The suffocating cloud of gray dust rose thick behind them, blinding their vision and clogging their lungs. Down the narrow mountain road, Chinua desperately kicked the flanks of her mount, urging the exhausted beast to find a speed it simply did not possess. But the horse had been walking all night through the freezing mountain gales, and carrying the immense weight of two fully armored warriors had entirely drained its strength. It could do nothing more than a heavy, ragged trot.
Suddenly, the shifting weight behind her told her everything. Khawn's massive, battered body finally gave out. With a heavy, hollow thud, he slipped from the saddle and crashed violently onto the hard dirt road.
"Khawn!" Chinua shrieked.
She violently pulled on the reins, bringing the spent horse to a skidding halt, and threw herself to the ground. She sprinted back to him, her heart shattering into pieces as she reached his side. There, protruding from the steel armor on Khawn's upper back, were two more black-feathered arrows. He had taken them during the height of the chase, shielding her body with his own massive frame without uttering a single word.
"Khawn!" Chinua cried, desperately pulling his heavy frame up into her trembling arms.
"Just go, Chinua..." Khawn wheezed, thick crimson spilling past his clenched teeth as he tried to swallow down the agonizing pain. He weakly reached down, his fingers searching for his fallen weapon. "I'll... I'll hold them back."
"You get up!" Chinua snapped, her voice cracking with a fierce, stubborn defiance. She absolutely refused to lose another brother today.
Gathering every ounce of her remaining strength, she grabbed Khawn's heavy arm and violently wrapped it around her shoulder, hoisting his bulk upward. With her free hand, she delivered a sharp, stinging slap to the horse's flank, sending the empty animal bolting down the main highway to act as a decoy. Then, bracing her boots against the rocky earth, she dragged Khawn off the exposed dirt road and plunged into the thick, protective tree line.
Supporting his immense weight against her own bleeding ribs, she guided him onto a narrow, overgrown woodcutter's mountain trail. It was a steep, grueling path that would take much longer to traverse, but she knew its secret—it bypassed the heavily patrolled main roads and led straight into the rugged, lawless territory of Salran Hill.
Out on the main dirt road, the thundering approach of the imperial cavalry abruptly slowed to a halt.
"The horse is empty!" one of the masked guards shouted, pointing a gloved hand at the riderless mount trotting in the distance. "They must be around here somewhere!"
The leader of the masked imperial brigade pulled tightly on his reins, his sharp eyes surveying the dense, silent brush. "You ten, stay behind and continue the search. The rest of us will return to the inn to deliver the news to Minister Gegeen."
"Yes, sir!"
With a collective shout, the eighteen masked imperial guards wheeled their horses around and took off, their hoofbeats rapidly fading into the distance and leaving only the ten designated hunters behind. The silence of the forest returned, heavy and suffocating.
Suddenly, one of the remaining ten guards narrowed his eyes at the ground. He vaulted down from his saddle, kneeling in the dirt to inspect a crushed, discolored leaf. He rubbed his fingers against the wet surface. "There is a blood trail here."
Another masked guard guided his mount closer, peering into the deep, winding shadows of the tree line. "They have taken the mountain road."
The leader of the search party drew his sword, the polished steel hissing sharply in the cold mountain air. "Off your horses. We are chasing them on foot. With both of them heavily injured, they won't have gone far!"
With coordinated, lethal efficiency, the ten assassins dismounted, abandoned their horses by the roadside, and plunged directly into the dark woodcutter's trail, tracking the fresh crimson drops left in the desperate wake of the vanguard.
As they stumbled down the overgrown mountain trail, Khawn chanced to look down through the gloom. His heart seized. Staining the trampled leaves beneath their feet was a steady, dark trail of blood—but it was not just his own. Mixed with his heavy crimson drops were the smaller, rhythmic splatters of Chinua's.
Slowly, Khawn lifted his heavy gaze. He looked at her profile, her jaw tight and trembling with raw exertion, tracking upward across her bloodless lips to her eyes. Even now, with her breath rattling and her body failing, the fierce, burning aurora in her eyes remained exactly the same as the first day he had met her in that wretched slave market.
Back then, he was just a broken teenager, branded a monster and treated like a wild animal. He had survived solely by killing and fighting others in the pits—a nameless young boy with no hope, no dreams, living from one bloody day to the next with heavy iron shackles biting into his wrists and ankles. He had been a beast destined to die in chains. But that day in the market, he had met the person who would give him a name, a hope, a family, and his freedom.
If he hadn't met Chinua, he would have died a slave. He would never have had the opportunity to become someone worthy—someone who possessed a name, brothers-in-arms like Od and Muunokhoi, and a peaceful future back home where an unborn child was waiting for him to return and give them a name of their own.
Her words from that life-changing day echoed in his mind, clear and resonant as a temple bell: "Sell your life to me, and I promise that for the rest of your life, these shackles will never bind your hands or feet again."
"Erkhtenger..." Khawn breathed, his voice a frail rasp. "Free sky. No masters. No shackles..."
Chinua forced a tender smile, though tears brimmed at the edges of her eyes, reflecting the dim light. "It's a perfect name," she whispered softly. "Qinru will love it."
A long, fragile pause stretched between them. Khawn's gaze remained fixed on her face, lingering on the only warmth left in his darkening world. He took a slow, agonizing breath, holding her eyes as if trying to anchor himself to her.
"Thank you," he rasped, his thick voice trembling with everything left unsaid.
"For?" Chinua asked, her gaze locked stubbornly straight ahead as she forced her trembling legs to move forward through the brush.
"For... everything," Khawn replied, a swell of mixed emotions threatening to choke him more than the blood pooling in his throat. "I've always wanted to say thank you to you."
"Thank me later, when we are out of these damn woods," she snapped softly, trying desperately to sound commanding. But the effort was too much. Suddenly, her chest tightened violently, and she began to cough, thick blood staining her pale lips as the shadows of the forest closed in around them.
As soon as Chinua's coughing fit subsided, a terrifying sound shattered the quiet of the forest—the rapid, rhythmic thud of heavy boots sprinting over damp earth, approaching them at a terrifying speed.
They both knew the brutal reality. In their battered, bleeding condition, outrunning the hunters on this steep, treacherous trail was a mathematical impossibility. Instead of burning their remaining strength in a futile flight, they stopped dead in their tracks. Pressing their backs together, they drew deep, ragged breaths, forcing their trembling muscles to steady for a final, desperate stand.
They looked at each other. No words were spoken, but in that silent glance, a lifetime of shared battles passed between them. This fight would determine their fate, but as warriors of the Hmagol Vanguard, they feared no death.
Within heartbeats, the brush erupted. Rushing through the overgrown path toward them, the ten masked imperial guards appeared, their steel blades drawn and gleaming wickedly in the dim forest light. Without a single word of warning, the assassins charged.
Chinua and Khawn surged forward as one, meeting the onslaught head-on. As the first two imperial guards lunged, Chinua and Khawn intercepted them mid-strike with lethal, practiced precision. Khawn clamped his massive hands onto his attacker's wrists, twisting with raw, bone-snapping force until the soldier's sword shattered and dropped uselessly into the dirt. Chinua mirrored his movement perfectly, catching her opponent's blade on her own guard and ripping it from his grip before driving her steel clean through his chest armor.
They grabbed the fallen weapons, swinging with feral ferocity, but the sheer numbers of the masked hunters began to tell. Utilizing their coordinated imperial training, the remaining guards aggressively forced their way between the two vanguard partners, successfully separating them. Five assassins swarmed Khawn, completely cutting him off, while the other five locked Chinua into a separate, desperate ring of death.
The forest floor became a chaotic blur of blood, mud, and screaming steel.
Khawn fought like a cornered beast, entirely ignoring the agonizing bite of the arrows in his back and the dagger in his side. He managed to cleave through his first two opponents, but every victory cost him precious flesh. Swords slipped past his failing guard, slicing deep trenches into his thighs and shoulders.
Chinua spun through her own attackers, her movements a blur of desperate, survivalist instinct. She parried a lethal throat-thrust, counter-slashing to take off one guard's hand, then whirled to drive her blade through the neck of another. But a heavy boot caught her flared waist wound, sending a wave of white-hot agony through her abdomen that nearly brought her to her knees.
One by one, the masked imperial guards were being slaughtered, but the toll on the defenders was catastrophic. Their blood was pouring freely onto the ancient roots of the trees.
Finally, the crushing weight of their horrific injuries caught up to them.
With a heavy, rattling groan, Khawn's legs gave out, and he crashed hard onto the muddy ground. Before he could recover, one of the last surviving imperial guards threw his entire weight onto the giant's chest. The assassin's gauntleted hands wrapped tightly around Khawn's throat, squeezing down with merciless, suffocating force to choke the last remnants of life out of his lungs.
Several yards away, completely isolated, Chinua was violently slammed backward against a jagged, moss-covered boulder. A masked imperial guard pinned her down, his heavy knee burying mercilessly into her fractured ribs while he drove the weight of his sword downward toward her throat. Using every ounce of her failing strength, Chinua locked her fingers onto the assassin's wrists, holding the razor-sharp edge mere inches from her neck with both hands, her muscles shaking violently as she fought to keep death at bay.
As Khawn lay gasping beneath the choking grip of his attacker, his vision began to blur into a dark, heavy haze. But through the shifting shadows of the canopy, his eyes locked onto Chinua.
The blade of the imperial guard pinning her to the boulder was creeping inches closer and closer to her throat. Khawn knew the brutal math of her condition. With her mangled shoulder and the deep abdominal puncture, combined with the agonizing flare of her recurrent right shoulder injury, Chinua simply did not have the leverage or the physical strength left to resist the man's full weight.
From where he lay, he could see her arms trembling violently. Slowly, agonizingly, her elbows began to bend under the pressure. The steel edge was hovering just hairbreadths from her skin.
Suddenly, the suffocating pressure around Khawn's neck faded, replaced by a voice echoing from the deepest corners of his memory. It was her voice, clean and resonant, speaking to a broken teen:
"You are free. You can go where you want to go. I don't need slaves to serve me, Khawn. I need a true friend who will walk by my side as an equal."
"Chinua..." Khawn murmured through blood-flecked lips.
A surge of raw, primal adrenaline tore through his dying veins, completely overriding the paralysis of his nervous system. His thick right hand dropped to his waist, his fingers locking onto the bone hilt of the dagger buried deep in his left abdomen. With a swift, violent motion, he ripped the blade free from his own flesh.
A loud, agonizing scream tore from his lungs—a sound more like a wounded beast than a man. Before his choking attacker could even register the movement, Khawn swung his arm up, driving the blood-slicked dagger straight into the side of the imperial guard's neck.
The assassin's grip instantly shattered as he clutched at his severed artery. Khawn didn't waste a heartbeat. He brutally shoved the thrashing, wounded imperial guard off his chest, rode him down into the dirt, and stabbed the blade repeatedly into the man's chest until the body went entirely limp beneath him.
He didn't stop to breathe. Leaving his own attacker in the mud, Khawn threw his massive frame forward, lunging across the few yards of bloody grass toward the boulder. The assassin pinning Chinua never saw him coming. With the last reserve of his earthly strength, Khawn brought the heavy dagger down, driving the blade straight through the side of the man's head with a sickening, definitive crunch.
The assassin collapsed instantly, his dead weight sliding off Chinua and pooling into the mud.
For a single second, the forest was completely still. Then, the immense toll of Khawn's actions caught up to his body. His vision fractured into blinding white light. A torrent of fresh, dark crimson rushed out from his unsealed abdominal wound, mixing with the old, dried blood caking his armor. His fingers lost their grip on the dagger hilt, and slowly, heavily, the mountain of a man dropped to his knees right beside her.
"Khawn..."
Chinua's ragged voice was barely a whisper as she threw herself toward her fallen brother. Her knees slammed into the dirt, and she wrapped her arms tightly around his massive frame, catching him before his heavy body could collapse completely onto the cold earth. She held him against her chest, her hands desperately pressing against the torrent of blood pouring from his chest and stomach.
"We are almost home," she choked out, her voice trembling with a desperate, frantic hope. "Just over that mountain... just over that ridge, Khawn, we will be home. Qinru is waiting for you. You have to see her."
"I... I am sorry, Chinua..." Khawn wheezed, his chest rattling violently as a fresh wave of crimson spilled past his lips, staining his rugged jaw. He looked up at her, his eyes clouded and unfocused. "I don't think... I can walk that far."
"I'll carry you," Chinua said instantly, her jaw tightening with fierce, stubborn denial. She refused to accept it. "You've carried me before. Remember? You carried me all the way from Ntsua-ntu to Txoo when my legs gave out. This time, I will carry you. I'll carry you all the way to Pojin."
Without waiting for his answer, she turned her back to him. Grabbing his thick, calloused hands, she violently hoisted his massive weight onto her shoulders. Her fractured ribs screamed in absolute agony, and her stitched abdomen threatened to tear open completely under the crushing bulk of the giant warrior, but she didn't care. She braced her boots against the dirt and took a slow, agonizing step forward, dragging him deeper along the isolated woodcutter's trail.
"Remember not to fall asleep," Chinua commanded, her voice cracking as she forced her feet to move. "When I was wounded, I didn't sleep. Therefore, you cannot fall asleep. Keep your eyes open, Khawn."
Behind her, Khawn's heavy head rested against her shoulder. His fading gaze stared blankly at the rustling green leaves above, watching the ancient trees slowly pass by as Chinua dragged them forward.
Then, the cold forest began to blur.
The dark, damp shadows of the mountain trail faded away, replaced by a radiant, golden warmth. Through his hazy vision, the figure of someone walking right beside them became clearer and clearer. His breath grew shallow and light, the weight of his physical agony suddenly lifting away. There, stepping gracefully along the grass with a beautiful, bright smile, was Qinru. It was the exact same smile she had given him on the day he left Pojin for Kark City—the smile that had kept him alive through every brutal campaign.
"So beautiful," Khawn murmured through his fading, shallow breath, a serene peace washing over his rugged face. "So... beautiful..."
With the last ounce of his strength, he weakly lifted his hand, reaching out into the empty air, trying desperately to clasp the hand of the beautiful woman walking beside him.
His fingers brushed against nothingness. Then, his hand slowly, limply dropped down. The final breath escaped his lips, and his entire, unmoving weight slumped heavily onto the back of Chinua.
In that exact moment, Chinua stopped dead in the middle of the track.
The sudden, absolute stillness behind her told her everything. She closed her eyes tightly, but she couldn't stop the tears from streaming down her blood-stained cheeks. A suffocating, agonizing pain gripped her chest, squeezing her heart so tightly that it became impossible to breathe, while the tears blurring her vision made it impossible to see the path ahead.
Standing entirely alone under the vast canopy of the mountain forest, she let out a soft, broken sob—a sound so fragile and hollow that it mimicked the mournful rustling of the leaves above.