Zero to warlord: the last blood

Because something is wrong

He spent forty minutes before sunrise learning Harrison Park's layout and identifying every exit. 

By the time he sat down on the bench by the dry fountain, he had three viable escape routes mapped, two positions from which he could see the park's main entrance without being easily visible himself, and a working knowledge of who else was in the park at this hour: a man walking a dog on the east path, a runner who had been on her third loop when he arrived, and a figure in a parked car on the north street whose engine had not turned off.

The old man arrived exactly at sunrise.

He was slim and white-haired and moved through the park with the unhurried economy of someone who had been moving through difficult spaces for decades and had made peace with whatever those spaces cost. He carried nothing visible. He wore nothing notable. He sat down at the far end of the bench with a distance between them that suggested both comfort with the space and deliberate respect for it, and he looked at Alex with eyes that were dark and very still and carried the specific quality of someone who had been looking at you for a long time already.

"You have your mother's jaw," Master Li said.

The words landed oddly. Alex had never heard anyone describe his face in terms of someone else's features. He had no one to compare himself to.

"You don't get to open with that," Alex said.

"No," the old man agreed. "I don't. I'm sorry." He was quiet for a moment. "I'm Li Jian. Forty years ago, I was the Dragon Clan's Senior Elder. Your father was the Clan Head. We were, for a time, as close as men in positions like ours manage to be."

"You were reported dead."

"Yes. I reported it myself."

"Why?"

"Because twenty years ago, I made a choice that I have been living with ever since. And the safest thing I could do afterward was to not exist in a way that created consequences for other people." He folded his hands in his lap. Not nervous. Resigned, maybe. "Alex, I want to tell you many things. I also need to tell you that this park currently has two Zhao Clan observers — one at the east gate and one on the building across the north street. They picked up your energy signature again this morning. They haven't identified you yet, but they're methodical people and they will, if we stay here long."

Alex's enhanced senses had already found them. The car on the north street was one of Zhao's. The runner on the east path had stopped running twelve minutes ago and was doing a very unconvincing impression of someone stretching.

"How long have I got?"

"Fifteen minutes. Possibly twenty." Master Li looked at him steadily. "Come with me. I have a vehicle, a location that is secure, and information you cannot afford not to have."

"Tell me one thing first," Alex said. "Right now, before I go anywhere with you. What happened to my parents."

The old man did not look away. He did not reach for an easier version of the answer. He said, simply and plainly: "Zhao Rong ordered them killed twenty-one years ago, when you were five years old. He believed the Dragon Clan heir represented a threat to his control of the Underground. He eliminated the threat before it could grow." He paused. "And I did not stop it. I am going to explain that. But I won't do it in a way that lets me off easily, and I won't do it in fifteen minutes."

Alex looked at him for a long time.

"All right," he said. He stood. "Let's go."

He stood, and as he did, the universe provided the collision it was apparently determined to schedule: Derek Huang came through the north gate with two crew members, coffee in hand, head down, taking the shortcut he had been taking through Harrison Park for two years on the way from his gym class to the café on the adjacent block.

Derek looked up. Saw Alex.

The expression that crossed Derek's face in the first two seconds was the most honest thing Alex had ever seen on it. The ego was caught off-guard and the real reactions were visible briefly, unmasked: surprise, then the beginning of something that was not quite fear but was adjacent to it — an involuntary reassessment, animal and fast, of something that looked different this morning than it had last night.

Then the armor went back up.

"Look at this," Derek said. He spread his arms. The performance voice, the audience voice, though the only audience was his two crew members. "Still here. What's the plan, orphan? Sleep on the bench again tonight?"

Alex said nothing. He was calculating exits and timing and measuring the observer by the east gate, who was no longer pretending to stretch.

Derek stepped into his path. He put his hand out and pressed it flat against Alex's chest.

It was meant as a casual shove. The kind of shove you give someone you've been shoving for years because the message has long since been sent and the action is just maintenance.

His hand hit Alex's chest and Alex did not move.

Derek pushed harder.

Alex did not move.

The math of this was simple: Alex was Level 3 with F-Rank strength. He had not transformed into something superhuman. But Iron Body was passive, and it stacked on top of the bloodline's baseline enhancement, and the result was that Derek Huang — who was strong enough for a civilian and had nothing beyond that — was now pushing against something that had fundamentally recalibrated what it was made of.

The confusion on Derek's face was almost worth the night Alex had just had.

One of Derek's crew stepped in. He grabbed Alex's arm. Alex used the grip as a pivot point and turned in a half circle and the crew member went stumbling into the bench and sat down hard on it, staring at what had just happened to his balance.

Derek swung.

Alex leaned back three inches. The punch went past his ear. Then Alex stepped inside Derek's guard and put his open palm on Derek's sternum and pushed.

He used maybe fifteen percent of what he actually had now.

Derek went backward into the memorial pillar at the edge of the fountain area and sat down against it and his coffee hit the ground and became irrelevant.

The crew member who hadn't tried to intervene took three careful steps backward and found a spot to be very interested in the middle distance.

Alex looked down at Derek.

Derek looked up. The armor was still fighting to reassemble itself, but under it — visible, for just a moment, genuinely visible — was something Alex had never seen in sixteen years of knowing this person. Fear. Small, real, and trying to hide.

"The next time you put your hands on me," Alex said, quietly enough that only Derek could hear it, "you're going to need to be significantly more prepared than this." He straightened. "Go home, Derek."

He walked past him. Master Li fell in beside him smoothly. They went through the north gate.

Behind them, Derek Huang sat against the pillar with coffee seeping into his shoes and something moving through him that he would not be able to name for a while.

He pulled out his phone. He called a number.

"I need everything you can find on Alex Stone," he said. "The orphan from south Graystone. And I need it fast." A pause. "Because something is wrong. And I need to know what it is before it becomes my problem."

The call went through channels that Derek did not fully understand, and landed eventually in a building that Derek would have recognized and been alarmed by if he'd known his family's connections as clearly as he would eventually come to know them. In that building, a report was flagged for the attention of Commander Zhao Rong's operations team: the heir had been physically identified, and he had already demonstrated capability in a public setting.

Zhao read the report two hours later. He was not alarmed. He had expected this.

He was slightly impressed by the speed, though. He would not admit it to anyone.

He made a note in the heir's operational file: *Subject demonstrates unusual composure for first-day awakened. Recalibrate engagement timeline. He is further along than standard projections.*

He crossed out *forty-eight hours* on the operational timeline for Marcus Bell.

He wrote: *Twenty-four.*