SUPREME WAR GOD The Despised Son-in-Law Returns

Chapter 6: Snow Pepper and Black Salt

Damon didn't look at the window. He picked up his chopsticks, slurped loudly from an empty bowl and then slammed it down on the counter.

"I can't pay," he said in a loud, slurred voice. "Put it on my tab, old man."

Gus understood at once. His face turned red, and he came around the counter shouting. "Tab? You've never paid a tab in your life! Get out of my shop, you drunk beggar!"

He grabbed Damon by the collar and shoved him out the door into the street. Damon stumbled and fell against a fish stall, and the dockworkers laughed. Across the road, behind the green door of the tea shop, a man in a grey cap lowered his newspaper, shook his head and went back to reading.

Ten minutes later, Damon slipped through the back alley and knocked twice on the kitchen door.

Gus pulled him inside and locked it. "You still think fast, Commander."

"So do you."

The back room was tiny and full of flour sacks. Gus dragged one heavy sack out of the corner, cut it open with a kitchen knife and pulled a small black notebook wrapped in plastic from deep inside the flour.

"Here," he said. "I kept it for you."

Damon unwrapped it. Inside were names, codes and phone numbers written in tiny, careful handwriting: officers, sergeants, medics and quartermasters, every Legion man Gus had managed to find in five years.

"Some of them drink too much now," Gus said. "Some work in mines, and some guard car parks for pennies. A few joined Draven." He tapped a small red cross beside one name. "The ones with the red marks, you don't trust."

Damon turned the pages slowly. "You did all this alone?"

"Alone and quietly." Gus nodded at the black ring. "Where did you find the seal, Commander? I heard it was lost forever."

"A girl bought it back from a pawn shop with every cent she had."

"Then she's a better soldier than half the men in that book."

"I never believed it, Commander, not for one single day. You carried my nephew down a mountain on your back for two nights. A traitor doesn't do that." Gus sat down heavily on a flour sack. "But there's something worse you need to know, and it's about the family you live with."

"The Whitmores?"

"The Kanes are Draven's dogs in Eastbay. Silas Kane runs the docks, the gambling dens and half the police chiefs in the city, and everything he does, he does for the Grand Marshal." Gus lowered his voice. "Right now, Silas Kane is trying to kill Whitmore Pharmaceuticals."

"Why would the Kanes care about a herbal medicine company?"

"They don't care about the company; they want Frostvine Valley. The old herb farm outside the city, the one in the mist."

"What's so special about an herb farm?"

"That's the strange part, Commander. I don't know, and I've asked everyone I can." Gus rubbed his bald head. "And one more thing. The Grant Group has been borrowing from the Kanes for two years. Lucas Grant's family owes Silas more than they could ever pay back."

Damon went quiet.

The bank called back the loan, and Kane stole the hospital contract. The Grants rushed in to save the Whitmores, and the Grants belonged to Kane. It hadn't been a rescue at the birthday party; it had been a trap, and Lucas was just the hand that closed it.

"Everything is connected," he said.

"What are your orders, Commander? Give me one word, and I'll call every name in that book tonight."

"No." Damon slid the notebook inside his shirt. "The Legion has waited five years. It can wait a little longer, until I'm strong enough that they won't die for following me."

Gus studied his face. "You've changed. The old Asura would have taken a train to the capital tonight and started killing."

"The old Asura had never been on his knees."

The rain was falling hard when Damon walked home along the river. His road took him past the old Whitmore warehouse, a long brick building with the company name painted in faded green letters across the front.

He heard the shouting over the rain before he saw anything, then glass breaking, and a man crying out in pain.

The big doors stood wide open. Inside, under one swinging light bulb, eight men in black jackets were smashing boxes of herbal medicine with iron bars. Two old workers lay groaning on the concrete floor, and a third was curled up, covering his head, while a big man kicked him again and again.

"Tell your pretty boss lady," the big man said, "every week she keeps this company open, something else breaks. Next time, it'll be bones."

"Leave them alone," Damon said from the doorway.

All eight men turned around. The big one laughed. "Well, look who it is, the idiot son-in-law! Did your wife send you to fight us?"

"Nobody sent me."

"Then you're dumber than they say." He pointed with his iron bar. "Break his legs, boys."

Three of them rushed him at once.

Damon had almost no power, but he had something these men had never seen: twenty years of war in his head. He stepped inside the first bar's swing and drove two stiff fingers into the man's throat. The second man's knee folded the wrong way under his heel, and he turned the third man's own swing back into his face.

Three men were down in four seconds.

As each one fell, Damon felt something strange. A warm, dark thread rose from each beaten man, their anger and their will to kill, and it flowed straight into his belly, where the Asura Core drank it like dry soil drinking rain.

The last five came at him together.

He moved through them like water around rocks, taking one bar on his shoulder and answering with a knee, an elbow and an open palm to the neck. With every man who dropped, the Core beat faster and hotter, until the last one hit the floor, and something inside Damon broke open with a sound only he could hear.

Power surged up from his belly, through his chest and into his arms. It was thin, but it was real, a living current of inner force.

The Core wanted more. It whispered to him to finish them, to crush the throats of the men still moving, and for one moment his hand hovered over the big man's neck. Then Damon pulled it back. He had made a rule on the cliff at Frostgate long ago; he didn't kill men who were already beaten.

Less than a day after waking, he had broken into the Inner Force realm.

Behind a delivery truck at the edge of the yard, a white sneaker stepped back quickly into the shadows. Damon saw it, and he said nothing.

One of the old workers lifted his bloody face and squinted through the rain. "Mr. Damon? Is that really you?"

"It's me, Uncle Ben. Can you stand?"

"I think so." The old man stared at the eight bodies on the floor. "But how did you..."

"Get the others to Saint Moore Hospital. Ask for Dr. Elena Moore and tell her the man from the lobby sent you; she'll take care of the bills."

He crouched beside the big man, who lay in a puddle with one arm bent at a terrible angle.

"Who sent you?"

The man spat out blood and laughed weakly. "Doesn't matter who. You think you're tough now?" He grinned with red teeth. "Mr. Grant already paid Iron Hand Rourke to break both your legs, and Rourke is a Master." His eyes glittered. "He's waiting for you tomorrow night, and he never misses."