Back to me for a bit. Junha. Hi again.
So. My brother's spent the last stretch of his life — give or take a thousand years — being the terrifying one, and honestly, I love that for him. But this part? The tournament? This one was mine.
Here's the setup, because Minho would make you wait for it and I won't.
Five clans, each with its own fighters, the way they've always had them. But for something as serious as an alliance, they don't send just anyone. They send the best of the best of the best. The order came down like a sentence read aloud: the Rabbit clan first, then the Fox, then the Snake, then the Wolf — and at the very end of it, if you were somehow still standing, Taetigkon himself.
The whole tribe had turned out for it. Tiers of beastmen packed around a ring of hard-packed earth, the roar of them rolling down like weather, every clan there to watch two humans either earn their respect or get folded in half trying.
Minho and I both signed up. Obviously. The two of us against five clans' champions and a leader the size of a building — and before you ask, that's not arrogance, it's just an honest read of what we can do now. He's a thousand-year war crammed into a man. I'm whatever the woman in my dream made me. Between us, we liked our odds.
We split the field. Before he peeled off, Minho caught my shoulder. He didn't say be careful — he's never once said that to me, not in this life. He just looked at me for a second, that brother look with all those years stacked behind it now, and said, "You don't have to win them all. You just have to not lose."
"Inspiring. Put it on a poster."
The corner of his mouth moved. From Minho, that's a standing ovation. Then he was gone into the crowd, toward his half of the slaughter, and I was on my own.
Good. I wanted to be, for this one.
And that's when she dropped out of the sky.
I mean that almost literally. I was walking to my ring, minding my own business, when something came off the top tier of the stadium and landed directly in front of me — light, easy, like a twenty-foot drop was a step down off a curb. A girl. Fox, by the ears and the tail and the entirely-too-pleased look on her face.
She tilted her head, studied me for about half a second, and said:
"You're different from your brother."
I laughed. Couldn't help it. "Girl. How'd you figure that one out so fast?"
I should not have said girl.
A second figure came up behind her — older, composed, and already deeply unimpressed with me. "How disrespectful," she said. "She is Yuri. The fox princess of this tribe. The leader's only daughter."
Which raised more questions than it answered, frankly — last I checked, the leader was a tiger — but I've learned to let some things go. The headline was: princess. I'd just girl-ed a princess.
"Ah," I said. "Right. And you'd be—?"
"I am her attendant." She drew herself up, prim as a folded napkin. "Yeonwoo. Pink-haired rabbit-woman, in the service of the princess."
"Thank you for the information," I said, completely sincerely — because it was useful information — and Yeonwoo's whole face crumpled into a pout, like sincerity was the one attack she hadn't trained against.
Yuri watched the entire exchange like it was the best thing she'd seen all week. Then she grinned at me — a real one, sharp and bright.
"You," she said, "are intriguing."
Now. Here's the thing nobody tells you about being the normal brother of the scariest man alive. You get used to being the side character in your own life. Minho's the regressor. Minho's the legend. Minho carries the thousand years and the secret and the weight of all of it — and I carry the bags.
So when a fox princess drops out of a stadium, looks past all of that, looks straight at me, and calls me the interesting one—
Yeah. I'm not going to pretend that didn't do something.
I kept my face together. Mostly. "I get that a lot," I lied.
"No, you don't," she said, still grinning, and stepped neatly aside, clearing my path to the ring. "Go on, then. Let's see if you fight as interesting as you talk."
Behind her, Yeonwoo was still pouting. I had a feeling she was going to be a problem. The good kind.
And me — I rolled my shoulders, cracked my neck, and walked out onto the hard earth to go pick a fight with the Rabbit clan's very best.
Whatever that woman handed me in the dream I can't remember? I had the sudden, electric feeling I was about to find out exactly how much of it was real.
— To be continued.