Trapped in the Same Day for a Thousand Years

Chapter 277: Peerless Master

by cnwebnovels

A fierce gust of air came at him.

Wu Chen’s hand came up and closed on the tattooed arm. Before the baton could fall he pulled the arm sideways, drew the man in, and drove his knee up.

Crack!

“Ahhh!”

The tattooed young man screamed as Wu Chen flung him away. He rolled to the wall and lay there clutching his right arm with his left, howling.

The arm was broken, bent backward in the opposite direction.

Another young man nearby saw it happen and, without thinking, closed the two steps to Wu Chen. His baton had barely come up before his whole body pitched toward the wall. Wu Chen’s fist had landed square on his face, and several teeth flew out of his mouth.

“Fuck!”

Cries of shock went up. Everyone in the alley close enough to Wu Chen stopped fighting on instinct.

They had all seen it. The man in the suit who had come to meddle could not only fight; he was vicious with it.

That moment’s pause gave the short-haired young man, knocked down again, the chance to roll to his feet and stagger two steps toward Wu Chen.

Wu Chen said nothing to him. He simply walked two steps deeper into the alley.

That put the short-haired young man nearer the alley mouth with Wu Chen between him and the pack. If they wanted to keep beating him, they would have to get past Wu Chen first.

The short-haired young man braced a hand against the wall. He could barely keep his feet. His left leg had taken at least two baton strikes; nothing was broken, but the moment he put weight through it the pain shot up and set the leg trembling.

“Brother Bao!”

The girl in the black dress ran the two steps to him and caught hold of him.

And the instant she took his weight, he lost the ability to stand at all.

Until now he had been holding himself upright on sheer will and adrenaline. But a chivalrous stranger had appeared to help them, and he was an expert. That sense of being out of danger, for the moment, combined with his girlfriend’s concern, was enough to drain the last of his strength away.

At the same time—

“Fuck! He dares stick his nose in? Get him!” the white-haired young man among the thugs shouted, waving his collapsible baton.

Men who lived this life cared about face. They had the numbers. How could they back down? Wu Chen had crippled two of them, and naturally that did not frighten them. If anything, it made them furious.

“Get him!”

“Go!”

The group charged at Wu Chen snarling, weapons swinging, every one of them looking fierce and fearless.

Except for the white-haired young man.

He was smart.

He had been running with street crowds since he was thirteen and was a minor leader himself now. He knew how to handle a vicious opponent, and you did not simply charge in without thinking. Let the others go first and wear him down. Once his brothers had put Wu Chen on the ground, then he would join in.

A lovely plan.

As for waiting until Wu Chen was down—

that was never going to happen.

The fight began.

Wu Chen stepped in and kicked one man off his feet, then caught another and sent him over his shoulder with an economy of movement that looked almost light.

The night was thick. There was plenty of moonlight, but high walls ran along both sides of the alley and the light inside was badly short. Not so dark that people could not see one another—only blurred, everything indistinct.

Figures moved through the gloom.

Shouts rose one after another.

The sounds of fighting, of impact, of screaming never stopped.

Wu Chen against ten or twenty men looked almost like a scene from an old Xiangjiang film, a supreme master trapped in an alley and cutting down gods themselves if gods stood in his way. Cutting down gods was naturally a rhetorical flourish.

But those ten or twenty men truly were no match for him.

Alley fighting was its own classic kind of fight. There were more films and television dramas with scenes like this than anyone could count.

Wu Chen had deliberately trained for fighting inside elevators. Elevator combat was extreme and highly specialized.

Alley fighting he had never specifically trained for.

Not training for it specifically did not mean he had never done it. In fact, across his thousand years in the loop, the alley fight was the kind he had fought most.

It required no particular design or arrangement. It simply happened.

Cause trouble, run, get blocked in—and eight times out of ten you ended up in an alley. If you got away, that was another story. If you did not, the alley fight followed naturally.

During the thousand-year loop, Wu Chen had been hacked to death in alleys many times. Mostly in the early years. His technique had still been poor then, and he went looking for trouble, courting death—sometimes for amusement, sometimes specifically to practice fighting. And when Wu Chen fought, he fought as though his life were on the line. His opponents did the same.

So he got hacked to death.

That was the early period.

Later it stopped happening. His technique improved and his experience grew vastly richer.

From everything Wu Chen had learned across those thousand years, he knew that the hardest men to beat in Donghai were the elite bodyguards around major figures. One-on-one, no one was his match. But against a group of them, his stamina would eventually fail.

The men fighting him now were not elite bodyguards.

Wu Chen knew who they were. Street thugs and bar security, nothing more. They stood at the very bottom of Donghai’s underworld. Not a genuine trained fighter among them; a few had practiced a little, and in front of Wu Chen there was no meaningful difference between them and men who had never trained at all.

And in an alley, beating them was very nearly play.

The terrain kept them from coming at him all at once. Three or four at most.

No threat whatsoever.

“Ahhh!”

“Fuck!”

The screams kept coming.

The short-haired young man sat against the wall in the corner, fingers laced tight with his girlfriend’s, trying to recover. He turned his head and watched Wu Chen go on walking deeper into the alley.

He was fucking stunned.

Wu Chen really was advancing one step at a time. And those ten or twenty men seemed to be feeding themselves to him, rushing in wave after wave and going down within moments. One had his hair seized and his head driven into the wall. Another had his leg broken by a kick.

In truth the details were hard to make out. The dark made everything hazy.

Yet that same haziness, that inability to see every detail, made Wu Chen’s movements look cleaner still, more decisive. There was something of a cold-blooded killer in it. Ruthless strikes, fast hands—and somehow he even looked stylish doing it.

Wu Chen had all but rewritten the short-haired young man’s understanding of what an expert could be.

He had trained himself. That was why he understood how formidable Wu Chen’s compact, precise, lightning-quick style was.

A peerless master.

This was what one looked like.

The short-haired young man stared, eyes wide, stunned. And gradually excitement began to surge through him.

This was fucking incredible.

The girl in the black dress held his arm, their fingers still laced, and watched Wu Chen push his way steadily deeper into the alley. She was just as stunned, and she murmured to him without thinking, “He… he’s even better than Uncle Wei, isn’t he?”

“What the fuck is this?”

A horrified voice came from farther inside the alley.

The white-haired young man, who had kept to the rear the entire time. He was stunned too—and badly rattled.

And not only him. Behind him, deeper in the alley, four young men and women stood huddled together.

They were the ones who had caused all of this. More precisely, the tall, thin young man with the punk hairstyle had caused it. He had called these people in.

Earlier the four of them had watched from more than ten meters outside the alley. When the short-haired young man and the girl in the black dress fled inside and the thugs went after them, the four had followed to keep watching.

The white-haired young man was the leader of the thugs.

The punk-haired young man and his companions, by their clothes and their manner, were rich kids who spent their nights in clubs.

Now they were stunned as well. And they were more frightened than the white-haired young man, because they were not really part of the underworld. It was not that they had never been in a group fight, but they had never seen a whole crowd beaten until arms and legs were breaking.

They had run into one terrifyingly formidable bastard.

Closer.

Wu Chen had already put fourteen or fifteen men down. Only a few remained, and even they were losing the nerve to attack.

The white-haired young man saw Wu Chen still coming.

He gritted his teeth, stamped a foot, and charged with his baton. He had no choice. If he lost his nerve now he could forget about surviving in this world afterward. And if he hid, what would become of the young masters and young ladies behind him? If they were crippled while he walked away without a scratch, he was dead.

Go.

Even charging in as a gesture and getting kicked hard enough to break a bone would be better than the alternatives.

That was the thinking. But once he charged, he did not hold back. He reached Wu Chen and swung the baton straight at his shoulder.

Not the head. After so many years in this life he understood that a baton to the head could kill. No one could die here.

He fought the way instinct and habit had trained him to.

Another man offering himself up.

His arm had risen far too high. Against an attack like that, with no defense behind it, Wu Chen could not be bothered to catch his wrist. He lifted his foot for a straight kick, fast as lightning.

“Mr. Wu?!”

The white-haired young man shrieked, and the sound was so sharp he might have seen a ghost.