Polluted Jianghu: 新年少鹏

Storm clouds as black as raven feather banners cover the sky, roiling like a witch's cauldron. Lightning white as bone touches the grand, frozen even as the skies move. You are lying against the turf, watching the lightning play across the sky. Raindrops land on your face, running off in rivulets. The air is crackling with ozone. You can taste the frisson in the air. It's comfortable, but if this is your dream you can't help but feel that you could have just skipped this.

"Stupid dream," you mutter. Then again, most dreams are. Post facto justifications of tangled events firing in the old grey matter. You don't have higher hopes for a lucid dream.

A thundercrack.

"What is it now?" you groan.

Get up.

"Why? I'm sleeping. This is rest."

You can't rest. Not now. Not ever. Hands reached around your collar, pulled you to a standing position. You stumble, just for a moment. Water beads obscure your vision. Look at me, it snarled. You wipe your vision clear. You don't know what you expected. Pengju? This can't be Penju, not this assembly of knives rusted together into a bird headed man. Stand up straight. It hits you in the chest, and you reflexively follow its orders. Why are you resting?

"I can't believe this is a question."

Why?

"You're the world's shittiest spirit guide."

Why do you fight?

You raise your eyes to the sky. Fuck, there's still rain. "I don't fucking know. I don't fucking know the reason why I do half the things I do. I feel like the world's on rails and I'm just here for the ride. Maybe it's just because I wanted to fight. To feel like I could control something but then he fucking beat the stuffing out of me."

See?

"No, I don't see. Is- is this some fucking koan?"

If it is, what are you going to do?

You slug it in the face. You get your fingers cut open to the bone for your troubles. Good answer, it snarls. You will need fury to survive the fucking Jurchens. You are marching to war and you will need all the fury you can mus-

"Yue Fei, you died. You were betrayed by the emperor and the Song fell to Genghis Khan. Why are you lecturing me now?"

-ter, so remember the method of spears and hands and feet and that you must descend to hell if no one else will. You have to defend Tianxia! Have to have to have to have to have to have to have to.

You laugh. You can't believe it. Yuexia's self righteous larping got to you. "It's the Japanese. And I'm here to steal their shit to figure out where I came from. And for money. It's Yuexia you want to say this to. She'd eat this shit up."

Do you really believe that? The world is falling away, the landscape collapsing into nothingness.

"I-"

Darkness.

When you wake up your fingers throb like they've been sliced open. Maybe they are, but the bandages aren't red with blood. Awareness comes slowly, thoughts seeping into your cortex as you mechanically don your clothes.

Oh. Oh shit. Right, today's the big day. You hustle down the stairs. There's no one around, but that doesn't mean anything. The same clerk is at the desk, so you pay another hundred from the envelope in your pocket before you leave.

An hour later you're at the meeting point, an isolated courtyard that's connected to the main road by a narrow alleyway, which raises interesting questions as to how Flay managed to get a van parked in the courtyard, next to a planter's box where a withered tree stretches to the sky. She pops her head out from the back door of the van. "Hey, you're here early! Did you get new threads? No, wait. Why are your bandages still on?"

"Yeah, the Zhenyan jacket felt too obvious. And it's a fashion statement." A shiver runs through you. Should have gone with a winter coat or at least a sweater under the track jacket. You lean the rental bike against the post, and wander over to the van. There's banks of turn-of-the-millenium computers in there, backed up with antennae connected to comms equipment and TV screens. "Nice setup," you say as you munch a jianbing. "How'd you get the van in here?

"Thanks. I brought it in through that garage." She points at a steel folding door. "Lots of this stuff is cheap, but it works. C'mon in, I need to get the presentation set up. Yuexia is coming too, she's just taking-"

"Taking what?" the voice comes as a surprise. Yuexia lightly hops on to the van, sword leaning on her shoulder. "I had to get a reason to leave after last night. My maid-"

"You have a fucking maid?" you burst out. A fucking maid. Holy shit. If she's so fucking rich why is she farting around the streets. Doesn't she have anything more important to do like, you don't know, drink champagne made out of crushed pearls or some ostentatious shit like that.

"Yes?" Yuexia seems uncomfortable, fingers playing around with the hilt of her sword. "It's just like a housekeeper? Why're you mad?"

"Communism," Flay interjects testily. "Both of you simmer down. Okay, so Kirisaki-rengo." An organization chart pops up on a wall monitor. One name at the top splits into two, and those two have things such as 'goon gang- Cannibal Justification' and 'racket- Sato Import/Export' attached to them. Affiliate gangs and rackets, you suppose. "They're an Osakan syndicate that lost a war bigly. S'why they're in China now- they had a local branch during the fifties, and the oyabun- Kirisaki Daichi- took all his talent here. Now, he's got two sub bosses- Kirishima Manzo and Oogami Hiroshi."

The slide changes. Kirishima Manzo has high cheekbones and a thin sword scar running over a milky eye. Another scar twists his mouth upwards. Oogami Hiroshi looks more like a guy you'd see at a bar doing his best to avoid his wife looking for him.

"So. Psyche profile. Kirishima Manzo is your violent guy, your real go getter. There's a video of him personally ripping out this guy's spine cause he called Kirishima a bad word. Business sense of a shark which is not all that good. What I've dug up on him is that he's burakumin. If I was feeling freudian, I'd say the fact that he's a complete psycho bastard is rooted in an inferiority complex, trying to prove that he's a man among man. But that's not important. The important thing is that he's got Korean gangs friendly with him so he gets to smuggle Korean manufacture into J3."

You gesture at the monitor with your breakfast. "Isn't that a lucrative racket?" The question surprises you. Why would you know about this crap if you're just a legbreaker? "Even second shelf Korean cybernetics can net you tens of thousands. How did this psycho land that racket?"

"Good question. It's because Oogami Hiroshi is a card carrying member of Nippon Kaigi."

"Yeah, that'd do it."

Flay nods. "Oogami is a very boring money earner. As far as I can tell he doesn't even skim off the take."

"Fake," you declare. "He's just got a really good accountant in his pocket."

"Yeah, maybe. Anyway, he does a little shabu shabu dealing on the side. Sorry, 'health supplements.' Runs a couple dark casinos, extortion schemes. If Kirisaki bites it Oogami would be the best choice but he's also a racist. Keeps on trying to get Kirisaki-rengo to take back Osaka. I don't really like his chances with the organization he has right now."

You try your best to remember the org chart. "They have… seven gangs under their thumb? I just remember the one named Cannibal Justification, though."

"It's a cool name," Yuexia agrees.

"They literally eat people," Flay says as she alt-tabs to a shell and enters a few commands.

"I meant that they're villains who need to be exterminated," Yuexia backtracks.

"It's still a cool name and I can't judge cannibalism," you contradict.

"The duality of man," Flay laughs. "Okay, so, the plan. Both of them are hiring." She points a finger at Yuexia and you. "Each one of you goes to a separate boss. You follow their orders while I hack into their network and spread some kompromat. Trigger some low key conflict among the mook gangs. That's where you two come in- I want you to off some moderates, plug in some faked data, and Bob's your uncle, we have a civil war."

"You do this often?" You chew and swallow the last of the jianbing, stuffing the plastic bag in your pocket.

Flay winks at you. "I'd tell ya. But then I'd have to kill ya."

Pretend to work for:
[]- Oogami Hiroshi
[]- Kirishima Manzo

The pills taste like concentrated bitterness. It's the most bitter thing that ever bittered but within moments you feel like you could dance a jig on neurotoxin dipped knives suspended over a moat of lava filled with piranhas. Ouyang Meng really did know her shit, you guess. You sorta expect to get in a fight in the abstract, but more than anything your lower spine has been killing you and the only painkillers you had on hand were her pills.

Flay's unmarked white van drives off into the snowy city, leaving you alone in front of a six story business park. The lowest floor is a Korean barbecue, but there are no lights on and the chairs are all stacked up. Kirshima Manzo's office is in the penthouse suite- those windows have a light shining through them. A door by the barbecue stand, with a camera and a speaker attached. Deep breaths. Flay coached you through this and most of it was just glare menacingly and threatening imminent violence. You know that. Shit's all you know.

You ring the buzzer next to the door by the barbecue and wait, shifting from foot to foot, staring at the fisheye lens.

"Yer here for the job?"

A light accent. "Yep," you reply. "Open up. It's freezing out here."

A whatever the yaks call their bottom feeder opens the door and tries to glare at you. All he manages to do is make you think of a cat. You really feel sorry for the guy that has to intimidate you. He's trying, bless his heart, but a thug that knows karate (he's bouncing on the balls of his feet) and has a switchblade in his pocket doesn't measure up to your you-ness. You clap his shoulder. He flinches, arm twitching in the two motions before a right straight. "You're doing great work," you try as you brush past the thug and up the stairs. It doesn't really help him but you like to think it does.

"Go take a seat in the waiting room! Mr. Kirishima's out for a while." he yells at you. Then he throws the knife against the floor and storms out to sulk. Cute. You head up the stairwell. There are patches of it where someone spackled it over with whitewall. Then you're at the waiting room, closing the door with the frosted glass window behind you. There's no one in the waiting room, so you settle into the couch by a potted plant, leaning over to grab and flip open a magazine from the coffee table.It's about local culture, which is fairly dire. There's an endless stream of hipster-ass art films about the inherent emptiness of capitalism but we should seek inner balance rather than do something about it. You run an eye down the interminable opinion columns, the vacuous lifestyle articles. The only thing that catches your gaze is an advertisement placed out by the Palace Museum.

A bronze spear and a bronze sword. Fuchai of Wu and Guojian of Yue's weapons that they wielded when they vied for hegemony all those years past. You idly wonder how many favors the director had to call in from Henan to pull this exhibit off. The bronze weapons are held across each other, under a statue of the respective users, great rivals in life, immortalized in… ice? That can't be right. You frown and look at it again.

No, yes they got a guy from Harbin to sculpt Fuchai and Guojian. Neat. Dyed water ice to mimic colors. Your eyes are drawn again and again to Fuchai's spear. Wouldn't it be nice to swing that around? Your palms itch at the thought. How many heroes can the Palace Museum hire, really? Or you know, you could just poke around the violent maniac adjacent economy and turn up a spear. Rather than, like, lifting priceless historical artifacts.

The door slams open. Kirishima Manzo storms in and the room is filled with a small stormcloud of sharply suited yakuza thugs. In all his scarred glory, Kirishima stands in front of you while his flunkies screen the exits. You scratch your cheek as the underboss takes out a cigarette and lights it. The bastard, you think. You want that.

"You're the only one?" he growls. Like a bag of rocks.

"Didn't your guy already ask that?"

"He's the only one," a pencil pusher interjects, adjusting his glasses. "I told you, the Wu Manor scared off the rest."

Kirishima growls some more. "And the only one that joined is this mummy? We have to have other people."

"I really don't like the tone of your voice," you remark mildly. Ha, you're enjoying this. The frission of violence, threatening to boil over. A job that's like dancing over razorblades. It gets the ol' sodden brain going. "It's contributing to a hostile working environment. Besides, haven't you watched movies? It's always the weirdo that turns the tide, and I can reassure you that there are very few people in Jing-Jin-Ji that are less weird than I am."

"Holy fuck," someone says. "The rot's got into his brain."

Emotions play and flicker across his face. Frustration, fury, and all that. "You know who I am?"

"Yes. Kirishima Manzo."

"Do you know who I work for?"

"Kirisaki-rengo, on the down and outs in the churn in the J3 underworld. Why the third degree?"

The room all of a sudden is silent. A snub nosed revolver, gleaming in the filtered light, sits like a lead weight in the room. It has its own gravity, all the thugs know what is going to happen. You do too, but you are cool as cucumbers. You faced Metalhead, this pistol is nothing. It clicks, you feel the press of the gun through the gauze swaddling your forehead. "Now," he hisses. "Give me a reason why I should spend war money on you, broken boy."

Front for the job:
[1.1] {Pain is a Teacher} "Pull the trigger and find out."
[1.2] {Wrathful Manifestation} "I'll take all of you. Y'all ain't shit."
[]- Refer to Sunflower and Metalhead. Earnestly refer to your virtues.