Chapter 259: Fight intensifies
Jae’s eyes never left him. Even as the enemy lines shifted, even as torches flickered and arrows nocked, he tracked Lord Veynar with a stillness that cut against the rising storm. His calm wasn’t silence. It was focus. The kind that pressed down on the heart and made the air feel heavier.
The prince’s orders still echoed in the cadets’ ears. Some clung to Sun’s voice like rope on a cliff. Others to the memory of Veynar’s laughter, sharp and taunting, replaying whether they wanted it or not. But Jae, he listened to something else.
To instinct. To the tug of fire in his blood, the kind that didn’t warn of doom alone. His instincts screamed of danger, yes, but also of opportunity.
The chance to turn fear into something sharper. To take the night and make it theirs.
"Byun," Jae called, his voice cutting across the noise with a steadiness that made heads lift. "Shadows right. Elise, cover the healers. Tirel," he smirked faintly, brushing his hair back from his face, "stop flirting and melt the siege toys."
Even with the enemy pressing in, Tirel found time to flash her teeth. She blew him a kiss through the fire, her voice sing-song and mocking. "As you command, my flame."
Her hands swept outward, fire rushing like ribbons from her palms. The flames lashed across a cart stacked high with oil jars, setting the wood to groaning before it erupted in a roar that shook the ground. The explosion lit the battlefield in a searing orange glare. Raiders stumbled back, shields raised too late as burning oil cascaded like liquid light. Shouts turned into screams. Chaos spread.
Byun was already in motion. His shadows unfurled from his boots like living smoke, curling across the ground and stretching tall, forming jagged walls of darkness. The enemy ranks fractured around them, formations breaking as men tried to push past barriers that weren’t entirely there yet blocked them all the same.
"Look at me," Byun crowed, his voice maddeningly cheerful over the din. "I’m useful and pretty. Multitasking!"
Someone actually laughed, quick, incredulous, before choking on the dust in the air.
Elise, quieter than both, was already kneeling beside a cadet crumpled in the dirt. His tunic was soaked dark at the chest, blood pumping too fast, too freely. She pressed her hands over the wound, mana sparking blue from her palms as it coursed into the boy’s body, halting the crimson flow.
Her hands trembled. Her shoulders shook. But her voice didn’t falter. "Stay with me. I won’t let you go." She repeated it, like a charm or prayer, until the boy’s breaths came slower, steadier. Rising to her feet, she gripped her blade again, spinning to catch a raider that slipped past Byun’s shadows. A precise strike to the neck, no killing blow, just a nerve pinched hard enough to send him crumpling unconscious. She stepped over him, back to her patient before his body even hit the ground.
Through it all, Jae burned.
His fire wasn’t wild or uncontrolled like Tirel’s, though it was no less fierce. Every strike from his blade carried purpose. Every flame that surged from his core was measured, deliberate, carving open space where cadets could rally, where fear could ease just enough for them to lift their swords again.
It wasn’t just fighting. It was holding the line steady through the storm.
And still, over the clash of steel and the roars of fire, Veynar’s laughter rose higher.
"A flame among kindling! Yes!" His voice rang like a hymn, his words carrying with eerie clarity even through the chaos. "You’re the one! The little farmboy who thinks he can rewrite war!"
His spear whirled, a blur of steel and fury. Each arc gouged furrows into the earth, sparks flying, dust flaring into smoke. He was a spectacle, a tyrant and performer both.
"I’ll snuff you myself!"
With a sudden lunge, Veynar closed the distance, his boots splitting earth beneath their weight. The air rippled with the force of his charge. Jae surged to meet him, fire bursting from his blade as if answering an old challenge.
Dragonfire met enchanted steel.
The collision rang like a bell struck by lightning. Flame and force exploded outward, tents whipping back, grass catching fire, cadets staggering under the shockwave. For a heartbeat, the battlefield froze, every eye fixed on the two at its center.
Veynar shoved forward, teeth bared, eyes alive with something too wide, too bright to be ordinary fury. It was delight. It was theater. "Marvelous! You’re brighter than rumor painted you. Shall we make the night sing, boy?"
Jae smirked, steady even as his arms strained against the spear’s weight. His blade burned hotter, red-orange spilling from its edge in molten arcs. "You talk too much."
They broke apart, only to clash again. Fire and spear, steel and heat, colliding over and over. Each impact sent new ripples through the air, battering tents, rattling loose shields from hands, shaking cadets to their bones.
The raid faltered. What had begun as a strike to crush and scatter had found resistance sharper than expected. The enemy momentum bled away, broken against fire, shadow, steel, and stubborn will. Cadets who had moments ago trembled now shouted as they swung, emboldened by the sight of Jae holding the impossible line.
Byun whistled low, dragging another soldier into his shadows and pinning him to the dirt with a casual flick of his wrist. "You know, Jae," he called, almost conversational despite the screaming all around them, "if you keep hogging the spotlight, I’m going to need a new trick. People are forgetting I’m devastatingly handsome."
"Not possible," Tirel shot back sweetly, flames cracking through three raiders in one breath. "No one could forget that mouth of yours."
"Flattered," Byun replied with a grin, slamming another enemy to the ground with a shadow tendril. "But also wounded. My mouth deserves more than compliments, it deserves worship."
A groan rose from somewhere in the cadet line, but it sounded more like relief than annoyance.