Butter didn’t wait. This time, she attacked.

  She launched herself forward, a whirlwind of motion. Beside her, the spectral form of Clap shot ahead in a streak of yellow and green, its feathered body moving with predatory silence. As Butter became a blender of legs, unleashing a flurry of spinning heel kicks and snapping front kicks to keep the deadly eagle claws at a distance, Clap lunged for the woman’s flank, its jaws snapping shut on empty air where her phased thigh should have been.

  The woman’s hand snapped out, a contemptuous backhand aimed to swat the creature away. But her palm didn't pass through mist. It connected with a solid, feathered skull with a sharp SMACK.

  The woman’s eyes widened a fraction. In that same instant, Clap used the transferred force, its body whipping around with the impact. Its tail, a solid arc of crimson-marked feathers, slammed into the woman’s lower back.

  There was no sound to the world, but the effect was instantaneous.

  The woman’s eyes flew wide with a jolt of pure, shocked pain. She grunted, an involuntary, sharp exhalation, and stumbled forward a step, her perfect posture broken. The rules had changed. This creature was her equal in this strange, non-physical dimension.

  Butter seized the opportunity. She landed, pivoted on her right foot, and unleashed a devastating Shaolin Spinning Kick with her left leg, a powerful, sweeping arc aimed directly at the woman's head. The move was all direct force and committed rotation, pressing the newfound advantage. As expected, the woman’s hand shot out, her fingers forming that brutal eagle grip to catch the ankle and crush the bone.

  The grip closed. Metal shrieked. The prosthetic leg didn’t budge.

  A flicker of confusion in the steel-gray eyes. Butter yanked her leg forward with all her strength, using the woman’s own grip as an anchor to drag her off-balance. The woman stumbled forward, over-extended, her back exposed for a single, precious second.

  Directly in her path, Clap materialized. The raptor lunged, its jaws snapping for her face. A jolt of pure, startled revulsion flashed across the woman's features. She recoiled instinctively, leaping backward to avoid the phased creature's bite.

  It was a fatal error. Her backward leap carried her directly into the path of Butter's onslaught. Her spine and kidneys were perfectly presented, a target she herself had delivered.

  Butter was already there. Her hands became a piston-driven storm, a Wing Chun barrage of Bong Sao and chain punches. The blows landed with sickening, wet thuds and cracks into the exposed back, crimson immediately soaking through the exquisite silk of the hanfu.

  The woman snarled, a sound of pure fury. She swung around with blinding speed, her arms becoming a flurry of hooks and jabs, the sharp, piercing strikes of Bird style Kung Fu.

  Butter swiped them away with sharp, brutal Pak Sao deflections, her own movements a counterpoint of sharp, efficient brutality. From the periphery, Clap darted in, its jaws aiming to tear a chunk from the woman's leading arm.

  The woman didn't miss a beat. Her form became a whirlwind of seamless defense. Her right hand, fingers still formed into a Bird's Beak, continued its relentless assault on Butter, forcing her to block a series of sharp, piercing strikes aimed at her eyes and throat. Simultaneously, her left hand snapped out in a perfectly timed Ying Zhua, her eagle claw catching Clap squarely on the snout and shoving the spectral raptor back with a dismissive, powerful flick.

  She was holding them both off. At once. Butter and her summon, two attackers operating on different planes of existence, were being parried by a single, furious opponent.

  Driven by a surge of desperate anger, Butter mixed in sharp, powerful front kicks from her rooted stance, each impact designed to break the woman's rhythm and structure. The woman, for the first time, was forced to give ground, staggering back a step.

  She settled into a new, alien pose, one leg coiled beneath her. Then she blasted forward. Her arm shot out, her fingers folding except for a single, hooked finger aiming to dig under Butter’s jaw.

  The result flashed in Butter's mind: not a grip, but a scoop. Her jaw, unhinged and ripped from her skull in one clean, grotesque motion.

  Butter growled, rolling her body sideways in a desperate Lop Sao deflection. As she moved, a blur of green and yellow struck. Clap, seizing the moment of the woman's full commitment, lunged and sank its phased teeth deep into the woman's shoulder.

  A sharp, involuntary hiss of pain escaped the woman's lips. Her focus fractured for a critical microsecond, her lethal strike faltering ever so slightly.

  It was all the opening Butter needed. In the same motion as her deflection, she gripped the woman’s extended arm and drove a fist like a piledriver into the compromised shoulder socket.

  POP. A wet, sickening sound of tendon and bone yielding. The woman’s arm went completely limp, dangling at a grotesque angle.

  Before she could even register the damage, Butter was already in the air, spinning. Her prosthetic leg came around in a flying bicycle kick aimed to split the woman’s head in two. The woman brought her good arm up in a desperate block.

  CRACK! The force of the kick was monumental.

  A dark crimson stain was already spreading across the exquisite silk of her hanfu at the shoulder, the fabric clinging wetly to the ruined joint. As the impact of the kick reverberated through her block, Clap lunged once more, its jaws seeking her vulnerable throat.

  This time, there was no contempt, only a cold, calculated assessment. Injured, outnumbered, and facing an enemy that could truly harm her, she chose disengagement.

  The ground beneath the woman’s feet rippled like liquid. She sank into the pavement as if into a pool of black water and vanished without a sound, leaving only a few drops of blood spattering on the asphalt where she had stood.

  Butter landed hard, breathing in ragged gasps, sweat stinging her eyes. She wiped her brow with a trembling arm, her body screaming in protest. A flick of her wrist summoned the fuzzy blue sketchbook. Clap, its form already shimmering with the effort of maintaining its phased state, dissolved in a wisp of green and yellow light, flowing back into the page as a freshly completed drawing. She gave the page a faint, grateful stroke with her thumb; a quick, almost unconscious pet, before the book vanished. She couldn't afford to waste a single drop of magic, not now.

  She scanned the street, expecting carnage, panic, screams.

  Nothing. The traffic light changed. A couple laughed, sharing a smoothie. A man checked his phone, oblivious. The world had moved on, utterly unaware of the phantom war that had just raged in its midst.

  The realization hit her then, a cold spike of dread that dwarfed the ache in her muscles.

  The collar. The silver choker around the woman’s neck. It still pulsed with that soft, rhythmic, white light.

  Yume’s had been a shackle. A limiter that kept the storm on a leash. This woman’s was identical.

  She’d dislocated the woman’s arm, battered her with strikes that could tear through steel, and kicked her with enough force to decapitate a bull. And she hadn’t taken it off.

  She was fighting handicapped. At a fraction of her true power. Without whatever enchanted weapon a Storm Assassin of her caliber would surely wield. This wasn’t a battle; it was a probing exercise. A test Butter was barely passing.

  Butter’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drum counting down to oblivion. The next time the woman appeared, it wouldn’t be to feel her out. It would be to end the experiment. To end her.

  She had to end it first. She had to land a killing blow before her opponent decided to get serious.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Her eyes, wide and wary, darted across the peaceful street, the laughing couple, the oblivious man, the shimmering asphalt where the woman had vanished. Every shadow felt like a potential doorway. Every flicker of light felt like the prelude to an attack. Her breath hitched in her throat, every muscle coiled tighter than a spring, waiting for the world to tear open again. She was a live wire of pure, undiluted dread.

  The attack didn't come from the shadows. It didn't come from the air. It came from a place of impossible silence behind her.

  A hand settled on her lower back. Not a strike. A caress.

  Then, the fingers, elegant, deadly, dug inward. They didn't break the skin; they phased through it, through muscle and tissue, with the nauseating ease of a hand passing through water. Butter felt a cold, impossible pressure as those fingertips came to rest directly against the base of her spine, cradling the very core of her nervous system.

  She froze. Every muscle locked in primal, petrified horror. Her breath hitched in her throat, a tiny, pathetic sound. Her eyes widened, staring at nothing, seeing only the unimaginable violation of what was about to happen. One twitch of those fingers and she would be unmade from the inside out.

  "A futile struggle,"a voice whispered in her ear, calm and melodic as a chime, yet colder than glacial ice. The woman's breath was a warm, grotesque intimacy against her neck. "You bear her mark. You are a creature of that woman."

  This wasn't a random attack. This was an execution. Butter’s heart didn't just sink; it plummeted through the soles of her feet, leaving a void of cold certainty in her chest. There would be no begging. No pleas would touch whatever ancient, cold justice drove this woman. Her purpose was as sharp and final as her fingers.

  In the face of that absolute finality, a different kind of instinct took over. Not fear. Not desperation. The cold, calculated logic of a cornered animal that chooses to chew its own leg off to live.

  Her hand flashed up, not toward the woman behind her, but against her own torso. Her palm slapped against her solar plexus with a sound that cracked the air like a gunshot.

  The Vibrating Palm. Her father's eighth technique.

  For years, the internal mechanics of it had been a locked door in her mind. She understood the theory, a controlled, internal shockwave... but the practical execution, the precise resonance required to channel destructive force through her own body without vaporizing her own organs, had always eluded her. It seemed impossible, a theoretical ghost.

  Now, with death's fingers cradling her spine, the impossible clicked.

  It wasn't a conscious understanding. It was a visceral, cellular knowing. Her body, in its last desperate act of rebellion, finally understood the price and accepted it. The door didn't just open; it shattered.

  A sharp, internal shockwave rippled out from the point of impact. It wasn't meant to be used this way. It was a last resort, a gambit of pure, self-destructive spite.

  The wave tore through her own body first. A sickening, simultaneous CRUNCH echoed inside her ribcage as every one of her ribs fractured under the internal concussive force. White-hot agony blinded her. She winced, a strangled cry escaping her lips as her knees buckled.

  But the technique worked as designed. The shockwave, having traveled through the medium of her own body, reached the point of contact behind her, the woman's fingers buried in her back.

  And the tricky, brutal genius of the technique was this: the vibration amplified the farther it traveled.

  The ripple passed from Butter's flesh into the woman's fingertips, up her wrist, through her arm.

  It happened in a millisecond.

  Inside the woman's body, the wave found its resonance. It was a tremor becoming a quake becoming a cataclysm.

  There was a sound like a bag of china plates being dropped from a great height. A series of wet, internal SNAPS and POPS.

  The woman behind her gasped. A raw, wet, shocking sound, full of blood and shattered surprise. The grip on Butter's spine vanished.

  Butter collapsed forward, clutching her ruined chest, gasping through the pain.

  Behind her, the woman in the exquisite hanfu crumpled to the asphalt. She didn't fall with grace; she folded like a puppet with its strings cut. Her head lolled, and a thick stream of crimson blood spilled from her perfect lips, painting a dark, expanding rose on the gray concrete.

  Her steel-gray eyes were wide, not with pain, but with a dawning, furious recognition. A memory, sharp and unbidden, sliced through the agony in her shattered body.

  She was inside the skeletal ruin of a skyscraper, the wind howling through shattered windows. The air stank of ozone and spilled viscera. And there, outside, clinging vertically to the building's facade, was the iguana. Its scales were a venomous, pulsating cyan, patterned with swirling, bioluminescent scars that pulsed with a sickening light. Its neck was twisted in a grotesque corkscrew, rotating its head a full 180 degrees to press its snout against the glass. It stared down at her from its position below, a single milky eye the size of a dinner plate holding her reflection. Its jaw was unhinged to reveal a spiraling throat of rotating needle-teeth, and from its crown, fleshy, flower-like antennae bloomed, tasting her scent on the wind.

  Its inverted gaze was an intimate violation.

  She did not run. She became the reply. In an explosion of shattering glass and twisted steel, she blasted outward, a vengeful goddess turning the window into a weapon. She landed in a silent, cratering crouch amidst the barren battlefield, the shards of the iguana's perch now raining down around her like glittering, lethal snow.

  Her senses, expanded to encompass the entire warzone, flickered to her far left. There, a moving shadow. The only man permitted to stand among the Storm Assassins. He was a study in impossible economy. His movements were not bursts of overwhelming power, but a continuous, flowing blur of pure, honed technique. She could feel it from here, his spiritual reserves were nearly non-existent, a flickering candle next to the infernos wielded by her sisters. He was a human, fighting monsters that could stand against gods.

  A flicker of distaste crossed her features. The ambient filth of the battlefield was a persistent annoyance. With a thought, she channeled a whisper of her power. A wave of unseen force passed over her robes, not unlike a gentle breeze, but one that scoured away every speck of dust, every droplet of alien ichor, leaving the silk pristine. From a hidden fold in her sleeve, she produced a small, jade vial. She uncorked it and sprayed a fine, scented mist of plum blossom and sandalwood into the air around her, creating a small oasis of perfume in the stench of death.

  In that exact moment, a beetle-like beast the size of a small car, its carapace the color of oil-slick and its mandibles clicking with a sound like snapping bones, lunged at her from a pile of rubble.

  She didn't turn. She didn't even look.

  Her right foot, still in its delicate silk slipper, simply dug a fraction of an inch into the scorched earth, hooking under a loose piece of rubble. In the same motion, she kicked it backward.

  There was no visible projectile. There was only a CRACK that split the air, and a tunnel of vacuum that tore through the space between her and the creature.

  The beetle-beast simply ceased to exist from the neck up. Its head, thorax, and forward limbs were instantly, utterly vaporized. The remaining body, now just a hollowed-out shell of legs and abdomen, took two stumbling steps before collapsing, twitching, to the ground.

  She finished inhaling the scent of her perfume, recorked the vial, and tucked it away, her focus returning to the shadow of the man as if she had just swatted a gnat.

  A hulking beast, a regenerating horror, charged him. It was a grotesque mockery of a boar, scaled up to the size of a dump truck. Its skin was not skin, but a translucent, weeping membrane, stretched taut over a seething mass of pink sinew and hyper-dense muscle fiber. Beneath this membrane, you could see its biology at work: bones that visibly cracked and re-knit themselves with each thunderous step, and organs that swelled, split, and duplicated in a constant, frantic cycle of self-repair.

  Its head was a fortress of off-white, ever-growing tusks that spiraled out from its jaw like petrified coral, constantly splintering and regenerating in a shower of bone dust. Where its eyes should have been were instead two deep, pulsing cavities, each one a writhing nest of prehensile, tooth-lined tongues that tasted the air, slapping wetly against its own face.

  Most horrifying was its back, which was split open along the spine in a permanent, weeping fissure. From this canyon of raw flesh, thick, umbilical-like cords would periodically erupt, lashing out to snag the mangled corpses of other monsters from the battlefield and drag them into its body, a grisly fuel for its endless regeneration. It was a creature designed to outlast any assault, to wear down gods through sheer, disgusting persistence. It would have taken a thousand of her blows to overwhelm its obscene healing factor.

  The man did not dodge. He took a single, grounding step as the behemoth closed the distance, the stench of its open body cavity blasting over him like a foul wind. He delivered a swift, almost gentle push of his palm to the creature's chest.

  The impact was silent.

  But the effect was a geometric catastrophe. The force did not dissipate; it multiplied. It traveled through the monster's body as if it were a perfectly tuned medium. The first cell experienced a tremor. The next, a shockwave. The next, a localized earthquake. By the time the vibration reached the beast's hindquarters, the energy had compounded into something unquantifiable, a number that broke the scale. The creature did not scream. It did not bleed. It vaporized from the inside out, its entire biological structure simultaneously and catastrophically resonating into a fine, expanding mist of component atoms.

  His Eighth Technique. The Vibrating Palm. A move that turned the enemy's own existence into the fuel for its annihilation.

  The memory vanished, leaving only the taste of her own blood and the sight of the broken girl before her.

  This girl. This thing. She had just used that move. A crude, unperfected copy, yes, a desperate, self-shattering mimicry. But she had known the basics. The core, terrifying principle of turning the body into a conduit for a propagating, annihilating frequency.

  How?

  Her voice was a ragged, blood-choked whisper, but it carried the force of a thunderclap.

  "你这种蝼蚁... 从哪里学来的这招？"

  (Nǐ zhè zhǒng lóuyǐ...cóng nǎlǐ xué lái de zhè zhāo?)

  "A lowly insect like you...from where did you learn this move?"

  It wasn't a question. It was an accusation.

  The blood-choked accusation hung in the air, a verdict without a judge. Butter didn't have an answer. All she had was white-hot pain radiating from her shattered ribs and the primal urge to run.

  Gritting her teeth against the agony, she forced herself to her knees. Her movements were jerky, frantic. The world was already tilting, the sirens growing louder. She had to be gone before they arrived. Before this woman, this terrifying, broken woman, could somehow get back up.

  Then the world rippled.