Du Laoliu stood in the shade of the treeline, fanning himself lazily with a palm-leaf fan, looking down at Xiao Anguo's convoy with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had recently discovered that life could, in fact, be quite good.
It had started with guns.
A few months back, he'd gritted his teeth and spent a significant sum acquiring roughly a hundred foreign rifles out of Guangxi.
The investment had paid off beyond anything he'd anticipated. His standing within the Gelaohui had climbed almost overnight, and then — almost comically — members of the Tongmenghui had begun showing up to court him.
The revolution, apparently, had a way of finding men with weapons.
He didn't particularly understand what revolution meant. He suspected most of the men using the word didn't either.
What he did understand was that chaos had arrived, and chaos, properly managed, was an opportunity.
The guns were simply a business decision.
Which was why, two weeks ago, he had gone further.
He'd located some Frenchmen willing to part with a Hotchkiss Mle 1897 heavy machine gun and paid five hundred silver dollars for it without flinching. Five hundred dollars was a serious sum. But the moment that machine gun arrived, his operation changed character entirely.
Since then, he had been using the old Gelaohui leadership's participation in the Railway Protection Movement as convenient cover — blocking Qing army supply columns under the noble banner of protecting Sichuan's railways, then relieving those columns of whatever they happened to be carrying. In just one month, the arrangement had netted him several thousand silver dollars.
He touched the pouch at his belt almost unconsciously. Five thousand silver dollars, exchanged for banknotes, folded flat and tucked against his body. If he could pull off a few more scores like this, it genuinely wouldn't matter who ended up ruling the country.
As for the next score...
Du Laoliu squinted down the hillside at the convoy below. Twelve, maybe fourteen carts, all closely covered, their escorts carrying long spears. That much security meant something worth protecting.
His mouth watered at the arithmetic of it.
Seventy, eighty thousand silver dollars, maybe more.
All he had to do was move quickly, leave no witnesses, and clean up the story afterward.
Label them Qing spies, ride into Chengdu with the news, collect whatever reward was going, and — if things went the way he imagined — perhaps even parlay the whole affair into an appointment.
The magistrate of Guang'an County had a pleasant ring to it.
He rolled up his sleeves.
He'd had the Hotchkiss dragged up into the trees and concealed well back from the edge — a precaution born of long habit.
You didn't survive long as a mountain bandit by being reckless.
His men had pushed forward to make contact, drawing the convoy's attention down the slope, while the machine gun waited in the shadows like a held breath.
Du Laoliu watched his gunner load the bright copper rounds into the chamber, one after another, and felt a particular thrill move through him.
The machine gun fires like gold.
He'd heard the saying.
Now he understood it.
He was still savoring the thought when it happened.
A figure broke from the crowd below — tall, broad-shouldered, moving with sudden explosive purpose.
The young man roared a single word — "Scatter!" — and then launched himself through the air like something fired from a catapult, slamming bodily into the dark-faced convoy leader and carrying them both behind cover.
Du Laoliu stared.
What in the—
A flying donkey waiting to be slaughtered?
What kind of fool threw himself toward a machine gun?
"Kill him!"
The gunner needed no further encouragement.
The Hotchkiss opened up.
"Brrrrrrrrrrt—brrt—brrt!"
The world became noise and dust and the tearing sound of rounds chewing through earth and wood.
Three soldiers further back in the column were hit before they could even react — they dropped without a sound, crumpling into the road in spreading pools of dark red.
Xiao Anguo found himself on the ground before he understood why, his ears ringing, the air around him suddenly thick with grit.
Then a hand caught his arm and hauled him bodily behind a large boulder, and the world came back into focus — the roar of the machine gun, the screaming of horses, and Yang Qiu crouched beside him, breathing hard.
Xiao Anguo had been managing escorts and supply runs long enough to recognize when someone had just saved his life.
His eyes went wide.
"Tiger — are you alright?" He grabbed Yang Qiu's arm and saw the livid red welt already rising across it.
"You're hit—"
"Mosquito bite,"
Yang Qiu said flatly.
He was lying, of course, and they both knew it.
The graze burned like a brand.
But the more pressing thought running through Yang Qiu's mind was directed entirely at himself: Years out of service, and I'm still out here playing the hero.
He'd moved on pure instinct, body reacting before his brain caught up, the way it had been trained to do in a lifetime that — technically speaking — hadn't happened yet in this world's calendar.
Luckily the gunner was a novice.
Luckily the burst had gone wide.
The memory of those rounds hissing past his ear still made the back of his neck go cold.
"Brother Yang! Are you both alright?"
Bingwen had already found cover further along the rock face, Ma Kui beside him, the rest of the soldiers spreading out to return fire.
Bingwen's voice carried a note of urgency that went beyond mere comradeship — he'd watched Yang Qiu vanish into that initial burst and clearly hadn't been sure what he'd see when the dust cleared.
"We're fine — stay down!"
Yang Qiu called back, sharpening his voice to cut through the gunfire.
"Watch their machine gun, don't give them a clean line!"
The standoff settled into a grim rhythm.
Both sides exchanged fire across the road, the three dead soldiers lying grotesquely exposed in the middle ground between them, untouchable while the Hotchkiss held its position on the hill.
The machine gun was the problem — it defined the entire geometry of the fight.
Up on the slope, Du Laoliu watched the tall young man and the convoy leader disappear behind the boulder and felt something shift in his chest.
Not quite fear.
More like the particular unease of a man who has miscalculated something and doesn't yet know how badly.
That kind of agility wasn't peasant luck.
Those were military reflexes.
"Brothers!"
He pointed down the slope, filling his voice with righteous fury.
"These are Qing Dynasty lackeys! They've come to steal our railway! Kill them all!"
The bandits roared back in ragged unison, and the firing intensified.
The familiar percussion of a firefight pulled something loose in Yang Qiu's muscle memory — something comfortable and dangerous in equal measure.
He cocked his rifle in a single practiced motion, then glanced at Xiao Anguo.
"Watch this."
He reached into his pack, pulled out an old bundled garment, and hurled it high over the top of the boulder.
The cloth billowed and tumbled through the air.
Immediately — almost comically — the shooting from the hillside lurched toward it. Half a dozen rifles tracked the movement, the gunner swinging the Hotchkiss instinctively, everyone up there apparently convinced that the flying donkey had decided to repeat his earlier trick.
In that half-second of redirected attention, Yang Qiu leaned left around the boulder's edge and fired.
Through a gap in the rocks, Xiao Anguo watched one of the bandits — the man who had been doing most of the talking earlier, peering out from behind his cover to assess the situation — catch the bullet squarely in the chest.
He sat down hard and did not get up.
"Damn it!"
Xiao Anguo turned to find Yang Qiu scowling at his own weapon with undisguised contempt.
"What—"
"I pulled the trigger three times," Yang Qiu hissed, the words meant only for himself as he pressed his spine into the biting grit of the rock. Above him, the hillside erupted; retaliatory fire shrieked past, shattering the stone into a blinding spray of grey dust.
"Three times," he muttered, staring at the heavy iron in his hand. "One bullet."
He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, cataloguing the sheer stupidity of the mistake.
In his other life, his hands knew the fluid, effortless rhythm of an automatic—the way the lead followed the finger without thought.
But this Mauser was a different beast, a stubborn relic of steel and springs that demanded a bolt-cycled tribute for every shot.
His body had acted on a memory that didn't belong in this century, and in the heat of the moment, his modern instincts had betrayed him.
Idiot. Absolute idiot.
He reloaded with sharp, deliberate movements, already adjusting. To his left, Bingwen and Ma Kui were doing solid work — keeping heads down, drawing fire — which gave him space to think.
"Bingwen! Brother Ma — cover me!"
The two men immediately read him.
They organized the soldiers to concentrate a sustained burst on the machine gun's position, the volume of fire forcing the Hotchkiss crew to duck, and in the gap Yang Qiu was already moving. He leaned out right, fired, and a second bandit dropped.
He was already moving again before the echo died — sliding past Xiao Anguo to the other side of the boulder, planting both feet flat against the rock face.
Instead of leaning out in the predictable way, he pushed off hard and fired from a half-lying position as his body swung clear, presenting almost nothing as a target.
A third bandit went down.
The exchange took perhaps four seconds.
Xiao Anguo, Ma Kui, and Bingwen all stared.
Up on the hill, Du Laoliu stared harder than any of them — his jaw slack, his palm-leaf fan hanging forgotten at his side.
He had seen a lot of men shoot in his time.
He had never seen a man move like that. The tall young fool who should have been dead in the opening burst had somehow become the most dangerous thing in the valley.
And his crew was bleeding.
Du Laoliu pressed both hands against his chest, as though he could keep the ache from spreading.
That gun team was his investment. Those were his men.
Still — for all his fluid, alarming precision, Yang Qiu was working with a bolt-action Hanyang that forced him to cycle after every shot.
Without a suppressive weapon of his own, and with the Hotchkiss still dominating the open ground, he had no way to press the advantage.
Yang Qiu knew it.
He settled back behind the rock, jaw tight, and thought about it.
The Type 81. He could have worked wonders with the Type 81 — familiar weight, reliable action, a rate of fire that would have had these hillside amateurs crawling back into the trees inside of two minutes. But the Type 81 existed in another life on another continent in a future that hadn't happened yet.
What he did have, tucked at the bottom of his pack under a spare shirt, was the M1911A1.
He dug it out. Checked the safety. Thumbed the magazine. Good.
The M1911A1 was a close-range weapon — useless at the distances currently in play — but the fact of its existence reminded him that standing problems sometimes required unconventional solutions.
Xiao Anguo had been watching Yang Qiu think, and by now the fog of shock and confusion had cleared enough for something sharper to take its place.
The young man had saved his life, fought with professional competence that bore no resemblance to any supply soldier he'd ever commanded, and was now sitting in the dirt studying terrain with the focused intensity of an officer.
"Brother Tiger," he said quietly.
Yang Qiu glanced up — slightly caught off guard by the title.
Everyone called him Tiger, sure. The nickname had followed him from his first week in the army, some combination of his surname and his tendency to train like he had something to prove.
But Brother Tiger, from Xiao Anguo's mouth, was something different. It carried weight.
"What do you think?" Xiao Anguo asked. "We can't hold here indefinitely. Sooner or later they'll maneuver around us."
"I know." Yang Qiu had already been working through it. He pointed toward the cliff face rising to their left — steep, uneven, the kind of rock that offered handholds if you knew what you were doing. "There's only one real option. Someone has to go up, circle behind them, and take out that machine gun. Everything else is buying time."
"Alright." Xiao Anguo turned immediately, clearly intending to call men and move.
Yang Qiu caught his arm. "Not like that. If we start climbing in the open, the Hotchkiss will cut us apart before we get ten meters up. We need to pull their attention away from that cliff face first."
Xiao Anguo turned back. "Pull their attention — how?"
Yang Qiu picked up a stone from the ground and began sketching. In the dirt between them: a rough oval for the boulder, a line for the road, crosshatches for the cliff, an X for the Hotchkiss position. Simple. Clear. He drew arrows showing fields of fire, marked the blind spots, indicated where a sustained push from the main body would force the bandits to concentrate their attention.
"Firepower as a lure," he said. "We don't actually need to break through — we just need them convinced we're trying to break through. Maximum noise, maximum aggression, here and here." He tapped the diagram. "While they're focused on holding that line, the climbing party moves."
He watched Xiao Anguo's eyes track the scratches in the dirt, following the logic, and saw the moment it resolved into understanding.
"Yes," Xiao Anguo said. He nodded once, firmly. "Yes, that works."
Yang Qiu let out a breath he hadn't fully realized he'd been holding. Explaining tactical concepts to men trained in a completely different military tradition, in the middle of an active firefight, with no shared vocabulary for half the relevant terms — it was, genuinely, more exhausting than the shooting.
He was grateful Xiao Anguo was as sharp as he was.
He handed off the coordination to Xiao Anguo, trusting him to manage the covering fire and timing, then turned to his own preparations. Pistol out. Safety checked. He looked at it for a moment — then looked down at his belt, where there was no holster, because of course there wasn't a holster, because Brother Hat, whoever he was in whatever afterlife administered these arrangements, had apparently considered a pistol sufficient and everything else decorative.
He tucked the M1911A1 into his waistband with the careful deliberateness of a man making peace with an imperfect situation.
This world. He'd arrived in it for less than a day and was already wedged between a cliff face and a machine gun, improvising a flanking maneuver with a weapon that could take his dignity along with his leg if he wasn't careful.
He looked up at the treeline, at the bandits up there with their stolen Japanese rifles and their French machine gun and their five-dollar revolutionary vocabulary, and felt something clarify inside him — not anger, exactly.
Something older and more practical than anger.
They absolutely had to rebel against this.