Description
Synopsis for “Retreat”
After foiling one of Fu Manchu’s sinister plots in Florida, Shang-Chi has to swim for it. When he comes ashore, he finds two Si-Fan assassins, Jekin and Dahar, waiting. He manages to push them into a morass with a tree trunk and throw it in after them, then escape into the Everglades. He still has intermittent hallucinations from a heavy dose of mimosa, so when he runs into the Man-Thing, he doubts that it’s real. It grabs him. He kicks it. It’s real.
Master of Kung Fu Vol 1 19 001
splash page of MOKF #19
Shang-Chi winds up with both feet sticking out of the Man-Thing’s back. A stranger pulls him through the sodden mass. He introduces himself as Lu Sun, no fixed address, and mentions seeing the two Si-Fan climb out of the swamp. Lu Sun wanders away. Shang-Chi follows him. The Man-Thing follows Shang-Chi.
Shang-Chi has a flashback. A schoolmate named K’uei Mêng told him that Fu Manchu was evil, that he wanted to control the world, not help it. Shang-Chi told his father what he had heard. Fu reassured him of his good intentions. Mêng never returned to the classes.
Elsewhere in the swamp, a fleet of empty trucks bounces along a dirt road. They should have barrels of mimosa-laced oil in them, but Shang-Chi blew them up (last issue). Fu Manchu sits in the lead van. Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Black Jack Tarr, and a group of federal agents ambush them. Tarr tears open the first truck’s door, but Fu has disappeared!
After some rest in a clearing, Shang-Chi asks Lu Sun for advice about fighting against his own father. “One may may overcome another—one army may overcome another—but the world is not changed. Man will always contend.” But surely evil must be destroyed wherever it is found? “Revenge is also a destroyer of men, my friend. It blinds them to the present as they dwell on past and future. Thus, it blinds them to life.”
Without warning, two arrows puncture Lu Sun’s leg. Jekin and Dahar have caught up to Shang-Chi, who has had a chance to recover from the mimosa. Shang-Chi battles them briskly but briefly— a flip lands him in quicksand. The assassins step back, then notice that the Man-Thing has shambled into the clearing. They go after the creature. They don’t know that “whosoever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch” … which is exactly what happens. Lu Sun pulls Shang-Chi out of the quicksand and wanders away.
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