I Killed Him Off Ages Ago

In the pit of her stomach, a molten serpent of long-simmering fury began to uncoil. Perla bit down hard on the soft tissue of her inner cheek, the sharp, coppery tang of her own blood a brutal anchor against the tempest raging within. She could not afford to lose her composure, not with the delicate architecture of her plan so near to completion. To surrender to that rage would be to demolish everything she had so painstakingly built. She had to endure. She had to see it to its conclusion.

“There’s a certain irony to all this, isn’t there?” she asked, her voice a deceptively airy counterpoint to the storm inside her. “I remember the indignation you feigned when the whispers began, the rumors that you would betray us all. Why not simply prove them wrong? All that was ever required of you was to be worthy of our trust. Was that truly such a monumental task?”

A blade sliced through the intervening air, its journey ending with a violent thwump as it embedded itself in the wooden post, mere inches from her temple. The displaced air was a whisper of ice against her skin. She had thrown herself aside with a reactive speed that drew heavily on her dwindling reserves, a cost she was loath to acknowledge.

Jiro pivoted toward her, a guttural warning rumbling deep in his chest. “Be silent.” His gaze was a furnace of pure, undiluted hatred, yet seeing it finally fixed upon her felt like a small, crucial victory.

“So, the boy I knew, the one I grew up with… he was a phantom all along?” Perla pressed, her tone meticulously laced with a rehearsed disappointment. “I can’t profess to be entirely shocked.”

“And if the whispers were true?” Jiro spat the words, as though they were venom he had to expel. “What does it matter what any of them think? Their opinions are ash in the wind.”

“Don’t say that,” Perla murmured, her voice softening into a manufactured gentleness that curdled like acid in her own throat. “You care. You have always been obsessed with the opinions of others.”

Two predatory steps erased the space between them. His fingers coiled around her neck, a vise of bone and sinew that rested a hair's breadth from crushing her windpipe, a clear and brutal promise of what he was capable of. “Do not presume to understand me,” he snarled, his face so close she could feel the heat of his breath. “There is no ‘us.’ There has never been anything but a chasm between your kind and mine.”

Perla did not so much as flinch. Her swollen eyes, glistening with tears she refused to shed, held his unwavering gaze. A slow, desolate smile graced her lips, which were split from where she had bitten them. The inferno of her rage had subsided, supplanted by something far colder, far harder, and infinitely more resolute. “Perhaps you have yet to grasp it,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “but at our core, we are all the same.” She saw him inhale, preparing to interrupt, and forged ahead. “Too much the same, I suspect. It causes some of us to lash out, merely to feel a sense of distinction. I’m not just speaking of you. I am speaking of myself. Untie me, Jiro, and you will understand. I have harbored a secret from the clan for seven years.”

“Do you take me for an imbecile?” he scoffed, the sound a low rumble against her ear. “To simply cut your bonds so you can flee?”

“For the past seven years, every time I claimed to be visiting the market, I was in the woods. Training. Every animal destined for our family’s restaurant, I took its life with my own hands. I have hunted the tigers in the meadow to the brink of extinction.” A perilous glint sparked in Perla’s eyes. “And in doing so, I have nurtured a strength beyond your comprehension.”

Jiro let out a harsh, grating sound devoid of humor. “You must have struck your head when you were taken. A helpless girl like you, slay a tiger? Train yourself? Its maw would be around your throat before you could even register the attack.” A cruel slash of a smile spread across his face. “Then again, perhaps I should release you. The spectacle of your attempt to fight would be… amusing.”

A vein pulsed at her temple, yet Perla’s bleak smile only deepened. Just another moment, she thought, her heart hammering a frantic cadence against her ribs. Just one more minute in his suffocating presence.

“I have killed more than a thousand of them,” she stated, her voice stripped of all bravado, leaving behind only a chilling sincerity. “Without ever touching them. My power dwarfs yours. I could extinguish the light from your eyes before a single thought to blink could form in your mind.” Even as she fought to maintain her calm facade, a part of her recoiled from the raw brutality of the threat, uncertain of the dark wellspring from which such words had emerged.

It was the final provocation he required.

“What… did you say to me, you little cur?” Jiro’s voice fractured with unbridled fury. Without conscious intent, his control shattered. Primal energy erupted from his hands, sheathing his arms in hungry, incandescent flame that bathed the dark chamber in a flickering, hellish glow.

Perla suppressed a smile of grim triumph. Fire. A current of victory surged through her. His element would become her deliverance.

She pinned him with a defiant glare and spat on the floor near his boots. “Take your best shot,” she taunted, her voice saturated with the condescension of every tormentor she had ever endured. “You’ll likely stumble over your own feet and immolate yourself, you incompetent fool.” Her very life now rested on one of two things: the perfection of her performance, or the profound depth of his stupidity.

A torrent of fire roared toward her.

She swung sideways on her bound legs, the movement impossibly fluid as the flames licked the air where she had been a moment before. A wild, liberated smile finally broke across her features. For seven grueling years, she had been her own relentless instructor, her own most unforgiving judge. Measured against her hard-won mastery, Jiro was a pathetic amateur—a clan slacker whose sole notable skill was a talent for arson. That a man of such indolence and ineptitude could hold the rank of lieutenant was a damning indictment of the clan’s decay.

I will reclaim what is mine, Perla vowed, the promise a blazing inferno in her own heart as the chamber ignited around her.

Then, she threw back her head and shrieked, the sound a piercing, theatrical cry of terror. “Help! Fire!”

It was a desperate play, made riskier by her own understated reputation in fire magic. But her options had been exhausted. As she had anticipated, the locked door splintered inward and men flooded the room. Jiro, still lost in a haze of black, impotent fury, stared at the vacant spot she had occupied.

She was now pressed against the opposite wall, which had started to smolder. Drawing on her own power, she subtly quelled the flames nearest to her body, bracing against the blistering heat. She loosed another cry, and her gaze locked with one of the newcomers. “Ah, Thom!” she exclaimed, a strange, sharp grin twisting her lips. “You’re not looking well.”

As if their heads were pulled by unseen threads, the other men turned to their comrade. A look of utter bewilderment crossed his face. He opened his mouth to reply, to call them all fools, but the word never materialized.

He simply detonated. A wet, concussive boom filled the room with a spray of gore and viscera, and a secondary eruption of fire incinerated the men standing closest to him.

Perla sagged against the wall, her breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. She offered a wicked smile to Jiro, who was now writhing on the floor, grievously wounded by the blast. “You see,” she wheezed, “over the past seven years, I also perfected a rather vicious little bomb technique.” But the assault had exacted a terrible price. The surge of power was already ebbing, leaving a profound, hollowing fatigue that stole the marrow from her bones. She was far weaker than she dared to let on; the strength to escape the warehouse, let alone make the arduous journey to the southern territories, had evaporated. Control was slipping through her fingers.

Her final words were a whisper to the roaring conflagration. “Consider this my contribution to the war effort… Cera.” Then, her world dissolved into blackness.

From a hidden vantage in the rafters, a pair of sharp, predatory eyes watched her collapse, completely oblivious as the flames surged ever higher, wrapping her in their fiery, all-consuming embrace.

Krysta lay back in the tall grass, her attention fixed on the immense, dispassionate canvas of the sky. Clouds drifted on invisible currents, their slow, stately procession a silent, perpetual cycle of transformation. She was not sleeping.

She envisioned the distant warehouse, now reduced to a blazing pyre against the horizon. A faint, contemptuous smirk touched her lips as she contemplated the captive’s little spectacle of personal vengeance. It was an emotional, foolish indulgence. Had the girl not grasped the tactical bankruptcy of her actions? She had just compelled Krysta to abandon and relocate her primary base of operations, significantly elevating the risk of ambush by an Ignis Clan patrol. Krysta concluded that the girl must have been too consumed by her own fury, too debilitated by malnourishment, to engage in any sort of lucid, strategic thought. It was, in the end, a simple matter of logic.

She pictured the girl’s body, entombed beneath tons of charred timber and collapsed roofing. Exactly where it now belonged.

Krysta dismissed the image. The girl was now a ghost, a footnote; there was no utility in dwelling on her. A living captive would have been more advantageous, of course, but Jiro had already divulged what was necessary. The bargaining chip was no longer required.

Unless… the worst-case scenario had come to pass. A sliver of dread, a possibility so catastrophic she refused to give it shape, pushing it back into the shadowed realm of the unthinkable.