I lunged upward from the mud, ignoring the exhaustion, ignoring the venom, ignoring everything but the desperate, roaring need to silence him. I didn't have a weapon. I drove my right hand forward, curling my index and middle fingers into the rigid spear I had used in the temple. I aimed directly for his throat, intending to crush the vagus nerve and put him to sleep instantly. Mu-Rak didn't dodge. He swatted my arm away with the flat of his blade, effortlessly redirecting my strike. Before I could recover my balance, he drove his heavy leather boot directly into the center of my chest. The impact cracked a rib. The air violently exploded from my lungs. I flew backward through the air, crashing spine-first into a thick, unyielding bamboo stalk. I slumped into the mud, coughing violently. Blood and rainwater mixed in my mouth. My vision strobed with dark, black spots. 

My right arm was free. I didn't try to stand. I grabbed a handful of the freezing, wet mud and hurled it directly into the eye-slits of the assassin standing over me with the sword. He flinched, blindly swiping at his face. I rolled onto my stomach, ignoring the agonizing pull of the chain still wrapped around my ankle. I grabbed the heavy iron links with my right hand and violently pulled. The assassin holding the other end was caught off balance. He tripped forward, face-planting into the sludge. I scrambled to my hands and knees, moving like a wounded animal. I dragged myself toward the thickest cluster of bamboo, pushing through the hard, green stalks. "Don't let him run!" A throwing knife whistled through the dark, burying itself deep into the meat of my right thigh. I screamed, a ragged, wet sound, biting my tongue to keep from coll

The blinding, blood-red text of the system warning did not just hover in my vision; it burned directly into my retinas. [Projected Deficit: -1,500 Karma.][Result: Immediate Existential Erasure.] The heat radiating from Hwa Ryeon’s body was a physical weight, pressing the boiling steam down against the granite floor of the dead-end gorge. The air tasted like scorched ozone and copper. She stood ten feet away, her back to me, raising that terrifying, humming, blood-red dao toward the fifteen Shadow Hall assassins scrambling frantically toward the bamboo forest. I couldn't feel my legs. The nightshade venom had turned the lower half of my body into a block of dead, heavy lead. My left arm was completely paralyzed. My golden Foundation Establishment Qi was nothing but a hollow, echoing void. But if she swung that sword, I was dead. Worse than dead. I would

The freezing rain returned the moment Hwa Ryeon stepped back into the shadows, washing the thick, hissing steam out of the dead-end gorge. I remained on my knees on the cracked granite. I stared at my right hand. The deep, horizontal gash across my palm poured hot blood down my wrist, the edges of the wound blackened and burning from the lingering Demonic Qi of her blade. Through the dark, rattling stalks of the bamboo maze, the faint metallic glints in the pale moonlight grew sharper. The fifteen Shadow Hall assassins were creeping back into the clearing. They moved cautiously, their boots scraping against the wet stone, their featureless silver masks turning left and right. They were scanning the shadows for the crimson silk of the Demonic Princess. When they realized she was truly gone, their attention snapped back to me. I was a broken, bleeding target sitting in a puddle of my own blood.

The freezing mountain rain had slowed to a miserable, icy drizzle, but the cold remained—a deep, biting chill that sank straight into the marrow of my bones. Jang Mu-Rak stood before me in the center of the dead-end gorge. He didn't look like a man who had just watched his entire execution squad get dismantled by a dying, broken, one-armed vagrant. He looked perfectly calm. He looked entirely bored. He held his twin blackened daggers in a casual, reverse grip, the poisoned steel catching the faint, filtered light of the pale moon. I pushed my bleeding back against the wet rock wall. Every single movement was an absolute chore. My chest felt like it had been shredded by a thousand hot knives. My breath came in shallow, rattling hitches that tasted like copper and ash. My left arm was still dead, a heavy, useless anchor of frozen muscle and nerve-death dragging down my shoulder. "Get up, Seven," Mu-Rak said. His voic