Butter sat in a corner booth, the faux-leather squeaking softly under her jeans. She’d chosen it for its sightlines to both exits and its proximity to the fire escape door. Old habits.
This had been the logic: put an ocean between herself and the ghosts of Lucien's mansion. Get lost in the anonymity of a Chengdu back-alley, where her face was just another foreigner's and no one would think to look for a girl who could stop bullet trains. It was the perfect place to be invisible.
The irony was a poison, now, waiting in the first sip of her latte.
Weeks. It had been weeks since the quiet end in Brad’s chamber. The world had kept turning, a fact that felt both cruel and merciful.
Her uniform was a armor of anonymity: an olive-green beanie pulled low over her brow, shadowing her eyes. A baggy band t-shirt swallowed her frame and her jeans were wide-legged enough to completely conceal the tell-tale lines of her prosthetic leg. The goal was to be a ghost, to move through the world without inviting the stares, the pity, the questions. To just be a girl in a coffee shop, nursing a too-sweet caramel latte she didn’t really want but had ordered for the normalcy of it.
She fished a single, wrapped lemon drop from her pocket, the cellophane crinkling a tiny, private counter-rhythm to the café’s noise. She unwrapped it with practiced ease and placed it on her tongue. The initial, eye-watering sourness made her shoulders drop an inch she hadn’t realized they’d been holding tense.
Then, she plugged in her earphones.
The world didn't just quiet down; it was obliterated. The gentle jazz piping through the Grindstone’s speakers, the chatter, the clinking of cups, all of it was violently and beautifully evicted by the screaming distortion of a guitar. A relentless, pummeling drumbeat kicked in, syncing perfectly with the frantic thump of her own heart. It was noise to anyone else, pure auditory chaos. To her, it was a scaffold. It built a wall around her booth, a fortress of sound where nothing else could get in. No memories, no what-ifs, no lingering phantom pains. Just the raw, screaming now.
She closed her eyes, the lemon drop a sharp, citric sunburst melting on her tongue. The sourness and the sonic assault were a perfect, paradoxical fit, a brutal, exhilarating clarity that burned away the fog. Her head gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod to the driving rhythm, her fingers tracing the beat on the cool Formica table. For a few minutes, encased in the noise and the sharp, sweet-sour taste, she wasn’t a ghost. She was just Butter. And it was enough.
///
The whiplash of the last month was a dull ache in her bones. Grief for Brad was a cold stone in her gut, permanent and heavy. Winter’s return from the grave had been a hurricane of feral energy and sharp, protective claws, a chaotic, welcome miracle that had simultaneously healed and shattered her all over again. To lose someone and then have them violently, miraculously returned was a specific kind of madness she wasn’t equipped to handle.
And Lucien... his absence was a different kind of pressure. A silent, waiting void. She could feel it, a low-grade hum of wrongness in the back of her skull. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, it was big. And it was bad.
She was done. The dregs of her latte were cold and sickly sweet. She needed air that didn’t smell of sugar and regret. Tossing a few bills on the table, with an extravagant amount of tips, she slid out of the booth, the motion automatic, her body leaning into the subtle, familiar shift in weight her prosthetic required.
As she stood, a small figure caught her eye. A little girl, no more than six, with a tousle of soft brown hair, was peeking out from behind her mother's leg. She was swaddled in a fluffy, well-loved teddy bear onesie. Her wide, curious eyes were locked not on Butter, but on the small, colorful packet of sweets poking out of Butter's hand.
Butter paused. The child, emboldened by a shy smile, toddled forward, her tiny feet shuffling on the tile. She didn't say a word, just pointed a chubby finger at the candies.
A feeling, fragile and unfamiliar, bloomed in Butter's chest. She knelt, bringing herself to the girl's level. She didn't just offer the packet; she tore it open and poured a small, jewel-like assortment of hard candies and lemon drops into her own palm, then extended her open hand to the girl.
The little girl’s face lit up. She carefully selected a single, ruby-red candy, her tiny fingers brushing Butter's skin. "Pretty," she whispered, her voice a soft hush, pointing a chubby finger at Butter. "Like... fairy."
Before Butter could react, a small, warm hand reached out and touched her cheek. The touch was feather-light, inquisitive. The girl giggled, a sound like tiny bells, full of missing teeth and pure, unvarnished joy. For a heartbeat, the fortress around Butter's heart didn't just crack; it vanished.
Then, the girl scurried back to her mother, clutching her prize.
Butter rose, closing her hand around the remaining candies. The ghost of that tiny, warm touch still lingered on her skin. The world felt a fraction less heavy. She turned, a faint, real smile touching her lips for the first time in weeks, and took two steps toward the door, her hand reaching for the polished brass handle.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
When she felt it.
A gaze. Not the casual, fleeting glance of a stranger looking at an albino foreigner, curious but ultimately dismissive. This was different. This was a pressure. A focused, pinpoint intensity that saw past the beanie, through the baggy clothes, and landed between her shoulder blades like a physical touch, seeking the power coiled within.
Every nerve ending screamed. Her fighter’s instincts, dulled by the coffee shop’s false peace, snapped back online in a millisecond.
She spun her head to the left, eyes sharp, body coiling into a defensive stance she barely stopped herself from taking.
And there she was.
Seated alone at a small round table was a vision of impossible elegance. A Chinese woman, her posture regal and utterly still, dressed in a gorgeous, high-quality hanfu of light silver silk, overlaid with intricate, sweeping patterns of a vibrant, poetic red. The silk was exquisite, embroidered with intricate gold threads that coiled like sleeping dragons. Diamond and gold trinkets adorned her elaborately packed royal hair, her wrists, her fingers, each piece seeming to hum with a subtle, contained energy. An exotic crimson and orange flower was neatly tucked in the right side of her hair. Her nails were painted with exquisite, miniature designs in gold and crimson. Her face was a porcelain mask of beauty, sharp and delicate, with a single, perfect beauty mark gracing her chin.
But it was her eyes that held Butter first. Steel gray. The flat, cold color of old coins. They held no warmth, only a calculating, ancient curiosity.
Then Butter’s gaze dropped. And her breath hitched in her throat, a silent, painful gasp.
Around the woman’s neck was a choker. Polished silver, etched with runes that pulsed with a soft, rhythmic, white light.
The world narrowed. The hiss of the espresso machine faded to a distant ocean roar. The chatter of the customers dissolved into meaningless static.
Yume.
The name landed in her heart like a lead weight. Yume, with her easy smile and her own cursed choker. Yume, who was gone. Butter had packed the memory of her away in a locked box, pretending that if she didn't open it, the pain wouldn't be real. It was a childish lie, and this woman, this stranger, had just ripped the lid off.
A botched, reflexive smile touched Butter’s lips, a weak, trembling thing meant to acknowledge the stare and defuse the situation. She gave a slight, awkward bow of her head, a gesture of pure, flustered instinct.
She was utterly oblivious to the storm she had just inadvertently summoned.
For in the woman’s coin-gray eyes, a lightning bolt of recognition, cold, sharp, and utterly triumphant, had already begun its deadly arc.
The world didn’t slow down. It exploded. There was no warning, no gathering of energy, no shouted incantation. One second, the woman’s coin-gray eyes were just watching, cold and curious. The next, they flashed with an otherworldly, steel-blue light.
Butter’s body moved before her mind could process the command. It was pure, adrenalized instinct, the kind Winter had beaten into her.
She threw herself to the right. The air where she’d been standing didn’t just move; it vaporized.
A spear of lightning, the color of a glacier’s heart and thicker than a tree trunk, erupted from the woman's thrust-out hand, launched from the convergence of her thumb and two extended fingers. It BOOMED past Butter. The sound wasn't a crackle; it was a concussive blast of pure force that shattered every window in The Grindstone and sent cups flying from their shelves. The heat seared across Butter’s shoulder, the fabric of her baggy shirt instantly blackening and curling away. The ends of the hair escaping her beanie singed to brittle ash, the acrid smell filling her nostrils.
Her eyes, wide with shock, tracked the blast. It should have vaporized the espresso machine, the back wall, the entire city block behind it.
It didn’t.
The staggering lightning bolt passed through the wall like a ghost. The brick and plaster didn’t explode outward; they rippled, for a split second, like the surface of a pond disturbed by a thrown stone. Then the lightning was gone, vanished into nothingness, leaving behind unmarked wall and the ringing, deafening silence that follows a bomb blast.
It had been meant for her. Only for her.
Screams erupted, high and panicked. Patrons scrambled over overturned chairs, a stampede for the doors, a blur of terrified faces. But impossibly, miraculously, no one was hit. No one was hurt. The physics-defying attack had ignored them all completely.
Butter’s mind reeled, trying to compute the impossible. The calculation was interrupted.
The woman in the hanfu was simply... gone from her seat. Not a blur of speed. An utter disappearance.
And in that fraction of a second, a chilling, ancillary detail registered in Butter’s mind, cutting through the adrenaline.
The stampede. The screaming patrons scrambling for the doors. Their eyes were wide with terror, but they swept right over the woman’s now-empty table as if it were a piece of the scenery. Not a single cry of "Where did she go?" Their terror was purely for the shattered windows, the concussive boom. They weren't reacting to her movement because they had never seen her in the first place.
She was never here for them.
The realization was an ice-cold needle in her spine. This woman had been sitting there, a vision of impossible elegance, invisible to every other soul in the room. A ghost at the feast. Butter had drawn her lethal attention by the one unforgivable act: she had stared. She had seen. She had recognized the choker, and in doing so, she had looked upon something she was never meant to see.
The air to Butter’s left warped, and the woman was just there, her movement seamless as a rewound film. Her elegant hand was no longer resting on the table. It was twisted into a devastating claw, the form unmistakable to anyone who had spent a lifetime in combat.
Ying Zhua. Eagle Claw.
The woman’s voice was a silken whip-crack of disdain, spoken in a dialect of Chinese that was unnervingly ancient and precise.
"你胆敢直视我？你这蛆虫。"
(Nǐ dǎngǎn zhíshì wǒ? Nǐ zhè qūchóng.)
"You dare look me in the eye? You maggot."
Butter’s mind, already reeling, seized on the detail with the frantic clarity of a seasoned martial artist. She had seen it before, had even used variants of it herself. But this... this was different.
This was Ying Zhua perfected. No, that wasn't strong enough. This was Ying Zhua perfected beyond infinity. The woman’s fingers were not merely curled; they were a manifestation of the style’s ultimate, theoretical essence, each joint locked into a position of impossible structural integrity, the fingertips sharpened into points of condensed light that seemed to tear at the very fabric of the air around them. It wasn't a technique; it was a fundamental truth of violence, given form.
She struck straight out, no wind-up, no telegraph. The movement was pure, lethal precision.
In the split second before impact, Butter’s psychic aura flared out in a desperate, reflexive attempt to gauge the threat. It wasn't a conscious act; it was an animal instinct to measure the predator about to kill it. A string of cold, impossible data flashed back
Butter’s forearms snapped up in a cross-block. The impact wasn't a sound; it was a sickening CRUNCH of condensed air and straining bone. She had stopped the strike, but the force was a living thing, a shockwave that traveled up her arms, jolting her teeth, and slammed her own blocking arms back into her chest like a piston. The message was clear: this was a checkmate delivered with the casual force of a god.