The Way of Restraint

Chapter 209: With Me Here, You’re Untouchable

Su Jie was at Larry’s side almost before the thought had finished forming.

He seized the billionaire’s arm and shifted their position through several angles in rapid succession.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Sniper fire. Rounds struck the ground nearby, one after another.

They were under attack.

Larry went white. He hadn’t anticipated this — not on his first time out, not here. He had no idea who wanted him dead.

“It’s all right,” Su Jie said, his voice entirely level. “I’m here. No one is touching you.”

He kept Larry moving, his steps fluid and drifting, continuously denying the snipers a stable target. He was reading the geometry — the sight lines, the angles, the positions — and moving them through the spaces between.

Half a month ago, Su Jie could not have done this with anything like this confidence. But the training regimen he had designed for himself, built around Larry’s resources, had been relentless. Two weeks of sustained exposure to live fire across varied terrain had embedded something in him: the ability to look at a piece of ground and see immediately where an ambush could be laid, where a shooter would position, how the trajectory would run, and how to move ahead of it. His old knowledge of fengshui landscape reading, as it turned out, had made him unusually good at terrain analysis.

As he moved Larry, he was already calling out positions through his communications device — transmitting the snipers’ locations to the security team, directing them to intercept and apprehend.

Simultaneously he steered Larry to cover.

The surrounding terrain was completely clear in his mind: topography, vectors, the distribution of bystanders, every variable that might shift the situation. The position he chose for cover was nearly perfect — it blocked every viable angle of attack.

“Mr. Larry,” Su Jie said, “please don’t let this interrupt your walk. These are minor nuisances. I’ll have them cleared up.”

His composure was absolute. And it transferred immediately. Larry steadied.

He had worked with exceptional bodyguards before. None of them, when an attack came, had ever looked like this. Every previous time, the security response had felt like controlled panic — everyone operating at the edge of their capacity. Su Jie looked like a man watching something he had already rehearsed.

In this moment, Larry found himself thinking that Su Jie wasn’t quite human in the ordinary sense — more like a highly advanced mechanism from some future era, one that could scan a complex situation and produce the correct response instantaneously.

Something in him went quiet.

With Su Jie present, he felt that even if the sky fell, it would not reach him.

*****

Along the riverbank, people had been out for afternoon walks. When the shots came, most of them ran. But two people were moving toward the stone sculpture where Larry was sheltered — not away from it.

One was a vagrant: filthy clothing, the particular texture of someone who slept on park benches year-round. America had no shortage of these. The other was a young woman, dressed like a student.

Both were moving quickly, and both had weapons in their hands before they closed the distance.

A combat knife. And a tranquilizer gun.

Su Jie had already identified them as wrong before the weapons appeared. He had also recognized the vagrant.

The Punishment — Kong Dian.

An old acquaintance.

The woman’s background was unknown, but her bearing was unmistakably that of someone highly capable. Almost certainly Kong Dian’s partner.

Su Jie recalled what Gu Yang had told him: the Judge’s squad carried code names — Judgment, Punishment, Crush, Subvert, Profane, Tear, Destroy. In the shadow world they were a name that made people careful. After Gu Yang’s departure from the group, Kong Dian had pursued a personal vendetta against Su Jie through multiple attempts, and had ultimately retreated without success.

Now he had turned up here, going after Larry.

Su Jie slid out from cover and closed the distance immediately.

Two smooth river stones left his hand.

The riverbank provided an endless supply of them.

Crack!

The stones left his fingers and tore through the air with a sound like something ripping. The force behind them was enough to drop a large animal.

Kong Dian and the woman both moved. Both avoided. But the woman lost her shot with the tranquilizer gun.

The number of people who could evade Su Jie’s thrown weapons was very small. After two weeks of dedicated training, his technique had reached a level where, at close range, he could sustain a continuous barrage like bolts from a crossbow. He didn’t give them a moment to settle.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

Stone after stone, overlapping in rhythm, the sound jagged and insistent. Kong Dian and the woman scrambled to stay clear.

Five seconds. In five seconds, Su Jie had closed to contact range.

Bang!

Su Jie drove a punch at Kong Dian. Kong Dian’s knife came across in response — and in that instant he recognized who was in front of him. Surprise crossed his face.

Su Jie showed none in return. His wrist turned, knocked the knife free, pressed forward in the same motion, and drove his elbow into Kong Dian’s sternum. The impact broke ribs across the chest wall. Kong Dian crumpled and lost consciousness.

The woman came from the side with her own blade.

Su Jie’s leg came up — without any visible preparation, the motion was simply there — and connected with her tibia.

Crack!

Two kicks, fast as a single blink. Both legs broken clean. A third strike put her down and out.

Two elite operatives, neutralized inside the same breath.

Half a year ago, Su Jie and Kong Dian had fought to a standstill — neither able to decisively overcome the other. Now Kong Dian hadn’t lasted three exchanges.

Su Jie found this unsurprising. If a practitioner of the Realm of the Living Dead still had to grind out a prolonged fight with someone like Kong Dian, the level wouldn’t be worth much.

He walked back to where Larry was sheltering.

“Mr. Larry — it’s been fully cleared. The attack involved three snipers targeting the security perimeter, and two close-combat specialists sent to take you alive. Everything has been handled. The team has been notified to process the scene. You can continue your walk if you’d like.”

“I finally step outside for a few hours of quiet and this happens.” Larry’s discomfort was real, though looking at Su Jie, some of it subsided. The sense of safety returned. He had no particular desire to continue the walk, however.

They returned to headquarters.

*****

Larry reviewed the incident report.

“Sir, this attack is rated Class S,” Cass said, presenting findings alongside several members of the security team. “The assets deployed were all high-grade operatives. The snipers escaped. The two who were detained are well-known in the shadow world — code names Punishment and Profane. Combined international bounty of three million US dollars. Their record shows no failed operations prior to today.”

“Understood.”

Larry looked at the classification and understood what it meant. Someone had committed real resources and genuine intent to this. Without Su Jie, he had no certainty about what the outcome would have been.

He sat with that for a moment.

The security team read the room and withdrew to discuss next steps among themselves.

Su Jie settled into a chair in the corridor outside and returned to his daily practice — as though what had happened was a minor interruption and nothing more.

To him, it essentially was. But in terms of what it had established in Larry’s mind — that was now settled permanently. With Su Jie present, safety was absolute. The man was simply capable of whatever the situation required.

*****

The next day was the Zhang family annual assembly.

Larry had agreed to attend quietly. The attack had not changed his word.

Early that morning, he set out with Su Jie, Cass, Sawai Takeji, and Smith for the Zhang family ancestral hall.

The annual assembly was ordinarily closed to outsiders, but this gathering included significant business discussions that warranted the presence of a small number of important guests.

Larry was the most important of them by a considerable distance.

This was also central to why Zhang Manman had worked so hard to place Su Jie as Larry’s bodyguard. Larry attending — with a bodyguard she had placed — was a statement of her standing that no one in the Zhang family could ignore. Whatever they thought of her gender, she had delivered this.

When the car reached the gates of the ancestral hall, a delegation came out to receive them.

Su Jie immediately picked out the man at the front: middle-aged, smooth-faced, no beard, his age impossible to read — anywhere between thirty and fifty. He wore a suit, and everything about his bearing suggested a person at the center of operations. By contrast, Larry had arrived in jeans and a down jacket, looking like a junior employee.

Larry’s approach to clothing had always been like this. He’d started as a programmer, and nothing about his success had changed the habit.

That’s Zhang Hongyuan, Su Jie noted, matching the face to the Zhang family records he had studied. The man who controlled the family’s finances, administration, and personnel — everything that Zhang Hongqing, the Dragon Head, had delegated.

Behind Zhang Hongyuan came a cluster of the Zhang family’s core figures. The moment Larry stepped from the vehicle, they moved forward quickly — handshakes, greetings, the particular energy of people receiving someone genuinely important.

After the handshake, Zhang Hongyuan’s eyes moved briefly across the group accompanying Larry. They paused on Su Jie for a fraction of a second, then withdrew.

But in that fraction, Su Jie felt it clearly.

Not hostility.

Killing intent.

The distinction mattered. Zhang Hongyuan already knew who Su Jie was. That was inevitable — the elder generation had been moving against him since his arrival, and information traveled in families. Everything would have reached Zhang Hongyuan.

Su Jie had already learned the history — the confrontation between his father and the Zhang family, the marriage transfer to Zhang Hongyuan that had triggered everything, the pursuit, the intervention. Straightforward enough in outline.

But looking now at Zhang Hongyuan — smooth-skinned, beardless, that quality of coldness in his bearing, an air that didn’t sit quite right in the way Su Jie had been trained to read people —

Father hurt him badly that day. Badly enough to sustain a feud this severe. Broken bones would heal. What kind of injury would justify this depth of killing intent….

A thought surfaced, tentative but insistent.

Unless Father didn’t just break bones. Unless he… made Zhang Hongyuan a eunuch.