properly. Those advisers will receive immortality and greater rewards.”

“Are you insane?” Chi Li was speaking, but I was not paying much attention to her words.

I was trying to understand how I had sensed the knives coming when even my enhanced perception could not detect them directly.

“You’d join an actual dark lord for power? That never ends well!”

“How would you know?” More invisible knives shot from…

There.

“Because some fantasy novels said so?”

In the northeast corner above the storm drain, there was a faint hollow outline. Similar momentary hollows flickered around the knives themselves before they disturbed the air while flying through it.

“No,” I said after slamming the invisible man into the brick wall behind him hard enough to drive him several inches into it. “Because you’re a damned idiot.”

He had hidden himself well, but had completely failed to conceal the empty space his body left in the surrounding air.

The invisible attacker became solid.

He was a perfectly ordinary-looking middle-aged man with thinning hair, messy black strands hanging around his shoulders, sun-darkened skin, and a patched, worn-out parka.

He glared at me.

When my fist drove into his chest and his bones broke like twigs, he smiled crookedly.

“We’ll… see… little girl…”

He forced out the words, then vanished completely, bloodstains and all.

…Had he just teleported?

“Cheng Rui!” Chi Li cried, kneeling beside the wounded boy.

The brown-haired boy did not react to her voice. He lay there limp, bleeding very, very slowly from his side.

“Damn it. He’s lost too much blood.”

My best friend patted her pockets, then pulled out…

A red cookie?

She pressed the little piece of candy to Cheng Rui’s forehead until it cracked.

Red light flashed.

In the next moment, the boy no longer had that dying, hollow look.

Magical healing.

“He needs more healing, and that was my last healing seal,” Chi Li said, nearly frantic.

She lifted the unconscious boy, exoskeleton and all, as if he weighed nothing.

“I should never have let him come without armor.”

She looked at me as if weighing something in her mind, then made a decision.

“We need to get back to headquarters as quickly as possible.”