Part 3 · Chapters
Defeating the Boy Who Once Bullied Him
Victory can lift your head—and make you lose sight of those beside you.
The familiar roar struck his chest before anything else. Beneath that fire wolf's claws, Xiao Jin had been knocked down, mocked, and had risen again and again. The monster's voice had not changed. What had changed was that he could finally look that past in the eye.
The pursuit squad caught up with the refugees at dusk.
Xiao Jin recognized the roar before the blazing fire wolf cleared the ridge. Two heads now stretched from the flames, and its body was twice the size it had been when it ran wild in the Ash District.
Yan Tuo rode on its back.
The moment he saw Xiao Jin, the smugness vanished from his face as if swept away by a cold wind. After a flash of fear, he tightened his grip on his academy sword.
“Impersonating the dead and conspiring with the Frost people,” Yan Tuo declared. “Another crime to your name, Xiao Jin.”
“So when I died, what bothered you most was losing someone to bully?”
As the guards spread out, a fire arrow that had already been loosed passed through the wagons and struck an old man shielding a child.
Shuang Ya immediately turned and ran to the wounded man.
Xiao Jin raised a hand to stop the refugees trying to follow.
“Help him first. I'll handle this fight.”
Yan Tuo summoned the two-headed fire wolf. Its left head breathed a fan of flames; its right gathered explosive fireballs, cutting off every escape. Once, Xiao Jin could only have fled through alleys. Now he sensed the attacks' paths before the heat currents even formed.
Ash Step flashed again and again.
He slipped along the edge of the fire wave, losing a corner of his ragged cloak to the flames. Yan Tuo's sword followed, his academy technique precise, vicious, and fast. Xiao Jin parried with his broken staff. The Ember Blade formed only at the instant of contact, wasting none of his fire.
Three exchanges. Seven. Twelve.
Yan Tuo grew more frantic. The person he had once trampled into the ground could not only keep up, but seemed to see every change of move before it came.
“What did you get down in that abyss?” he roared.
“I fell. A lot.”
Yan Tuo drove his heel into the scorched earth. The royal-city flame patterns along his sword lit up in sequence. The two-headed wolf stopped lunging wildly and crouched to either side, even its breathing matching his sword's movement.
“Tenfold Inferno Break!”
The first slash sealed the ground at Xiao Jin's feet. The second drove him into a corner. The third and fourth waves crossed, and the wolf's fangs lunged through the gaps. Ten trails of fire fell in an interlocking pattern, turning the scorched ground into a burning cage.
The old Xiao Jin would have watched only the fastest blade. Now he heard Yan Tuo's breathing first. After every three bursts, the breath stifled by pride trembled briefly. It was not that the weakness was too small. No one had ever been willing to admit it existed.
He did not rush to counterattack. He simply let Ash Step follow that brief pause. As the tenth trail of fire fell, Xiao Jin had already passed through the brightest part and entered the blind spot neither of the wolf's heads could see.
The wolf lunged from behind. Xiao Jin deliberately let its left head catch his cloak and used the toss of its head to launch himself into the air. Ash Step burst between the two heads. He landed on its spine and cut the controlling cord of flame between them with his fire blade.
The summoned beast scattered into sparks at once.
Before Yan Tuo recovered, Xiao Jin knocked the sword from his hand. The Ember Blade stopped before his throat, perfectly steady.
The hillside was so quiet that only sparks falling on snow could be heard.
Yan Tuo collapsed to the ground, white-faced. “Go on. Haven't you been waiting for this day?”
He shut his eyes, waiting for every humiliation in the coal dust to be repaid.
Instead, the fire blade went out.
Xiao Jin turned toward the injured refugees. The old man struck by the arrow was still bleeding. Xiao Jin used Ember Breathing to steady his body temperature while Shuang Ya sealed the wound with thin ice.
Yan Tuo opened his eyes in disbelief. “Why?”
Xiao Jin did not turn back.
“I didn't get stronger to become another you.”
The words shamed Yan Tuo more deeply than any sword could. Yet beneath the shame, something long buried under family and power cracked open for the first time.
Shuang Ya put away her ice crystals. Wariness was no longer the only thing in her eyes as she looked at Xiao Jin.
“You really didn't want revenge?”
“I thought about it.”
“Then why let it go?”
Xiao Jin looked toward distant, dim Flame City. “Because the road I'm taking goes farther than him.”