The Challenge

Palmer stooped and snatched up a large rock from the ground.
The first knife hand strike cracked the rock; the second one sent two equal halves toppling to the floor.
Sweat beaded on his forehead, posed in a full squatting horse stance, he declared, “I’m ready!”

“To Die?” asked Leo.

Palmer laughed, “I’m kind of hard to kill,”

“Fool, you’re dead already!”

Then it happened; a ripple of hitherto unfelt energy coursed a complex path through his nervous system and more intrinsically through his internal Chi meridians.
Those unseen conduits of the very essence of being; the Chi, the life force.

Master Leo Yim, much younger than most opponents expected now sat on a wooden bench and watched the muscular fighter struggle against the sudden paralysis.

“Good, good,” purred Leo Yim.
They all fell for it.
The poisoned hand was the greatest and most subtle of all the skills of the vagabond. And people like the boorish Chuck Palmer walked right into it and didn’t even know.
Two taps, one on the chest, one low on the spine.

The effect was catastrophic.

Palmer opened his mouth to call for help, but instead of words, he coughed up half a pint of dark and putrid bile.

Master Yim counted silently, “One…”

Palmer’s hands locked into approximations of claws as the next stage of the death smite took effect.
His eyes bulged and protruded as if forced outward from the recess of his skull; then exploded in one dreadful moment as the deadly energy collected in his cerebral cortex.
His internal organs liquefied; his eyes no more than crimson stains dribbling down his chest, yet Palmer was still alive.

Master Yim counted off another digit, “Two...”

In a final effect, the entirety of Palmer’s ribcage splintered in on itself like a bear trap from hell sending countless shards of razor sharp bone through his lungs.

Famed torturers from history such as Torquemada or the Marquis de Sade could never have envisaged the physical and mental agony endured by Palmer in his last moments.

But Master Yim of the Vagabonds could.
For countless hundreds of years the fore runners of the better known Ninja clans had perfect death in a myriad of ways.

Chuck Palmer, martial arts champion and showman just received his.
He dropped to the floor, a sack of dead flesh and ruined organs.

“And three…” smiled Master Leo Yim.

He went back to the old man and his jigsaw depicting the Eifel Tower at night.

He liked jigsaws…

and spending time with his housekeeper…

and killing troublesome Westerners.