They thought they were the hunters, until they realized their prey's shadow was longer than their own.
The six members of the Heavy Sword squad from the Langya Special Operations Brigade were elite soldiers who had fought their way up from boot camp. Team leader Lin Zhan, a former fencer; Wei Qingshan, son of a hunter from the Greater Khingan Mountains; Zhou Tie, who had carried water at Shaolin Temple for ten years; Luo Lie, orphaned by a flash flood; Gu Huaijin, a tactical genius from a family of revolutionary cadres; and Su Mu, heir to a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Six men, six different paths, forged into a single blade.
They had only one mission: hunt.
Starting with a camp of infiltrators near the border, they pursued their targets to an abandoned quarry, a remote mountain outpost deep in a disputed region, and an oil-drilling platform in a foreign desert. At every hideout, they found an armband: dark gray, with an owl spreading its wings and two empty hollows where its eyes should be. Its owner was a mysterious figure codenamed Owl. Every one of his subordinates bore a token carved into the bone with a knife. Not a tattoo, not a brand, but a number etched into the bone membrane with a blade's tip. The cuts were mixed with fluorescent powder and glowed by themselves in the dark.
Lin Zhan thought they were hunting an organization, until he discovered that Captain Gao, the man who had forged them into blades, bore the same scar on his collarbone. The number: CL-07. The same as the one beneath Owl's jaw and the marks borne by every person they had hunted. The same blade, the same hands.
They weren't chasing their enemy. They were chasing Captain Gao's past.
From hunters to seekers, from the border to the frontier, from one blade to another. When the thirty-two people marked with numbers began disappearing one by one from
