Guo's pattern was three knocks. I had seen it in his positioning, in the angles he'd chosen, in the patience of a commander who understood that the most effective traps were sequential.

  The first knock came as smoke.

  South-west. A building was burning. Lao Chen's forge, maybe, or the storage shed beside it. It wasn't qi-fire but physical fire, set deliberately.

  Wei saw the smoke from the east gate. His head turned. The reflex I'd watched for months — the boy who could not see a problem without running toward it.

  He looked at the settlers. The men at the wall. He pointed south. "Go."

  Four of them went toward the fire, with buckets and tools.

  First knock, first response. Wei had split his force.

  The second knock came as screaming.

  From the north — civilians, high-pitched and panicked, the sound humans produce when they believe they are about to die. Two of Guo's people had pushed around the barrier's edge — the gap where the northern wall met the hillside, where I had not extended the signs because the hillside itself was the defense.

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  They had found the gap.

  Civilians in the north quarter. Two families.

  Wei heard it.

  He looked east where the remaining attackers were still pressing. Looked north to the screaming.

  He ran north.

  Alone. The settlers at the east gate were not enough to hold without him but enough to stand.

  Second knock, second response. Wei was now separated from the group.

  I watched from the wall. I could see Guo's architecture — the sequential isolation, the deliberate splitting, the boy being drawn further from safety with each response. I could see it and I could see Wei running into it because running toward the problem was what Wei did.

  He reached the north quarter and engaged. Two sect-cultivators against a fourteen-year-old boy on depleted reserves. He was faster than they expected. Always faster. He disabled one in seven seconds, drove the other back beyond the barrier line.

  The civilians were safe. Shaking and crying but alive.

  Wei turned back toward the east gate.

  And then—

  In the east — beyond the gate, fifty paces into the open ground.

  A moaning.

  A figure hunched in the undergrowth, clutching their side. The posture of a wounded person who had crawled to safety.

  Wei stopped.

  The distance was fifty paces from the gate, eighty from his position — open ground, beyond the barriers.

  A person in pain.

  The third knock.