Fifty people stood in the square and looked at Hunter like he’d climbed up out of the ground.
He could feel it in them: hearts hammering, mothers’ arms locked around their children, two young men in front with their empty hands curled, ready to die for nothing.
To them he was a demon, soaked red to the elbows, who’d come down the road faster than a horse and walked through their guard.
Shit.
What do I do?
he asked, silently, desperately.
Tell me what to do.
[SYSTEM] HONESTLY?
I DIDN’T PLAN THIS FAR.
YOU’RE THE SCARY ONE.
SAY SOMETHING SCARY
He had never said anything scary in his life.
He’d once made an intern cry by accident, explaining deductibles.
Then a memory surfaced: three in the morning, another sleepless night, a tired man on a telephone in a movie he could mouth along to.
Hunter took a breath and spoke, and something in his chest caught the words on the way out and threw them.
His qi, or whatever it was, went into his voice without asking.
The sentences came out enormous, rolling across the square and off the wall and back.
“I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know what you want.
If you’re looking for mercy, I can tell you I don’t have any.”
Half the crowd flinched.
An old woman went down on her knees.
Holy shit.
That worked.
I have so much mercy, he thought.
Please don’t make me use any of this.
“But what I do have is a very particular set of skills.
Skills I have acquired over a very long career.”
I adjusted home insurance claims.
I once got a man eleven hundred dollars for a hailstorm.
“Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”
Children were crying now, properly.
A woman at the back swayed, and her husband caught her.
“Give me your valuables, and that will be the end of it.
I will not look for you.
I will not pursue you.
But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
The echo died, and the weeping started, low and everywhere at once, and Hunter wanted to walk back into the forest until something ate him.
The village head stepped forward.
His hands were shaking, but he kept his voice level for his people’s sake, which Hunter respected more than he could have said.
“Immortal.” He bowed deeply, and his eyes flicked once toward the gate and away.
“If you’ll permit it, I’ll gather what you want myself.
So that there are no more…” He chose the word with great care.
“Incidents.”
Yes, an incident.
It was an incident.
Hunter grabbed the word with both hands and hated himself for it.
“We’re a poor village,” the head went on, quietly.
“But you’ll have everything we have. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Only let us live.”
“All right.” His voice came out rough.
“Take two of your men.
Two of mine will go with you.” He looked at Lex and Xuan.
“Go with him and make sure it all gets collected.
And we need horses, four if they’ve got them.”
That left Tao, still standing by the tree, still holding his sword the wrong way around.
Hunter didn’t have it in him to say anything about the sword.
“Stay with me,” he said.
“Don’t move until I tell you.”
He sat down on a crate at the edge of the square, where everyone could see him, and closed his eyes, and let the sense do the watching.
He followed the little party through twenty-odd homes.
In every one, someone’s heart went tight as Lex or Xuan picked up a pot or a coat or a string of coins.
People’s lives, one careful year at a time, going into sacks.
He tried to do it the way he’d done inventory.
That worked for about three houses.
The biggest house stood near the granary, two stories, the village head’s own.
Hunter followed them upstairs, and felt Lex stop in the bedroom, and felt his pulse kick.
At the same moment, down in the square, the village head’s wife made a small sound.
Her heart simply stopped, the way a heart does when someone opens the one door in the house you didn’t want opened.
“Master!” Lex’s voice floated down from the upstairs window, high with excitement.
“There’s a loose board behind the bed.
They’ve hidden something.”