Chapter 26: Sorry?
The heavy silence that hung over the clearing lasted for only a fraction of a second before the sheer absurdity and humiliation of the display shattered the bandit leader’s sanity. His face turned a deep, bruised shade of purple as the blood rushed to his head, and the thick veins on his forehead bulged so violently they looked ready to burst through his skin.
"You... you bastard!" the leader roared, his voice cracking with unadulterated fury as he pointed a trembling, gauntleted finger directly toward the shadows where the spear had been launched.
Across the moonlit clearing, Lu Feng’s eyes jammed directly with the leader’s furious gaze. Caught red-handed in the act of peeking through the foliage, Lu Feng blinked in surprise.
Feeling a sudden, awkward urge to acknowledge the glaring blunder, he foolishly smiled and mouthed a quiet, sarcastic word to the enraged boss. "Sorry?"
That single, casual gesture was the final straw. Veins popped in the man’s head, and before he even finished speaking his next command, the other twenty-nine assassins had moved to attack.
"Kill him! Tear him limb from limb and bring me his heart!" the leader shrieked, drawing his massive broadsword as he charged forward at the head of the pack.
Lu Feng’s expression morphed into one of both fear and confusion. All he’d done was apologise after meeting eyes with the leader, and now all of them were coming his way? The sheer collective momentum of twenty-nine seasoned killers crashing through the underbrush sounded like a stampede of wild beasts.
Without wasting another second, Lu Feng turned on his heel and took off, leading them further into the forest.
His goal was to scatter them as sparsely as possible. He was very aware that he couldn’t defeat all twenty-nine of them at the same time in a direct, head-on collision. Even with the monstrous, game-breaking power of the Primordial Chaos Bead humming in his Dantian and the raw physical enhancements coursing through his limbs, swarming was a death sentence.
So he planned to take them all out the same way he’d done with the previous groups: by using the dark terrain to isolate them, picking them apart one by one through guerrilla tactics and brutal, surgical precision.
Even then, he wasn’t entirely sure he could pull such a feat off. The previous ones had felt like luck was on his side, a series of flukes where everything somehow aligned in his favor, and this time, he was desperately hoping that luck wouldn’t run out.
He sprinted through the dense labyrinth of ancient trees, weaving through thickets and leaping over rotting logs with a fluid grace that left no visible trail. Behind him, the aggressive shouts of the chasing mob echoed through the canopy, but as they charged blindly into the dark, tangled woods, their formation naturally fractured. The faster runners surged ahead, while the slower ones lagged behind, getting caught on low-hanging branches and uneven roots.
Lu Feng made sure to scatter them thoroughly, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse as he doubled back, slipped through narrow gaps, and deliberately led small clusters down separate paths. He calculated every movement, leaving the largest group at just three members, while ensuring that all the rest were broken down into pairs or isolated wanderers.
Each group had enough physical space between them for him to finish each target off completely before backup could possibly arrive and close the distance.
That was what he wanted to believe with all of his heart, but would that be possible?
Only one way to find out.
After successfully scattering the group across a wide, sprawling sector of the forest, he began his systematic thinning process, reducing them as silently and swiftly as possible. He’d already taken down ten people earlier in the night, and now he had twenty-nine more to go.
Worse still, he was on a strict timer. He checked the invisible mental counter hovering at the edge of his vision and realized with a jolt that he had somehow used almost half the allocated time.
Thirteen minutes was a terrifyingly short window to hunt down and slaughter nearly thirty desperate men spread out across a dark forest, but he locked his jaw and hardened his resolve. He believed he could make it work. He had to.
His first victim was wandering entirely alone, a lone wolf detached from the rest of the pack, making the kill exceptionally easy for him. The man was nervously sweeping his torch back and forth, muttering curses under his breath as he kicked aside piles of damp leaves.
With a longer sword he had scavenged from one of the earlier corpses, Lu Feng dropped silently from a low oak branch directly behind the man’s blind spot. He moved like a phantom, his steps devoid of friction.
Before the assassin could even draw a breath to gasp, Lu Feng drove the blade straight through the man’s back, the cold steel piercing his heart with absolute precision.
Simultaneously, Lu Feng slammed his free hand tightly over the man’s mouth, smothering any potential sound so his dying gurgle wouldn’t give out their location to nearby patrollers.
The man stiffened, his eyes rolling back in shock as the life drained from his limbs, and Lu Feng lowered him gently to the damp earth without a single rustle of grass giving him away.
Without pausing to catch his breath, Lu Feng melted back into the shadows and moved to the next target, intent on doing something similar. Not far away, another single victim was cautiously searching through the dense forest for him, entirely unaware that the roles had flipped completely, and that their supposed prey was indeed the apex predator waiting in the dark.
The second lone wanderer didn’t even realize he was walking into his own grave. The man was kicking aside damp, decaying leaves, his heavy boots making an obnoxious crunching sound that echoed foolishly through the quiet night air. He held a flickering torch in one hand and a rusted short sword in the other, muttering harsh, frustrated curses under his breath about how much he hated late-night perimeter sweeps.
He had no idea that his life was about to be abruptly terminated.
Lu Feng materialized from the dense foliage like a ghost riding the night wind. He didn’t make a single sound as he dropped from a low-hanging oak branch directly behind the man’s blind spot.
His stolen broadsword sank deep into the base of the man’s skull with absolute, surgical precision, piercing straight through the soft tissue at the nape of the neck before a single breath could leave his lungs. The man stiffened instantly, his torch slipping from his fingers to hiss softly out in the dirt, and collapsed into the undergrowth without a whimper.
From that moment on, the hunt turned into an absolute blur of calculated slaughter.
Lu Feng swept through the dark labyrinth of trees with a scary efficiency that defied human logic. He moved from shadow to shadow, his newly awakened senses tracking every heartbeat, every shallow breath, and every subtle shift of weight among the scattered enemy ranks.