The journey from Wang Jianshe's fluorescent-bathed, gravel-strewn kingdom of stress back to the relative sanity of the Shizhu Mountain road felt less like driving and more like a slow, painful migration. Every pothole sent a fresh jolt of agony up Michael's spine, a receipt for the night's supernatural labor. The Wuling Sunshine, its suspension groaning in sympathy, wheezed its way up the winding access road, its missing windshield turning the cabin into a wind tunnel. The crisp, pine-scented air of the mountain, a good five degrees cooler than the city's feverish breath, was initially a relief. Soon, however, it became a biting, relentless chill that seeped through his sweaty hoodie and gnawed at his bones.
By the time he reached the familiar, desolate clearing at the summit—his personal interdimensional bus stop—the cold had sharpened his mind, cutting through the fog of exhaustion. A sudden, stomach-dropping realization followed. The rice. I forgot to buy the bloody rice.He fumbled for his phone, the screen's blue light harsh in the absolute dark. 4:17 AM. The portal's cooldown, that internal chronometer he now carried, indicated a little over two hours to go. Time, yet no time. The weight of the cash in his pocket felt different now—not just a reward, but an unmet obligation.
He sat in the silent, chilly dark, the engine off, listening to the clicks and sighs of the truck cooling down. Plans began to form, a desperate manager's logistics. The ton of bug-ridden rice in Cinder Town's cellar wouldn't last. Not with the digging, the hoping, the sheer number of mouths he'd pledged to feed. The Wuling, for all its indignities, was a champion. It had carried a ton with ease. Why not two? Two tons of grain would be a fortress, a bulwark against the gnawing anxiety in Old Gimpy's eyes. Two tons, he thought, a grim smile touching his lips. Let them envy their lucky stars for having a lord who thinks in bulk.
Decided, he started the engine again. He'd drive back down, find a 24-hour diner, wait for the wholesale market to stir at dawn, and be first in line. The wind, now a constant, icy river pouring through the empty windshield frame, dictated his attire. He fished a disposable mask from the glovebox—the kind worn during flu season or bad pollution days—and fastened it over his nose and mouth. Warm the mouth, warm the body, his grandmother used to say. Right now, he'd take any folk wisdom he could get.
He guided the laden van back onto the descent, the road a twisting ribbon of darkness barely held at bay by his tired headlights. The cold was a sharp, clarifying pain. He drove with a heightened awareness, every sense straining against the fatigue. Which is why he heard it long before he saw it: not the sound of a single vehicle, but a swarm. A rising, angry hornet-nest buzz of high-revving small engines, coming up the mountain towards him.
Bikers. At this hour?A dart of alarm pierced his lethargy. This road was narrow, carved into the hillside, with precious few pull-outs. His mind, still operating on the brutal, survivalist calculus of the Wasteland, screamed threat. He began looking for a wider spot, a gravelly shoulder, anything to get his bulky, overloaded van out of the path of the oncoming insanity.
He never found it.
The swarm rounded the bend below him in a tsunami of light and noise. Not motorbikes, but 'ghost bikes'—souped-up mopeds slung low to the ground, wrapped in garish neon underlighting that painted the road and trees in lurid, pulsating pinks and blues. They were a single, multi-headed creature of noise and light, weaving across the centerline. On the back of each, clinging to leather-jacketed riders, were girls in tiny, impractical clothing, their faces blurred by speed and the night.
Michael stood on the brakes, the van shuddering. He was mostly off the road, but 'mostly' wasn't enough. One bike, ridden by a lanky youth with hair the color of a chemical fire, shot past with inches to spare. The girl on the back, her legs bare and gleaming in the chaotic light, didn't flinch or scream in terror. She threw her head back and shrieked—a sound of pure, exhilarated delight.
The near-miss unspooled something tight and hot in Michael's chest. The fear melted, replaced by a boiling, righteous anger. An accident here would mean police, reports, insurance, questions about his overloaded, uninsured, windshield-less vehicle. It would mean the night's earnings, won with blood and magic, evaporating into a vortex of bureaucratic hell. He leaned out of the driver's window, the cold air smacking his face, and yelled into the retreating roar of engines, the words ripped from a place of pure, spent frustration.
"YOU BRAIN-DEAD GITS! IN A RUSH TO MEET YOUR MAKER?!"
The words, sharp and clear, hung in the sudden relative quiet as the last bike passed. Then, as if on a single, malicious command, the swarm of lights ahead slowed. Brake lights flared, blood-red eyes in the dark. They began to turn. Not one or two. All of them. A slow, deliberate pirouette of neon and chrome, until a dozen pairs of headlights were pointed back up the hill, pinning Michael and his pathetic van in their glare.
Oh, hell.
They rolled back up, a pack of sleek, buzzing predators surrounding a wounded, boxy ruminant. The lead rider, the one with the fire-hair, killed his engine. The others followed suit, the sudden silence louder than the noise had been. In the stillness, Michael could hear their laughter, the clink of metal, the soft, excited whispers of the girls.
WHACK!
The blow came from his blind side, a short, brutal swing of a baseball bat that smashed the passenger-side mirror into a shower of plastic and glass. The van rocked. It was the starter's pistol. A storm of violence descended upon the Wuling. Chains whipped against its flanks. Metal pipes dented its doors. Boots kicked its tires. The van became a steel drum in a mad symphony, a cacophony of crashes and bangs and the whooping, drunken cries of the pack. They weren't trying to kill him; they were dismantling his dignity, piece by piece.
After a minute that felt like an hour, a hand gesture from the fire-haired leader, the one they'd called 'Tiger,' stopped the violence. The sudden quiet was filled with heavy breathing and the hot, sour smell of cheap alcohol and adrenaline.
"Out." The command was flat, absolute.
Michael took a slow breath. The fear was gone, burned away by a colder, more familiar emotion—the calculating survival instinct of Cinder Town. He reached into the glovebox, his fingers finding the soft, ancient leather of the scroll case he'd taken from Andrew's hoard. His thumb found the crackling edge of a Bull's Strengthscroll. A smaller one, a Cat's Grace, was nestled behind it. He palmed the Grace, feeling the strange, dormant buzz of the vellum against his skin. He plucked a cigarette from the pack on the dash, tucked it behind his ear with a gesture that felt absurdly casual, and opened the door.
He stepped out into the circle of light, a slight figure in a grimy hoodie, silhouetted by his own battered truck. He looked at Tiger, then slowly around the ring of sneering, excited faces.
"What's the matter?" Michael asked, his voice deceptively light, almost conversational. "Numbers make you brave? How about a proper square-go? One on one. Or are you lot only tough when it's twenty to one?"
The laughter that erupted was raw and unhinged. Tiger grinned, a flash of teeth in the garish light. "A 'square-go'? Sure, mate. You've got two choices. You fight all of us. Or…" he spread his arms, encompassing his pack, "…we all fight you. Your pick."
As they laughed, Michael tilted his head back. The moon, a shard of bone, was scudding behind fast-moving clouds. The wind moaned through the pines. It was, as the old cliché went, a dark and stormy night. A perfect night for bad decisions and worse magic.
"I offered my hand to the moon," he murmured, the words almost lost to the wind, a line from some half-remembered poem. "But the moon shines on the gutter."
Then, moving with a speed that belied his weary frame, he raised his right hand as if to push his hair back. Behind his head, out of their sight, his left hand, tucked into his pocket, found the edge of the Cat's Gracescroll. He didn't know the invocation. He simply willedit, pouring his fear, his anger, his desperate need into the parchment, and tore it cleanly in two.
There was no explosion of light. No thunderclap. Just a sudden, profound silence in his own mind, as if a switch had been thrown. The world didn't slow down; he sped up. The aches in his body didn't vanish, but they became irrelevant data, background noise. His senses sharpened to a painful degree—he could see the pore on Tiger's nose, hear the quickening heartbeat of the girl behind him, smell the specific brand of oil on the chain in a thug's hand.
When the first one lunged, a meaty boy with a studded belt, Michael wasn't there. He'd already sidestepped, his own movement a blur of efficient motion. A tap behind the knee, a twist of the wrist, and the boy was on the ground, howling, his own chain tangled around his legs. The second came from the left; Michael ducked under a wild swing, came up inside the boy's guard, and drove an elbow into a soft diaphragm. The air left the attacker in a surprised oof.
It wasn't fighting. It was editing. A removal of obstacles. He moved through them like a ghost, a poltergeist of precise, painful physics. A kick to a knee here, a pressure-point jab there, a disarming twist that sent a pipe clattering onto the asphalt. He used their momentum, their weight, their drunken overconfidence against them. He was among them, then behind them, never where they swung. The Gracescroll didn't make him stronger; it made him elsewhere. It turned the crowded, violent circle into a roomy dancefloor where only he knew the steps.
In under three minutes, it was over. The clearing was a landscape of groaning, confused bodies. The girls stood frozen, their screams of excitement now silent, hands over their mouths. Tiger, the last one standing, stared at Michael, his face a mask of stunned incomprehension. There was no blood, no broken bones—just humiliation and a galaxy of sharp, teaching pains.
Michael walked slowly back to his driver's door. He paused, looked at the ruined mirror, the fresh dents in his van's flank. He looked at Tiger, and for a second, the contractor's laborer was gone, replaced by the Lord of Cinder Town, the man who bargained with Ogres.
"Remember this night, 'Tiger,'" Michael said, his voice quiet but carrying in the sudden, wind-swept silence. "When you're older. When you have a car that costs more than this mountain. When you see a van like this, on a road like this… you'll think of me. And you'll move over."
He got in, started the engine—a prosaic, grinding sound that shattered the spell. He didn't look back as he drove away, leaving the neon-lit wreckage of their night behind. The magic was fading from his limbs, leaving only a deep, trembling fatigue and the absolute certainty that some lessons, taught on nights of high wind and dark skies, are learned for a lifetime. For years after, successful businessmen in Yangcheng would be noted for their curiously deferential driving around delivery vans, a quirk universally attributed to impeccable manners. None of them could have explained the cold knot of memory that tightened in their guts at the sight of a battered Wuling Sunshine, or why, on instinct, they always, always gave it room.