As he turned around, he was greeted by a hollow, empty smile; one he was unfortunately already acquainted with.
"Bonan Matenon" the smile said kindly enough, but the overwhelming hint of menace was impossible to ignore. "You seem to be missing something." This was said without irony. The figure, of course spoke of Megan laying uselessly in the dust. However, this was not a threat. Not an immediate threat in any event. But he knew that he would need to use his takouba before this little exchange was complete. The way this figure spoke, the way he looked, and most of all, the way he moved, made him uncomfortable. No. That wasn't the right word. He had to admit it; he was scared. Back at the pub, his normal mortal blow, the one that had sent countless hollow people scattering headless had been as a troublesome to this figure as a light breeze. It was almost as if the blow had not come close to finding its mark…
Work had seemed as though it had been increasingly difficult lately. Most of the time it only took one quick swing; an almost imperceptible amount of energy and force for a profitable pay day. But sometimes he had had to gauge a little more force. Sometimes he had to correct his swing the moment before impact. Sometimes a mark he knew he had struck would have time to make a final lunge at him that it shouldn't have been able to make. Sure, the mark would fall, but instead of dying where it stood, he would have to move to avoid being struck by the falling body. And there had even been a time or two when he had been forced to strike twice. He always made it look easy, and anyone watching would have thought that he was deliberately toying with his quarry. He had even told himself that that was what he was doing at the time. But the truth was that he was having to try harder to complete the contracts he had been given lately.
Oddly enough, this was only in this province, and more specifically, in the northernmost sectors in the Northern Central (or NorCen) province. There were fewer people here than there were, say, in the South, and far less people than in the West. Pockets of settlement were sparse in NorCen, but when one came across a settlement, once usually found them to be teeming with people, and most of those people were of the seedier variety. No one went into the regions north of NorCen, so it was about as frontier as you could get. Thugs, prostas, gamblers, and assassins were all in abundance, and it was for this reason that most of his work was in this region. There was always someone who needed to be taken care of, or more likely, a group of people who needed to be taken care of. Just a few contracts ago, he had been paid very well to dispatch a den of almost 30 hollows. 27 hollows and one head, to be exact. The head always took a little extra effort, but you could spot a head a mile away, and you knew what to expect. But 5 of the hollows had been surprisingly fast and powerful, and the head… He shuddered at the thought of how close that one had been…
Even though most of his work lately had been in NorCen, he was always on the move, and had spent time in the South and East, and had even spent some time in the SouCen province over the last 2 years. And as he thought about it, his trouble dispatching contracts had been confined to his marks in NorCen. After "The Fall", people had been slow to come back to this part of the continent. The meteor had fallen in NorCen, but at the time of The Fall, that had seemed like a rather meaningless event. How could you worry about a falling rock when you had ten thousand people dying of starvation and war every month? Especially when that rock hit in the sticks, a hell hole with a total population of less than 25 thousand permanent residents. It might as well have been uninhabited, with maybe 1 person for every 5 square miles. Outside of NorCen, the hollows dropped like flies just as always, but he couldn't just decline contracts here where they were the most lucrative. What the hell were those people doing in NorCen before The Fall anyway? The region was rich with natural resources, but the continent was rich with natural resources, so no one ever saw a reason to wander into the badlands and face God-Knows-What just to make a dollar. And with the inherent greed of his countrymen, that was a strong statement indeed.
A gentle clearing of the throat brought him back to his current situation. The stranger had made the noise, but didn't seem to be paying any attention to him, which irritated him. Didn't this "person" know who he was? He was actually offended at the thought that someone who was to die at his hand wasn't paying him the proper respect. Then again, he didn't know how long he had been lost in thought.
It seemed as though this mysterious figure was waiting for something to happen. He made no movement except to occasionally shift his weight from one foot to the other, but he was obviously in no hurry to complete his business, whatever that was. Eventually, he spoke. "You must be Rien Xifeng. I've been looking for you for some time." Again the unsettling smile danced across his face. "Why is Megan laying there so unceremoniously in the dirt? She doesn't belong there. Go ahead. Pick her up."
"That smile of his starting to piss me off" Rien thought to himself as he edged toward his blade.
