Crammed into the shabby, old-fashioned van were four big men in suits who looked thoroughly out of place with the vehicle.
“Mr.
Silver, there’s a sedan that’s been tailing us on the left for a good while now—I speed up and it speeds up too.” The man in the driver’s seat turned to the man in the passenger seat, who was flashily shuffling a deck of playing cards.
He was the only one dressed slightly differently, which marked him out as the little boss.
At a glance he seemed to be wearing the same style of suit as the others, but he was actually in a tailcoat, a tall black top hat perched on his head.
A hooked nose and a waxed handlebar mustache, gaunt of frame, spine ramrod-straight—he looked for all the world like a magician who’d groomed himself and was ready to step onstage for his act.
Hearing the driver, he performed a flourish and made the cards vanish.
“Turn left up ahead into the outskirts and see if it follows.
The Feds aren’t this stupid.”
The driver did as told—and sure enough, the sedan followed right along!
Without even the pretense of concealment.
It even brazenly rammed them of its own accord, shoving them clean off the road and into a tree.
The black-suited man in the driver’s seat kicked the door flying in a fury.
“Fuck!
You miserable, gutter-crawling bastards!”
“Espers, by the looks of it.” George coolly glanced at the four men climbing unscathed out of the van, and unhurriedly opened his own door.
“Mingxue, maybe you don’t quite believe in our abilities.” He’d taken it upon himself to start calling the girl by her given name; the other two got out of the car as well.
“Wait here a moment—we’ll finish dealing with these rats and then keep talking.”
In the very instant he stepped fully out of the car, something sliced through the air with a whistling “shff” and flashed past—like a bullet it punched through the front windshield and buried itself deep in the rear window; at the same moment, the girl in the passenger seat, whose door was still open, toppled back inside, a ceaseless “huh, huh” gurgling from her throat.
Blood spattered across Lu Mingxue’s head; the sudden turn of events so frightened her that she clapped a hand over her mouth and pressed herself flat against the back seat.
She saw an ordinary King of Hearts embedded in the car window—it was this paper object that had, in a single instant, sliced open that woman’s throat.
Before she could even process it, a person was simply dead.
There was no lament for a life slipping away; only terror surged up into the girl’s heart all at once.
She didn’t dare look at what happened next.
Even though she’d helped the police interrogate criminals, she’d never developed any great fortitude of nerve.
Ordinarily all she had to do was watch from behind one-way glass as a real interrogator questioned a suspect, then write down the answers in the suspect’s mind—the suspect didn’t even need to know they’d been read at all.
At their companion’s death, the young driver and that blond punk George let out furious roars.
Having suddenly awakened superpowers and cast themselves as the protagonists of the world, they were utterly unprepared for a comrade to die before their eyes—at least not a death this abrupt, this unforeshadowed, this utterly without meaning.
But all that followed was the same air-splitting whistle of playing cards as before, and the screams of George and the other.
Reality was cruel.
However furious they got, they had no last-minute power-up, not even a chance to stall for time.
Perhaps no one had ever taught them what it meant to overestimate themselves—but someone was teaching them now.
Lu Mingxue lay flat on the back seat, clamping her trembling hand hard over her mouth, begging her own body not to shamefully make some noise out of fear, while in her heart she silently offered up fifty years of her own lifespan if only these people would hurry up and leave.
But just as, when a teacher calls on someone about the reading, everyone hopes not to be picked—the thing you least want to happen is the very thing most likely to happen.
“Mr.
Silver, there’s another one in the car—looks like they’ve passed out.”
She heard the words come from outside the car.
That bastard George hadn’t shut the door at all on his way out, so these people didn’t even have to come close to see her legs.
Her heart plunged to the bottom in an instant.
In that moment she’d already made up her mind to get out, kneel, and beg for mercy in the hope they’d let her off—backbone was clearly not a thing that belonged to someone like her.
They seemed to think she’d fainted—then just go with that and leave quickly, please!
“Oh?
Take a lighter and torch her along with the car—there’s no lake around here anyway,” Mr.
Silver decided.
No!
She scrambled up at once and half-rolled, half-crawled out of the car, heedless of whether she could actually get away—terror drove her past any rational, correct course of action.
“Wait—I’m useful to you!
I can read minds—”
To save her own life she shouted the most humiliating words of her entire life.
Even if, watching TV, most people sneer at those who beg like this, when it’s truly upon you, how many can actually harden their brows and shout “Kill me”?
The will to live is an instinct that even some people who want to kill themselves struggle to overcome.
She didn’t say anything like “just let me live and I’ll do anything you want”—not out of any inner reserve, but because she figured she didn’t have the looks or the goods for it; she hadn’t even shaved her leg hair carefully these past couple of days, since you couldn’t tell under black stockings anyway.
Lu Mingxue dropped to her knees in the very posture she’d already mentally rehearsed toward Mi Xiaoliu in class that day.
“I can see into others—”
“See, isn’t she awake after all?” Mr.
Silver said with a smile, flicking out a Black Joker.
The paper card cut through the air and sank, bullet-like, deep into a girl’s smooth skin, dark-red blood dripping from the far corner of the card still jutting out of the flesh.
This made Mi Xiaoliu, striding past the spot, wave a hand and skid to a halt, and she turned expressionlessly to look at the playing card that had, as it happened, struck her own shoulder.
She slowly turned around.
Mr.
Silver was visibly stunned too.
He’d never imagined that at a moment like this some freak hero-saves-the-damsel scenario could actually play out—and the kicker was, he hadn’t even gotten to deliver a long-winded villain monologue like they do on TV, explain his ability, and then, to top it off, expound on his dream.
Mi Xiaoliu pulled the card out of her shoulder.
The blood that had already welled out vanished in an instant, and the wound that had cut deep into her flesh rapidly knit closed.
It stung a little.
“Sasha, I want to hit them.”
“You’re the Master, Master.
The most Sasha can do about what you decide is offer advice…” Sasha said, at a loss for words.
“Anyway, they don’t look like good people.”
By the time Sasha finished that first sentence, one of the black-suited men blocking the way had already been sent flying by a kick from Mi Xiaoliu, planted headfirst in the field, down for the count.
Mr.
Silver naturally wouldn’t just let her approach; playing cards poured out like a downpour from a wrist that had all but blurred into afterimages.
She dodged them, but their sheer force sliced the trees behind her into several pieces.
Lu Mingxue, sprawled on the ground with her head in her arms, shrieked in terror.
He hurled cards while backpedaling fast, but his three subordinates couldn’t even manage to buy him time before they got to enjoy the sensation of flight.
“The Feds?” Mr.
Silver frowned at the black-robed figure before him—likely a Physical Enhancement-type esper—and began weighing his options.
Just take this one out.
From the build, it wasn’t a very strong Physical Enhancement type.
But when he saw the very van his group had driven in on come smashing into his face like a cannonball in the blink of an eye, he realized something was wrong.
“Why’d you stop?” Sister Hermit’s voice came through the Bluetooth earpiece in Mi Xiaoliu’s ear.
“Don’t just stand there—that man isn’t Night Demon.
I’ll send you a new location.”
The phone warmed twice; the temperature at this hour was still quite cold.
Hermit: [Image]
Hermit: [Location]
A finely detailed pencil sketch, depicting a no-name compact sedan traveling along a small road on the city’s outskirts, with a map location beneath it.
Level 3 spirit photography—this was Sister Hermit’s ability.
She’d developed it to the point where, knowing a target’s appearance, she could draw out their current situation and their location on a map.
Mi Xiaoliu glanced at Mr.
Silver, pinned beneath the van and trailing a long streak of blood, then at Lu Mingxue, sitting on the ground with her calves trembling and an unidentified liquid pooling beneath her skirt, and then she turned, cut across the field by the shortest route, and sprinted off into the distance.
“…” went Lu Mingxue.
Did this count as being rescued, damsel-style, by a hero?
Or was it a beauty saving an ugly duckling?
She didn’t kill me—that little girl didn’t kill me…
and she even saved me.
She’d even, before leaving, been mentally calculating how many baozi a million could buy.
Even now her head was still trembling with delayed fear.
The corpses on the ground and in the car were the genuine article, giving off the stench of blood and bodily waste…
okay, the waste smell was her own.
One second more and she’d have made up a full mahjong table with those three corpses.
No telling whether that stroke of luck really had cost her fifty years of her lifespan.
Forcing herself calm, she stood up—only to find, when she turned her head, that the magician who’d just been pinned under the van was gone.
So frightened that she paid no mind to her damp underwear, skirt, and stockings, she spun around and dashed into the field, hiding herself among the not-yet-lush corn, and didn’t dare show herself for a long, long time.
Her phone had been confiscated by some fat bastard, so she couldn’t call the police.
Thank you all so much!