In neon-lit Neo-Shangzhen

Dwells the Temple of Razors

The cradle of the Scarlet Thorn

From its depths come howling horrors

Wearing the flesh of women

Seeing through crimson eyes

Slaughtering all in their wake

—Qian Yan the Desecrated, once of Wu Dang

**

Ko’ais drove her thumbs into sect-sister Mai’ka’s eye sockets, ripping past tissue and into brain matter, and rode upon her thrashing corpse until its death throes played themselves out. Mai’ka’s final breath escaped in a tortured gasp. Blood seeped from the back of her crushed skull, forming a swiftly congealing puddle upon one of Neo-Shangzhen’s countless rubbish-strewn alley floors. The stench of death, gory and excremental, wafted up to Ko’ais’s nostrils, barely hindered by the megapolis’s smog-laden air.

She breathed deeply of it, her nerves and senses supercharged beyond the point of agony by the Scarlet Thorn. It encased her in an aegis, a field of thrumming energy that made her muscle fibers strong enough to shred plate steel and her reflexes fast enough for her to dance unscathed through a storm of bullets. It laced black veins across her cheeks and filled her eyes with a sanguine radiance. It filled her veins with its rage and drove spikes of murderlust into her mind.

The Scarlet Thorn was the Forbidden Path forged in the Temple of Razors and forced upon her by the Blade Mistress, and Ko’ais hated it almost more than she hated herself. Yet she needed it now. Needed its power to survive the night. Needed its pain to white out the howling terror in her soul.

Xi’rou, Cha’lin, and Wo’rai emerged from the flickering neon that bathed every corner of Neo-Shangzhen. They, too, were wrapped within the Scarlet Thorn. Black veins pulsed across their pale cheeks, and their eyes shone crimson. Their aegises screeched and whined against one another within the confines of the alley, setting the smog a-flutter with every pulse.

“Littlest one,” Xi’rou hissed. Like Ko’ais, she was clad in a Razor Acolyte’s battle harness, but her shoulder guard bore a senior sect-sister’s insignia. A serpent tattoo adorned her shaved skull, and a massive halberd with a half-moon blade hung loosely in her hands. “Time for you to come home. Mistress misses you.”

“I’ll kill you all first. Then I’ll be free,” Ko’ais growled. Surging to her feet, she tore Mai’ka’s head off and flung it at Xi’ruo.

Cha’lin smashed it out of the air with her spiked mace, showering the dirty alley floor with shards of bone and flecks of brain matter.

“We can hurt her. We can cut her. Mistress said we could.” Wo’rai giggled as she twirled a length of spiked chain in her hands.

“I want to eat her tongue,” Cha’lin whispered. She wiped away a trail of drool from the corner of her mouth. “But I want to hear her scream and beg and cry first.”

“We all want what’s best for you, littlest one. If you don’t come home, we’ll cut you and make you bleed. And then Mistress will be sad, wouldn’t she? Sad that her darling little prodigy got hurt, that her littlest one had to suffer,” Xi’rou said, almost pleadingly. “But please, resist a little bit. I want to hurt you. Break you a little. Bleed you a little.”

Ko’ais did not bother replying. She drew her short sword. The Scarlet Thorn told—begged—her to charge into them and start tearing them to pieces, but she knew that she could not fight three of her sect-sisters at once. Not if Xi’rou was one of them.

But she would not go back with them. Not to Mistress and her knives and leather gloves and…

Her sect-sisters moved closer, penning her within the alley and backing her up against a rusted iron drum.

Fight. Kill. Die. Ko’ais felt a growl rising in her throat. She leaned forward… and saw him: a boy sitting against an alley wall and scooping handfuls of moldy noodles out of a paper pail into his mouth. He wore tattered rags and mismatched boots. His face was streaked with dirt and grime, and his dark hair hung from his scalp in ragged, unkempt clumps.

The Razor Acolytes stopped, noticing the boy barely a heartbeat later. They turned their gazes toward him, their crimson eyes widened in obvious surprise.

He looked up at Ko’ais and cast a glance at her sect-sisters before shrugging and continuing his meal.

“Wha…What?” Wo’rai stammered. “How could we not have sensed this worm? He’s been here all along.”

“A child beggar,” Xi’ruo snapped. “He … no, it is nothing. Focus, you maggots.”

But Ko’ais knew he wasn’t nothing. He’d crouched, unnoticed, in the midst of four Razor Acolytes until being found through sheer coincidental nearness. His knuckles and palms were covered with calluses, and his face bore numerous faded blade scars. Most telling of all was the rusty war-knife tucked into his cloth belt.

The boy shifted uneasily on his haunches. With obvious reluctance, he turned to Ko’ais and held out the paper pail to her.

“If you’re hungry, you can have some,” he said. “I should be able to dig out some more.”

“You… you expect me to eat that?” she replied, nonplussed. Most people cowered and groveled in the presence of a single Razor Acolyte, let alone four. This boy met her crimson gaze with a casual and bewildering nonchalance.

“It’s food. No?” He shrugged and withdrew the pail. “More for me then. I don’t think you’ll have time to eat anyway.”

“Such insolence from a beggar!” Cha’lin snarled. She strode to him and slapped the paper pail out of his hands before he could protest. “How dare you speak to a Razor Acolyte like this?”

“Why’d you do that? I wasn’t speaking to you.” With a grunt of annoyance, the boy shuffled to the paper pail and cast a pointed glance at Cha’lin as he began scooping up the spilled noodles. “Besides, you definitely don’t look like you need to eat any more.”

Did…did he just call Cha’lin fat? Ko’ais stifled a spiteful giggle at the boy’s comment and the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. But it’s true. Cha’lin’s harness is too tight for her.

“Die, worm!” the Razor Acolyte snarled, swinging her mace in a skull-splitting arc.

The boy caught the weapon by its haft as it descended, stopping its spiked head inches away from his face.

Then he drew his knife and plunged it up through Cha’lin’s chin, the rusty blade reaching up easily into her brain.

He kicked the twitching corpse aside into a pile of garbage. His features, previously open and unassuming, had gone ice cold. Ko’ais knew that look. It stared back at her every time she looked into a mirror. It was the same one her sect-sisters bore: the bared teeth and frozen eyes, that silent, feral snarl of battle fury and murderlust.

And it was now clear that he followed a Path as well, having slipped into its aegis so swiftly and subtly that she’d barely sensed him doing so. It was not the Scarlet Thorn: this Path had an aegis wreathed the air around his ragged frame with electric crackles. His pupils dilated to fill his eyes with their blackness.

He growled and flexed his aegis. Its energy field cratered the concrete beneath his feet.

Xi’rou hurled herself at him, shrieking incoherently. The senior sect-sister’s composure had finally broken at the shedding of fresh blood. Ko’ais felt the same: the Scarlet Thorn called her to death and murder. Its siren song was sweet and loud in her veins. Its piercing agony told her to rend and tear.

“Suffer, littlest one!” Wo’rai screamed as she lashed her spiked chain at Ko’ais’s face.

Ko’ais sneered. By herself, Wo’rai was not much more of a threat than Mai’ka. She dashed aside the whistling chain with her sword and seized its now-limp length in her free hand.

Pulling at it with the full force of her aegis, Ko’ais tore Wo’rai off her feet and smashed her into an alley wall. The permacrete surface cracked beneath the impact. Wo’rai gasped, blood oozing from her ears and the corners of her eyes. Before she could peel herself from the wall, Ko’ais stabbed her in the chest, ripping her ribcage open and cleaving her heart in two. She spat on Wo’rai as the Razor Acolyte spasmed and died, before turning to confront Xi’ruo.

But the senior sect-sister was already faltering in her battle against the boy. His aegis hammered at Xi’ruo’s, threatening to overwhelm it and shatter her limbic channels. He parried and countered with a precision and grace far beyond anything the senior sect-sister had ever been capable of.

It was obvious. He’s like me, a prodigy of martial science.

Xi’ruo suffered a blade wound—her third—on her shoulder. Gasping, she brought her left hand up and spread her fingers. Poison needles sliced through the air from her bracer to plunge into the boy’s face and neck.

His head snapped back, and he cried out as the nerve venom began to work. Snarling triumphantly, Xi’ruo swept her halberd in an arc that would bisect the youth.

Before Ko’ais could intervene, the boy dropped his knife and seized the halberd by its haft. He kicked out at Xi’ruo, but she met his hurtling foot with both her open palms.

A dull, resonating thump reverberated in the air as their aegises clashed. Xi’rou flew backwards, skipping off the rubbish-strewn concrete before she came to a rolling halt, almost at the end of the alley. She scrambled to her feet, her crimson eyes wide and her jaw trembling with evident agony.

Ko’ais advanced upon Xi’ruo, but the senior sect-sister threw herself into a full sprint away from the alley, swiftly disappearing into the neon-lit smog.

Ko’ais considered pursuing, but instead, she found herself looking at the boy. He’d already plucked the needles from his flesh and assumed a cross-legged lotus seated stance. Sweat poured down his face and spasms wracked his frame as he placed his palms a hands-breadth beneath his navel, hovering them over his nexus.

He’s trying to purge the venom from his system with his internal energy. She shook her head, amazed. Most martial scientists would have already been dead, their major organs reduced to a putrefying soup.

He looked up at Ko’ais as she approached.

“Relax,” she said, sitting down before him. “If I’d wanted you dead, you’d be wearing your entrails around your neck by now. I have a dose of the antidote on me. It will help neutralize some of the poison, but you did just take five needles laced with the Crumpling Death. We’ll have to force the rest of the residual toxins out of your system with our internal energy.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, Ko’ais took out a pill from a compartment of her battle harness and popped it into his mouth. She held her hand over his lips to prevent him from spitting it out and glared at him until he swallowed. Within moments, his spasms receded, and some color returned to his pale face.

“What did you mean by our internal energy?” he asked shakily.

“You killed Cha’lin for me. The least I can do is help you out,” Ko’ais said, holding up both her palms. “Now come on. Align your palm channels with mine. We don’t have all night.”

He gave her a weak nod and placed his palms against hers. Ko’ais took a deep breath and pulsed her internal energy against his system. It was a heady, foreign experience. Their respective Paths were cruel and bitter entities. Their internal energies clawed, bit, and fought, but eventually, they entwined and melded, as if in recognition of some dark, ecstatic kinship.

After some time, the boy drew back, breaking his connection with Ko’ais, and coughed up several mouthfuls of blackened blood.

Ko’ais stood and offered her hand to the boy. He hesitated for a moment before taking it and hoisting himself to his feet.

“I’m Ko’ais of the Scarlet Thorn,” she said. “Who’re you?”

Her crimson eyes met his dark ones.

“I’m Raksha of the Stormbringer.”

They had to still be there. Habitant block #451, 85th floor, unit 21.

People rarely moved dwellings in Neo-Shangzhen, unless they suddenly got hold of a lot of money or a very different job.

Or unless they died.

No. They’re alive. They must be.

Ko’ais raced down the teeming streets that led to #451. Her boots splashed through a puddle of spilled coolant as she rounded a corner and ran across a night market. Peddlers ceased their haggling as they caught sight of her. A pack of off-duty manufactory serfs scrambled out of her path. A haggard woman pulled her child into a protective embrace as Ko’ais ran past.

They recognized her battle harness, the iconic armor of a Razor Acolyte, one of the sanctioned terror and enforcement agents of Hegemonic Lord Aquilinius, ruler of Neo-Shangzhen. The Temple of Razors killed by his decree, and in return, he allowed its Acolytes to feast at will upon the megapolis’s serfs.

The Mistress had taken her just after her eighth birthday, and over the last ten years, she’d gone on hundreds of missions. Nearly a thousand insurgents, manufactory serfs on strike, and agents of rival Hegemonic Lords had perished by her hands. Their dying pleas haunted her thoughts, and their death masks lurked in her peripheral vision, just out of sight, but not completely. They’d even begun to creep into her dreams of home, her dreams of Ko’shin and Ma.

No more. I won’t be Mistress’s toy anymore. I won’t be like Xi’ruo and the others. I won’t kill for her anymore. Ko’ais glanced at the thousands of flickering neon signs that festooned the streets of Neo-Shangzhen. They told her what she needed to know. She was almost home. “Home. I’m going home.”

“What did you say?” Raksha asked.

He ran behind her, Xi’ruo’s halberd blade bouncing at his hip. He’d broken its shaft off a third of the way down its length before discarding his rusty war-knife.

“Nothing. Don’t fall behind.”

“Why am I following you?” he asked, but she sensed that the question was mostly directed at himself rather than to her. The dirty and tattered martial scientist had been about to resume rummaging through the garbage in the alley and let her go on her way. Instead, she’d caught him by the arm and told him to come along with her.

He’d been reluctant until Ko’ais had promised him food that would taste much better than half-decomposed garbage.

“This better be worth it,” he muttered grumpily.

Ko’ais couldn’t help looking over her shoulder and flashing her brightest smile at him. She’d learned several years ago that, unclouded by her aegis, her smile had quite a profound effect on men. Raksha was no exception. He colored slightly underneath the layer of grime upon his face.Much to her surprise, she found his reaction delightful.

He killed Cha’lin, so he’s caught up in all of this now anyway. He’ll come in handy if we get intercepted by any more sect-sisters. I might as well make use of him however I can. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to know more about his Path. Ko’ais shook her head, realizing that she was trying to justify bringing him along.

As far as she could tell, Raksha was about two or three years younger than her, but for all his prowess, he was like an unmannered child with dubious hygiene and a lack of common sense. And of course, it felt utterly wrong to leave him to eat garbage and sleep on decaying cardboard. Why was a martial scientist of his caliber living like a beggar?

And then there was that look in his eyes once he’d released his aegis: clear and open. Facing her, his expression had been one of simple acknowledgment, nothing more, but also nothing less. No one had looked at her like that before.

No one except Ko’shin, whose diapers she had changed and whom she had fed and raised, until…

Until the day Mistress came.

She skidded to a halt before #451. The building reached a hundred stories into the smog-laden sky above Neo-Shangzhen. Somewhere, high up in its concrete heart, was the place she’d been snatched from a decade ago.

“Mama. Ko’shin.” Ko’ais felt tears welling up in the corner of her eyes. “I’m home.”