The situation was bad.

Lin Xuan kept one knee on the cobble with Su Qingyue’s weight braced against his thigh. The four hired blades had spread along the width of the alley with the stances of men paid by the contract. Master Hu stood three paces behind them with his hands folded back into his sleeves, watching the way a man watched a kettle that had not yet boiled.

’Mira. Options.’

[ Casualties, Xuan. You will not save Qi at any point in this combat. From the first exchange you go in with everything. The senile old man is your real problem, so be careful with him. The other four are Stage 3 of Qi Refining, weaker than you individually, but four of them have the numbers and that matters. Master Hu has crossed past your range. He is Foundation Establishment, Stage 4. ]

’Shit. That is high.’

[ It is. ]

He raised himself slowly, slid one arm under Su Qingyue’s shoulders and the other under her knees, and stood up with her against his chest. The cracked-ice clasp in her hair caught a thread of late light from the strip of sky above the alley. He carried her three paces to the side wall and lowered her against the brick, head tipped, breathing soft and slow. He took the clasp out, closed her hand around it, and tucked her fist against her own ribs.

Master Hu watched the gesture without moving.

"Oh? Easy, young master." The old man’s smile arrived without warmth, the slow polite smile of a tradesman over a counter. "The girl is not part of our work tonight. You are. Although my boys here have had a quiet hour, and a quiet hour at their pay is a poor wage. They might appreciate the chance to make up the difference."

The four masked men half-turned toward him. The closest one straightened by a fraction.

"May we, Master Hu?"

"Are you certain, Master?"

Master Hu inclined his head, the small slow nod of a foreman granting overtime.

"If the work is good. Go ahead."

Lin Xuan’s stance shifted by a thread.

[ Xuan. Now. Before he changes his mind about you watching her go first. ]

Plain Steel left the sheath at the cleanest angle his right hand had drawn it from in two years. Cloud Step opened underneath him and the footwork carried him three paces along the diagonal in the time it took the closest hired blade to register that the boy with the cracked rib had moved at all. The man’s mouth parted on the front end of an order.

The order never came out. Awakening Dragon entered along the diagonal of the rising blade, hooked his curved cleaver out of line, and Piercing Dragon followed without a step between forms. The point of Plain Steel left the front of his throat by a finger’s width on the way through. He folded sideways before his knees understood what they had been asked to hold.

[ Crouch. ]

Lin Xuan dropped before the word had finished forming. The straight blade of the second man passed an inch above the line of his hair, the wind of the cut fanning his ear. The cut was clean. The cut had been read.

"Does this one have a sixth sense or what?"

The voice came from above and behind. Lin Xuan did not stand to answer it. He stayed low, and the small braced spring that Cloud Step taught a beginner before it taught them anything else fired his heel up between the second man’s legs at the angle of a piston working from a chamber.

The sound the man made started high and went somewhere it was never going to come back from. He folded knees-first, hands cupped, weight pitching forward over a center of gravity that had stopped existing.

Lin Xuan rose to finish him.

The other two arrived first.

They came from the two empty quadrants of the alley on the same beat, the third from his left and the fourth from his right, blades already on their travel lines. Horizontal cut at the rib on the left. Downward diagonal at the shoulder on the right.

Plain Steel met the left cut first, because the third man had committed earlier. Coiling Dragon took the curved blade by the spine and threaded it past Lin Xuan’s chest into open air, his right wrist already turning into the answer for the second cut as the first one cleared.

Plain Steel caught the descending diagonal three fingers from his collar bone, deflected it down along its own line, and let it bury its tip into the cobble at his feet. The two of them had read his stance as wide open during the kick and adjusted on the same breath.

[ Tighter, Xuan. They will chain. ]

The third man recovered out of the deflection and brought the curved blade back across in a return. The fourth man yanked his straight blade free of the cobble and went for a vertical chop. They timed the two cuts on the same beat to take the tempo out of him.

Plain Steel split the answer.

His right hand kept the spine of the blade on the third man’s curve and rotated the wrist a half turn, riding the cut into a circle that took it past his hip. His left palm came up along the flat of Plain Steel and pushed the blade into the path of the descending chop.

The fourth man’s strike hit the flat of the steel, the impact ran up Lin Xuan’s elbow and stayed in the joint, and before the third had finished his return Plain Steel fired forward in a Piercing Dragon at the third man’s shoulder.

The point went in shallow. Enough. The third man stumbled back two paces, the curved cleaver dropping out of a hand that had stopped working.

The fourth man committed his second cut into the gap the third had opened. Twin Dragon Strike answered it, both blades traveling along opposite diagonals from the same wrist motion, the first parrying the cut down into the cobble and the second opening the fourth man’s throat from the opposite angle.

He had not finished a sentence. He had not started one.

Lin Xuan turned on the second man, still folded over the place his testicles had recently been, and ended the work with a clean horizontal across the back of his neck.

Three down. The third man on his knees, sword on the floor, one hand pressed to a punctured shoulder.

Master Hu had still not moved.

"Mhm. Quicker than I had budgeted. I should have asked for five." His voice carried the same patient cadence a man used when reviewing a ledger after a slow afternoon. "You there. On your knees."

The third man raised his face toward Master Hu with an expression that had stopped being professional.

"Master Hu—"

Lin Xuan crossed the two paces and finished it with the same horizontal he had used on the second man.

Four down.

Master Hu still had not moved.