Chapter 165: God of Elevator Combat

Chapter 165: God of Elevator Combat

By the time the elevator doors slid open, five men were already down inside. Three were still standing.

Wu Chen, in the farthest corner, with the skinny masked man he had hauled into his arms as a shield—and a man in a black baseball cap bringing a knife down toward Wu Chen’s head.

The fight was not finished when the doors opened.

Elevator combat moved at a blistering pace, but there were simply too many of them.

The blade came down. Wu Chen shoved the skinny masked man away, snapped a kick up, and struck the man’s knife hand at the wrist. The knife tore loose, flew upward, punched through the elevator ceiling, and stuck there. Wu Chen swept his own blade back in a short arc—

The man in the black cap clutched at his spurting throat, staggered back a step, and tripped over a body.

It sounded complicated when described. In practice, it was only a handful of movements.

Wu Chen was extremely fast.

In fact, from the moment the doors began to part until one second after they stood fully open, he finished it.

All seven men were down on the elevator floor. None of them were dead yet—there simply had not been time. Even a fatal wound to the neck does not kill a man in a dozen seconds.

They were all twitching.

Some clutched their throats. One had a hand pressed to his chest, while his other hand—

Was gone. Severed at the wrist.

Outside the elevator, Li Ruobing had a hand over her mouth. Her eyes had gone red at once. She stood utterly still, staring into the car with her eyes wide.

Her bodyguards were much the same, gazes fixed and blank on what lay inside.

Wu Chen had won.

In a cramped box with almost nowhere to dodge, he had fought seven men alone and won. All seven were down. He was the only one on his feet. Blood was everywhere.

It made no sense.

Nobody could do this.

And even supposing someone could win, he should have been mortally wounded himself.

Li Ruobing’s bodyguards were the elite of the elite.

So they understood.

And the better they understood, the more impossible it looked. Even in theory the odds of such a thing were vanishingly small.

And yet—

There was nothing impossible about it at all.

Because Wu Chen had trained for this.

He had chosen this shopping center deliberately. He had known that once Ding Ruilong learned the first operation had failed, he would not let it go; given the man’s temperament, he was very likely to go to extremes and order Wu Chen killed regardless of consequence.

So Wu Chen had picked this place—a shopping center with dreadful business and almost no customers in the morning.

He was giving himself an opportunity as well.

After all, if Wu Chen was going to kill people, he could hardly let anyone watch him do it.

He had not known in advance exactly where or how they would strike. They might ram his car in the garage. They might corner him in an elevator. There was no way to be certain.

But Wu Chen feared nothing.

He had even been slightly excited.

Especially by the possibility of an elevator fight.

It was a classic method of murder, one that turned up constantly in the films of his previous life.

In a certain famous crime film, a police superintendent was cornered in an elevator before being thrown from a building. And most famously, in another film, a gang boss was surrounded in an elevator by a pack of men and stabbed who knew how many times—and still won the fight, earning himself the name God of Elevator Combat. In the end his wounds were too severe, and he died in the hospital.

There were countless other examples. Elevator fights had appeared in far too many films and television dramas.

As for Wu Chen—

He had been trapped in a single day for more than a thousand years. He had gone mad, gone berserk, courted death without number.

And he had specifically trained for elevator combat.

He had trained with his own life. Die, reset, try again.

During the stretch of the loop he had devoted to hand-to-hand fighting, Wu Chen had drilled elevator combat on purpose, because he believed it was something a man could genuinely master.

It was not like trying to defeat several hundred people alone. That was flatly impossible; stamina alone forbade it. Nothing beyond the limits of the human body could ever be achieved, however much a man trained.

Elevator combat was different.

However many enemies there were, only a handful could fit inside an elevator.

The confined space limited him—and it limited them exactly as much.

Training it also raised close-quarters killing ability to a terrifying degree.

Wu Chen had died dozens of times learning it. Later he reached the point where he could win but come out gravely wounded. After that he could win with light injuries.

And in the end he could win without a scratch.

He had even distilled several principles of elevator combat.

First, he had to stand in a corner. That protected his back and both rear flanks. His enemies could come only from the front.

Second, he needed a shield.

At the outset he had to seize one man, disable him, and drag him in front of his body. One man was enough to cover most of him.

Third, he had to keep his footing.

Otherwise an opponent could kick the shield and bring him down with it.

And once he was down, he was dead.

Another point: knives were not the only weapons.

The shield itself was a weapon.

An elevator was so cramped that shoving the man in front of him outward could knock down several attackers at once. But before pushing one shield away, he had to lock onto the next, so that the instant he let go of the body in his arms he could seize another.

There were many more principles.

All of them sounded hopelessly idealized.

But Wu Chen had trained them with his life, over and over.

He had insisted on mastering it not only to sharpen his fighting ability, but also—

For the thrill of it.

Wu Chen would say without hesitation that in all the world today, nobody was better at elevator combat than he was.

Nobody at all.

However great another man’s talent, he could never have had Wu Chen’s training conditions.

Clang!

Wu Chen dropped the knife, straightened his suit jacket out of habit, and stepped out of the elevator.

“You’re here.”

He looked at Li Ruobing, standing two meters off with a gun in her hand, greeted her with a smile, then pulled the decorative handkerchief from his breast pocket, shook it open, and began wiping the blood from his hands.

Li Ruobing and her bodyguards made no sound whatsoever.

They only stared.

At that moment Wu Chen looked terrifying.

Terrifying in the plainest sense of the word.

He was covered in blood, his upper body worst of all. His suit, his shirt collar, his chin, part of his cheek, even his hair were smeared with it.

The blood had sprayed onto him. His method required a shield; every time he disabled a man he hauled him into his arms, and whatever came out of the other man ended up on him.

“You—”

Roughly five seconds of silence passed before Li Ruobing found her voice. She took a sudden step forward, eyes still wide.

“Where are you hurt?”

“I’m not.” Wu Chen smiled.

He was still smiling.

Li Ruobing went on staring at him. She collected herself. There was too much she wanted to ask, and she asked none of it. Instead she took out a handkerchief and began wiping the blood from his face.

“Send someone to the property management surveillance room.”

Wu Chen turned his head and glanced at Zhou Huan.

He did not need to explain. He was only reminding him there was work to do.

Zhou Huan caught it at once. A hand to his earpiece, he spoke rapidly. “Xiao Wu, Old Chen, get to the surveillance room. Binzi, find the power supply and cut power to all the elevators—”

Then he spun around.

“You two, bring the cars over and block off the area. Get ready to load people. The rest of you, smash the cameras in the garage—”

Orders given, Zhou Huan strode off to one side and pulled out his phone.

He called Li Ruotai.

“Young Master, there’s been an incident on Mr. Wu’s end. We may need you to contact the owner of Xinmao Shopping Center.”

Wu Chen smiled at Li Ruobing. She had gotten off about as much as she could. The rest was not coming away like this.

“That’s enough. I’ll shower when we get back. You won’t get it clean.”

That said, Wu Chen stepped back into the elevator and searched Old Dao, unconscious but still alive.

He drew out Old Dao’s phone.

He knew the man.

He had known who Old Dao was during the loop.

Using Old Dao’s own fingerprint, Wu Chen unlocked the phone. Then he stepped back, raised it, and aimed it into the elevator.

Click!

He took a photograph.

Then he entered a number and sent the photograph to someone by text.

Immediately afterward he dialed the same number and raised the phone to his ear.