"I asked a stupid question."
When someone can casually hoist a several-hundred-kilogram loom and then fly you, a grown man, into the sky… does it really matter who they are?
You still think you could get back at them?
Reality isn't a comic book; people with superpowers don't follow that idiotic "no-kill" rule.
With impeccable poise, Sloan drew his sidearms and casually tossed them to the floor.
Whatever.
At least this way he could die with some dignity.
Li Pu rather admired Sloan for that.
But the formalities still had to be observed; otherwise he wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of capturing the man from so far away.
He brought out Fox and the Kross father-and-son pair, untying the ropes and zip-ties binding them.
Next he produced four plastic chairs and had them sit in a row.
Kross deliberately placed his son Wesley in the corner.
He looked at Li Pu: "My son has nothing to do with this. You have a child too—let him go."
Sloan, seated beside him, let out a snort.
"How could he have nothing to do with it?"
Sloan leaned forward slightly, looking past Kross toward Wesley.
"Kid, your heart often races, and even though you take beta-blockers exactly as the Doctor says, they don't help, right?
Because you're terrified one surge of excitement could kill you, you're obsessed with your health.
Every day you eat a sesame-crusted salmon-and-veggie sandwich, no smoking, no drinking, and you won't touch the heavy stuff.
You even ration sex with your girlfriend, so she's cuckolded you a dozen times over.
You know it, and it makes you furious, but the anti-anxiety meds you swallow every day leave you too numb to get angry.
And you're on those meds because you think the stress is unbearable.
Sometimes when you look at things, they either slow to a crawl or suddenly zoom in and enlarge…"
Perhaps thanks to racial talent, Sloan spat the words at machine-gun speed, tongue never tripping.
Before Kross could cut in, the old man had unloaded all of it on Wesley.
And every word was true; the bullied-looking Wesley kept nodding.
"Sloan!"
Kross glared at the old Black man beside him but made no move.
"Eh, don't mind me. If you two really need to fight, I don't mind."
Li Pu folded his arms, utterly indifferent.
Sloan didn't care either; he only shot Kross a taunting glance: "Really? You sure?"
The Brotherhood of Assassins shared many skills, but each member also had a personal specialty depending on innate gifts.
Without guns, in close combat Kross might not beat this old man Sloan.
Seeing Kross stay silent, Sloan turned back to Wesley: "Boy, you're not sick at all; those symptoms are your gift.
Your heart races because it's built to race!
Unlike ordinary people, yours can theoretically hit four hundred beats per minute.
Anyone else would be dead at that rate.
You feel anxious and slightly exhausted because your adrenaline output dwarfs normal levels.
Your blood is flooded with it; besides letting your body absorb it, you need an outlet if you want to feel normal.
In fact, with your physique you could crush most athletes and haul in several Olympic golds.
…All of it comes from your father.
And he should have told you all this, but instead he hid everything."
The torrent of information short-circuited Wesley's brain; he muttered, "My father? A gift?"
Sloan's goal achieved, a smug grin spread across his face.
Watching the old Black man, Li Pu thought he was plenty vicious.
Even knowing he might die in a moment, he had to make someone else suffer more before the end.
Kross had been driven into a trap of self-justification.
"Wesley, don't listen to his nonsense. I've watched over you since you were born."
"But you never told the boy he has Brotherhood talent—he's a natural-born assassin!"
Sloan countered at just the right moment.
"Shut up, you damn n—!"
Kross twisted and sprayed Sloan with spit.
"I won't let my child become a Brotherhood assassin, because you've twisted the Brotherhood ever since you started misreading the Loom of Fate!"
When he said that, Fox, seated on Sloan's other side and silent until now, suddenly looked at Sloan too.
By now Sloan no longer bothered to deny it; the old Black man was perfectly candid.
"Yes, damn right I misread that motherf***ing loom!
Because it gave my name.
Before that moment I'd devoted myself to the duty fate assigned us, never slack, never proud.
And what did I get? The Loom decided I had to die! Not just me— you, you, you—"
The more Sloan spoke, the angrier he got, eyes bloodshot as if a stroke might hit any second.
He pulled a stack of plastic bags from his suit pocket; each held a scrap of cloth and a tag.
Li Pu glanced over; the tags really did bear tiny print: "Sloan," "Kross," "Gunsmith," "Mr. X," "Repairman," "Fox," "Butcher."
"I carry them every moment because I fear one of you will kill me and none of you will know I protected everyone in the Brotherhood!
That thousand-year-old loom, faithfully served for a millennium, now wants to uproot us entirely!"
At that point Fox suddenly spoke: "The Loom is never wrong, Sloan. You taught me that."
The female assassin's face turned ice-cold.
"But are we supposed to just die? If our loyalty earns no least reward, why can't I claim repayment for every Brother and Sister!"
Li Pu couldn't stand listening any longer; he'd heard enough.
He basically had the gist of this twisted family drama, and if he didn't cut in soon he'd burst.
"Ahem…"
He faked a cough, drawing the assassins' attention.
"Loyalty that isn't absolute is absolutely disloyal."
First he hurled that "famous quote," leaving the silver-tongued Sloan choking, face scarlet.
Then Li Pu pointed at the loom he'd carried in and asked earnestly, "One small question: you really believe this thing is over a thousand years old?"
In truth, the moment he'd found the legendary Loom of Fate, Li Pu had begun to doubt.
"Haven't any of you ever gone to school?"
America's history spans only two hundred years!
Even if you claim this thing came from Old Europe, it's more advanced than the spinning jenny, right?
The jenny didn't appear until the eighteenth century!
If your Brotherhood had owned that machine a thousand years ago, why didn't you copy it and become the richest organization on Earth?
And, by the way, binary code was first set down by Leibniz.
If your order understood binary a millennium ago, how come no one ever used it to write Cybernetics, or invent a calculator, a computer—no offense, but has each generation of your Brotherhood suffered catastrophic IQ loss?
I'd originally invited Mr. Sloan here to ask about deciphering the loom's code.
Right now I just want to rant.
Was English the global language a thousand years ago?
You say you used binary to translate English letters and obey the loom's kill-orders—are you insane?
Even if it can encode Greek, Latin, French, what happens when it meets a logographic script?
If you claim the Brotherhood invented something like Unicode early on, fine, it can read Chinese—yet I still have one more question.
Mr. Sloan I'm not sure about, but Mr. Cross, Ms. Fox, plus 'Repairman', 'Butcher'… those are obviously codenames, not real names, right?
So you worship the loom as a god, but it doesn't even know your real names—only a bunch of nicknames?
And you kill on the basis of a nickname—what if you murder the wrong person?
Having vented every grievance, Li Pu instantly felt much better.
As his tirade ended, his System actually dinged and gave him a prompt.
[Host has voiced extensive reasonable doubts, exposing a century-old hoax. Reward: Intelligence +1 (12→13).]
Fine, thirteen sounds unlucky, but gaining a precious stat point just for ranting—what more could you ask for?
Li Pu felt even happier.
There's a saying: the total amount of joy in the World is constant; it can't be created or destroyed, only transferred from one person (or group) to another.
Li Pu was delighted, but the three assassins of the Brotherhood who understood his rant were anything but.
Sloan, who had just cursed the Loom as 'sour radish—don't eat', cracked first.
The old Black man shot out of his chair, no longer cowed by Li Pu's pressure, and lunged toward the Loom.
Though he had tampered with its orders, turning a Brotherhood of ideals into a guild of hired killers, Sloan had still maintained the Loom with ten—no, twelve—percent dedication.
Crude as it sounds, though he called the machine a bitch, she was the white moonlight in the old man's heart.
Sloan's 'love' for the machine, twisted as it was, ran deeper than any he'd felt for a lover.
'Impossible, impossible!'
He circled the Loom like a mule at the grindstone, then glared at Li Pu.
'I've spent nearly my whole life maintaining her. I know her structure better than any lover's body—every screw, every thread…'
A dyed-in-the-wool villain, Sloan now looked pathetic, a beaten cur.
'Did you ever check the raw Materials?'
Unable to watch him suffer, Li Pu put the old man out of his misery.
'I visited your mill; it's still running. But New York doesn't grow cotton—where do those yarns come from?
This loom is like a computer: if someone tampers with the input yarn, can they get the output they want?'
Sloan froze, then yanked two spindles from the Loom.
Like a madman he ran his palms along the cotton, eyes wide, comparing the strands.
'Oh no! I'm such a fool!'
He wailed, clutching his head and squatting on the floor.
He saw that even yarn from the same batch at the same mill varied in thickness.
'What's going on?' Cross and Fox hurried over, stunned.
'Aaaaargh—'
Sloan roared, snapped a spindle in two—and froze.
The cylinder had split along a glued seam.
Someone had reassembled it after slicing it lengthwise.
On the glued face he saw the same symbol printed on a dollar bill.
'Those bastards lied to the Brotherhood for generations, lied to me—I'll kill every last one of them!'
Sloan went berserk.
When your ideal is first shattered, then you cobble together a closed logic to protect your heart, only to learn that ideal was a deliberate lie—such a plot is more surreal than The Truman Show and just as unbearable.
'Unforgivable! I'll drown them all in shit!'
For revenge he would pay any price.
Red-eyed, Sloan turned to Li Pu: 'Please, let me live long enough to avenge this. Name your price—the Brotherhood—no, I still have plenty of clean money, take it all…'
Honestly, Li Pu hadn't expected this outcome.
After exposing the hoax, his first thought wasn't reward but the education of little Broly and little Koz.
Look at these super-assassins: power far beyond ordinary folk, yet fools for generations.
A bit of history, computer science, or basic logic would have let them see through the Loom.
As a parent you must make your kids go to school; never let them become educational dropouts.
Society's too complicated—when rich kids mess up someone covers for them, but how many second chances does an average family have?