Chapter 10: Analysis, Exploitation

Vegas, two hours after Iron Newt's death.

In his hotel room, Gilson II was watching a show—not on television, but live. The act was actually quite dull. A fourteen-year-old girl, drugged beforehand, was cutting herself with a dagger. That was all.

For this noble lord, who had lost most of his bodily functions yet still burned with a lust for power, this was the most exciting entertainment available. Watching a healthy, beautiful young person wither before his eyes and become crippled brought him immense satisfaction. Tonight he would sleep on that blood-soaked bed, breathing in the smell of blood. Only then could he have pleasant dreams.

Today's show ended quickly. After a dozen or so cuts, the girl severed an artery and fainted from blood loss. When she had lain motionless for some time, Gilson II tapped a few keys on the touchscreen beside his wheelchair, looking disgruntled. Several medical staff promptly entered the room. The count said, “The usual arrangements.” They carried her out.

The usual arrangements meant giving the girl's family enough money to keep their mouths shut forever. To a noble, it really wasn't much. Even a sports car Gilson II had owned twenty years ago, when he was at university, had cost more than a commoner's family could earn in a lifetime, even if they never spent a penny on food or drink.

The sad thing was that, over the years, almost all the teenagers who had “performed” for Gilson II had volunteered. Or rather, their families had made the decision together. It was a choice born of desperation. If one nightmarish experience could buy a life free from worries about food and clothing, many people would choose it. Their lives were already another kind of nightmare, a long one from which they could never wake.

Wei Sheng passed the people carrying the stretcher in the corridor. He cast a sidelong glance at the girl and sighed softly. Though disgusted by the count's hobby, he depended on the man and was paid handsomely. He had no wish to lose this source of income for the sake of justice that offered him no personal benefit. Besides, these children rarely died. They could almost always be saved in time. At worst, they were left with some mental or physical disability, or became bitter enemies of their parents. That sort of thing.

“Wei Sheng.” Before he could knock, Gilson II opened the door using the computer beside him and fired a question at him. “Did Iron Newt succeed?”

Gilson II had secretly financed the construction of this hotel. The entire building was like an extension of his body, so Wei Sheng was unsurprised. He simply entered and closed the door behind him. “Maple Leaf Commandery police found his body. The local HL has taken over the case. I've already contacted them through certain channels and arranged for them to announce that a tourist named Roda Rich accidentally fell into chemicals at a nearby factory, suffered severe burns all over his body, and eventually died in the street.”

“Useless!” Gilson II roared. “Some Strong-rank ability user! They're all useless! What rank is this Gambling Snake, anyway? How much do I have to spend? What rank of ability user do I have to hire to bring him here?”

“He's Strong rank too, of course,” Wei Sheng said. “There are only a handful of people at Fierce rank or above in the whole world.” What he meant was that Strong rank was the highest the count could hire. Anyone higher might not be for sale.

“Then why is Iron Newt dead? Aren't they the same rank?!” Gilson II demanded.

“It came down to a difference in fighting technique,” Wei Sheng said.

Gilson II calmed down a little and replied through gritted teeth, “Then... what do we do now? Let him escape?”

“No,” Wei Sheng said. “Judging by everything he's done so far, he may come to us himself.”

“What?!” Gilson II's pupils instantly contracted. Fear rose within him, as though that horrifying scene from years ago had never ended.

Wei Sheng said, “At first, I thought he'd asked Jordan to pass you that message just to make you suspicious of Jordan. But Iron Newt's death, and some of the things he said to Iron Newt, make me think... he means it.”

When Wei Sheng left, Gilson II was deeply conflicted. He had abandoned his insistence on taking Gambling Snake alive. Now he wanted the man brought before him, alive or dead. Clearly, he was more worried about Gambling Snake coming to kill him than about being denied the pleasure of revenge.

Wei Sheng himself thought the prospect unlikely. In his view, Gambling Snake was powerful, but hardly powerful enough to storm the place alone. Gilson II did, after all, have some formidable people working for him.

Wei Sheng was a Paper-rank ability user. He might not be particularly strong in combat, but he excelled at gathering and analyzing intelligence. His ability let him control animals' movements and share their sight and hearing. Once he had established a mental connection with an animal, he could take control of it again at any time, wherever it was and however far away. Through that animal's eyes, he could also establish connections with other animals. Wei Sheng had therefore spent years studying bird migration, allowing his eyes and ears to reach almost every corner of the globe. This seemingly perfect surveillance network did have plenty of drawbacks. He couldn't watch places the animals couldn't fly into, for instance, and he frequently had to replace the animals he had established connections with. They were part of the food chain, after all. Death was inevitable.

Of course, Wei Sheng could maintain an active connection with only one animal at a time, or his mind would collapse. There were other requirements, too. First, the animal had to have a brain, which definitely ruled out slugs and starfish. Second, the brain had to be fairly large, so insects were out. Third, the animal couldn't be too clever, so humans were out too.

Despite all these restrictions, Wei Sheng's surveillance and tracking abilities were still formidable, more reliable and harder to detect than sending people in person. The drawback was that he couldn't stay awake controlling animals and watching someone twenty-four hours a day. He therefore had to alternate surveillance duties with the assassins sent to the area.

As for his analytical skills, Wei Sheng was naturally far better than a pretentious idiot like Jordan, with his sham refinement.

Take Gambling Snake's fight with Iron Newt, for example. Wei Sheng had watched the entire thing through a pigeon's eyes, and it had given him a profound appreciation of just how frightening a Qianming assassin could be.

The opening gunshots had targeted four potentially vital spots on Iron Newt's body: the head, heart, abdomen, and knee. Iron Newt hadn't dodged, because his iron scales could stop bullets. Almost instantly, Gambling Snake had followed his instincts and closed in to attack the throat with his hidden blade. This time Iron Newt had blocked the attack with his hand, directly exposing his first weakness: his throat.

Next, Gambling Snake had decisively abandoned his weapon to avoid prolonged contact with his opponent and tried attacking with a grenade. The blast wave and shrapnel had proved equally ineffective against Iron Newt. However many weaknesses he might have, area attacks were clearly not powerful enough to threaten even his vulnerable spots. Only precise, forceful attacks would work, and they would have to hit harder than ordinary bullets or flying grenade fragments.

After that, Gambling Snake had asked his opponent's name. He was feigning weakness, pretending to take his enemy very seriously, but it was a trap. He had deliberately given Iron Newt the impression that he was at a disadvantage, astonished by Iron Newt's strength. Watching from the sidelines, Wei Sheng could see perfectly well that Gambling Snake had not suffered a scratch so far, while Iron Newt had already taken several hits. They might not have done much damage, but it was obvious who held the tactical advantage.

Sure enough, Iron Newt had taken the bait and attacked without restraint, coming down at him from above. Gambling Snake had thrust with his flexible sword. Besides countering the attack, he also intended to test Iron Newt's ability to track moving objects and react instantly. You couldn't measure a person's limits while he stood on level ground. Only by attacking him in midair, with nothing to push off against, could you see just how far he could dodge.

Then Gambling Snake had opened up the distance again and, before Iron Newt could regain his footing, thrown three knives at his eyes, throat, and ankle. All three targets were weaknesses. The vulnerability of his throat had been exposed at the outset. His eyes were what his hand had moved to protect first when the flexible sword stabbed toward his face. The ankle was another probe.

There was one thing even Wei Sheng had missed. Gambling Snake had deliberately slowed those three throwing knives. If Iron Newt hadn't had time to react, the attack would have lost its value.

Iron Newt had blocked two knives and dodged the third, then charged headlong at him in humiliated fury. Gambling Snake, who by then had put some distance between them, learned the last thing he wanted to know, which was Iron Newt's top running speed.

Only then had the fight truly begun. Gambling Snake now knew his opponent's speed, reactions, weaknesses, and the minimum force required to penetrate his vulnerable spots. That was enough. How hard his opponent could hit, how much punishment the rest of his body could withstand, how well he could recover, and so on, meant nothing.

Give your opponent no chance to hurt you, quickly locate and precisely strike his vital spots, and kill him with a single blow. That was an assassin.

Iron Newt's reaction to the attack on his ankle showed that his scales were weaker around joints that needed to stretch and bend. Attacking those places could also immobilize him.

So Gambling Snake had stopped and launched an attack too fast for Iron Newt to react to, with more force than his weak spots could withstand. That single attack had decided the fight.

Having watched the duel from beginning to end, Wei Sheng had considered what would have happened if someone with the same physical abilities as Gambling Snake had fought Iron Newt instead. That person would also have won, but might have been wounded, perhaps even barely scraping through at great cost. Trading punches and kicks while searching for weaknesses could never be as efficient as Gambling Snake's method.

Every move Gambling Snake made had a purpose. He wasted no energy and gave his opponent no advantage in the fight. Most frightening of all was how he used tiny actions to manipulate his opponent's state of mind, allowing him to kill without suffering so much as a scratch.

That was precisely why Wei Sheng had given Gilson II his conclusion: “It came down to a difference in fighting technique.”

...

Gambling Snake, meanwhile, had hardly had an easy time of it since that day.

Gilson II had many henchmen. From Europe to the Americas, the attempts on Gambling Snake's life never stopped. There were no more experts of Iron Newt's caliber, however, and Jordan never appeared again either.

For nearly two weeks, the assassins dogged his every step. Gambling Snake repeatedly switched false identities, convincing enough to get him through airport security, yet he could never shake his pursuers. Of course, they dared not face him head-on. Even a Strong-rank expert had been killed, after all. A direct attack would probably just mean throwing their lives away. Most resorted to sniping, poison, ambushes, and the like. Unfortunately for them, none succeeded, and they lost some of their own people in the process.

To a master like Gambling Snake, their methods were child's play, hardly worth mentioning. An assassin's first weapon was a sniper rifle, while his last might be nothing more than a small knife. The closer you got to the target, the more skill you needed. Beginners used firearms to keep their distance. A master could operate with ease at any range.

Gambling Snake also soon worked out why they kept locating him. He ruled out every possible way he could be followed. In the end, the one method he couldn't eliminate was, as expected, tracking by an ability user.

So he examined the contents of the Book of the Heart again and singled out another ability user working for Gilson II. This man was Wei Sheng.

An ordinary person, on learning this, might have started shooting small animals indiscriminately. Gambling Snake didn't. He devised a plan to turn Wei Sheng's ability to his own use.

The Tom Stall of a month ago might not have thought of such a strategy, but now he had the Book of the Heart as a powerful ally. As the distance between him and his enemy shrank, Gambling Snake's killing instincts grew ever sharper...