Hong Kong variety show: The mastermind behind the scenes is emerging.

News of Ah Gou's arrest quickly reached the inner walls of the walled city. Less than fifteen minutes after the handcuffs were put on, word was already circulating in several alleys hidden deep within the walled city.

The way messages were relayed in the Walled City was very traditional—not by phone, but by people running around.

A young boy in slippers ran from Lung Chin Road to Lung Shing Lane, and shouted at a third-floor window at the alley entrance: "Brother Gou has been apprehended by the police!"

Half a face peeked out of the window, paused for a moment, and then withdrew. Less than two minutes later, another man ran down the stairs, shirtless, clutching a t-shirt he hadn't had time to put on, and ran towards the triangle area.

The message traveled through the alley, taking several turns, and with each new voice it passed through, it added a layer of fear.

When Ba Dong received the message, he was squatting in the stairwell on the third floor of a tenement building in the western district, eating a char siu bun.

The steamed buns were bought from Chen's downstairs, two cents each. The dough was stiff and the char siu filling was so little you could barely taste it. He stuffed the last bite into his mouth, puffed out his cheeks twice, then crumpled the old newspaper that had been used to line the bun into a ball and threw it against the wall.

"Ah Gou is dead too," the henchman who came to deliver the news said in a low voice, crouching at the corner of the stairs. "They caught him as soon as he got to the registration office. People from Longjin Road said the cops have a list, and none of the people on it will escape."

Ba Dong swallowed the char siu in his mouth, didn't look at him, and just wiped his hand on his pants.

Those were hands with bulging veins, disproportionately large knuckles, and thick calluses on the base of the thumb and knuckles.

"Where are the others?"

"A few stubborn guys tried to pry open the barbed wire in the back alley and sneak out, but they were all caught red-handed." The henchman swallowed hard, his eyes filled with fear. "The plainclothes officers just disguised themselves as civilians queuing up and blended into the crowd. Anyone who dared to take even half a step back had a gun pressed against their waist, not even giving them a chance to draw their weapon!"

Ba Dong stood up, dusted off his knees, and then stomped out a few cigarette butts scattered at his feet.

He walked to the skylight in the stairwell and looked out—outside the window were densely packed self-built tin sheds, piled up one on top of another, cutting the sky into several irregular gray fragments.

From this vantage point, you can just see the very last bit of the queue at the Longjin Road registration point; the crowd is surging, like a gray tide slowly inching its way towards the registration table. Outside the cordon, a row of military uniforms stands ramrod straight. There's no sign of them leaving.

"Call Aaron and Fatty Hong." He closed the ventilator, turned and went upstairs. "Let's go back to the base on the rooftop first."

"Back to the rooftop?"

"Do you have a better idea?"

The younger brother nodded: "Yes, boss."

Ba Dong, a South Vietnamese—more precisely, a native of Da Nang, South Vietnam—was dragged away from the fields by conscription officers when North Vietnamese tanks rolled over the Quang Tri provincial defense line in 1972, and thrown into the hellish battlefield of the 3rd Marine Battalion.

Later, the war ended and North Vietnam was gone, but he learned some "skills" in the army—how to disassemble an American-made M16, how to disassemble and repack the munitions in a 40-foot container, and how to use the fishery company's customs declaration to transport the container from Cam Ranh Bay to the other side of the South China Sea.

With these skills, Pa Dong quickly made a fortune after arriving in Hong Kong.

Compared to Ah Gou, a nobody who "only knows how" to rob gold bars, Ba Dong's status in the underworld is clearly several levels higher. For example, Ba Dong not only has the identity cards that Ah Gou longs for, but he even has several different national ones.

He chose to settle in the ruins of the walled city purely as an excellent cover for arms and heavy smuggling operations.

However, no matter how powerful he had been in the past, in the face of the police's meticulously planned encirclement, he was now trapped here, just like those losers he had once looked down upon.

Ba Dong, along with his underlings, pondered the current situation as they walked towards the rooftop on the seventh floor.

In reality, this tenement building originally had only six floors. The so-called "seventh floor" was just a group of shacks illegally built by the residents using rusted iron sheets and wooden planks.

The shack extends outwards from the edge of the rooftop, leaving a narrow passageway in the middle, piled with discarded appliances, rusty folding chairs, and several plastic buckets that haven't been washed for who knows how many years.

Pushing open the creaking iron door to the rooftop, a musty smell and a strange stench hit him—a smell he had never gotten used to, no matter how long he had lived in the walled city.

Aaron and Fat Hong were already on the rooftop. The former was smoking against the cement railing at the edge of the rooftop, while the latter was squatting on the ground, idly prying at the cement blocks in the gaps between the floor tiles with a rusty wire.

Ba Dong walked up to them and briefly explained the situation at the registration point outside.

"The cops came prepared," he said, taking a Marlboro from Aaron, lighting it with the lighter Aaron offered, and taking a deep drag. "I don't know how they found out, but it's clear they know us inside and out."

Fei Hong tossed aside the piece of cement he had finally pried out and looked up: "So what do we do now? Force our way in?"

"Go downstairs and see how many cops are standing at the intersection before you say that," Aaron spat into his cigarette butt.

"If it doesn't work during the day, then try at night—"

"Tonight?" Ba Dong tucked a cigarette between his fingers, letting out a very soft, cold laugh. "Do you think they'll leave tonight? Or do you think they'll miss your photos?"

Fei Hong remained silent; he knew Ba Dong was telling the truth. Those cops knew exactly what was engraved on the gold ring Ah Gou hid in the treasure chest under his bed, so there was no way they didn't know what Fei Hong looked like.

Aaron stubbed out his cigarette, wiped his hands on his pants, and after a long pause, whispered, "If all else fails... we'll take all the stuff out of the warehouse, grab a few big ones, tie up a bunch of people, and force the police to let us through—"

"And then?" Ba Dong didn't let him finish. He tapped the rooftop railing twice slowly with his large knuckles.

"Tie up a bunch of people, force the police to release them, and then where do you go? Do you think the police will give you a plane to fly to Cam Ranh Bay?" Ba Dong's tone was full of disappointment. "Haven't you seen armies besiege cities in North Vietnam? It's an impenetrable fortress outside now. The more you make a fuss, the faster you'll die."

Aaron leaned against the outer wall of the tin shack and remained silent.

"Don't rush," Ba Dong stubbed out his cigarette on the railing, turned and walked towards the rooftop door. "Have someone go and find out who's the best at gathering information—"

As he spoke, he pushed open the rooftop door.

Then he stopped.

At the other end of the rooftop, dozens of cold figures had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

More than twenty elite assassins, dressed in black tactical special operations uniforms and wearing heavy bulletproof vests, lined up in a row.

The black tactical goggles under the helmet were pulled down to their lowest point, obscuring all facial features, making them look like a group of ghosts emerging from the abyss of hell.

Everyone was armed with an MP5, the slings taut over their shoulders, and the muzzles of their guns were all pointed at them.

The wind suddenly picked up at the edge of the rooftop, causing an old T-shirt hanging on a wire and left unattended to slap against the metal wall.

Because of Ba Dong's obstruction, A Long and Fei Hong behind him had not yet seen the other side, but they could read all the information they needed to know from Ba Dong's sudden stop and instinctively reached for their waists.

"Don't move!" Ba Dong was sweating profusely and quickly ordered his men.

"...Who are you?"

A series of footsteps came from behind the crowd. The sound was strange, with one footstep light and the other heavy, as if it belonged to someone with a limp.

The gunmen's formation parted to the sides like a tide, making way for a passage.

Feng Yuxiu came out.

Today he wore a navy blue stand-up collar jacket, zipped all the way up, the collar pressed tightly against the sides of his neck. The scars on his flat face were still the same, the old ones hadn't faded, and the new ones hadn't appeared, only the look in his eyes was more somber than before.

"The brewery, Cohen."

Upon hearing this name, Ba Dong's pupils contracted sharply, and he could no longer muster any thought of resistance.

Ba Dong had lived on Hong Kong Island for a long time, long enough to witness firsthand how the behemoth that was the distillery was born little by little and rose to dominate the underworld. He knew that with the distillery's capabilities, crushing him would be no more difficult than crushing an ant.

"I don't remember when I offended the distillery's superiors."

"There's no grudge. It's just that some people don't want you bunch of cancerous tumors to leave the city," Feng Yuxiu said, sheathing his dagger in his belt, switching the steel cable to his other hand and weighing it in his hand. He looked at Ba Dong and said, "I heard you're a Muay Thai expert, is that right?"

Ba Dong didn't admit it, but slowly pulled his hand back from the rooftop door frame and loosened his wrist.

"I learned a little in the army, but I'm not exactly an expert."

Feng Yuxiu smiled, revealing his two rows of front teeth that had been worn down from years of clenching his teeth. The tug on his face caused dense crow's feet to appear at the corners of his eyes.

"I've looked you up. You're a three-time consecutive close combat champion from the 3rd Battalion of the Da Nang Marine Corps. Since coming to Hong Kong, you've used your full strength in four fights. You're proficient in Muay Thai, Krav Maga, and knife fighting."

Ba Dong didn't say anything, but simply pulled the old T-shirt that had been blown from the clothes rack and was curled up on the wire by the door frame and threw it aside, then stretched his shoulders. His cervical spine made a crisp snapping sound.

"What do you want?"

"Defeat me, and you and your men can leave the stronghold." Feng Yuxiu slowly unfastened the bracelet in his hand, put it in his pocket, and pointed with his index finger at the men behind Ba Dong. "These twenty-odd guns won't stop you."

Ba Dong remained silent for a moment, his gaze sweeping over Feng Yuxiu's dead face, then moving to the group of assassins behind him who were like steel-willed warriors, and finally settling on the despairing faces of his subordinates, A Long and Fei Hong.

Then, he actually let out a strange laugh.

There was no resentment or fear in that laughter, only the ferocity and madness of a cornered beast fighting for survival.

He knew Cohen's reputation—everyone in Hong Kong's underworld with even a little knowledge of martial arts knew this martial arts fanatic. He also knew that although Cohen was extremely ruthless, he always kept his word.

He reached out and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt.

"Then come on."

"Very good," Feng Yuxiu's eyes flashed with a bloodthirsty light as he slowly adopted the starting stance of Muay Thai. "Today, we will determine who is superior and who is inferior, and we will also decide who lives and who dies."

……

In the fifth minute, Ba Dong lay on the rooftop, his limbs twitching, blood foam coming out of his mouth, and his eyes open.

Feng Yuxiu stood up and wiped the few pieces of skin stuck to his knuckles on his pants. He glanced down at Ba Dong one last time, picked up the bracelet that had fallen to the ground and wrapped it back around his wrist, then turned and walked towards the rooftop door, waving as he passed the line of assassins.

"Take the others back."

More than twenty gun barrels simultaneously closed, aiming at Aaron, Fat Hong, and the other henchmen still frozen on the rooftop and in the stairwell.

Some people slung submachine guns behind their backs, pulled out straps from their waists and fastened them to their wrists, while others pulled them up one by one and pushed them toward the stairwell.

The entire process was devoid of unnecessary words or footsteps, save for the few clicks as the gun sling was fastened to the bulletproof vest on the shoulder.

Below the rooftop on Longjin Road, the loudspeaker was still repeating the same old registration notice, and the sunlight was already making the tin shed scorching hot.

The worn-out T-shirt, lying in the dust, was finally lifted by a gust of wind, flew over the cold barbed wire, and slowly flew out of the village.