"So you've defeated Takeda." Wang said it as fact, not a question.

"I have. Don't forget Huanshin He, and Fung as well. Chen was a bit more of a challenge than the old masters." Jian said the last word with a particular note of distaste and reproach laced with sarcasm.

Wang laughed, a true honest laugh, and Jian felt a pang of regret that they were enemies. "I did tell them," he said. "'Leave him alone,' I told them, but of course, they didn't listen."

"They never do," agreed Jian.

"I'd like to make you an offer," said Wang, a request that took Jian by surprise. His reaction alone spurred Wang to continue. "I should really thank you, I think, for weeding out the weak and the useless. Kemo Nguyen was getting old, and the Masters, well, I don't think I need to extrapolate on their uselessness. Lin Wei, Kim Jiyang; all old news, obsolete in the new Triad."

"New Triad? I'm afraid you've lost me, Wang."

"You've paved my way, my boy, and now it's time for me to return the favor. But this is an old debt." Pei Wang was still smiling when the bullet was fired.

Artifice Comics Presents
Silver Shadow #13
"Hong Kong Nights"
(Part IV)
by Aaron Baugh

Jian flinched, a move that saved his life. He jumped, and instead of penetrating his skull, the high-caliber round shattered his right humerus and carried through into his chest, perforating a lung and lodging behind his fifth rib on the left side of his chest.

He collapsed to the ground, and could not draw air, only hiss as blood leaked from his nose and mouth. He managed to get to his knees, but a vicious kick flipped him onto his back. Jian saw the shooter, and closed his eyes.

Across the alley, Han rose from a prone position and reloaded his rifle.

Wang stood over Jian and stared down at him. "Now, Jian, it ends for you. Be happy that you've done some good in your life. I couldn't have done it without you."

Han emerged from the building he had taken his shot from and stood beside Wang. "Should I finish it?"

"No."

"But why?"

"He's done us a very kind service, Han, and besides, I owe him these next moments, wondering if he'll die, wondering what will happen once the pain and the blood loss rob him of consciousness." Wang knelt. "No reclusive temple monks to save you, Jian, as they did me all those years ago." He smiled and examined Jian's shattered arm, the spreading stain of blood on his chest and side. "It's not a broken back, but I think it'll do."

Wang stood and walked away, Han pausing long enough to look at Jian and laugh once before he followed his master.

Jian closed his eyes, opened them. He took in one shuddering breath, then closed his eyes once more.

Infinity greeted him.

* * *

[Pacific City]

Guy had never been able to hold any real job. After high school, he had gone into amateur boxing, then wrestling, then boxing again. He proved that he was a very physical, if wholly untalented rugby player, but this was Australia and that was good enough for most of the fans.

It had been when his knee gave out that everything he'd worked for went slithering down the tubes. Locals turned him on to all manner of addictive substances, and when he ran out of money, he began working for the trade, doing anything from grunt work to light muscle work. It had been three victims ago that he'd made his first kill, and though he lacked finesse, he had the basic mechanics down well enough to be a passable assassin for hire.

In the meantime, though, he had to get eating money, and for that he indulged in everything from mugging to armed robbery. It was after knocking over a particularly small corner grocery that he began to get that odd tickle down his spine.

Watched, or followed. Both, most likely.

He reached into his jacket pocket and got his fingers around the snub-nosed revolver, and risked a look over his shoulder. When he turned around, it was face-first into a thrown piece of concrete, one of the granular, lumpy bits left over after a sidewalk was repaired. He swore and put his free hand to his forehead. It came back speckled with blood, and he looked up the nearly empty street.

The back of a running kid in a gray sweatshirt caught his eye, and he took off, bowling over an older man who'd just emerged from a rundown hotel. Guy's knee protested with every heavy step, and he started to breath heavily far too soon for his own liking. He rounded the corner and saw the kid take another left, just past the sign for an all-night video rental store.

He smiled. These had been his old stomping grounds, and the idiot kid just turned into a blind alley. Guy didn't hurry quite as much as he made his way there and turned in. There the kid was, trying to get onto a fire escape via a dumpster, already haven given up on the sheer wall in the rear of the alley. Guy grinned as he took a few quick steps, grabbed the kid by the back of the pants, and tossed him onto the ground.

The kid's breath left his lungs in a gasp, and Guy shoved the gun's barrel into his face, drawing back curiously as he saw that the boy had painted his face gray, with a white and black yin-yang symbol in the center of his forehead.

Shadows fell over him as light from the mouth of the alley was obscured. Guy looked up to see six young people, all in gray sweatshirts, all with their hoods up, all with painted faces, all holding some sort of melee weapon. "What the fuck?" he had time to say before the kid on the ground kicked him hard on the kneecap of his bad leg. Pain, red-hot, searing pain hit Guy's nervous system and he stumbled, the hand holding the gun going to the pavement to keep him from collapsing entirely.

They closed in on him as one.

The first to reach him struck him with a pilfered nightstick across his head. A second had no weapon so exotic, simply a cricket bat. That blow split his scalp and knocked him back. After that, the group worked him over, not caring that he didn't fight back, or cry out. He was already unconscious by the time they moved beyond boots and fists and picked up their various instruments again. The night was still young, and their leader already felt his cell phone vibrating his pocket. They'd found another one.

Pacific City police found him the next morning, beaten nearly to death, the contents of his robbery scattered over his chest, gun laying nearby. Pinned to his shirt was a note, written in neat, block-style print.

"Simply because the Shadow does not strike does not mean he has departed. Those who have forgotten they need to fear the shadows shall learn to do so again. Many shadows fall, and some of them watch. We are as ghosts in the shadows, a legion devoted to His way. Watch for us, and be wary."

Officer William Pendleton looked at the note, at the small picture of a yin-yang printed on the bottom. Pendleton sighed, and silently cursed his city, cursed whomever'd done this, cursed the nearly dead criminal on the street, and cursed the heroes, heroines, and the villains that used his city as a backdrop for their games.

***

[Southern China]

Voices.

"...remarkable that he's even alive. The surgery was amazingly simple. There was very little internal bleeding despite his injuries."

"That is the advantage of the Way. Despite his steps off the true path, he has learned, and his body has learned as well. These things do not surprise me."

"Well, for a man of modern medicine, I don't mind telling you that I...."

Darkness gave way to more voices, and though he went through the cycle of nearly awake and blissfully unconscious, this time Jian opened his eyes to see two faces from his past and one he'd never seen before. The first was the calm, spectacled visage of Kwai Shen, the Hong Kong recluse who'd removed a slug from his shoulder. The man was dressed in a starched white shirt, the cuffs rolled back crisply and evenly. His hair was only slightly disheveled, as if fingers had been run through it after a sweat.

The second belonged to a Shaolin monk named Fei Tzu. The third belonged to a man that knew Jian Li Fong's life, knew his life among shadows, knew Charles Ling.

The third face belonged to Zhing Ra Ming.

"How do you feel?" asked Fei Tzu as he moved up to lean over Jian, look in his eyes. He found no fog, no mist, only the clearness of good health.

"Like hell," he said, his mouth feeling like cotton.

Kwai Shen stepped forward, holding a glass with a crooked straw in it. "Drink," he said, and Jian was surprised to taste tea with a heavy dose of herbs instead of the water he'd thought he'd get. "You were right, Mr. Fong. It was better that I didn't learn your name, although circumstances brought it to me anyway. I might have refused that night."

Jian pushed the straw away with his tongue. "That tastes horrible. Terrible."

"Good. No more delusions, then."

"Delusions?" asked Jian.

"Brought about by the shock of extreme physical trauma, combined with the loss of blood. You lay there for many hours before we found you."

"How did you find me?" he croaked.

Fei Tzu harrumphed and scowled. "Like Hansel and Gretel you were, with corpses and broken men instead of stones and bread crumbs. Of course, Master Ling was very helpful in putting us on the trail."

Jian closed his eyes. Ling was involved? How much did this odd trio know, then, about everything?

"Calm yourself," said Tzu. "Your secrets are safe with us," and he patted Jian's good arm in a paternal way.

The old man had always been able to read Jian's thoughts. It was an annoying trait. "Who is he?" asked Jian, lifting his left arm and indicating Ra Ming, who looked out of place in his deep orange robes. The man might as well have worn a sign on his back, declaring himself as the epitome of what a Shaolin monk should look like.

Fei Tzu was dressed in the plain blue 'pajamas' that Jian always remembered him wearing, be it sparring or meditation, rain or shine, summer or winter.

"I," said Zhing, "am a man who is extremely disappointed in you, little shadow."

"Do show some respect, Li Fong. Master Zhing carried you most of the way himself," said Tzu.

Jian's eyes narrowed. "Nice to meet you, too. I've heard the name, the stories, mostly from this old fool." Jian's head nodded towards Fei Tzu.

"That old fool saved your life," said Zhing evenly.

"He already knows I'm grateful," replied Jian, "but he should be glad that his old rival is dead."

"Ah. Yes. Him. Does that make us even?" asked Tzu. "Do you now owe me nothing?"

"Now? I owed you nothing before." Jian sat up, a quick, abrupt thing that obviously hurt him. He was too proud to do more than wince, and even then it was a tightening around the eyes, a quirk of the lips. "Should we take that trip down memory lane, old man?" asked Jian rapidly, vehemently. "Should we talk about how after six months you passed judgment on me? Told me I was a master, told me that there was nothing more here for me?"

"There wasn't," said Tzu, somewhat sadly.

"There was HIM!" said Jian, pointing accusingly at Zhing.

"I wouldn't take you," said Zhing, simple and to the point. "You were too young and imbalanced."

"Bull. Shit." Jian made it two words, distinct and separate, and swung his legs over the edge of the padded table and stood. "I was hungry. Hungry for what you knew, what you could teach me. Instead, I found others like The Mongolian, and the Triad masters. All after Charles Ling had taught me all he could."

"You were a sponge," said Fei Tzu, "soaking up everything you could, heedless of what such rapid learning could do to you, not caring what you absorbed."

"And here you are," said Zhing. "Nearly dead, a pale," and here he paused, his lips quirking into a small grin, "shadow of your former self. You have become a hollow caricature of yourself, Jian. You haven't found the inner spark that will allow you to fully realize your potential."

"Really?" scoffed Jian. "Tae Kwon Do, Yu Sool, Kuk Sool Won, Aikido, Jiujitsu, Judo, twelve forms of Karate, Moo Gi Gong, Zanshisen Ryu, and at least nine styles named after animals, both real and mythological that I can think of in five seconds! My potential!? I'm NOT DONE YET!" said Jian. "I'd think my potential is very nearly fully realized, monk. Inner spark, my ass."

Zhing closed his eyes and shook his head. From a counter nearby, Kwai Shen looked on the spectacle with amazement, wholly entertained.

"Men spend lifetimes mastering one form, or one kata within a style, little shadow."

"Stop calling me that," interjected Jian.

Zhing continued, nonplussed at the interruption. "They let themselves become dedicated until they become one with their own way." He began to pace, placing his hands behind him. "Master Tzu has chosen Bok Pai, and he may do things within that style that I, a master in my own right of four styles, cannot begin to fathom. You, we see, have much more of a gift. I can see your talents, your strengths, but most glaringly, your weaknesses. I know that you are stronger than any man has a right to be, I know that you move faster, that you can sense things beyond that of mortal men. You survived a terrible injury, your will influencing your body, making it mend itself until it was nearly used up. Your arts are your key to unlocking these gifts, little shadow, and you gloss over them, choosing quantity over quality, letting your hubris take you by the nose and lead you about."

Jian was angry, his face darkened. He lifted a foot to take a step, and Zhing's hand shot out, still a full six inches from his chest, but Jian was stopped as surely as if he were pressing against a wall. Ra-Ming's eyes were closed.

"You are like a paper lantern with no candle," said Zhing, "a great empty vessel, thin and fragile. But I have the means to fill you, make you whole and solid."

"With what?"

"With light, little shadow. With light." Zhing pulled his right hand from behind his back, and Jian saw the perfect sphere of orange he held, cupped in his hand. Its surface shimmered and moved, and Jian could feel the intense concentration that Zhing exerted to keep it that way. Everything told him that the small sphere wanted to fly free and disrupt what it touched.

It reminded Jian of Millennium Man, of Michael, of Charlie, of Chuck Starling and Zhao and his studios. He leaned back against the table, and closed his eyes.

Zhing let the sphere dissipate. He crossed to Jian and placed a hand on his uninjured shoulder. "All it takes is focus," said the monk, "and you will pass on to the next level. After that, you focus harder, and harder still."

Jian barked a short, rough laugh, hearing himself saying much the same thing to frustrated students who couldn't time a roundhouse kick properly, or who bruised their hands trying to shatter a thin panel of wood.

"When did I lose it?" he asked to no one in particular.

"We'll find out," said Fei Tzu, moving to stand next to Jian, his arms crossed over his chest. "We'll make you whole again, in many ways," said the old man, tapping Jian's injured arm.

"I still think you're an old fool," said Jian, much like an angry child who regretted a tantrum.

"Yes, yes. Be sure you pay attention this time."

"We leave after dinner," said Zhing.

"Dinner? What time is it now? In fact, what day is it?"

Kwai Shen finally spoke again. "You've been out for nearly ninety-six hours. It's a Thursday, and dinner is in an hour or so."

Jian blinked. Four days. Pei Wang could have gone anywhere.

* * *

The next weeks passed in a haze of pain and training. With no specific goal, Jian flailed about for the first few days, then focused on repairing his arm and showing Fei Tzu and Zhing Ra Ming that he was not a slave to his own pride. As he rested and healed, the two Shaolin told him of what they knew of Charles Ling, what they knew about the girl he'd drafted into serving as the new vigilante protector of Pacific City.

Charles Ling. Helping and protecting him even now. What a guy. Jian was sorry that it was the truest friends that you could never repay. There was no possible way to get out of the personal debt that he felt he owed him. So he would return as soon as he could, and try to find some way to make that happen.

In the meantime, he focused himself, then redoubled his focus. After his arm healed in a surprisingly short amount of time, he threw himself hard into his retraining, which consisted of ritually besting every student who trained at the temple.

It started as a way to exercise his wounded body, and to build up the strength he'd spent in rebuilding himself. After that, he did it to prove to his two teachers that he was no mere pupil. They responded by not talking about his triumphs, not mentioning how he'd seamlessly blended six styles to overcome their resident masters.

After his pride was satisfied, he began to teach those he defeated, often stopping in mid-fight while he had them in a joint-lock or pinned them to the floor. He'd hold them there, discuss what they had done wrong, then let them get up and try it again.

As he entered this phase, Fei Tzu would only smile, and Zhing would simply watch impassively. Added to this, Jian spent a great deal of time alone, and took to traveling outside the temple, but never more than a day's walk. It was after sprinting and leaping from toehold to handhold, up the sheer rock face of a cliff, that he finally began to make breakthroughs of his own, and he turned himself inward, to take a good look at himself.

He replayed the events of the recent past, from the day he put on that silly gray outfit and began to beat muggers and rapists. Thoughts of Emma Randolph and her mysterious origins and motives, thoughts of training Michael and trying to help him help the city. It all was so clear and vibrant, and when the Triad had come calling, he had regressed. Despite the comfort and sense of belonging that he had created for himself, he lapsed back into old ways, old methods. It began with Fung, when he had discarded form and content and simply followed up a skillful attack with actions no more artful than barroom brawling. He'd moved astride the fallen martial artist, and used his powerful fists to pound the man's skull into bone chips.

There had been no art to it at all. That was why he had defeated Pei Wang all those years ago. He had been the hungry, demanding boy that Fei Tzu spoke of with such remembrance and Zhing with so much contempt. He hadn't been ready for much of anything, hadn't matured his understanding that he could do anything.

Anything.

So this was another of his talents, he thought. Mysteria turns invisible, Michael can fly and fire bolts of sunlight, and that annoying Bush character can fall off buildings and not get himself killed. It was in this moment of retrospection that Jian knew what it was he could do. The list began in his head.

He was the type of man who heard the joints of terrorists in the Gallery of Antiquities right before they fired their assault weapons. He was the man who threw knives with unerring accuracy. He'd run up walls, climbed sheer surfaces, run down massive guy wires that anchored television towers and were only inches wide. Survived a gunshot wound that would have killed nearly anyone else, and survived long enough for help to arrive. Watching was a form of learning. His body could mimic his imagination, his muscle memory was so accurate that he could do anything he put his mind to, anything he forced his body to learn. The truth coalesced into stone from a haze of misunderstanding.

He was the master of his own body.

And he stood from his perch above the monastery, and smiled. He had long thought himself bound to techniques learned from other men, and he mastered them so easily...because he incorporated them into himself. Every man was a product of his own experiences and how he absorbs the experiences of others, but Jian was that to the nth degree. He knew, even now, that he could make demands of his body, of mind, muscle, bone, and sinew, and it would deliver or break in the attempt.

Martial arts, all of them, strove for this moment of clarity, strove to provide the mesh of spirit, mind, and flesh. That was why he was drawn to them, that was why he could embrace them so quickly. The time he'd spent in Hong Kong was denial, a reversal into visceral knowledge he retained from the past, an ugly past of broken loyalties and empty oaths, of selfishness and deceit.

With a deep, cleansing breath, he pushed it into the recesses of his mind, conscious of its existence, hoping he'd never need it again.

A voice reached his ears. "So?"

Jian smiled the smile of a relaxed man, but didn't turn to look at Ra Ming. "Your lantern is lit, Master Zhing."

Jian heard his smile in his reply. "Prove it, little shadow."

Zhing blasted the bit of rock Jian stood on with a blast from his hands, but Jian landed behind him and pushed him without touching him. Zhing pivoted and kicked, throwing his body weight away from the cliff's edge. Jian dodged, riposted, and Zhing blocked.

The pause spanned a heartbeat, and they clashed again, leaving the cliff for a small stand of bamboo. They left this for the forest, then down the mountain along the path of a small stream. Neither touched the other. In all his life, Jian had never felt such exhilaration, not in his three fights with Emma Randolph, not when he'd bested the Triad masters. Now he sparred across landscapes with Zhing, their blows splitting the air, their feet crushing stone.

Zhing came for him in a jump kick, and Jian grabbed the outstretched foot, swung the man on its end like a bat and let go. The monk somersaulted in mid air and landed on the ground like a leaf falling from a tree. "You aren't trying," he said calmly.

Jian grinned. "Neither are you."

"You're recovering from a near-death experience."

"True." Jian's fists came up and he shuffled his feet, Ali-style. "What's your excuse?" Zhing smiled and lunged forward, his flurry of punches dodged, sometimes lightly blocked enough to deter them from their true course. Jian leaned out of the way of a snap kick and flipped backwards, making Zhing lean away from his own lethal feet.

Continuing his momentum, Jian did two reverse handsprings and then turned towards the cliff face behind him. With a look towards Ra Ming, he tilted his head in a 'come on' gesture and then sprinted away, Zhing Ra Ming close behind.

It only ended when their epic duel led them into a cave. After an attempted punch that was blocked, Zhing broke the lock and Jian flipped back into the shadows of the cave, made deeper by the fleeing sunlight.

Zhing created an orb, and its weak light illuminated the cave, throwing odd shadows as it pulsed, cupped in his hands.

"Thank you," came Jian's voice, echoing off the surfaces of the cave. "I am indeed the little shadow now." Zhing realized that the cave's acoustics weren't the cause for the odd distortion. The voice came from the shadows themselves. "Light creates shadow. What can I say to thank the man who has given me so much, even provides me with shadows cast from his own light? I shall thank you, Master Zhing." A pause. "Shall we continue?"

"I yield, for now," said Zhing Ra Ming. "To engage an enemy in a battlefield of his own choosing is poor strategy."

Jian walked out of a shadow directly in front of Zhing. "A technique I cannot teach," he began. He held out a clenched fist.

Zhing's orb dissipated, and he regarded Jian with a careful look.

Jian's hand unfolded, holding a small rock. "But if you would know my thoughts, Grasshopper, you must take this pebble from my hand."

Zhing's face turned to a frown. "Terrible. Lampooning that which has truly liberated you. Have you no shame?"

Jian laughed and tossed the pebble away. "A side effect of my Western upbringing. Hope you don't hold it against me."

* * *

"How do you explain it?" asked the doctor, addressing Fei Tzu. "He was bitter, all the first week or so. Now, he's like a different person."

Tzu smiled and sipped his tea. The pair sat in the well-tended gardens. A dozen yards beyond them, students raked and weeded the walkpaths. "And now you see the true miracle of The Way."

"Every martial art calls itself 'The Way'," countered Kwai Shen. "No matter the style."

"You generalize in error," corrected the monk gently. "If you would think about myself and Master Zhing compared to our young Li Fong, you would see the contrasts. We have grown up with the Way, let it guide us along its path, regardless of how direct or winding. Because of that, we are whole, and content. Now, let us think of Li Fong. He has changed paths very many times, and not when convenient. He leaps from path to path, but not where they intersect. Therefore, he does not finish each way. You have seen him made whole, because all the divergent paths he has taken in his life have finally come together."

"And that's all it takes?"

"Take yourself," continued the old man. "You set out to learn about medicine at an early age, no?"

"Not particularly. I was in my teens."

"Still, you could have stopped along the way. But think about what would have happened to you then. You could have gone on in any other discipline, but the inner doubts would unbalance your soul, leaving you lacking."

"But he's gone this long. If that man hadn't had a rifle, he might have taken Wang apart. He defeated the Triad masters this way, why not Wang?"

"Because Wang is different now. They last fought in Japan, in a nearly forgotten Shinto temple. Jian was searching for yet another teacher, and he met Wang doing the same. They traveled together, and upon reaching the rural temple, they found it empty. Wang proceeded to loot the temple, and Jian stopped him. They fought, and Jian left Wang behind, bloodied with a broken back."

"He was stopping a thief."

"He left the man to die."

"Mercy."

"Yes. Something that he has come to regret now."

"Why? If he has become whole, as you claim, then he realizes the importance of mercy, the fact that it must be tempered with vengeance."

"Such as he showed for the men from the Triad?" said the old man slyly. "No, he regrets his lack of mercy earlier because now he will have to fight again, and he'll have to make the same decision again."

Kwai Shen nodded, and drank his tea, which by this time had cooled to a comfortable drinking temperature. "What will he do this time?" asked the doctor.

Tzu shrugged. "If I were him, I'd kill the bastard."

* * *

He'd spent thirty-nine days with the monks, cloistered in the rough country of southwestern China. In that time he'd examined himself and come through remade. Now, he was ready to change things, to put right past mistakes and to make certain that those who'd sacrificed for him could have their burdens eased.

First, he had to go back to Hong Kong. Zhing Ra Ming and Fei Tzu didn't say anything to him as he left. They'd mended and cleaned his clothing, let him take a few simple garments with him. The hotel where he'd left his luggage had doubtlessly thrown out his suitcase, leaving him with naught but the clothes on his back.

He didn't really mind at all.

Hong Kong wasn't much changed as he got off the ferry and walked through its streets. The surface remained unchanged, and with all of his former enemies dead, Jian didn't have anyplace to start, so he went with the most obvious, and clumsy, route.

"Have you seen Pei Wang today?" he asked, starting in a garment shop. The sales clerk retreated from his counter into the back room.

A pawn shop closed a steel grate in his face; and a fruit vendor handed him a watermelon, then moved his cart further down the street.

And so he was sitting in the meager shade of a thin tree, eating the watermelon that he'd broken open with his hands when the three men found him.

"You been asking for Pei Wang?" asked the youngest of them. They fanned out to surround him, and Jian smiled as he spat out a black seed and licked the fingers of his left hand. He nodded.

"You've found him, then," said the leader, a boy of no more than eighteen.

"No, I don't think I have," replied Jian.

"I'm Pei Wang," he said.

"No you aren't. And I think he'd do terrible things to you if he found out that you were claiming to be him."

The boy took a step forward and Jian raised a hand. "Oh, come on now. Have a seat, have some watermelon, why don't you? It's a warm day, and it's actually quite sweet." Jian wiped his hands on his pants and gestured for the boys to come closer.

"What do you want with Pei Wang?" asked a second boy.

"To give him a message, that's all. Tell him that the man who broke his back is here to finish the job. I will be in Kemo Nguyen's office this evening, after dinner. Ask him to join me, won't you?" Jian deposited the remnants of his melon in a nearby trash can and left. The three toughs may be just that, but if they were in Hong Kong and had even a few contacts on the street, they'd make sure that word got to where it needed to be.

* * *

Han was back where he'd been before, once the watchers had told him that Li Fong was headed for Nguyen's office. The window had long been repaired, but he sighted in on the center of the now-bare room and adjusted his sights. Wang had told him to be there early, and he looked forward to a wait of at least a few hours. He'd even brought a sack lunch.

He was, however, wholly unprepared for the single footfall behind him and the sickening feeling of being lifted from his prone position. Just before he hurtled out of the forty-eighth story window, he caught Li Fong's reflection in the glass and screamed.

Jian watched him fall, then turned his gaze across the street to the very room that Han had been sighting in on. Tonight, then.

* * *

Wang entered the room as the last rays of afternoon light disappeared behind the horizon, further blocked by the steel skyline of Hong Kong. He squinted through the window where Kemo Nguyen's bullet had passed more than a month ago. There was no way to make out the hidden form of Han, his ace in the hole.

The remodeling had been quite complete, the walls recovered in conservative paneling, carpet replaced. There was nothing to suggest that this room had been a man's tomb.

"Wool-gathering, Wang?" asked a voice from the shadows in the far corner of the room.

The master of the New Triad blinked. It couldn't be..."Li Fong?"

Jian stepped out of the shadows, seeming to materialize in front of Wang. "In the flesh, and not so dead as advertised."

"You look good. Considerably less broken than last time. I won't ask how you managed such a stunning recovery." Wang tossed his jacket onto the new desk in the room. After ten long, silent seconds, he looked out the window.

"The key to a good plan is to never get old," said Jian as he took a step forward. "I'd say you and Han are pretty stale with the old sniper trick." He swung, and his knuckles cracked into Wang's jaw.

Wang spun with the impact and kicked, Jian taking the blow with his arm and shoulder in a block. A punch, then, blocked. Another that found a rib, and a third that made Jian lean back, only to launch forward with an attack of his own and see Wang dance out of the way.

Wang spat blood. Jian rubbed his arm.

"I've thought about this for a long time," said Wang as he shifted into a modified stance, much like Leopard, somewhat like Wu Wing Chao. Jian brought his hands high, elbows prominent, and his weight back on his rear foot. He remained silent.

An attack from Wang. A dodge. Attack. Block. Attack attack attack. Block dodge dodge.

Wang's foot snapped out, Jian pushed it aside as his body went the opposite way. He turned and his roundhouse backhand found Wang's neck. The counter drove Jian away, but he pressed forward and jammed his thumb into the crook of Wang's arm, numbing it so that it was too slow to block the series of short kicks and punches that made his ribs ache. With a flip of his wrists, Jian sent Wang sprawling shoulder-first into the room's desk.

Jian turned and smiled at Wang, who was now picking himself up off the floor. "More?"

Wang rubbed his numb arm, his fingers realigning nerves and relaxing muscle. "You've gotten better."

"Not so simple when I've not been shot, huh?"

The Triad leader leapt forward, his hands and feet slashing out in wicked arcs. Jian never attempted a counter attack for the first thirty seconds. Each attack, he would dodge, sometimes by inches, sometimes by a hair's breadth. His arms never moved from his sides, and he simply bent and pivoted his body until he saw the moment of Wang's weakness, the moment that he left himself wide open in his anger at his own failure.

Jian's hand came up suddenly, palm out, and Wang felt something slam into his chest, though the hand was clearly not touching him. Li Fong leapt into the air, his left leg spinning out and his heel crashing into the side of Wang's face.

Wang spun twice before impacting the wall, and Jian landed as he had been standing, hands calmly at his sides. Jian watched as Wang stood shakily, one hand on the wall, the other cradling the broken remains of teeth and jawbone. He tried to speak, but only made unintelligible mutterings. Blood spattered onto the floor and dripped down his chin.

Jian's snap kick to his gut doubled him over, the palm strike to the temple dazed him, and Wang sank to his knees. Jian squatted in front of him. He looked at him for long moments, then sniffed. "You should've just let me go, Wang. You could've had your little empire and I wouldn't still be here. I have a life too, you know."

"Yah, yah eetn eh..." he replied, fractured jaw obscuring his speech.

"Yes," said Jian, "I've beaten you. I've also been shown the error of my ways. Mercy let me leave you in that temple. Mercy got you here today. If you'd put me down all those days ago, we wouldn't be here, would we? And if I'd put you down all those years ago, we wouldn't be here. See where mercy gets us?"

Wang looked into Jian's eyes, and the unspoken let Jian know that he did, indeed, understand. The next blow was the final one, an axe kick that both fractured Wang's skull and compressed his cervical vertebrae all at the same time. Jian was finally done in Hong Kong.

* * *

Tzu was there to see him off, as was Kwai Shen. "That's an amazing story," said the doctor. "I'm sad that he had to die, though. You talk about him like you're kindred spirits. It - it must have been hard."

Jian nodded. "The challenge was more here," and he touched his forehead, "than here," and he smacked his balled fist into the palm of his other hand.

"Something tells me that is always how it will be for you, Li Fong," said Tzu, for once dressed in slacks and a conservative shirt.

Laughter was Jian's response.

"But tell me before you go, why was Wang found shattered on the pavement below the building, and not in the office where you fought him?"

Jian smiled and finished his bottle of water, then fished out some money and dropped it on the table. "Li Fong defeated his old rival for the final time." He stood, and his smile grew dark. "But the Silver Shadow sent a message to the Triads and the other gangs that remain." He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and turned to leave. He'd put a few steps between himself and the table before Kwai Shen's voice caught him.

"What's the message, then?"

"Behave." Jian kept walking.