Kill the Japanese Invaders

In the winter of 1937, Nanjing fell. The biting wind swept across the banks of the Qinhuai River, carrying the smell of gunpowder. On the flagstones of the Yue family's martial arts school, Yue Haoyuan and his wife, along with dozens of their students, were slain in a pool of blood, never letting go of the steel blades in their hands. Yue Yutong, who had mastered her family's martial arts by the age of thirteen and was also well versed in poetry, watched her whole family slaughtered from a hidden compartment in the woodshed. In a fury, she drew her blade and killed sixteen Japanese soldiers, but was captured after being gravely wounded. After enduring endless humiliation, she tried to take her own life with a knife several times. The Japanese soldiers' cruel laughter and her loved ones' screams became the most searing scars of her seventeenth year, and kindled the fire of her vengeance. After narrowly escaping with her life, her unhealed wounds and bone-deep hatred completely stripped away the gentleness she once possessed. Among the ruins of Nanjing, she found her friends Zhang Yuxin and Li Manling, whose families had also been destroyed. The three clenched their fists. “Kill the Japanese” became their sole vow. Knowing the streets and alleys of Nanjing like the back of their hands, they turned the Qinhuai River docks, the lanes of Laomendong, and the Confucius Temple stage into their battlefields of revenge. At first, they crept up on and killed enemy soldiers, seizing their guns and ammunition. Then they burned down a granary in the south of the city, its flames lighting up half the night sky. Later, disguised as peddlers, they blew up an arms depot in the west, the blast shattering the invaders' arrogance. The homes of traitors were set ablaze night after night, and secret messages belonging to the puppet army went missing again and again. The three young women became known as the “Three Female Fiends,” keeping the Japanese soldiers across the city in constant fear. During a raid on the puppet police station, they rescued New Fourth Army soldiers who had been imprisoned there, and made contact with an advance detachment. Their personal quest for revenge now joined the great tide of national resistance. They continued to move through the city's streets and alleys, but the poetry books on their desks had been replaced by military maps, and their sword tassels were stained with gunpowder and dust. Yue Yutong always remembered her father's words: “When learning martial arts, first...”