She stalked toward him, calm now, confident. The hum around them faded, replaced with the normal din of combat as she let the illusions die. She did not need them anymore, not from the look in her eyes.

  Somewhere between breathing and hurting, a memory surfaced.

  The robed man. Blood everywhere. The way he had crushed that jade bottle. The pills.

  The healing pills in his storage bag.

  His hand twitched toward the belt pouch at his side, stopped, and then moved slower, more cautious. He could not just yank the bottle out and pop a pill. Any halfway competent opponent would see that and stop him.

  So he forced himself to sway.

  He staggered to his feet, legs shaking harder than they actually needed to. Took one step back, then another, making his little hopping retreats look more desperate than deliberate. His hand brushed his belt, then his chest, then finally dipped toward his side as if he were clutching his ribs. His fingers slid into the pouch’s mouth, feeling around until they closed over the cool shape of the jade bottle.

  He stumbled again, letting his foot catch on a rock. As he pitched sideways, he let the bottle roll along his palm, thumb popping the lid. He brought that hand up as if to shield his face, fingers curling just long enough to snag one small pill and flick it into his mouth.

  The bottle itself he palmed back down and shoved into the bag’s opening as he hit the ground on his side.

  She watched him, amusement in her eyes, misreading the whole thing.

  “Pathetic,” she said. “You should have taken my offer.”

  The pill hit his stomach with a strange warmth. A moment later, that warmth spread. It flowed into his ribs, threaded into the bruises, soaked into his aching muscles. It did not fix everything, but it started knitting things back together at a speed he could feel.

  His qi stirred, rising from the sluggish puddle it had become into something closer to a stream.

  She started talking. Of course she did.

  People like her always talked when they thought they had already won. Boasting. Threatening. Asking questions they did not actually care to hear answers to.

  He only caught half of it. Something about how he should not have meddled, how this was Cai family business now whether they liked it or not, how she had been merciful.

  He pushed himself to his knees. The pill’s heat climbed up his spine, tickled the back of his throat, and settled there like pressure.

  That was new.

  He swallowed, but the pressure did not go away. It built. He could almost taste metal and storm on his tongue. His lungs felt full and empty at the same time, like they were waiting for something.

  Oh. Oh, you have got to be kidding me, he thought.

  The pressure spiked.

  He stood up straight without meaning to, chest expanding. The woman stopped mid-sentence, watching him with a frown, finally sensing that something had changed.

  He opened his mouth.

  And for the first time in a real fight, he cawed.

  It ripped out of him, loud and sharp and wrong, a sound that did not belong in a human throat. It was part shout, part bird call, part echo of something that belonged high above storm clouds and deep inside his forging-anvil of a Dantian.

  The sound hit her like a hammer.

  She flinched, eyes widening. Her hands snapped up to her ears on pure reflex, more from instinct than thought. Around them, the nearest fighters, bandit and guard alike, stumbled or winced. The air itself seemed to ripple.

  For her, it was worse.

  Her ears rang. Her vision wobbled. The world spun for a second, as if she had been twirled in place and then shoved. More importantly, inside her body, her qi stuttered. The smooth flow through her meridians jerked off rhythm for a heartbeat, like a song skipping a beat.

  She tried to reassert control, to clamp down and smooth it out, but the damage was done. That one brief hitch robbed her of balance.

  Algraves was already moving.

  He lunged in, body suddenly feeling light and solid at the same time, like the ground itself was helping him. The pill’s warmth and the aftershock of that Corvid shout pushed him forward. He closed the gap in three quick crow-steps and drove one of his claw-knives toward her ribs.

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  She tried to twist away, but her timing was off.

  Steel bit into flesh. This time it was not a shallow scratch on her arm. He felt the resistance of muscle and the slide of the blade along bone before it came free again, blood darkening her tunic.

  She staggered back with a gasp, shock flashing across her face. Not just from the wound, but from the fact that he had actually hurt her.

  The illusions around the battlefield wavered and vanished completely.

  She snapped her head toward the caravan.

  “Cover me!” she shrieked.

  Two bandits broke away from their fights immediately. Coincidentally or not, they were the same two who had been hacking at the Cai merchants. They sprinted toward her, blood on their blades, faces panicked.

  Everyone else was either dead, dying, or locked down in fights they were losing.

  The woman took all of that in at a glance. Her eyes hardened. Whatever pride she had, it was not enough to make her stay here and die for a botched robbery.

  She grabbed the first bandit that reached her by the collar, spun, and hurled him bodily toward a knot of guards. He crashed into them, sending two men sprawling. The second bandit she seized by the back of his armor and tossed him directly into Hu Bo’s path, forcing the guard captain to twist aside or run the man through.

  Then she turned and ran.

  She did not flee in a blind panic. Her strides were long and controlled, feet slamming into the road as she headed for the darkness beyond the firelight. Even wounded, she was fast. Faster than he was.

  Algraves growled low in his throat.

  He took three running steps, then jumped.

  His body moved like it had when the Corvid had dragged him through lightning and death. He tucked knees and arms in, letting momentum carry him, then snapped out into a diving arc, arms spread like wings, Claw knife on display in his dominant hand.

  He came down on her like a crow stooping on prey.

  She sensed him at the last instant. She spun, planting her feet, and threw one hand up to catch his shoulder. Her other hand snapped out to grab his wrist, fingers clamping down like iron around the knife he was leading with.

  For a heartbeat, they froze like that, bodies straining. Her smirk came back, thin and cold.

  “Too slow,” she said.

  Then she jerked.

  His arm screamed in protest. She started to twist, planning to slam him into the ground with his own momentum.

  Unfortunately for her, he had two knives.

  The second blade was already in his off hand, hidden at his side. As she focused on the wrist she had trapped, he let the opposite hand move in close, kept it compact, and drove that knife up under her ribs, aiming for where his training and too many battlefield autopsies told him the heart sat.

  The point punched through cloth and flesh. There was a moment of resistance, then a terrible, slick give.

  Her eyes went wide. The smirk vanished.

  She let go of him, staggering back, one hand flying to her chest. Her fingers closed around the knife hilt, but he slapped her hand away before she could pull it free.

  “Do not,” he said quietly. “You will just make a mess.”

  She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something. What actually came out was a wet cough and a trickle of blood. Her knees buckled.

  He did not assume that was enough.

  Remembering the robed man and his little pill tricks, Algraves stepped in and grabbed her hair, yanking her head back. He watched her eyes, looking for clarity, for the telltale focus of someone about to trigger some last desperate technique.

  He saw only pain and disbelief.

  He slashed once, clean and efficient, across her throat. Blood spilled. Her body jerked, then sagged.

  He let her fall.

  Around him, the last pockets of fighting sputtered out. The remaining bandits, seeing their leader die and most of their comrades already down, broke and tried to flee. The guards did not let them. This was not that kind of world.

  Hu Bo’s wolf-tooth club rose and fell. Blades flashed in the dark. Moments later, the only sounds were pained groans from the wounded and the harsh breathing of the living.

  No one offered mercy.

  The caravan guards moved through the aftermath with practiced motions, finishing off anyone still trying to crawl away, stripping weapons and usable gear from the bodies, dragging corpses to the roadside. They did not loot with joy, just grim practicality. Steel and leather were worth money. It would be a waste to leave them to rot.

  Algraves knelt beside the dead cultivator woman and went through her pockets and belt pouches. He found a few coins, a broken talisman, some dried meat, and a half-empty waterskin.

  No jade bottle. No hidden pills. No precious treasures.

  “Of course not,” he muttered. “Probably why you were out here robbing people in the first place.”

  He stood, scanning the surrounding darkness. Somewhere out there, there had to be a camp or a bolt hole where this group had been staging from. Bandits did not just appear out of nowhere and vanish back into it. Not organized ones, anyway.

  He walked a little way down the road, away from the caravan, and crouched near a distinctive chunk of stone jutting from the roadside ditch. He stacked a small cairn of fist-sized rocks there, memorizing its shape and the exact look of the surrounding trees.

  “Later,” he told himself. “When I am not bleeding and people I sort of like are not exhausted.”

  Behind him, the caravan came back to life in a different way. Wounded guards were bandaged. Ren Cai and Yon Cai checked on their family. Two of the older children were weeping quietly as someone dragged a dead bandit away from the wagon they had huddled behind.

  Broken crates were righted. One of the fires was rebuilt. Hu Bo walked the perimeter with a limp, checking to make sure no one else was lurking in the dark, then came back to clap Algraves on the shoulder.

  “You fight ugly,” the guard captain said, voice hoarse.

  Algraves huffed a laugh. “It works.”

  Hu Bo nodded once. That seemed to be all the praise he needed to give.

  They did not bother trying to sleep in. As soon as the worst wounds were wrapped and the wagons were checked for damage that might slow them, they started breaking down what was left of camp. Within a few hours, as the first light of dawn touched the edge of the Great Green, the caravan rolled back onto the road.

  No one complained about the early start.

  A few days later, with no more incidents, the walls of Junktar finally came into view.