Chapter 1341 - 1317: One Against Three

Chapter 1341: Chapter 1317: One Against Three

How could a person pull off two completely different, mutually complementary attacks from above and below, yet use the same kind of defense? And yet Xiao Lin could take this seemingly contradictory, tricky Body Technique and push it to the limit, completely different from the movement he’d been using earlier while fighting.

Chu Qi stared blankly at the four people ahead. He knew there was no room for him to intervene, and at the same time felt secretly glad he had never become Xiao Lin’s enemy.

Bang bang bang! Dull yet crisp impacts rang out all around. Xiao Lin managed to block the man on the left’s twin claws, but under the force of the blow he lost his balance. Seizing the opportunity, the man attacking from behind ruthlessly kicked the still-unstable Xiao Lin flying, while the shadowy woman in front had already brought the Crescent Blade that was held horizontally before her chest down toward the airborne Xiao Lin in a vicious chop.

Sprays of fresh blood drifted down from midair. Xiao Lin’s handsome face twisted and contorted under the killing intent, his clothes stained red with blood, making him look even more like a fiend from Hell.

Xiao Lin glanced at his wounds, rolled his shoulders, his joints grinding against each other with a rasping sound. His pitch-black eyes grew even more sharp and icy. He ignored the gashes on his body and pounced again like a wild wolf.

A few streaks of silver light flashed, shooting toward the major acupoints all over the shadowy woman’s body. Startled, she hurriedly used her Crescent Blade to block, and though she managed to deflect two Silver Needles, several still sank into her abdomen and armpit.

Handling three people at once was a bit taxing, so after weighing the situation, he decided to leave the shadowy woman for later—she might be the easier one to finish off afterward—and first deal with the other two.

The spikes swept out trailing afterimages, and everywhere they passed they left nothing but fatal wounds.

With the sweeping arc of the spikes, both men’s clothes were shredded, deep, unfathomable gashes opening all over them. The pain made the two roar in fury, and the blistering speed they’d shown before stalled as a result.

Xiao Lin seized the chance, leaping up, arms spreading wide. The two spikes in his hands shifted direction, trying to first pin one of them down before following up with a killing blow.

However, these two were no pushovers. Even though the spikes had brought them agony, after that brief pause their counterattack became all the more frenzied and vicious.

Xiao Lin hadn’t expected the pair to be this fierce and hard to deal with, but his hands didn’t slow down at all. Taking advantage of the moment when the two still couldn’t fully merge their rhythm, he forcefully cut between them. The spike in his left hand flicked, stabbing toward the throat of the man on his left.

The man on the left roared, his whole face twisting. At the instant the spike came, his shoulder jerked—not dodging, but charging straight in. It was precisely because of his reckless boldness that he managed to knock the spike off by a fraction, letting it scrape along the skin of his throat, passing from right to left.

Though it didn’t pierce his entire windpipe, it still carved a deep groove, blood spurting out in wet bursts.

The man on the right, seeing his partner grievously wounded, immediately rushed in. The two once again moved as one, unleashing an even more ferocious assault on Xiao Lin.

The fight ramped up yet another level. Watching from afar, Chu Qi knew things were reaching the endgame. Though the two still looked ferocious, they were already at the end of their strength.

Xiao Lin unleashed his ultimate move, using his speed and bizarre angles to inflict devastating damage on them, while at the same time the psychological pressure he exerted kept eating away at their minds.

Even so, Xiao Lin still hadn’t truly seized the final initiative. While dealing them heavy blows, he was paying a matching price in blood on his own body.

It was like a normal man facing off against a madman—one side wrecking things without restraint, the other hiding tricks up his sleeve. Under that kind of madness, even superior strength ends up discounted by the fact you’re fighting like you don’t care if you die.

Right now those two were the madmen, throwing their lives away for a final bout. It was precisely that madness that let them snatch the momentum. One of them clamped down on Xiao Lin’s wrist, then spun in place in a wild swing, hurling him hard and sending him flying.

Chu Qi saw this and blanched, quickly darting along Xiao Lin’s falling trajectory and using his own body to shield the concrete wall behind him.

Xiao Lin slapped a palm against Chu Qi’s shoulder, glanced at him once, then used the rebound to shoot back into the fray.

"Xiao, this is where you end. We’ll be taking your head back with us." The two men exchanged a look, then both let out hoarse roars as they charged.

"The ones staying here will be you." Though his internal organs were shaken and showed signs of displacement, and his blood flow was far from smooth, if they thought they could take his life that easily, these two were underestimating him far too much.

Drawing a deep breath, Xiao Lin’s body swayed, his Ghost-like Body Technique erupting at its absolute limit. With the simplest posture he met the two who were also charging at top speed. The spikes in his hands had already turned horizontal, their tips aimed at the onrushing enemies, his whole body bending backward, both arms pressing down at an angle impossible for normal people.

Maybe it was because they’d never seen such a posture before, but when the two who were rushing in suddenly found that Xiao Lin had disappeared, their bodies instinctively hesitated for a heartbeat. And in that exact instant, Xiao Lin, as if there were springs at his waist, snapped his upper body—already bent to the limit—back with explosive force.

Thud! Squelch! With no warning at all, the two spikes pierced straight into the bodies of the two men at full speed, not missing by so much as a hair. The spikes sank in to the hilt, and Xiao Lin could almost instantly feel, through their skin, the heat of internal organs rupturing.

The sudden shattering of their momentum blew the two apart from the inside; the spikes were just salt rubbed into that shattered impact.

Chu Qi pushed himself up from the ground. The dramatic finish left him speechless. Who would’ve thought to use such a childish method? Facing deadly enemies, he’d actually used a game from their childhood to end two men’s lives. Chu Qi had no idea what to even say.

But it wasn’t over. Though those two had died in an instant, there was still one more.

Xiao Lin walked up to the woman and yanked off the veil on her face; to his surprise, the person under the veil was not who he’d thought.

"It’s not her!" Xiao Lin said in puzzlement.

"Who did you think it was?" Watching her companion die, the woman didn’t feel a thing. Under the veil was a pretty face; if he hadn’t already known her identity, Xiao Lin really wouldn’t have wanted to see her as an Assassin.

"Where’s Boss Xing?"

"I’m Boss Xing!"

"No, you’re not!" Xiao Lin moved closer to the woman. He didn’t actually know what kind of scent Chu Qi had been talking about, but he still deliberately brought his nose close and sniffed her. "You don’t have her scent on you. If you don’t want to die, tell me where she’s hiding."

"Even if I tell you, I’ll die all the same."

That wasn’t a lie, but Xiao Lin had no intention of refuting her.

"But even if you’re not her, I’ll still find out who she is. Only if you don’t talk now, you die immediately." Though he didn’t want to rough up a woman, Xiao Lin still held the Silver Needle between two fingers.

"You’re very pretty, but that permanent scowl really ruins it." As she spoke, the woman suddenly burst into giggles, laughing uncontrollably, completely unable to stop. Chu Qi stared at Xiao Lin in surprise—what had he just done?

"Let me give you a heads-up. This point isn’t a fatal acupoint, but it’ll keep you laughing nonstop; in the end you’ll still die, only the dying part will drag on a lot longer. Don’t think you can just pull it out. Handle it the wrong way and you won’t die, but you’ll be crippled for life. You don’t want to spend the rest of your days flat on your back, do you?"

"You... hahaha!" The woman’s eyes widened as if she were about to spit fire, but she couldn’t suppress the urge to laugh.

Time ticked by second after second; the woman’s voice grew weaker and weaker. Chu Qi shot her a worried glance. "She’ll be okay, right?"

"Living or dying is her choice." Xiao Lin took a final drag on his cigarette and walked up to the woman. "Last question—where is Boss Xing?"

The woman’s forehead was drenched in sweat. Her lips twitched, but she no longer had the strength.

Xiao Lin pulled out the Silver Needle lodged in her acupoint. Her body eased somewhat; there were still occasional spasms, but nothing like the madness from before.

"She... she is..."

A streak of silver flashed into the woman’s glabella just as she was about to say the name. The technique and precision shocked Xiao Lin; he was only two centimeters away from that dart. If the shooter had wanted to kill him just now, he wouldn’t have noticed a thing.

Chu Qi was also stunned on the spot, bewildered. When he was about to give chase, Xiao Lin stopped him.

"No need to chase."

"But..."

"Someone with that level of skill among the death-row inmates?" Xiao Lin asked in curiosity, but Chu Qi shook his head. If someone like that had been in the training camp, there was no way no one would know—unless he’d hidden himself extremely well.

"Then he’s not one of your death-row people," Xiao Lin said. He hadn’t sensed the intruder at all; that kind of Body Technique was truly first-rate.

"Let’s go." Looking at the corpses on the ground, Xiao Lin let out a sigh.

In truth, these people were all very innocent. They wanted to escape the edge of death, yet in the end still couldn’t dodge death’s shroud. Quan Xianglin had woven them a beautiful dream, but at the same time had clamped shackles on them.

Who exactly was the executioner here—no one cared to think about it. Their eyes had long since been blinded by lies; they could no longer see the truth.

"Chu Qi, what went through your head when you first learned the truth?" On the way back, Xiao Lin asked.

"Anger. But even more than that, I wanted to live. The training camp back then existed to have us complete mission after mission to offset the crimes we’d committed, and then have our sentences downgraded step by step from death penalty, to death with reprieve, to life, to fixed-term, until we were finally released as innocent men."

"How long was the fixed term? Thirty years? There’s no such thing as a hundred-year sentence in China."

"There is—for the death-row inmates." Chu Qi seemed extremely unwilling to recall what had happened in the training camp; to him, that place was a nightmare. Everyone was fighting to get their sentence reduced. Many people didn’t die on the execution ground, nor at the hands of an enemy, but at the hands of their own, just to have one less person and one more shot at hope—never realizing that the number of death-row inmates would only grow, never shrink. (To be continued. If you like this work, you’re welcome to visit Qidian (qidian.com) to cast recommendation votes and monthly tickets. Your support is my greatest motivation. Mobile users, please read on m.qidian.com.)