Bandits had no respect for people’s schedules. I checked the location of the Mountain Cutter for the tenth time since stripping down and letting the warm spring waters soak over me. Of course I was nude. If I’d left my robe on, my master would have rolled over in his grave. The last thing I needed was his spirit returning from the otherworld to haunt me with his ugly true face.

  My amulet hung on my chest over the water. It was staying on. I couldn’t remove it if I wanted to and I preferred to keep the protection it offered close at hand. Odgen, my master, wouldn’t have complained about the necklace. He understood why I couldn’t remove it.

  Bad memories swirled up with the warmth of the spring water. If those bandits didn’t get here soon, I was going to have to go looking for them before the past caught up with me. Or worse, before I slipped off to sleep.

  Shaking my head out and sitting up straight, I heard the wheels of a cart squealing in the distance and I sighed with relief. No matter how hot the water became, it wouldn’t have bothered me. But waiting made me restless and edgy.

  With my head turned away from the road, I tuned out the soft burbling of the waters and focused. My master had called this state Tsuki no Kokoro, the Mind of the Moon. I rose above the waters, and though the approaching dusk light drowned out the moon’s radiance, I could feel it in the back of my mind.

  Footsteps neared the water. Strange, only two pairs of feet approached me from behind. And one of the people sneaking up on me had a limp. None of the bandits had a limp, at least not according to the villagers who’d paid me twenty-five pieces of gold for this job. Caution had earned me a longer life than most humans could comprehend, so I still laid my hand on the hilt of the Mountain Cutter and waited.

  Soft voices floated over the edge of the spring and caressed my ears with an unfamiliar ring. Were they flirting with each other? There was no way these were the bandits I sought. I turned my head over my shoulder and caught sight of an old man with a head of mossy sparse hair leaning into an equally old woman who’s hair had turned the shade of winter snows.

  She giggled at something the old man said and he rubbed the back of her hand. A pang struck through my chest as I watched them. My father had patted the back of my mother’s claws the same way, and she’d stared back at him with the same pure expression of adoration.

  Before I ruined it all.

  My self-loathing stopped before a rustle in the brush around the old couple and I cursed myself inwardly for my own distraction. I’d posted up in this spring for the express purpose of stopping the bandits who waylaid travelers here.

  And a group of them had managed to conceal themselves in the bushes without me noticing. If not for the old couple, I might have missed the bandits until they were right on top of me. Only magic could’ve hidden those bandits like that. And the villagers had neglected to warn me the bandits had a magician in their employ.

  They owed me another fifty gold for the omission.

  Odgen would have been dismayed at my greed. But he was dead and armies did not feed themselves and no amount of forage would fill the endless pit in the center of my belly.

  I grabbed the Mountain Cutter in hand and turned toward the two old humans. They’d distracted me, it was true. But they’d also given me the chance to surprise the bandits rather than the other way around. While they couldn’t have known the role they played, I intended to save them before the bandits struck. Their lives would have to satisfy Odgen’s spirit, wherever it might have found its rest.

  Rising from the water in the nude, the heat from the spring hid the pink cast to my skin. My blade lay along the line of my flank, hidden in the steam and approaching darkness behind me. I cut an imposing figure regardless, I could tell from the way the two people stopped as they heard the droplets of water splash against the stone.

  The man shoved the woman behind him and faced me with his hands out as if he might challenge me to a boxing match. He hadn’t seen my blade and neither had the bandits, who chose to make their appearance at the same time.

  “It’s our lucky day boys!” A man with a straggly, wild beard stood up from the nearest bush. Until he’d spoken, the bush had not made a sound. He broke the spell silencing him when he spoke. It was usually how such magics worked. “We got us a pair of wrinkled prunes and a fine little duckling for dinner!”

  The man drew a blade from his side, curved and rune etched as half a dozen other figures emerged from the shrubs.

  “What is happening here?” The man turned away from me. He made the correct initial assessment about how dangerous I was, at least based on appearances. In his place I would have ignored a soaking wet woman standing naked on the edge of a pool too. The man cast his gaze back and forth among the ragged men as they closed on him and his… wife? Almost certainly his wife. “I have money, I will pay you if you leave me alone!”

  Straggly-beard, the presumed leader of the group, chuckled and said, “oh, we’ll take your cart too…”

  He’d closed with the old man and finally laid a hand on him. I wasn’t waiting for the bandits to make the first move, no I was waiting for them to divert enough of their attention away from me I could act without concern I might have to clean their blood off of me before I killed them all.

  The old man yelped when Straggly-beard grabbed him and I shifted forward, shuffling my feet over the loose leaves carpeting the area around the spring. Two of the bandit’s companions turned to stare at me, alerted by the unavoidable sounds of my movement.

  But the leader ignored the naked woman advancing on him until I’d arced the Mountain Cutter overhead and severed his hand from his arm. I kicked him and sent a mental command to my amulet, which began the process of unfolding around me, a chartreuse glow spreading as I slid away from Straggly-beard, who hadn’t even started screaming yet.

  Blood sprayed over the old couple and high into the air with a soft whistling breath as I closed with the bandit directly behind his fallen leader. This man had a long spear over his shoulder, poorly maintained and relaxed to the point he hadn’t even brought the spear down to defend himself before I lopped the haft in two an instant before I separated the man’s head from his neck.

  Unlike his boss, the man didn’t move from the the incredible speed of my attack. Like a reed split by a lightning fast cut, the man remained upright, balancing on his out of position spear and utterly dead.

  A shout came from behind me, which I ignored as I closed with the spellcaster. The Magus would not be able to hurt me, but he could vanish into the forest or use one of his deplorable magics to hurt the old couple behind me.

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  The sword in the Magus’s hand quivered as he spat the words of a spell as quickly as his fear allowed. Too slow for the Mountain Cutter or for the circle gait Odgen had taught me. I leapt over bushes and an exposed root and brought the Mountain Cutter down through the man’s shoulder and out the side of his body.

  Two bandits down and the Magus split in twain, I spun through the fourth kata and turned to find an archer drawing a bead on me while his two companions wrestled with the old man and his wife.

  An arrow arced toward me, wobbling in the air. Its slow passage posed no threat to me or the green, silver, and black armor which now covered me from scalp to sole. Nonetheless, Odgen had taught me the value of intimidation so I cut the arrow out of the air with the Mountain Cutter and advanced toward the old man and his wife.

  “Oh shit, it’s the Jade Serpent!” The archer shouted and bolted toward his companions seeking shelter behind the two old folks the bandits had taken hostage.

  Great, they know me. More and more bandits had heard of me by now. And I found the notoriety a burden to my business, even if it added to my terror factor.

  Worse yet, as the archer closed with his two companions, the one on the left dragged his knife across the old man’s throat and grabbed the old woman. “Stop where you are or we’ll kill her too!”

  I sprinted toward them. Though I wanted neither the old man nor his wife’s blood on my conscience, the bandits had no such inhibitions. And if they killed the old woman they would have no more bargaining chips. The question was, did the bandits know that?

  The archer bolted rather than take the gamble. I hurled the Mountain Cutter overhand at him as he fled and tracked the blade over its course into his back. He dropped impaled on my blade as I closed with the final two bandits.

  “Stop stop!” The man with the bloody knife in hand pressed it against the old woman’s neck. Spittle flew from his lips as he tried to curb the inevitable tide of my advance.

  With my right arm, I shoved the woman back into the bandit and, as expected, a gap opened between the knife’s edge and her throat. With my armor-covered left hand I grabbed the bandit’s palm and twisted it. The knife fell and bones cracked under my grip.

  He squealed and I pushed the old woman on top of the man who bled out even now. I caught the knife before it dropped to the same level as my knee and drove it tip first into the second bandit cowering behind the old woman. The hit cracked as it hit the bandit’s eye socket and he dropped faster than the headless corpse behind me.

  The bandit burbled as he tried to break the grip on his hand. Like a wild beast caught in a trap, he wrenched his wrist out of socket and for a moment I contemplated letting him tear himself apart under my grip. But the old man on the ground did not have time to spare while I watched his bandit struggle. I crushed his fingers in my fist and jerked the bandit toward me. With a twist, I reversed his mangled fist and shoved it into his own throat. He struck his shattered hand with a crunch. Blood dribbled from his mouth as I shoved him away from the couple.

  The old woman screamed and huddled over the man. Until I’d dropped the final bandit, I hadn’t heard her cries with my conscious mind. Shaking myself out of my battle trance, I turned to find her fumbling over the man’s throat as he lifted his hands to her face. Blood streaked their clothing and a great mass of blood covered the man as if a warm spring had erupted form his neck.

  But, critically, the blood did not spurt in time with the man’s heart. When I grabbed the woman to move her away from her partner, she struck me about the head and shoulders. One of her blows smarted as it glanced off of my brow. But I ignored her struggles and set her forcibly off to the side, out of my way.

  The man’s mouth opened and shut in the throes of death. It was a face I’d grown all too familiar with. Masks of death each had a name, I called this one Fish Plucked from a Hook. He struggled and pulled himself out from under the pressure of my fingers.

  “Stop struggling, I am trying to save you.” The man eyes widened and I saw his spirit cross the river of death to the cave in shadow. One moment he yearned for life, the next my words were the last he would hear.

  I rocked back on my heels and returned to the present. The old woman struck me and shouted at me so I stood and moved away from her and her dead husband. In the distance a faint rasp of weight against the carpet of leaves told me two of the bandits yet lived. Neither the headless man, the bisected man, nor the man who’s arm had pierced his own throat yet lived.

  But the leader slinked away with the stump of his arm pumping his lifeblood out and the archer strained against the Mountain Cutter where its weight pinned him to the earth. I stood and turned from the scene of mourning behind in time to hear the wife’s cries change in timbre.

  Was she laughing now?

  I shut the two living bandits out of my thoughts and directed the entirety of my focus back to the woman. Blood streaked eyes turned up at me, weeping tears which mingled with the blood of her husband. Her voice came ragged, maddened in its urgency.

  “One down, two to go huntress.” She grabbed my armor and found a gap in the scales of my spirit as she pulled herself up to me. “I can promise you wealth or land. Name your price.”

  Now my face wore the mask of the hooked fish. No words left my lips as I looked down at the wild-eyed woman. And she confessed her crime without the need for me to ask her.

  “I lured the fool here, you see? I brought him to this spring with promises of a dalliance in the forest!” She searched the clearing between the road and the water. “He’d heard the rumors of bandits nearby, but he followed the urges of a nether master.” She pawed at her groin as she spoke, as if proud of her blasphemy. “And the bandits killed him, but now you must come back with me to kill his brother or I will have to marry an even younger, more odious fool!”

  At last my reason caught up with me. I pushed the woman away with disgust and growled at her. But before I could warn her to leave me be, she scrambled back on all fours. “Come back with me or I will tell them the Jade Serpent murdered my husband! I will tell them you did this.”

  I scoffed at her, though I appreciated the reminder that I was not the most depraved beast within a hundred miles. She didn’t dare stop me as I strode with purpose toward the fallen archer. The woman shrieked at me from behind as she began ripping through the bushes where her husband fell. At the same time, I pulled the Mountain Cutter and decapitated the archer with a single swift blow. The silence with which he accepted his end juxtaposed itself over the crunching of an avaricious old woman who cut away the pockets of her husband and the bandits who’d killed him.

  When she reached the one armed bandit, the man rose up against her and grabbed the front of her robe. She screamed at me to help her as she battered uselessly against him. The knife she’d taken from the bandit, the very same which killed her husband, darted out and ended in the other bandit’s chest.

  I stopped in the process of wiping down my master’s sword. For a moment the woman stood as still as an oak in a sheltered valley, one hand on the handle of a dagger she’d shoved into the lead bandit’s chest. Then she screamed with a vulgar ferocity and jabbed him over and over, tiny punctures sufficient to kill the man in time.

  But not swift enough.

  As a last act of desperation, the bandit struck out with the stump of his arm and buried the jagged bone in the woman’s neck. Like the bandit who’d almost taken her life, the woman fell impaled by a sharpened bone.

  The Mountain Cutter fit into its place on my back once I cleaned it and approached the sight of the woman and bandit leader’s end. She lay gasping in a mirror image to her husband next to the man who’d killed her with his last act of will.

  When the old woman went still, I listened for the sound of breath and found the bandit still somehow clinging to life.

  I crouched down next to him and listened to him wheeze through a clenched jaw, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. When I neared him, he tensed and tried to raise his stump. I pressed my hand to his arm and shook my head. “You’ve killed your last, brigand.”

  “P…please.” He implored me with the expression of a man who faced the gates of hell and knew what lay beyond. “Please, I have a family.”

  I nodded at him and lifted the dagger which had ended one innocent old man’s life. “Don’t we all.” Without waiting for his reply I drove the dagger into his neck and stood.

  The man shook his last before my knees had uncurled. Around me lay a field of death of my own making.

  “It must be spring.”