Chapter 31 — Shadow Guard

To be honest, Gao Yang was rather surprised to see Amber actually drag a captive back. An hour ago, he might not have been so astonished—but ever since this Shadow Master had been sent flying by a single slap from a bank salesman named ylittlepony, he had given up all hope for her combat ability. Sending her out on watch duty was less like posting a guard and more like deploying an alarm bell...

After all, Amber's shadow techniques really were formidable; letting her spot an assassin or a spy and raise the alarm should have been no problem... But who would have thought she'd bring one back alive?

At the same moment Amber hauled her catch inside, another set of hurried footsteps sounded outside the study, and Sir Byron burst through the door: "My lord, what's happened here?"

He had been stationed below to guard the main gate, but the commotion on the upper floor this time had been loud enough to rouse him.

As for Miss Meitzen's earlier visit... Amber had been sent flying at the first exchange, so it hadn't made much noise at all.

"It's nothing—just a petty thief, already caught," Gao Yang waved Byron off. "Go back to your post. Tonight is not a peaceful one."

Byron peered into the study with some confusion, taking in the smug Amber and the stalker sprawled on the floor, but faced with an order, the middle-aged knight still nodded: "Yes, sir."

"How did you catch him?" Gao Yang asked, looking at Amber in surprise after Sir Byron had left. "You beat him?"

"What's that look supposed to mean?!" Amber was thoroughly displeased with Gao Yang's reaction. "My frontal combat ability may be just a tiny bit lacking, but I'm not so bad that I can't beat anyone! I killed one of those monsters you called 'aberration' before..."

Gao Yang kept staring at her.

"Of course, the main thing is that this guy is an idiot," Amber, as expected, had more to say. "He probably could have won in a straight fight, but he just had to show off his shadow step to me, so I kicked him right out of shadow form. His mind got jolted between the Shadow Realm and the material world, and he passed out."

Gao Yang stared at her, dumbfounded, thinking that only a freak like her could pull off such a crude and brutal maneuver.

Shadow step was the signature skill of stalkers. Basically anyone who made a living in this trade had one or two tricks of "shadow walking," but an ordinary person's shadow walking and Amber's utterly unreasonable ability were not the same thing at all—one could even say they were completely different skill trees. A normal stalker could at most temporarily turn invisible in the material world and slip through the crevice between the material world and the Shadow Realm (what mages called the "Shadow Threshold"). This was an extremely dangerous technique, demanding precision and caution like dancing on the edge of a blade, because one misstep could send you tumbling into the shadow side, where the nameless things of the Shadow Realm would tear you to shreds. And Amber... heaven only knew what her ability was.

Under normal circumstances, stalkers only needed to focus on their own footsteps. As long as they didn't misstep, they needn't worry about falling into shadow, because "shadow walking" was also called the Lonely Road—every stalker knew that no matter how skilled a shadow master was, they could never step into another's shadow stride. So any stalker of refined technique could handle this "dance on the blade's edge" with ease. But that was under normal circumstances...

It was a different matter entirely when, while you were dancing on the blade's edge, a freak with a combat power of 1.5 geese suddenly lunged out from beside you and kicked you.

Amber was still rattling on smugly: "It was hilarious! The guy struck this incredibly stupid pose, then whoosh, went into shadow form. But I could see him plain as day—I watched him crouch and creep over to my side, waving his little knife around. So I pretended not to see him, and when he got to the edge, I kicked him..."

Rebecca ignored Amber and crouched beside Gao Yang to examine the uninvited guest together: "He's not going to wake up, is he?"

Gao Yang shook his head: "Hard to say. A normal person jolted at the Shadow Threshold either dies or turns into a vegetable."

As he spoke, the stalker on the floor suddenly twitched, then groggily came to.

Under normal circumstances, a trained stalker would at this point keep playing dead without batting an eye, seamlessly controlling his heartbeat and breathing so that onlookers noticed nothing. But the jolt he had just taken at the Shadow Threshold had robbed this professional of his self-control; by the time he realized something was wrong, he and Gao Yang were already staring at each other.

The nameless young man's expression was somewhat vacant, as though what had happened was a bit too far beyond his expectations. Then he made to bite the poison hidden in his mouth and kill himself—only to discover that the poison had been taken from his mouth at some point without his knowing.

He had no choice but to shut his mouth and say nothing.

"What's your name?" "What's your objective?" "Who sent you?"

Gao Yang fired several questions at him in a row, but received no response at all. The man might as well have been deaf.

Amber pulled out her little dagger and spun it rapidly around her hand: "Want me to interrogate him with a bit of torture? I'm not exactly a professional, but back when I used to sneak into dungeons to steal things, I did at least watch some of it in practice..."

Rebecca looked baffled: "You snuck into dungeons to steal what?"

"This you don't understand," Amber said smugly, launching into an explanation. "Lots of jailers hide the loot they take off prisoners in the nooks and crannies of the dungeon first. They have to wait for the shift change to move it out, otherwise the patrol officers or the lord would find out. So I timed my jobs for exactly that window..."

"Don't bother. Torture won't work," Gao Yang cut off Amber's gloating. "Royal Shadow Guard—trained specifically to serve the king, the elite of the elite. Beyond all their special-operations skills, their willpower is terrifying. I have to hand it to you for catching a master like this by sheer dumb luck—that's worth bragging about in taverns for half a year or more."

As he spoke, he glanced down at the young man, who now wore an expression of surprise: "Though in my day the Royal Shadow Guard were nothing but personal bodyguards, tasked at most with scouting intelligence in extreme environments. How is it that seven hundred years later, the Royal Shadow Guard has sunk to petty thievery?"

The captured Shadow Guard stared at Gao Yang in astonishment, but before he could speak, Gao Yang continued: "You want to ask how I saw through your identity?"

The Shadow Guard gave a slight nod.

"Obviously—because I personally drew up your titles back then, along with your first version of the training regimen," Gao Yang said, patting the Shadow Guard's cheek. "I was the first generation Royal Shadow Guard's instructor!!"

Amber stared at Gao Yang's nearly two-meter frame, dumbstruck: "You, a knight... an instructor for stalkers? You taught them stealth?"

Gao Yang smiled faintly: "No, I taught them physical training and two-handed swordsmanship."

Amber looked utterly lost: "Why would stalkers need to learn two-handed swordsmanship?!"

"So that when they're discovered on a mission, they can eliminate all the witnesses, of course."

"As a stalker, once you're discovered on a mission, doesn't that basically mean the mission's already over!?"

"No. For an Ansukan stalker, being discovered while sneaking is where the mission actually begins... Though this one here doesn't seem to have completed those training courses very well. Or maybe seven hundred years have passed and the courses I left behind were phased out as obsolete?"