Work Text:
DANGER
BANDITS
KEEP OUT
Words drawn in crimson on an aged wooden sign warded all travelers from the dirt road leading into the grove. One need only look to the trees – the markings of blades showed signs of struggle, weapons broken and beyond use laying abandoned in the undergrowth.
Within the neighboring towns and settlements, none dared to take a step beyond the sign. The disappearances noted among gossiping townsfolk were the only thing needed for all to give the area a wide berth. No soul that valued their coin as much as their life saw fit to prove the warning’s integrity.
Except one.
One whose bare feet strode with purpose unhindered by the dangers warned in the color of blood. Seen as brave to some. Suicidal to others. One constant remained certain, however.
Sifu Li Gho had been intrigued.
For territory to be marked because of bandits meant that a major merchant route was blocked off. Issues to trade don’t go unaddressed for long.
“Ki ki ki~”
She decided to humor these bandits. They were smart to take up residence here. Wide trees gave excellent cover. The uneven terrain made for a detriment against drawn carriages. Anyone running on foot wouldn’t fare that much better. If loose tree roots didn’t trip them down, the cleverly hidden vine traps made up for it.
Ambushers most likely, with seemingly a strong level of experience.
These thugs were clearly a dishonorable sort – robbing men and women blind and no sooner leaving them with a blade embedded in their backs.
Gho would have words with them, she decided.
Leisurely strolling along the path, she stopped where the foliage was thickest. A tail slipped from underneath her cloak and deftly grabbed the iron bo staff she kept strapped to her back. With a smirk across her hooded face, Gho clanged the edge of it against a nearby rock, the reverberating sound calling to figures who thought they could hide from her.
“Oki,” her casual chirp was followed by a fittingly jovial smile. “All that hiding will only get you so far! Especially when I know you’re there.”
Gho’s boisterous claim was met with silence.
“Come now, this isn’t any way to greet a guest is it?”
The uneasy calm was broken by the sharp sound of metal piercing wood. To Gho’s side, a dagger was found in the branch of a tree just behind her. A warning. Or perhaps more of an omen of events to come.
“Ki ki ki!” Gho only laughed. “An odd way to say ‘hello’.”
From her call, the rogues finally saw fit to reveal themselves. No less than ten, each of them surrounding her from all sides. Swords and daggers, assumedly stolen from guardsmen and militia, pointed at her from every angle.
The most grizzled looking of them stepped to her, his blade clutched loosely in his hand as he pointed it to her. A sign of overconfidence. Gho resisted the urge to scoff. It mattered not if a foe was outnumbered; any weakness found would be taken advantage of on the battlefield. His flimsy stance and footwork would’ve gotten him disarmed and disarmed in seconds.
He spoke in the native common tongue. A single phrase he repeated as he stepped closer. Something along the lines of…soul…render? Offender?
Sooo…suuu.
“Oki?... Ah, surrender!” Gho tittered out loud. “I see whoever taught you how to hold a sword taught you how to speak!”
The smugness in his face melted. The tension in the air grew thick, as though they all received a grim premonition of the events to come.
A breeze of wind cut through the fragile quiet.
He was as predictable as the weather. The bandit leader bounded as he moved to slice her in two – if that slovenly gait was meant to do anything of the sort.
He might as well have been moving in slow motion.
“Ki ki ki,”
Like the swiftest arrow, her elbow shot out from her cloak, reinforced by her anchored footing. The blow connected with the miscreant’s face – specifically his nose – sending him staggering to the ground, dazed.
There was a moment of pause as the rest of the bandits watched their leader in shock as if he’d been struck by lightning. His sword fell second, not a single drop of blood marring it.
“Dreadful posture! If you were in the Golden Army at the Siege of Bolanhui Temple, you would’ve been cut down before swinging your sword, oki oki!”
The rest of them waited for no order.
With a cheeky smirk, Gho let them come. The closest one charged from her side – simple and straightforward. He aimed to skewer her with his dagger, eyes burning with conviction. She could admire that.
To a fault.
A drape of black soon hindered his vision, stopping the thug in his tracks. As he fought to remove the cover from his face, he was standing face to face (or rather face to chest) with something he could not have expected.
Snowy white fur was found above all else. Her figure was feminine yet lined with potent muscle that remained visible from the surprising amount of skin her kasaya robe revealed. She might have still been mistaken for a peculiarly hairy human if it weren’t for the tail extending from her lower back, wrapped around her staff.
It pointed to one thing alone, as pointed out by one of the onlooking men:
“Beastkin!”
That, she understood.
Because it was true.
“Okikiki!” Gho chirped having forced herself into his face. “What? Have you been living under rocks for so long that you forgot what monkeys look like?”
She flipped in place, her energetic grin not once leaving her face. The bandit stumbling on his own two feet to move away from her did not share this same joviality.
Her hair was a wild untamed mane, unbefitting of her traditional-looking garb. From the eyes of the bandit group, however, it was plain to see that her origins were meaningless to them.
A smaller party went behind a spearman. Gho’s face lit somewhat. The spear was a weapon of warriors - of armies yet at a glance, his seemed devoid of the withers of true battle. She would see to fixing that.
The spearman moved to strike.
She bent effortlessly under a stab that would’ve skewered her. The weapon moved to sweep under her but failed to account for the powerful tail moving up and out of reach. Incapacitating attacks that ensured victims would remain helpless on the ground. He was clever, she gave him that.
She decided to match cleverness with cleverness. His face ran aghast with surprise when his spear was intercepted - not with her hands, but with her feet. In a manner appropriate to her inhuman form, Gho was aloft on her tail.
“Impressive! Though you seem to be lacking something.” She was able to casually throw the weight of the bandit’s spear aside. Her feet planted to the ground, on either side of the staff that remained wrapped within her tail.
A simple twist of her waist brought the harder end towards-
“AAGH!”
He fell flat to his back clutching a bruised shin.
“…Oh yes! Skill!”
The small crowd that had gathered behind him rightfully lost their nerve as their anchor fell. A change of tactics was not wanted; it was demanded.
Amid the confusion, a sneaky one struck from behind, his dagger aimed at her back.
She spared him no glance, only to disappear seconds later. Granted not even a moment’s pause to register his failure, he wondered why his shoulders suddenly felt heavier. Gho’s lively chitter rang just above him.
“A blind man can win any fight if his enemies were as noisy as you!”
The bandit felt the air ripped from his lungs. The unknown weight upon his shoulders seemed to be pulling his entire body upward like a sack of vegetables. His world shifted, going from the startled eyes of his fellow men to the orange sky. He was floating. Weightless in frozen time. His gaze momentarily shifted upward to discover the source of this phenomenon.
The demon monkey gazed down at him with a nightmarish grin.
Deft primate feet held him in a vice. Her arms crossed, unneeded for the menial task of carrying him upwards. His face was frozen in shock before resigning to his fate as the unwelcoming ground steadily closed in.
The impact sent the world back into motion.
Gho chuckled smugly, standing above the unconscious bandit she had just flipped to the ground. “Such poor form! Fighting you might just make me worse!”
Any semblance of superiority was diminished from the leader’s face. He looked to his remaining highwaymen, still outnumbering her yet that fact began to matter less. With each display of her raw skill, her unflinching smile grew further in menace.
His men made the only reasonable choice moments before he could give the order. The small gang dispersed without a second thought.
Another mistake.
Scattering did nothing. Her gleeful chittering may as well have been the cackling laughter of a banshee, hunting them down one by one.
The blur of white and black dispatched them one by one – a sword holder tripped up on his own two feet before the force of Gho’s foot brought him back to the ground front-first. Another had the misfortune of receiving blow between the eyes from her staff. He didn’t bother getting back up as her tail swept his feet.
The stragglers that witnessed the carnage around them gave up on the spot, dropping their weapons and to their knees.
Gho stood among a pile of beaten men.
“Oki…”
Her eyes set on the leader, having since not recovered from the bloodied nose he had suffered. Fear struck his face, unable to pick himself back up like an insect struggling to escape a spiderweb. He was unable to do anything about the foot that kept him trapped in place.
“I believe I know of a way to deal with you bandits.”
--
“Ki ki ki! Faster!”
The best time for a run was the very edge of sunrise as Gho was dead set on. Old folklore once declared the rays of the emerging sun to be the arrows of the mythical archer Tai-Yiyang that infused the first thing hit with life-giving energies.
Whether any truth could be found in that story was uncertain but Gho’s morning routine reflected upon it.
Perhaps too much, much to the chagrin of her “pupils”.
What felt like long agonizing years was condensed into mere hours, scaling through mountain cliffs. One could have seen the mounting strain of climbing crags as a test of endurance in of itself.
That was before acknowledging the rocks Gho tied to their backs.
Fittingly, the massive boulder thrice her size did almost nothing to slow the ecstatic monkey down.
“Oki! Hurry, my new students! We won’t get the most out of the sunrise unless we’re all properly warmed up, oki!”
May Tai-Yiyang have mercy on their souls.