The bell in the little church tolled once, thin and fragile, as Feng Jian guided the last of the villagers across the threshold. Smoke ghosted through the rafters. Children clung to their mothers; an old man pressed a damp cloth to a coughing boy's mouth. Near the door a farmer lifted a rusted hoe, jaw set.
"We'll help," he said, voice shaking but stubborn.
Feng rested two fingers on the man's wrist and lowered the tool. "Live. That's your fight." His tone was gentle, final. He turned, pushed the church door wide, and let the night swallow him.
A breath of wind carried the smell of ash and resin. Beyond the palisade, the treeline glowed with ember eyes. Drums thudded low and mean. The first wolf broke from the dark and the forest poured after it—goblins in a ragged flood, five riders crouched low over slavering mounts, bowmen threading through the underbrush, a knot of blade-wavers trying to sprint wide and slip the gate.
A cool pane of light slid across Feng's vision:
ASURA SYSTEM NOTICE — [Village Defense]Defend the town. Minimize civilian casualties.
He planted his feet at the broken gate and let his breath fall into its old rhythm.
[Skill Activated: Aura Skin]Effect: A thin veil of Natural Qi reinforces skin and nerves, dampens impact and heat for short bursts.
The first rider came in howling. Feng stepped inside the scream. One smooth cut opened the wolf's throat; the rider sailed past and crumpled without a sound. Two more tried to split left, aiming for the palisade. Feng lifted his left palm.
[Skill Activated: Natural Qi Ripple]Effect: Sends a compressed crescent of Natural Qi along the air current; mid-range cutting wave.
Two invisible arcs crossed the moonlight, and two bodies folded neatly from their saddles. The bowmen answered—black arrows stitched the gate. Feng blurred.
[Skill Activated: Shadow Step]Effect: Short-range phase through contiguous shadow (≤ 10m). Brief invulnerability during transit.
He reappeared in a doorway, blade whispering. A goblin staggered with its throat unstitched. Another arrow hissed; he caught the tone of it and tilted the Natural-Qi blade, letting the shaft skid aside while his wind blade slid on, a green line through a sternum. His face barely moved—only the eyes sharpened, the kind of quiet delight that belongs to people who love difficult math.
Five riders, three bowmen, a tangle of melee trying to drag his gaze—he didn't give it. He gave them angles. When two peeled wide to slip the village's edge, he slid under the fence's shadow and rose right in front of them, cutting left without looking, cutting right with a turn of the wrist, both bodies falling in the same heartbeat. When the bowmen shifted to the far hedge, he sent another pair of ripples out low, the cuts skimming the grass to take legs from beneath them.
In under a minute the ground before the gate was cluttered with bodies and torn tack. Twenty sent to probe him; none made it past. Feng tilted his head, listening to the forest's breath change. The front quieted. The back grew heavy.
Out there, beyond the churn and pant and stink, a larger shape stood nearly still. Two axes turned lazily in big hands, and every time they cut the air it groaned.
The Goblin Chief stepped from the trees.
Red lightning crawled along his forearms and into the twin blades. He didn't howl. He watched. When he was done watching, he rolled one shoulder and came forward in a patient, brutal jog.
Feng slid the daggers home and drew both long blades—his shorter, double-edged Natural-Qi sword in his left; the longer, single-edged wind blade in his right. The wind blade caught starlight; the edge wore a thin green line as if someone had inlaid spring into steel.
[Skill Activated: Wind Dance — Zephyr Coil]Effect: Light, circling footwork that steals momentum; +evasion within 3m.
They met like weather fronts colliding. The first exchange blew dust sideways in sheets. Feng's cut kissed the Chief's ribs, but the axe intercepted at a sick angle, sparks spraying. The Chief was already turning into the second stroke, reading, adjusting. The third clash bit deeper; the counters came earlier; the weight grew. He's learning me, Feng thought, and felt something hungry open behind his sternum.
The Chief stamped an axe into the dirt and the ground spider-webbed. Feng rode the crack with a small hop, let his wind blade fall and rise in two quick lines, then cast the Natural blade forward in a short, horizontal cut that didn't quite reach—until the air finished it for him in a thin ripple that split the Chief's shoulder guard.
The monster didn't retreat. The monster grinned. He fed more red into his lightning and came on with both axes humming.
[Skill Activated: Dragon Tempest Walk]Effect: Wind-assisted dash with afterimage. Each step sheds a faint cutting wake.
Feng moved—right, back, through, not where the axes were but where the hollow space between them would be—and his afterimage ate two wild counters the Chief threw to test him. When a hooked swing came for his knee, he stepped into shadow and out again on the Chief's wrong side, both blades whispering across corded muscle. Blood steamed and stank. The Chief's next answer was heavier, more true.
Good, Feng thought, parrying high and feeling his wrists buzz. Finally, something that keeps up.
An axe clipped a fencepost behind him; the whole rail splintered. The Chief chased the splinters with a rising sweep that would have cut a man in half. Feng let go of distance entirely.
[Skill Activated: Wind Dance — Gale Thread]Effect: Tight spiral around a single opponent; converts incoming force into lateral slip.
He placed his right foot close enough to see the lines of lightning crawling on the Chief's knuckles and turned around that foot as if it anchored him to the night. The big swing bled sideways; his wind blade traced a low green arc across the Chief's thigh; his Natural blade followed high, a blue-white bite across the collarbone. The Chief howled—no rage, only calculation shaded red—and answered with a whip of both axes so close Feng felt the teeth of the steel on his lashes as he bent under it.
The villagers were no longer screaming; the wall had gone quiet the way people do when they forget to breathe. Somewhere very far away, in a city that hung under a tree, thousands of other lungs forgot, too.
"Look," someone in the instructor's box said softly. "It's adapting fast enough to force him up."
"Then he goes up," another murmured.
Feng's shoulders ached. His breath stayed level anyway. A memory surfaced clear as snowfall: Mark's voice in a field at dawn.
When steel isn't enough, call the storm. Not the gale—not the breeze. The Dragon. You'll know when.
The Chief raised both axes high and called his own weather. Thunder gathered in a ring of red around his skull. He leapt, bringing both blades down like someone closing a door on the world.
Feng dropped his left hand from his Natural blade, slid it to the wind sword's hilt, and took both palms around it.
[Skill Activated: Wind Dragon Art — Dragon God's Descent]Effect: Two-handed invocation. Wind Qi condenses into a draconic manifest; one decisive downward cut. Immense single-target damage. Short post-cast fatigue.
The night went white-green.
Aura surged out of him in a column that tore the smoke to ribbons. The outline of a dragon coiled up that column—vast, translucent, eyes lit with old hunger—and for a heartbeat it seemed to look down at the Chief as if deciding whether he deserved to be remembered.
In the stands, heads turned as if pulled by a string. Ava's voice was a whisper. "Lisa…"
Lisa didn't answer. She didn't have to. The Wind Dragon Art belonged to her house. It also belonged—to the hand that could make the air remember it.
Feng stepped forward and brought the blade down.
The dragon came with it, a spine of wind that bit through red lightning, through iron, through the dense rope of the Chief's neck and shoulder. The cut ran clean from shoulder to hip. The axes finished their arcs into nothing and stuck there, dumbly, a moment longer than the body they belonged to.
Then everything let go.
Half a heartbeat of silence. Then the two pieces of the Chief realized they were two pieces and fell apart into the dust. The red in the lightning went out like a lamp pinched between fingers.
Feng stood with both hands still closed around the wind blade, chest rising once, twice. The aura peeled back from him in slow shreds. He let his left hand fall, lifted the Natural blade to guard without thinking, and listened. In the trees the goblins broke—panic first, then flight. On the wall someone finally remembered to shout.
He sheathed the wind blade. The green line along the edge dulled to its usual quiet. A smear of red moved on the steel and he wiped it away on the leg of a dead rider's trousers. He slid the Natural blade home and turned toward the church, just to check the door.
The farmer with the rusted hoe stood there, tears streaking soot, the tool forgotten at his boots. When his eyes met Feng's he nodded once, hard, like a man signing a promise.
High above, the academy's scrying panes threw light across rows and rows of stunned faces. The applause was late coming, and when it came it was huge and messy and human. The instructors didn't clap. They watched like people watching weather they'd thought only lived in stories.
A final pane of light slid across Feng's vision, cool and unsentimental:
[FLOOR 30 CLEAR]ADP Earned: 1,300Cumulative ADP: 4,927
He blinked the panel away. The night air tasted like iron and pine. Somewhere in the trees, wolves still ran, but not toward the village.
"Good," he said to nobody, with the smallest curl of a smile. "Next."