Chapter 27: Becoming The Hunter
To his own utter disbelief, he ended up surprising himself by wiping out half of the remaining group entirely unnoticed and within the span of just three minutes.
It was a feat that shocked him far more than it did anyone else. The speed, the fluid coordination of his limbs, and the casual, matter-of-fact brutality with which he ended lives felt completely alien to the boy who had not even woken up with a Dantian that morning. The rate at which it was getting easier to slay them was starting to become deeply alarming.
There was no hesitation left in his chest, no sudden spikes of paralyzing fear, and no moral agonizing over the pooling blood staining the grass. His mind had adapted to the bloodshed with an unnatural, chilling adaptability, as if a dormant predator inside his soul had finally broken out of its cage.
However, he couldn’t stop until he was done. He would come back to this memory after now and think hard on it, dissecting the terrifying ease with which he had transformed into a killer who dispatched human lives like stepping on insects.
For now, he had to wipe them all out, or it would be his life and the lives of innocent passengers that would pay the price... Well, they weren’t exactly innocent.
Not all of them, considering the greedy, self-serving loan shark and his manipulative wife sitting back in the carriage, or the corrupt guards who only protected those who paid top coin. But Han Lin and the other ordinary travelers didn’t deserve to be butchered in their sleep.
He resumed his midnight hunting, sliding deeper into the thickets where the remaining dozen assassins were desperately searching the brush, calling out to one another in mounting anxiety as their numbers mysteriously dwindled into nothingness.
He was moving through a particularly dense patch of hanging vines when his luck finally hit a brief, volatile snag. He misjudged the placement of a dry, brittle twig beneath his boot, and it snapped with a sharp, echoing *crack* that pierced the quiet woods like a gunshot.
A few paces away, an assassin whipping his torch around froze instantly. His eyes widened as they locked onto Lu Feng’s dark silhouette standing between the trees.
"Over here! I found—!"
The man opened his mouth to scream out a full alert to his remaining comrades, but before the assassin could signal others, Lu Feng launched himself at the assassin with the explosive velocity of a coiled spring.
He crossed the intervening space in a fraction of a second, slamming his hands over the man’s face and throat, and strangled him to death, breaking the man’s neck with a sharp, sickening snap in the process due to his explosive newfound strength.
The assassin went instantly limp, his windpipe crushed and his cervical vertebrae shattered before a single coherent warning could escape his lips. Lu Feng caught the falling body, lowered it quietly to the ground, and exhaled a sharp breath of relief.
That was entirely too close.
He didn’t have time to dwell on the near-miss, because the snap of the twig and the abrupt silencing of the scout had drawn immediate attention from nearby.
"Hey! Did you hear that?" a gruff voice called out from behind a thick cluster of weeping willows.
Heavy, hurried footsteps pounded against the dirt. When another one almost caught him approaching, bursting around the corner of a broad tree trunk with his broadsword raised and a savage grin on his face, Lu Feng didn’t even blink. He snatched a heavy, bloodied iron-headed axe he had stripped from an earlier victim’s belt and threw it at his new target, putting every ounce of his Primordial Chaos Bead-enhanced core behind the heave.
The heavy weapon whirled through the air with a vicious, whistling spin, closing the distance instantly and splitting his head wide open with a wet, brutal crunch before the man could even raise his guard. The momentum of the heavy axe carried the lifeless body backward, pinning him heavily against the trunk of a dying oak.
Lu Feng stepped out from the shadows, wiping a stray speck of dust from his dark traveling robe as he checked the mental timer hovering in his vision. The remaining few were scattering in pure, disorganized panic, realizing too late that they weren’t hunting a rat—they were trapped in a dark cage with a monster.
The woods soon grew deathly quiet, save for the frantic, erratic rustling of leaves and the heavy, terrified panting of the few remaining survivors. They were no longer an organized death squad. They were cornered rats, stumbling through the dark, calling out hoarsely to shadows that yielded nothing but cold silence and sudden death.
Lu Feng did not rush. With his enhanced senses and the relentless spinning of the Primordial Chaos Bead in his core, time felt pliable, slowing down enough for him to choreograph every single termination with chilling precision. He had a timer ticking down, and he had a score to settle.
The ninth man of this final cluster was crouched near a moss-covered boulder, his sword trembling so violently in his grip that the metal rattled against his armor. He was staring wildly into the darkness, completely blind to the fact that Lu Feng was descending from the overhanging branch directly above him.
Without a sound, Lu Feng dropped behind the man. His hand shot out like a steel vice, clamping over the assassin’s mouth to choke off any gasp, while his short blade drove upward under the ribs, piercing the liver and sliding straight into the heart.
The man spasmed violently for two seconds before going completely limp. Lu Feng eased the corpse down onto the damp grass, wiped his blade on the dead man’s tunic, and moved instantly toward the next target.
Ten was stumbling blindly through a thicket of thorn bushes, cursing the darkness and his commanding officer in equal measure.
"Damn it all, where are they? Where is everyone?" the man muttered, hacking away at a low-hanging vine with his broadsword.
He swung his blade in a wide, frustrated arc to clear his path, but as he turned, Lu Feng stepped seamlessly inside the lazy sweep of the weapon. Before the assassin could readjust his grip, Lu Feng drove his palm upward into the man’s chin with explosive physical force.
The brutal impact snapped the assassin’s head back, shattering his jaw and sending him crashing backward onto his spine.
Before the man could even scream, Lu Feng brought his heel down squarely on his windpipe, crushing the cartilage with a wet, final crunch.
Number eleven was smarter—or at least more panicked. He had heard the muffled thud of his comrade’s fall and spun around with his short spear leveled.
"Who’s there? Show yourself, coward!" the eleventh assassin roared, his voice cracking with rising hysteria.
Lu Feng did not bother hiding. He stepped out from behind a broad oak tree, his mismatched eyes gleaming with an eerie, composed light in the dim moonlight. The sudden appearance of his target completely broke the assassin’s nerve. With a desperate yell, the man lunged forward, thrusting the spear straight at Lu Feng’s chest.
Lu Feng simply tilted his torso a mere inch to the left, letting the iron tip graze harmlessly past his dark robe. As the man overextended his momentum, Lu Feng closed the distance in a blur, grabbing the shaft of the spear with one hand and driving his dagger straight through the assassin’s throat with the other.
Blood sprayed in a hot, dark arc across the leaves. Lu Feng let go of the gurgling man, watching him collapse into the dirt and claw frantically at his own neck until stillness finally took him.
That left only the twelfth man and the shattered remnants of the scattered group hiding further down the slope.
Number twelve had seen his comrade fall from behind a thick fern. Terror had completely paralyzed his legs; he tried to turn and run, but his boots tangled in the dense roots, sending him tumbling face-first into the mud. He scrambled to push himself up, spluttering and weeping, only to find Lu Feng standing directly over him like an executioner waiting for a verdict.
"Please... please don’t kill me," the twelfth assassin sobbed, pressing himself flat against the earth, raising his hands in a pathetic display of surrender. "I have family—I was just hired—"
Lu Feng showed no expression. Mercy was a luxury for those who hadn’t come to slaughter an entire caravan of innocent and semi-innocent travelers. Without a single word, Lu Feng swung his heavy broadsword in a swift, merciless horizontal sweep.
Thwack!
The blade sheared cleanly through the man’s neck, sending his head spinning off into the dark underbrush in a fountain of crimson, while the headless torso twitched twice before sinking into the mud.
Lu Feng stood amidst the quiet carnage, his breathing remarkably even, his mind ice-cold. He reached down, grabbed the hair of the severed head, and hoisted it up by the scalp. Blood dripped steadily from the ragged neck tissue, soaking into the dirt around his boots.
He checked his mental timer; he had beaten the clock with minutes to spare. But the hunt wasn’t over yet. There was still one person left who needed to understand the true cost of crossing him: the arrogant, vein-popping leader who had sent these forty men to their graves.
Holding the dripping, severed head tightly in his left hand and his blood-stained blade in his right, Lu Feng turned his footsteps toward the edge of the clearing where they had first encountered him.