Tao Zi shrank back, his dark eyes wide with panic.

Zhāo Yàn crossed his arms, his tails swaying dangerously. "You have a very strange way of showing affection, firing poisoned arrows at children."

"The arrow was a warning shot! To scatter the lowlanders!" the scarred leader insisted, dropping to one knee in the dirt. He looked directly at Tao Zi, placing a hand over his heart in a dramatic, sweeping gesture of loyalty.

"Young Master," the jaguar rasped, his voice dripping with sudden reverence. "We are the true loyalists of the Jade Jaguar Clan. We survived the coup five years ago. We have been searching the continent for you. We came to rescue you from these savages and return you to your rightful throne in the southern jungles!"

Tao Zi blinked. He looked at the kneeling man, a spark of desperate, aching hope flickering in his terrified eyes. Loyalists? People from his home? People who hadn’t forgotten him?

"You......you survived?" Tao Zi whispered, taking a tiny, hesitant step forward.

"Tao Zi, don’t!" Zhēn warned, tugging on his arm.

"Yes, Young Master!" the leader cried, tears welling in his eyes. "Your nursemaid sent word before she passed. We are here to serve you. Please, come with us. Let us take you home."

Han Shān frowned, his icy aura dimming slightly. He looked at Mo Xiao. If these were truly the boy’s surviving kin, it wasn’t their place to keep an heir from his people.

"Is this true?" Mo Xiao demanded, his voice stern but less murderous.

The scarred leader nodded fervently. "I swear it on the Great Spirit."

Tao Zi took another step forward. The idea of not having to hide anymore, of having a clan that belonged to him, was overwhelmingly intoxicating to the orphaned cub.

But before Tao Zi could cross the clearing, a calm voice cut through the heavy emotional atmosphere.

"Stop."

Everyone turned.

Yàn Shū stepped out from behind Han Shān. The Red Panda scholar was holding the black-feathered arrow he had pulled from the iron-wood tree. He adjusted his slightly crooked glasses, holding the arrow up to the sunlight.

"I apologize for interrupting this very touching reunion," Yàn Shū said smoothly. "But I must point out a few glaring statistical anomalies in your narrative."

The scarred leader’s eye twitched. "What are you babbling about, you panda?"

Yàn Shū didn’t flinch. He casually spun the arrow in his hand. "Anomaly number one. The fletching on this arrow is made from the Night-Stalker Raven, a bird native only to the western gorges, not the southern jungles."

Yàn Shū took a slow step forward, his fluffy tail swishing with scholarly confidence. "Anomaly number two. When you knelt, you placed your right hand over your left breast. Ancient texts clearly dictate that the Jade Jaguar loyalist salute requires the left hand over the right collarbone, to symbolize the guarding of the heart, not the lungs."

Tao Zi froze in his tracks.

The scarred leader’s face went completely pale. "I.....I was disoriented from the blast—"

"And finally," Yàn Shū interrupted, his amber eyes narrowing. He raised the tip of the arrow, pointing to a dark, sticky residue glistening on the arrowhead.

"This is Black-Bane venom," Yàn Shū stated flatly. "It is a highly volatile, completely lethal neurotoxin. Statistically speaking, loyalists executing a delicate extraction mission to rescue their beloved Young Master do not use indiscriminately lethal area-of-effect poisons for ’warning shots.’ They use paralyzing agents."

Yàn Shū tossed the arrow into the dirt at the leader’s feet.

"You are not loyalists," Yàn Shū declared, his voice ringing with absolute certainty. "You are the assassins sent by the usurpers to finish the job."

The silence in the clearing was absolute.

Tao Zi gasped, scrambling backward so fast he tripped over his own feet, landing hard in the dirt. Zhēn immediately threw her arms around him, shielding him.

The scarred leader’s fake tears vanished instantly. His expression twisted into a mask of ugly hatred. He slowly stood up, kicking the arrow aside.

"Clever little panda," the assassin sneered, spitting onto the grass. "Too clever for your own good."

Han Shān’s eyes blazed with fury. "You lied. You came to slaughter a child."

"He is a loose end!" the leader roared, pulling a strange, glowing black crystal from a hidden pouch at his waist. "The usurper King demands his head! If we cannot take him quietly, we will take him by force!"

"You and what army?" Zhāo Yàn scoffed, cracking his knuckles. "Your friends are taking a nap in the mud."

"I don’t need them," the scarred leader laughed, a manic, desperate sound. He raised the glowing black crystal high above his head. "I just need a distraction!"

He slammed the crystal violently into the earth.

CRAAAACK!

The ground violently heaved. A massive, jagged fissure ripped through the center of the clearing, tearing the grass apart. The sky above them instantly darkened as a foul, suffocating miasma poured out of the glowing crystal.

"Get the cubs back!" Mo Xiao bellowed, grabbing Hóng Yè by the shoulder and shoving him toward the tree line.

From the depths of the black miasma, a sound emerged. It wasn’t a roar. It was a wet, clicking, skittering sound that made the hairs on the back of Yàn Shū’s neck stand straight up.

A massive, segmented leg, covered in thick, bristly hairs and dripping with acidic venom, stabbed out of the smoke, slamming into the dirt.

Then another. And another.

"What is that?!" Hóng Yè yelled, dragging the terrified cubs behind a large boulder.

Yàn Shū’s eyes went wide with absolute horror. "Statistically..." he whispered, his voice trembling. "We are in a great deal of trouble."

Rising from the smoke, towering twenty feet into the air, was a fully grown, mutated Goliath Death-Weaver, a monstrous, heavily armored arachnid beast from the deep abyssal caves. Its eight multifaceted eyes locked onto the husbands, its mandibles clicking hungrily.

The scarred leader scrambled up the back of the monstrous spider, laughing maniacally as he pointed a poisoned dagger directly at Tao Zi.

"Kill the fathers!" the assassin shrieked. "Take the boy! Slaughter the rest!"

The Goliath Death-Weaver let out an ear-piercing screech and lunged.