The rain over Port Klang Bay wasn't water; it was a curtain of liquid neon, painting the slick asphalt in streaks of electric blue and bloody red. It drowned the usual sounds of the city, leaving only the percussive drumming on the corrugated iron roof of the old fish-packing warehouse. The air inside was thick, a humid mix of salt, decay, and the sharp, coppery tang of fear.
Master Chen, the aging Dragon Head of the Green Dragon Society, stood motionless in the center of the cavernous space. His hands, gnarled and scarred from a lifetime of battles both seen and unseen, were clasped behind his back. He wore a simple, dark suit, the fabric soaked through at the shoulders. He wasn't waiting for friends.
Around him, a dozen of his most loyal men formed a tight circle. Among them, trying to mask their nervousness with sheer bravado, were his four youngest—Long Yizhe, Hu Weilong, Sha Jie, and Ying Zhen. They were just boys playing at being men, foot soldiers who'd earned this night's duty by showing a flicker of promise.
"Steady," Chen's voice was a low rumble, quieter than the rain but cutting through it with an unnatural clarity. It was a voice that commanded not with volume, but with unshakable certainty. "They will come from the north entrance. The rain will hide their numbers until the last moment."
Hu, a bull of a youth with a temper as short as his fuse, cracked his knuckles. "Let them come. We'll send them back to the sewers they crawled from."
"Silence, Weilong," Chen said, his tone leaving no room for argument. His eyes, old and weary but impossibly sharp, scanned the shadows beyond the circle of dim overhead lights. "This is not a street brawl. You are not here to fight. You are here to watch. And to run."
Long Yizhe, the most thoughtful of the four, felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. The order felt wrong. Master Chen never ran. The Green Dragon never retreated.
That's when the lights went out.
Not with a flicker, but with a definitive, deafening *pop*. One moment the warehouse was bathed in weak yellow light, the next it was plunged into an abyss broken only by the faint, rhythmic strobe of a faulty neon sign outside, casting the world in intermittent pulses of sickly green.
The sound of the rain grew louder, more menacing.
Then came a new sound. A soft, almost graceful *shush* of cloth on wet concrete. Not the clumsy charge they expected. It was the sound of a single person.
A figure emerged from the darkness of the north entrance, backlit by a sudden flash of distant lightning. He was tall, slender, moving with an unnatural, gliding grace that seemed to defy the puddles on the floor. He wore no mask, his features sharp and cruel in the strobing green light. He was alone.
Master Chen didn't seem surprised. "So, the Iron Tiger sends its new pet. Shao. Where is your master? Too cowardly to face me himself?"
The young man, Shao, offered a smile that didn't touch his eyes. "The world is changing, old man. The Iron Tiger no longer needs its master. It has me."
What happened next was a blur that Long's mind could barely process.
Shao moved.
It wasn't a run or a charge. It was a displacement of air. He became a phantom, closing the twenty-meter gap in the space between two heartbeats. Chen's men reacted, a wall of muscle and fury moving to intercept.
It was like wheat against a scythe.
Shao didn't punch or kick in any conventional way. His limbs flowed, each movement an economy of lethal precision. A flick of his wrist and a man's throat collapsed. A subtle shift of his hip and another was thrown into the darkness, the sound of snapping bones echoing over the rain. He moved through them like a dancer, a poet of violence, each step a stanza of death.
This was no gangland hit. This was something else. Something purer and far more terrifying.
Master Chen finally moved, meeting Shao's advance. Their clash was silent but for the sharp crack of forearms blocking, the grunt of expelled air. Chen was older, but his movements were grounded, powerful, each block a mountain, each counter-strike a landslide. He was the solid earth to Shao's howling wind.
For a moment, it seemed the old Dragon would hold.
Then Shao's style changed. His movements became fluid, insubstantial. He seemed to melt away from Chen's powerful strikes. As Chen committed to a devastating palm strike aimed at Shao's chest, the younger man pivoted on his back foot, his body curving like a reed in the wind.
His leg rose in a perfect, silent arc, a thing of terrible beauty. It didn't seem to possess any force, until his foot connected with the side of Master Chen's head.
The sound was wrong. It wasn't a crack. It was a soft, wet, final *thud*.
The legendary Master Chen, pillar of the Green Dragon, dropped to the wet concrete like a sack of stones. His eyes were wide, unseeing, fixed on the roof high above.
The warehouse was silent, save for the relentless rain.
Shao stood over the body, his chest barely moving. He looked down at his work, his expression one of cold boredom. Then his gaze lifted, scanning the terrified remnants of Chen's men. His eyes found the four young faces, frozen in horror.
He took a step toward them.
It was Long who broke first. "RUN!" he screamed, the sound tearing from his throat.
The spell shattered. They turned and fled into the consuming darkness of the warehouse, the sound of Shao's soft, mocking laughter chasing them.
Long stumbled over a loose crate, his hands scraping rough wood. As he pushed himself up, his fingers brushed against something hidden beneath it. Not wood, but something smoother, older. A cylindrical container of aged leather, partly unrolled. His brain, screaming at him to move, barely registered it. He grabbed it on pure instinct, shoving it inside his jacket as he scrambled after the fading shadows of his brothers.
They burst out into the alley, the neon rain washing over them, their hearts hammering against their ribs like trapped birds. They didn't stop running.
Behind them, in the echoing silence of the warehouse, the legacy of the Green Dragon lay dead on the floor. And clutched to the chest of a terrified boy, stained with rain and his own blood, was the future—a fragile, ancient scroll that held the first whisper of a storm.