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Jun’s sleeves were quite wide and roomy, as was the style at the time. Or any time in this world, as far as Jun could tell. His noble robes and tunics differed in many ways from that of a common person, but not in this. That meant that his sleeve rolled back to his elbow as he propped his spear up on his shoulder and took stock of the situation.

There were twelve bandits. Well, with his traitor guard included, it was actually sixteen but there had been, in the past, tales and examples of bandit bands big enough to be honest-to-goodness armies. Living off the land, or being quietly and surreptitiously helped by remote villages and towns, they were usually inordinately knowledgable of the areas they plied their trade in. That meant they usually had the sort of clothing and equipment that made “working” there comfortable, no doubt “stolen” from the people who legitimately lived there.

Jun’s caravan was far enough away from the city that it was no longer visible, but the trees here were sparse with few mounds and bushes to make an ambush possible. All while the bandits dressed as though they were more comfortable in a city ghetto than the outdoors they were in. It was all hemp tunics in various states of maintenance: Some had conspicuous holes on their sleeves or near their hems, some had surprisingly good tailoring patchwork, a few were even whole. But none of them were clean.

There were common tools in all of their hands, from axes to knives. And those that evidently couldn’t afford those had improvised weapons instead, like wooden clubs. One or two even had hard leather whips. Actually, now that he was looking at them, not even all of them had any footwear at all; some walked with dirt up to their ankles and weren’t particularly uncomfortable while doing so. Not that Jun had much room to talk, he had not been too dissimilar not too long ago, or hopefully never, but the point still stood.

Compared to his well-fed, well-armed and well-trained men? It shouldn’t have mattered. But apparently being 9 against 16 were odds too great for the mighty Yan family Guard.

God, his guards sucked.

“What is the meaning of this?” Guard Captain Lou asked as he twirled his sword. The question was directed as much to Guardsmen among them as it was to the bandits.

“Drop your blade, fool,” one of the traitor guards sneered, “And we might let you leave alive. The chivalric men here would rather kill you, but as a special favor to you, I’ve convinced them that just castrating you would be fine; it’s not like you use your sacks for anything anyway.”

“As to the rest of you?” the man looked at the rest of Jun’s guard, “We’ve all been under the Yan yoke for far too long. Brothers, it is time to get what’s ours!”

“You DARE?” Jun’s guard captain shouted as he strode forward, grabbing a spear, “Unloyal dog, tear your tongue out and offer your fingers to this daddy and, perhaps, I might see the merit in granting you a quick death!”

“Is that before or after you’ve serviced every single Yan dick around?” the other man smirked.

A smirk that disappeared as a spear suddenly materialized in his chest, the blade protruding deeply into his rib cage. The traitor collapsed to his knees as Lou Tang grimly watched the work of his thrown spear.

Well, it was 15 against 9 now.

Jun was about to actually start clapping.

“I happen to have ample mistresses-,” for whatever insane reason, Captain Lou saw the need to defend himself from the accusations of the now-dead man.

“-and the only Yan dick I’ve even seen is the Young Master’s!”

Why did he have to-

“Very good, Guard Captain,” Jun said between clenched teeth and the man actually turned around and acknowledged his veiled displeasure as if it were acknowledgment. He even did it with a bow. Sadly, this made him turn his back on the bandits.

Sadly, they didn’t miss this fact either.

“Urgh,” Guard Captain Lou suddenly went still as his eyes widened, before slowly falling forward.

An axe protruding from his spine.

“FUCK!” one of Jun’s still loyal guards jumped away from the form of Lou Tang’s body, and even Jun had to stare hard and long at the absolutely clueless dumbass.

He didn’t deserve this.

“You still want to convince them? Be quick,” a muscled fat man spat at the traitor guards, the axe having come from his hands. He still had a few more looped around the sash going around his wide waist and wasted no time in filling his free hand with another.

“R-right,” one of the 3 surviving traitors noted, “Brothers, this is our chance to finally break away from the hateful Yan and make our destiny!”

“With that absolute moron dead,” he pointed at Lou’s body, “We have nothing to fear! Our ‘Young Master’ only fucks his women all day and night while WE do all the work. Our ‘Young Master’ waves about all of his silver coins while we have to live with copper. Does that sound fair to any of you?”

“But in his arrogance, he’s had us travel with a treasure’s worth of coin.” the man went on, “Brothers, there is enough there for ALL of us!”

“Oh, and, the two beauties he’s brought with him?” the man asked as Jun examined the weight of the Talismans in his hands, “Kill him and we can all get a turn!”

His men started to flag as they nervously looked around them. The traitor’s arguments, thought over as they were, were only affecting them as much as the number of men with them. Fear of what the Yan family would do to them in the future fought with fear of what they would suffer now.

Funny thing about money though? No one liked to share. If the bandits, if his traitors, believed that the number difference mattered as much as his still loyal guards were slowly being convinced of, well, there would not have been any point in negotiating at all. Especially with his Guard Captain dead.

“This Young Master has a rebuttal,” Jun simply said.

At that, the traitor went from hopeful to self-assured as he straightened up and actually tried to look his nose down at Jun, “Oh, I’ve been wanting to say this for so long, but why don’t you shut the fuck uuuuARGH!”

The man screamed mid-insult, grasping his face as a bolt of Fire slammed on it.

Chi was a very peculiar thing. Initially interesting to Jun at the beginning of his second life, back when everything was new and the world was mysterious and fantastic, he wondered about the things he saw and experienced. He wondered how Chi would feel like, and whether or not it would be possible to learn what was effectively eastern magic.

He would eventually come to know these answers, of course, and both were kind of disappointing. Because the answer to the second question was “maybe, and the attempt comes at great cost” while the first was “nothing at all.”

How did having blood feel like? How did Jun describe the presence of his hearing? He had four limbs, how would he describe that experience? Like “normal” was the answer or, perhaps, like “nothing in particular”. The same was, apparently, true of Chi.

Everything that lived generated, spent and moved Chi in and out of themselves. There was absolutely no conscious action to this, it was as much an organic consequence of living as generating corporal heat was. So how did one harness something one could not feel or even perceive? How did one use Chi?

Cultivating was the usual answer.

But if you had more money than sense, or more skill than was normal, talismans provided another. A lesser answer, to be certain, but still an answer.

Jun did not know how Xinrui made his talisman work, how it collected its Chi, or from whom or what it collected it from. He didn’t know if the bolt of fire used oxygen as fuel or if it was all Chi from beginning to end. He did not know if gravity affected it, if wind buffeted it, or if metal contained it. But he didn’t have to.

Jun willed the Talisman to work and a bolt of fire flew from the burning bamboo strip, hitting his guard straight in the mouth. And then, slowly, it spread from his jaw to the top of his hair. And then from his chin to his neck. It burned the hairs of his head, and blackened the skin of his face.

It pulled away the skin and started melting the bone of his skull.

And it all happened in the span of a minute.

“This Young Master is willing to release anyone unhappy with the Yan family from their duties and their work,” Jun gestured at the body as he brushed the burning talisman off his hand before the fire could touch his fingers.

Fourteen to nine.

“T-that’s right, we are loyal men!” one of his guards said, despite the disparity in number still being high.

“Yeah, long live the Yan family!” another one said.

“We will make you rue the day you chose to stand in the Young Lord’s way!” the other hefted his sword.

Between two dead bodies, one of them dead through a magical talisman, the bandits started to nervously shift on their feet, some of them going as far as starting to step back.

“Enough of this,” the fat man, the one with the axes, stepped up and motioned his men forward, “We gave them a chance to give up. Now it’s time to die!”

But what seemed to be their leader quickly patched up his men’s spines by taking the offensive. More than losing the opportunity to rob Jun without having to fight, it seemed as though he knew that the only way to salvage the situation now was to attack.

It was just as well. Jun’s best response was much the same.

“Kill them all,” he ordered his men.

“For the Yan family!” they all responded to the charge of the bandits with a charge of their own.

And making Jun privately wince to himself as they did.

The bandits were all evidently self-taught. They twirled their sticks, axes and knifes in a way they thought intimidating before they swung them in whichever way they remembered to while fighting. Which was to say, not very well. But there was more to a fight than just technique.

There was being able to correctly judge distances, which didn’t particularly require martial art training to do, only experience. There was being able to anticipate the moves of an opponent, which was this whole interplay between psychology and observation. There was even just physicality, as speed and strength each were as important as technique.

Jun’s guards didn’t fail in these either. Well, at least not compared to these bandits. No, the problem was, indeed, their technique. Because they were supposed to be trained.

But their swords and spears twirled needlessly in the air before being brought down upon the bandits in highly telegraphed arcs.

“Million slash!” technique names were screamed even as they were performed.

“Rock-biting thrust!” everything, footing, distance and timing, was potentially sacrificed just to perform the ideal attack. Or what they thought was an ideal attack.

Sometimes moves that would have best fit operas connected and worked well.

Some other times they didn’t.

But, as much as it rankled him, this was one area where Jun couldn’t fault them. Not really. After all, just about everyone did it.

In a world of Taoist supernatural powers, martial arts weren’t just martial arts. In here, martial arts were power. In here, much the same as it was anywhere, if a person wanted to be the best, they tended to emulate the best.

It just so happened that the best were Cultivators.

In the hands of someone that could shape Chi as easily as they pissed, the ponderous ridiculously showy movements would have been efficient through the consideration of Chi phenomena. The yelling of names would have meant giving them power. The sacrifice in the dozens of little facets that made for deadly fighters would have resulted in tangible trade-offs.

Yes, his men were trained. But they knew how the best fighters moved in tournaments, in duels, and in the tales. Everyone did.

So all being trained meant was that they attempted to apply that training to how the best supernatural fighters would.

“Out of my way,” the bandit chief knocked a sword swing he had years to anticipate as he slammed one of his axes in the stomach of one of Jun’s guards. The armored jacket kept the blow from going into the man’s guts, but it still made him bent over as he wheezed for breath. And with nine guards fighting against fourteen men, well, it made a hole on the front line that the bandit chief stepped into.

All so that he could rush at Jun.

“Run, noble boy, RUN!” the leader of the thieves yelled as he twirled two wood-cutting axes in his hand. He wasn’t too bad with those things, if Jun was going to be honest. He was strong and deceptively quick for his girth. So Jun decided that the man didn’t need to get any closer.

“Run!” the bandit chief encouraged him once again, but stopped once he felt something in his chest.

It was a hole. A small one.

Then he grunted when another appeared.

He tried to block when Jun’s arm lazily moved and made his spearhead go around the man’s hand to strike at his clavicle.

The bandit chief tried to interpose his axes in the most obvious line of Jun’s attack, so Jun simply switched his targets and started aiming for his shoulders and hips.

The man, seeing not much choice, decided to give up on trying to catch Jun’s thrusts and rushed through his attacks.

So Jun kept poking holes in him.

Left hand forward, making a cradle for his spear, and his right one moving back and forth, aiming for whichever spot seemed most open. He took steps back with the chief, not letting uip for a second, as that would have meant having to mind those axes and switching forms was much too inefficient when he could literally just take a step back.

And poke, poke, poke.

All Jun did was make one hole after another.

The Yan spear was, yes, a very complete martial art. But all it did , all it aimed to do, was poke holes.

It wasn’t exactly impressive but, heh, it did the job.

“Shit, the Chief is down!” one bandit yelled as the fat man went down to his knees as he looked upon his torso in disbelief.

“All is lost!” another bandit engaged with one of Jun’s guards turned around tried to escape with his weapons still in hand. But he was too slow and so was slain from the back for his troubles.

“Everyman for himself!” another dropped his weapon and so gained the ability to flee the guardsmen’s reach.

After that, it was like a dam broke, with bandits, his traitor guards included, turning tail and fleeing.

“Let them go,” Jun lazily waved his men down, if only because he really didn’t want to wait for his men to come back to leave this accursed place, “This Young Master is fine with these results.”

Indeed, despite being injured, none of his men had fallen in battle, while about half of the bandits did. It was the difference that actually having equipment made. Sadly, that also applied to the two surviving guardsmen that managed to get away.

“I-cough-yield,” the bandit leader managed to get out as blood dripped from his lips, “Mercy, Young Master, I beg of you-cough-mercy.”

“You dare?” one of his men sneered as he stepped over the beaten man, whose hands were barely keeping his torso out of the dirt, “Thieves don’t get to beg!”

Then he raised his spear and started twirling it in one of those faux Cultivator swings.

“Stop,” Jun, meanwhile, stopped it by simply grabbing his lead hand before he could impart force into it.

“Oh, you are LUCKY that the Young Master is so merciful,” the man spat.

“Oh, it’s not that,” Jun shook his head, “Look at him.”

The guard did. He peered at the Bandit Chief until he realized that he was no longer moving.

“He already bled to death,” Jun let him go, And, indeed, the bandit chief slowly dipped forward into the red mud, “On that topic, is everyone ok?”

The body of Captain Lou Tang coughed.

Riiight, right, right.

“Captin Lou Tang,” Jun rushed to his side. The axe had fallen off his back at some point, and they rolled him over so that he could breath, “Are you alright?”

“Y-young Master,” the captain weakly coughed, “D-did we win?”

“That we did…my friend,” Jun allowed. The man’s skin was pale and his eyes were staring straight up into the sky. Jun knew a dead man when he saw one, so he could at least make this death pleasant.

“That is…good,” Lou Tang breathed with satisfaction. He took a deep breath, or as much of one as he could under the circumstances, as his eyes gained momentary focus and he rolled them to meet Jun’s.

“I…have one last t-thing to say,” Captain Lou Tang declared with a faded voice, “An apology, l-long deserved.”

“This Young Master will hear it,” Jun noted.

“Re-remember the clearing?” the man’s voice started to slip away.

“You, um, don’t need to apologize about that,” Jun said. Why? He had essentially told him to ignore it for a reason, there was literally no reason to bring it back!

“But Young Master, this Lou Tang….doesn’t think your dick is too small.” but bring it back the man did, trying to turn it all into one last compliment to Jun.

And then he died.

“....if anyone asks, he died wishing eternal life to the Yan family,” Jun said.

“Oh, most definitely,” one of his guards looking around bobbed his head up and down.

“I was too far away to hear what he said, but that definitely sounds right,” said a man beside him.

“It sounded like a full death poem to me,” another guard opined, “Perhaps I’ll work on the details later.”

“It was the most epic thing I’ve ever heard of but, unfortunately, I wasn’t fully paying attention,” another one said.

Goddamned it Lou Tang.