Chapter Twenty-Five: Descending the Mountain

“One, two, three—” The two bandits spun around together.

What they saw was nothing but an empty, dilapidated temple. Apart from the two gaping holes that let in light from front and back, there was nothing else inside.

Dogzi let out a sigh of relief. “Brother, maybe we heard wrong! It’s nothing, it’s nothing…”

The other gripped his gun tightly. “Nonsense! How could both of us have misheard? Someone definitely came up here…”

He hadn’t finished speaking when he saw a mutilated, bloody human hand reach out from behind the ruined temple. Whoever that hand belonged to, it seemed on their way up the mountainside they’d grabbed onto something so rough it had stripped the flesh from their hand, exposing gleaming white bone over most of it.

The two bandits, terrified, raised their guns and fired. But with only a single hand stretched out from behind the temple, how good would their aim need to be to hit it from that distance? Out of ten shots, eight struck the temple wall, sparks flying wildly as bullets struck brick. In the flickering light, the owner of that bloody hand hooked their fingers into the ground and dragged themselves up from behind the ruin.

The two bandits, stumbling backward in terror, soon emptied their guns, fumbling frantically to reload. But the person crawling out from behind the temple was already standing before them.

It was only then that I saw the figure’s face clearly—it was unmistakably the Second-in-Command who had just slid down the slope behind the ruined te