Day 2 in Linhua.
Rui helped carry buckets of sludge water to the pit-fighters, pretending to be one of the desperate. She slipped behind a storage tent, found a young girl locked in a cage barely wide enough to sit.
She didn't speak.
She didn't cry.
She just stared.
Her eyes were grey. Too grey.
Rui left the girl a boiled egg and walked away before anyone noticed.
⸻
Chen Yu made friends.
If "friends" meant lunatics, arsonists, and gamblers.
He played dice with cannibals. Smoked dried fungi with ex-prisoners. Mocked the governor's guards so openly that they assumed he was either suicidal or useful.
He laughed until his sides hurt.
He cried when no one saw.
He left a note on the back of a ration card in the latrine wall:
"Don't save this place.
Make it forget it ever existed."
– C.Y.
⸻
Li Wei wandered.
He let them believe he was a killer for hire. Word spread quickly in Linhua. They asked him to handle a merchant from the west who owed too much. He slit the man's throat and made it look clean.
Not because the man was guilty.
But because he wanted to see how the system bled.
He found the records room that night—governor's logs, trade ledgers, blacklists, and tallies of "meat units."
The meat wasn't animal.
It hadn't been for weeks.
He stood over the candle-lit desk, eyes scanning figures like a scholar.
And then he smiled.
Just once.
⸻
The Strike began on the third night.
Rui poisoned the guards who patrolled the children's cages.
Chen Yu rigged the pit gates with black powder he'd won in a bet—he claimed it was salt with personality.
Li Wei walked into Governor Yao's quarters with a blade and a smile.
⸻
"Ah, the Ice Killer returns," Yao said, swirling wine. "Come to negotiate more glory?"
Li Wei sat.
Yao leaned in, amused. "You know… you could run this place. After me. I see it in your eyes. The cold. The control. The hunger."
Li Wei nodded slowly.
Then leaned forward and whispered, "You're right."
Yao laughed—until Li Wei jammed a writing quill through his ear and pinned him to the throne.
The man screamed.
The guards rushed in.
Li Wei stood calmly and lit a match.
Then tossed it into the rug soaked in oil he'd poured an hour earlier.
⸻
The fire rose like a judgment.
Children were already fleeing through the alleys—led by Rui, smeared in blood and soot.
The infected from the pits broke loose—Chen Yu opened every gate and fed them raw meat laced with spice and gunpowder.
He walked through the flames humming opera.
And laughing.
Always laughing.
Until one of the cannibal gamblers lunged at him—begging to be saved.
Chen Yu hugged him.
Then slit his throat with a broken spoon.
"Don't beg," he whispered. "It makes the world uglier."
⸻
Li Wei stood in the center of it all, watching Linhua burn.
People screamed.
Buildings collapsed.
Soot rained like snow.
And he felt nothing.
No joy.
No guilt.
Just the rightness of it.
Rui appeared beside him, dragging two children. "We can't carry more."
"Leave the rest," Li Wei said.
She stared at him.
"Rui," he added, softer. "If we try, we die. Then they die."
She didn't argue.
She just cried later, when no one saw.
⸻
They left Linhua behind before sunrise.
Chen Yu limped, covered in soot and blood.
He looked at Rui. "You ever feel like we're just… walking across graves that haven't been dug yet?"
She didn't answer.
He didn't need her to.
Li Wei led them forward, blade in hand, back straight, eyes fixed on the red horizon.
No one asked where they were going.
Because by now, they knew.
Wherever it was, it wouldn't be mercy.