Tao looked up, his expression belligerent, his fists curled around the arms of the chair. “I still think that we should go and get them. What if something happens to Qian on the way back? What if they’re ambushed and need help?” 

Yixing stopped in midstroke, his muscles tense as he held the heavy, gold-green guandao aloft and in place. “I understand that you’re worried about Qian, but I’ve already told you, Shifu has given explicit orders and we are not to leave the mountain until Qian returns. If anything happens to Qian, she will have to fend for herself.” 

Tao scowled, and his hand whipped up, lightning fast. Yixing whirled around, the guandao a flash of metal as he swung it around; a loud clang rang out, followed by a dull thud, as the dart Tao had thrown at Yixing was embedded in the opposite wall. 

“I don’t understand how you can be so nonchalant about this. What if she doesn’t come back? What if the Demon Sect takes her? You and I both know that that stupid scholar is nothing more than a deadweight and he’s just going to drag her own, assuming she even got to him in time and he hasn’t been killed by the Demon Sect. Are we really going to let her make her way back to the mountain herself, under such dangerous circumstances?” Tao demanded furiously. 

“We have our orders. Are you going to just disobey them? If so, you’re free to go - just understand that I’ll be sure to tell Shifu about it.” Yixing’s voice was chillingly patient, and he did not even look at Tao. 

Tao hesitated, his eyes darting left and right for a moment. 

“If he won’t go, I will.” Amber retorted from the doorway as she leaned against the door, her arms folded and her expression rebellious. “I’m not leaving Qian to drag both herself and that useless scholar back all on her own. Even you might not be able to do it, Xing.” 

A flicker of annoyance flashed across Yixing’s face, sudden and startling. “And what makes you think you’ll be of any help to Qian? Consider that the two of them are trying to make it back safely without any interference from the Demon Sect: in that case, the easiest way to do that would be to avoid being detected, and the smaller the group, the easier it is to keep moving and avoid detection. Besides, you’re both weaker than Qian in martial arts, so what makes you think you’ll be of much help to her?” 

That gave Tao and Amber pause, and their eyes met silently, now Amber’s face uncertain as well. With a final angry scowl, Amber whirled around and exited the room. Tao looked at Yixing, but his shoulders were slumped instead of set in defiance. “That sounded more like the kind of coldly logical thing that Yifan would say, not you, Xing.” 

The heavy metallic end of the guandao thudded against the wooden floor. “Leave, Tao. I need to practice, and you’re distracting me.” 

Silently, Tao turned and left the room, closing the wooden doors close quietly behind him. 

And Yixing stood, motionless, silent, dressed in dim darkness, as he thought. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“That’s enough - we’ll rest here for tonight.” Qian jerked on her reins as she indicated the inn some distance ahead. “We’ll start again early tomorrow morning.” She threw herself off the horse with nimble, practiced ease, then turned to Zhou Mi expectantly. 

Zhou Mi remained seated on the horse, his posture stiff and awkward - even after five days of continuous riding, he still could not quite figure out how to get on and off a horse by himself. 

Qian rolled her eyes, exasperated, but she stuck a hand out, holding onto Zhou Mi’s arm and helping him down the horse as she asked the question that she had been wondering at for the past five days. “How can you not know how to ride a horse? Don’t you learn anything in your lessons?” 

Zhou Mi looked slightly embarrassed as he defended himself. “I’m a scholar! And besides, I did ask for lessons in horseriding and swordfighting, just that my father...he was not to keen on the idea. So I never got a chance to learn.” 

Zhou Mi half-expected Qian to make some snarky remark about him being an imbecile when it came to the physical aspects of life, but to his surprise, she merely held onto the reins of the horse, leading it towards the inn. “Come on, we’ve been riding for hours and I want a good night’s rest before we set off tomorrow.” 

Zhou Mi took a step forward, then winced in pain, grimacing, as his muscles tense up. He’d heard stories from his other friends, of course, about how they had ached all over after their first few lessons of learning how to ride, but he never expected it to be this painful!

“What are you doing?” Qian’s expression was impatient as she paused, waiting for him. “Come on, hurry up!” 

Zhou Mi swallowed; he forced himself to put on a completely normal face, then hurriedly made his way to Qian’s side, trying hard not to wince, following her as she let a waiter lead her horse to the stables before entering the inn. The waiter murmured a soft, barely audible welcome, something that Zhou Mi thought a little strange - he’d thought that all the waiters in inns like this were loud-mouthed people calling for more business at their inn. But his exhaustion overshadowed this oddity, and he let the matter slip from his mind. 

Zhou Mi kept his head down as he sat down opposite Qian; even as Qian called for the waiter and placed orders for dinner, he kept his head low, trying to focus on blocking out the ache that he seemed to be feeling in every pore of his body. 

“You’ll get used to it. The ache is only going to get worse, so you had better get used to it.” Qian spoke without looking at him. Zhou Mi looked over at her, as she picked up a peanut with her chopsticks and tossed it into . 

“When you say worse, how much worse do you mean?” Zhou Mi asked, more than a little worriedly. 

Qian shrugged carelessly. “I wouldn’t know - I don’t know how high your tolerance for pain is. Although, judging by your current reaction, I’d guess it’s not very high at all.” She eyed him, but it was more speculative than anything, with only a hint of the contempt that Zhou Mi had become used to seeing from the Shushan Sect warriors. In the background, the chatter from the other patrons of the inn was soft, almost non-existent. 

“I’m not weak. At least, not as weak as you seem to think.” Zhou Mi interjected quietly, but not timidly. 

“Actions speak louder than words. In fact, since you’re so insistent that you’re not weak, you can prove it right now.”

Zhou Mi’s head shot up. “Right now - wait, what?”

Qian looked up, her voice ringing out throughout the entire inn. “That an inn so bustling with people would be so unusually quiet - either I’m growing deaf, or this is an ambush. Besides, did you people really think I would not notice the weapons hidden under your tables?”

Zhou Mi did a double-take; as he stared at the other occupants of the inn, he suddenly noticed that which he had missed the last time, although Qian had not: the tell-tale bulges of black under their tables, which no doubt was what Qian had been taken to be their weapons. 

Silence. 

Zhou Mi’s breath drew in deeply, and his eyes darted towards Qian, panicked, but she just stared straight ahead, perfectly cool. Zhou Mi felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and he tensed, ready to run or fight, whichever came first. 

And then the doors to a room on the second level of the inn were thrown open. 

They were not such much thrown open, as they were ripped right off their hinges, and then tossed aside like ragdolls, hitting the floor with a heavy, uniform crash. 

A girl stood at the doors, with straight, lustrous black hair that reached down to her waist. Her eyes were a brown so dark they were nearly black, her ruby red lips curved in a cruel, anticipating smile. In one hand, she held a whip made of leather, with a sharpened blade at the end of the whip and small metallic spikes that ran along the body of the whip, gleaming in the dim light. 

Qian growled, rising slowly from her seat. “Krystal.” 

As one, the other patrons of the inn rose, all facing Zhou Mi and Qian, their faces blank and detached. 

“Well, well, look what the dog dragged in.” The girl Qian had called Krystal looked amused as she leaned over the railing, holding the whip carelessly as it curled over her right arm. 

Qian’s hand was already on her short sword, her expression wary. Zhou Mi quickly reached for his dagger as well - he half-expected Krystal to stop him, but she paid him no mind, her gaze entirely focused on Qian. “You’ve caused a lot of trouble for us, you know.” 

Qian’s brows rose, and her voice was mockingly sarcastic. “Oh, is that so? Well, I assure you, if any trouble was caused, it was completely intentional.” 

The whip cracked; Zhou Mi flinched, jerking back instinctively, only to realize that Krystal had wrapped the whip around the leg of a chair, using it to pull the chair towards her. She sat down on the chair, looking down at them imperiously, the wrist that held the whip rotating lazily. “Oh yes, you little . We could have had that foolish imbecile standing next to you dead five days ago, but no, you just had to play the hero and save him. And you had to nearly kill Kyuhyun too, didn’t you? He almost didn’t make it, you know.” 

“And I care about that worm because?” Qian asked, her voice cold. “You know the only two words I have to say to that: good riddance.” 

“In that case, you should know why I’m here.” Krystal’s smirk was cold, and her grip on the whip tightened slowly. 

In a flash, Qian drew her sword, leaping back from the table and falling into a defensive position, sword raised warily. Zhou Mi’s hand had barely gotten a tight grip on his dagger when he felt a sudden, ripping agony in his wrist, a warm liquid spurting out over his fingers. With a gasp of pain, he released the dagger, which fell with a loud clang, and he slowly backed away from Krystal, doubled over in pain, his hand clutched to his side. 

Qian barely reacted to Krystal’s attack; aside from a slight tightening of her lips, it seemed as if she had hardly noticed it at all. Zhou Mi grimaced in pain, trying hard not to look down at his hand; even without seeing it, he could feel the loose flap of skin that Krystal’s whip had torn out, and he was already having difficulty trying to hold his stomach in. 

Krystal gave a light, tinkling laugh. In a movement more graceful than anything Zhou Mi had accomplished in his entire life, she leapt over the railing, landing on the balls of her feet without so much as stumbling. Her eyes flashed. “This is getting boring. Let’s just finish this so I can get back and have my bath, shall we?” 

Her words were like a signal to the other lackeys; slowly, inexorably and gradually gaining speed they headed for Zhou Mi, while Krystal engaged Qian. 

Zhou Mi groaned; with his uninjured hand he swept the knife up, but the action hurt his right hand so much that he nearly dropped the dagger again. He lifted it warningly. “Don’t come any closer, I’m warning you!”

He might as well not have spoken; several of the men smirked at his words, and some even laughed openly, snidely. 

They attacked. 

Zhou Mi would have liked to say that he was a swirling storm of motion, avoiding all their blows and delivering in some well-placed blows himself, but that was as far from the truth as could be. Instead, he tripped over his own well-placed foot, landed flat on his face, but by some of luck his outstretched arm, which held the dagger, managed to score one of the men in the leg. 

The man howled in pain, leaping back from Zhou Mi, the blood dripping from his pierced leg while the other men stared at him in disbelief. Zhou Mi took the moment to scramble back onto his feet, ignoring the searing agony in his right hand. He could scarcely believe how lucky he was, and now the men were slightly more wary, circling him instead. 

Zhou Mi took this chance to glance over at Qian and see how she was doing; both she and Krystal were moving like flashes of lightning, their weapons moving so fast that all he could hear was the slashing and swooshing of the sword and the whip. Qian’s eyes were focused on her opponent; she ducked a lash and kicked out with her right leg, catching Krystal neatly in the thigh. Krystal twisted and nearly fell, but her whip shot out again, swinging at Qian and preventing her from cutting at Krystal. 

“You should keep your eyes on your opponent instead of your woman, boy.” The voice came from Zhou Mi’s left, so close to his ear that he instinctively whirled around, lashing out with his knife - but his attack came too late, too slow. 

A burly, large hand grabbed his wrist, stopping his blow in midstrike, so strong that it felt as if the man could just twist his wrist off if he wanted it. Before Zhou Mi could say a word, he was wrenched around and thrown into a table. He slammed into the table with a resounding crash and rolled several times, gritting his teeth in pain as his wounded hand hit the floor again and again. He had barely gotten his hands underneath him to lift himself up when someone else did the work for him. Strong, rough hands grasped him by the collar and lifted him up as if it took no effort at all. 

Zhou Mi coughed weakly, opening his eyes to get a good look at his assailant. The man was tall, with black hair spiked carefully into sharp tips and model-like good looks. His ears were abnormally large, as was his smile, a predatory, feral grin.

Zhou Mi’s fist clenched around his dagger; he jerked his hand up to stab the man in the stomach, but before he could, the man’s leg came up between them and kicked him brutally in the chest, his hands letting go at the same time so Zhou Mi literally flew backwards, hitting the wall with a loud thump. 

The other men were just standing aside, grinning and nudging each other as they watched Zhou Mi get his kicked. If this had been any time, Zhou Mi would have been mortally humiliated, even angry, to be treated as such a joke. As it was, he didn’t even have the strength to feel embarrassed. 

The man stopped in front of him and stomped on Zhou Mi’s left wrist; Zhou Mi gasped in pain, his fingers convulsing as he released the dagger that he’d been gripping onto. The man kicked the dagger away, then grasped him by the hair, tugging him up brutally. “Any last words before I bash your face in?” 

It took a moment for Zhou Mi’s eyes to focus, and he stared straight at the man, blinking the blood out of his eyes. “Yes.” 

The man’s eyebrows rose, and he whistled. “Well, not such a gutless, whining weakling, after all, are you?” 

“Go to hell.” 

And Zhou Mi kicked him in the crotch. 

The man cried out -no, he yowled in pain, releasing Zhou Mi instinctively as he tottered back, his hands automatically flying to his jewels. Zhou Mi hit the ground with a painful crash, but even the pain couldn’t keep the grin off his face.

The other men surged forward, the laughter suddenly gone from their faces, but before they could, there was a sudden, harsh bark of laughter from the entrance of the inn. “Well, isn’t this a sight.”

Qian and Krystal froze, recognizing the voice immediately. Zhou Mi lifted his head weakly, and the grin on his face spread even wider. 

Wu Yifan stood at the door, his huge guandao swung over his shoulder, the smirk on his face so arrogant there could only be one conclusion to this mess. 

He was going to crush them. 

---------------------------------------------------------

Hey guys, I'm back! Wow, it's really been a while, hasn't it? Anyway, I was in China for a couple of weeks for my school programme, and while I was there I got a whole boatload of ideas for new stories; I've been busy planning those stories out, which is why I haven't updated at all lately, but here's the next chapter of Absolute Power, and I hope you enjoyed it!

I decided to move the timeskip to the next few chapters instead because i think it would be way too easy if Zhou Mi and Qian managed to get away from Demon Sect so easily. Oh, and can anyone guess who the "tall guy" with the "abnormally large ears" is? The ears should be a dead giveaway, right?

Anyway, Zhou Mi once again proves that he's not as useless as everyone seems to think - although he may be weaker than the other trained killers, but he's smart and bright enough to think of unexpected ways to lash back at the opponent. And Kris is back! That's why he hasn't been around the past couple of chapters, because he was sent on this journey to find and help Qian and Zhou Mi. Kris is actually a really strong fighter - in the Shushan Five he's second only to Yixing and leagues ahead of Tao and Amber, which is why Yixing trusted him with this task. That's also why Yixing appeared so cold at the start - because he had already sent Kris to help them, so he didn't want Tao and Amber rushing there too. 

That's it for now, I'll try to update within the next week or so, but I'm working on my other stories too so please be patient. And remember, comment and subscribe!