Chapter 23
Warm Hospitality
Heigangcheng, Renwang Commandery
A splash of cold water woke Yasuko up with a start. The lingering chill raised goosebumps from head to toe. She was in a dank, dimly lit room. It was cold, nearly freezing. Her stuttering breath came out in little puffs of steam through chattering teeth.
She had been stripped of all her equipment and was wearing nothing but thin, dingy prisoner's clothes—basically pajamas—which were plastered to her body because of the water. Speaking of which, looking down at herself, she saw that her prosthetics had been stripped off as well, so there was no pretending she was a male any more.
She was suspended from the ceiling by handcuffs, palms out, so it was putting extra strain on her shoulders. As a matter of fact, she was feeling quite a bit of pain all over. Her captors hadn't exactly been gentle with her while she was out. Speaking of which...
Thanks to her reflexes being so highly trained, she was able to tense up her abdominal muscles just before someone jabbed her in the stomach with a metal club. It helped blunt the pain a little, but that didn't stop it from hurting. A gasp of pain choked in her throat.
"Awake now, are we?" a man's voice asked. "Just in time to answer some questions."
Yasuko's eyes came into focus and she saw the man standing directly in front of her. Average height and build. Mid to late thirties. Maybe older if he was high-ranking enough for juvenation. Unlikely.
Soldier. Field dress. No insignia. Obviously an interrogator. There were two fairly beefy soldiers behind him, one of them still holding the bucket used to splash her.
"Let's start with something simple," the interrogator said. "Who are you?"
Nothing she could say was likely to improve her situation, so she decided to see where saying nothing would get her. It was hard to focus because of the cold anyway. Her shivering was making her handcuffs rattle against the pipe she was hanging from, which was only slightly louder than her still chattering teeth.
The interrogator adjusted his glasses and said, "Silence will not benefit you any. It will not protect whoever sent you here. I will get the information I want out of you. In exchange for your cooperation, I will see to it that your end is quick and less... dishonorable."
Well, wasn't he a gentleman?
"You clearly have a patron in high places," the interrogator said. "When we ran your blood and prints, the record that came up was obviously a fake, but we were not able to uncover the real file. Either it has been deleted or you were never in our databases to begin with. Needless to say, either case is extraordinary.
"During the examination of your body, you can imagine our surprise when we discovered your rather extensive prosthetics. Good enough to fool the assembly line medics at inprocessing. There are precious few with the ability and the resources to craft something like that. Going further to what was under the prosthetics, we found signs of a courtier's beauty treatments but also the conditioning reserved for our elite soldiers. Then there is of course your equipment."
The interrogator was no common thug, that much was clear. She shouldn't have been surprised that a man of Prince Wusheng's reputation had the cream of the crop working under him. This man would stop at nothing to get the answers he sought and he no doubt had more than enough training and experience to get what he wanted.
Yasuko was confident in her ability to take the pain, but did she really want to risk it? She needed to play for time. Maybe clamming up wasn't the way to go. If she could string him along, that might give her the time she needed.
"If you've figured out that much, you don't need me," she said.
The interrogator gave her a faint hint of a smile.
"So you can speak, Baihu-xiaojie."
Yasuko knew the Five Grand Armies were named after the Si Xiang. The Si Xiang plus Huanglong, of course. Why they weren't called the Wu Xiang instead, she didn't know. Anyway, the Grand Army of the West was named after Baihu and perhaps that was what the interrogator was referring to, mocking her for trying and failing to infiltrate the army. It might have been something else, too, something vulgar. Maybe both.
"I have to wonder why anyone would go to so much trouble to make a girl pass for a male to assassinate the General. And then there is the nature of your failure. It would seem that you meant to activate the overdrive function of your suit, but instead of being further amplified, you were shocked into unconsciousness instead. Either one of your employer's men has betrayed you or you were set up by your employer himself... herself?"
He was fishing. She wasn't going to bite.
Yasuko wouldn't put it past Prince Sturla to turn on her, but not before he'd gotten all the use out of her he could. If he wanted her dead, there were a million far easier ways to do it than this. Perhaps the interrogator thought that by insinuating her employer had betrayed her she would roll over on him. Little did he realize that she had no real loyalty to her employer, but so long as they wanted information out of her, they'd keep her alive and so long as she was alive, she had a chance of getting out.
The interrogator nodded to the soldier on his right, who then hit Yasuko again with the metal rod. They hadn't even broken any bones yet. They were going to have to do better than that.
"It would seem that pain is not an effective technique," the interrogator said, "but you need not worry. We have other techniques at our disposal." He nodded to the soldiers. "Get her down."
Really? They were going to be that careless? One soldier held her ankles while the other undid her handcuffs to get her off the pipe. Did they think that would be enough to stop her? She demonstrated how wrong they were by smashing the one soldier in the face with her elbow the moment her arm was free. As he staggered back holding his injured face, she fell hard on the floor. The other soldier was still holding her ankles, so she started kicking in an effort to get loose. The soldier lost his grip on one leg, which she then used to sweep his ankle with her heel. That was enough to make him let go of the other leg.
"What are you doing!?" the interrogator demanded. "Hold her down!"
Yasuko had already sprung to her feet and punched the soldier who was holding her legs in the face to keep him off balance. The one she hit in the face before was bleeding from the nose, which she probably had broken, made a blind charge to grab her, but she ducked out of the way, only to get grabbed by the collar by Ankles. She seized him by the wrist with one hand and smashed in his elbow with the other. That made him let go.
Nose picked up the metal rod. Yasuko dodged his first swing and the second one brained Ankles, knocking him out cold, maybe even killing him. Yasuko snatched up the bucket to block his next swing, then hit him in the face, aggravating his previous injury. She hit him a few more times to keep him staggered before following up with a palm heel strike to the chin that laid him out.
The interrogator came at her with an autoinjector, which she barely missed. She hit him upside the head with the bucket, knocking off his glasses, then grabbed his hand and shoved the autoinjector into his own neck. While he was busy stumbling around, she picked up the metal rod and hit Nose several times to make sure he wasn't going to get up again, then turned her attention to the interrogator. He was holding his neck, trying to get away, but his steps were already becoming unsteady.
Yasuko cracked him on the wrist, causing him to cry out in pain. She took out his knee next, dropping him to the floor. He still tried to crawl off, so Yasuko put her foot down on his back to hold him in place.
"Where d'ya think you're goin'?" she asked.
He made a pitiful little whimper. It would figure that someone like him would be such a weakling when it came down to it. Good at dishing out pain, not so good at taking it.
She turned him over, then sat down on his stomach, pinning his arms with her feet. Though his face was contorted in pain, his eyes had a dazed look to them.
"What was in that thing?" she asked. "Some kinda truth serum?"
The interrogator nodded, moaning a little as he did.
"Powerful stuff?"
He nodded again.
"Well, good, 'cause I've got some questions for you."