The forest around the Lantern Gate had fallen silent.
No birds. No wind. Just the sound of boots against stone and the faint hum of steel in Kael's grip.
The cloaked figure stepped closer, the black mask featureless except for a crimson slash across the left eye, a mark Kael remembered from childhood stories. The mark of a Fang enforcer. The ones they sent to erase traitors.
Jun positioned himself between Kael and the masked man. "I'll hold him off."
But Kael stepped forward.
"No. He's here for me."
The enforcer's voice came like a whisper from beneath the mask. "Kael Hiroshi. You were never meant to live past your seventh winter."
Kael didn't flinch. "You people killed my mother."
There was no answer, only the sound of a blade being drawn.
Jun's sword hissed from its sheath, but Kael raised his hand. "Let me do this."
He hadn't been trained like the others. He didn't grow up in the ranks of the Fang. But he had learned pain, loss, and survival. He had studied every movement in silence. And the blade in his hand, his father's blade, fit like it had been waiting for him all along.
The fight began with a blur.
Steel met steel.
The Fang enforcer moved like smoke, vanishing and striking from shadows. Kael blocked each strike by instinct, his body remembering something he had never been taught. Sparks flew. Jun's voice shouted something behind him, but Kael couldn't hear. Couldn't think.
He moved with a fury he didn't understand.
Then the enforcer slipped, just a fraction. Kael twisted, ducked under a sweeping slash, and drove the crimson-wrapped blade upward.
Steel sank into flesh.
The enforcer let out a choked breath. Kael held him steady, their eyes locked. He had imagined this moment. Revenge. Justice.
But there was no satisfaction. Only fire.
The masked man crumpled, and Kael stepped back, his chest heaving.
Jun approached cautiously. "You… you've never trained. How the hell did you do that?"
Kael stared at his hands, the blood dripping from the blade. "I don't know."
But he did.
It was in him. The Fang had tried to break his family. Now, that legacy burned in his veins, not to serve them, but to destroy them.
Jun put a hand on his shoulder. "This is only the beginning."
Kael nodded once. "Then we end it at the root."
...
Far away, in the silence of a candle-lit study, Mr. Jeef closed a file.
It was Kael's.
He smiled, cold and slow.
"So the boy remembers."