112 A Black Bird (1/2)
As the leader of the team, Gu Shenwei now was faced with an embarrassing dilemma. The more he knew, the harder it was for him to make a decision. He worried that they would fall into the unknown enemies' trap if they continued to travel forward. Meanwhile, he was not sure that it was safe for them to retreat.
He did not know where the enemies were. In the meantime, he was afraid that they might have already been prepared for all the actions he might take.
Under such circumstances, making a choice was like gambling. One could never know the result when he threw the dice. If he were lucky, he would win and be widely regarded as a hero.
As the leader of the former Tattooed Arm Gang, Gu Shenwei had made many decisions back in East Castle during the gang wars. However, at that time, it had been easy for him to predict his enemies' actions since they were all trained by the same academies and tended to use similar techniques and tactics. Now, his enemies were complete strangers so he could not be so sure about his judgment.
”Should we go forward or turn back?”
Gu Shenwei felt anxious but still managed to keep a straight face. He could not tell his concerns to too many people in case his uneasy feeling disturbed the machetemen. He summoned Dao San and asked him several questions. The next morning, he made a plan.
As they were already a third of the way now, if they continued to travel on this road, in 4 or 5 days, they would be able to meet an outpost of the Iron Mountain Gang.
Given that, Gu Shenwei decided to continue to travel in this way, but he did not want to wait passively for another attack to arrive.
He chose three brown-belt assassins and five machetemen to form a spearhead group with himself. They would travel to the front to explore the way. After that, he asked Shangguan Ru to lead all the rest machetemen to protect the team. He also appointed Maid Lotus and Shangguan Yushi to assist Master Ru.
In fact, Shangguan Ru preferred to join the spearhead group, but she was also quite pleased to lead more than 20 machetemen.
What Gu Shenwei planned to do was not just exploring the way. He ordered the members of the spearhead group to ride as fast as they could and paid no attention to the situation along the way at all. Once, the machetemen noticed something unusual on the roadside, but he just asked them to neglect it and keep on going forward.
They traveled like this for two days and a night. During this period of time, they only took a few breaks to drink and eat and feed their horses. The machetemen were exhausted. They were surprised that the teenagers still looked alright.
For the brown-belt assassins, this was not a big deal. They had similar experiences during their gang wars. Back then, once they had closed their eyes to sleep, they would have been killed. All of them had once stayed awake for days without eating or drinking anything.
Finally, they saw a camp again. There were six dead roving bandits in the field. Gu Shenwei was pretty sure that they were not machetemen hired by Meng Mingshi.
The six corpses were arranged in a circle. They all lay on their backs with their soles toward an extinguished fire in the center. The blood spouting out from their chests and stomachs dyed the soil red. Seen from a distance, they appeared like a big blooming six-petal flower.
It seemed that the murderer had assassinated them without meeting any resistance, and this murder had cut every dead man's chest and stomach open again.
Seeing the dead bodies, the five machetemen turned pale and looked at their chief nervously.
Their young chief, who had seen countless dead bodies and murder scenes, was not disturbed by the dreadful scene at all. He despised the murder's act very much.
In his view, it was meaningless to create such wounds on dead bodies unless the murderer wanted to hide some clues in the corpses.
He got off his horse to carefully examine the bodies. He found a sharp piece of stone inside the stomach of a corpse. He was pretty sure that the murderer must have used this thing to cut the dead bandits' chests and stomachs, but he could not figure out what the murder tried to hide. After all, there were many kinds of kung fu in this world, which he had never seen.
The spearhead group left a mark in this camp to inform the team behind them that they had come to this place. After that, they continued to gallop forward.
Gu Shenwei had no idea how the murderer had killed the bandits, but he knew for sure that they did not die very long ago. That meant, now they were not very far away from their enemies.
On the second night of the spearhead group's journey, they saw a campfire again.
Gu Shenwei ordered the five machetemen to hide in the thick grass nearby with all their horses. He took the three brown-belt assassins to check the situation.
He discovered that even Liuhua was more reliable than Meng Mingshi's machetemen. He would instead ask them to hide and wait than assign them an important task.
The four brown-belt assassins made a detour around the camp to make sure that there was nobody else hiding around it. After that, they moved toward the campfire slowly, and then they stopped and disappeared in the grass about 20 steps away from the fire.
Gu Shenwei was disappointed since the people in the camp were apparently not the unknown enemies they were searching for.
Eight shabbily clothed men were sitting around the campfire quietly with their heads down. They all leaned their upper bodies against their unsheathed machetes. Every now and then, one of them would throw a piece of wood to the fire. They looked tired and dejected, like a group of hopeless ghosts.
Apparently, they were a group of poor and hungry roving bandits, who could only eat chunks of meat and drink bowls of wine in their dreams.
Gu Shenwei guessed that they might have already surpassed their enemies.
He prayed that the unknown enemies would not take this chance to attack the team behind them.
On second thought, he reckoned that the enemies who had carried out a series of carefully-planned assassinations probably would not attack the team so hastily.
Gu Shenwei began to assign tasks to the brown-belt assassins, which was an easy job. They had received the same training and could quickly understand Slave Huan's orders.
Gu Shenwei sent Liuhua to deliver his orders to the machetemen.
Soon the eight roving bandits were wakened up by the galloping horses. They hurriedly rushed to the road with machetes in their hands, wanting to rob the travelers. However, they could not stop the horses at all. Nine horses sped past them and nearly knocked one of them down.
The eight men vented their anger and frustration by shouting and brandishing their machetes for a while, and then they returned to sit around the campfire again. They angrily chatted for a moment and then fell silent. As time went by, they fell asleep one by one with nobody keeping watch at night.
According to Gu Shenwei's plan, the five machetemen would keep galloping forward for some time and then return to join the brown-belt assassins before dawn. He intended to confuse the unknown enemies by doing so.