When Yi Yang landed, his toes crushed two blue roof tiles. He had already swept six or seven zhang from the roof of Fortune-Full Tower.
All five senses sharpened to their fullest.
First, he listened.
The commotion from the Heaven Patrol Office came from more than one location-at least three. The clashes of weapons rose and fell, their intervals uneven and their intensity varied.
The fighting in the northeast sounded the dullest, mostly the blunt clang of iron against iron, mixed with curses and the crunch of feet smashing rubble. It sounded like close-quarters fighting, with quite a few people involved.
The sounds directly north were sharper: blades screeching across armor plates, along with the humming vibrations of two currents of blood energy compressing the air as they collided at high frequency. Experts at the Qi-Blood Third Level or higher were fighting there.
The western area was far more chaotic. Clashing metal mingled with cries and running footsteps, without any rhythm or order, more like routed stragglers being chased down and hacked apart.
All three had erupted at once.
This was no duel, no sneak attack or assassination. It was an organized assault on a considerable scale.
Yi Yang never stopped moving. Keeping to the shadows of the roof ridges, he sped toward his little courtyard. Halfway there, as he passed through an alley, his nose caught the smell of blood first.
It was cloyingly thick, wrapped in the scents of rust and burning, drifting from the far end of the alley. Yi Yang slowed and crept a dozen steps along the foot of the wall, until the alley suddenly opened up.
At a crossroads, the fighting was already over.
Five corpses lay sprawled on the ground in different positions. Three wore the regulation black uniforms of the Heaven Patrol