The noise of armies had become background. Rams thudded, drums pounded, men screamed, and yet all of it folded away, leaving only a circle of dirt between me and my brother. Soldiers knew better than to stand between knives that had shared the same childhood. They stepped back without being told, their eyes wide, their mouths shut.
Wu Kang's armor was rent where Shen Yue's blade had kissed him earlier. Blood darkened the plates, but his eyes were not dim. He carried grief like a torch, and grief does not flicker in the wind.
"Brother," he said, voice raw, teeth bared. "This ends here. For Wu Ling. For the name you've blackened."
I said nothing. Words would only waste the breath needed for steel.
He struck first, as he always did. His blade fell with a storm's certainty, a downpour meant to break roofs and bones alike. I caught it, barely. The shock burned down my arm, settling in my teeth. He was heavier than before, as if each of his fifty thousand men had placed their weight behind him.
I gave him cold in return. Precision. No rage, no grief—only the subtraction of air where his throat would have been if he had not swayed. Sparks spat between us.
The circle shrank. We were not two brothers; we were two verdicts written in iron. His sword bit my pauldron and tore through leather beneath. Pain sang. I answered by opening his shoulder with a kiss of steel shallow enough to insult, deep enough to sting. He laughed, blood on his teeth, because wounds only made him hungrier.
I grew tired. He did not. He fought as if he had already accepted death and found it sweet. Every strike came faster, harder. My arm lagged. My breath shortened. My ribs remembered the weight of his boot when we sparred as boys, and memory is a cruel tutor.
His blade pressed mine down. Step by step, I was forced back. Dust stuck to my lips. My knees bent. The crowd around us leaned, as if the ground itself wanted me to fall.
He forced me down to one knee. His sword angled for my throat, and his eyes blazed with triumph not for himself, but for Wu Ling, whose ghost he carried like a standard.
"Die, little winter," he hissed.
The silence inside me woke.
The dust at my feet coiled into spirals too precise for chance. Horses screamed though no arrow touched them. Men clutched at their ears, faces pale as if they had heard their names whispered by something too vast to be kind. Shen Yue, some paces away, froze mid-step, her sword arm rigid, eyes wide with a horror she would not name.
Wu Kang's blade descended. For an instant, it was perfect—angle, force, certainty. It should have ended me.
It missed. By the width of breath, it missed, as if the air itself had shifted.
My body moved with a clarity sharper than any thought. The sword in my hand rose, not mine alone, but carried by the weight of the silence pressing through my ribs. I struck with inevitability. Steel met flesh at his side, tearing deep where the storm stored its strength.
Wu Kang howled, staggered, dropped to one knee. Blood poured, thick and dark, steaming in the cold. He looked up at me, shock and fury wrestling in his face.
"What are you?" he rasped.
I looked into his eyes and did not answer. Because I did not know. Because the answer would have been crueler than the wound.
I stood above him, sword ready. Shen Yue's voice came, calm, stripped of theater: "End it."
The silence inside me wanted more. It wanted to erase. To finish. My arm rose.
But hesitation—smaller than regret, thinner than mercy—stopped the stroke. Wu Kang rolled away, clutching his side, carried by the hands of his men who swarmed like ants to shield him. He vanished into their press, his blood marking the dirt like a signature.
The duel was over. The war was not.
I stood there, breathing like a bellows gone cold, the dust still swirling patterns no eye should follow. Soldiers looked at me not with joy, not even loyalty—only fear. They had seen something fight through me, not with me.
Shen Yue came close, two fingers touching my arm. Her eyes were steady, but the steadiness was not courage. It was resolve, brittle and sharp, as if she had chosen to stand beside a monster because she could not bear to leave him.
"Prince," General Sun said from the edge of the circle, his voice unreadable, "your orders."
I looked over the field—smoke rising, bodies cooling, the Golden Dragons faltering but not yet broken. My heart beat, slow and foreign, each pulse not my own.
"Huailing," I said, my voice flat, without echo. "We march on Huailing. Burn every road behind us. Salt the fields. Let the South watch hunger grow."
No cheer. No roar of approval. Only obedience, cold and mechanical.
Shen Yue lowered her gaze, her lips pressed thin. My soldiers bowed their heads, not in loyalty, but because it is easier than looking too long at winter.
I sheathed my sword. The silence inside me leaned, listening, patient.
I did not know if I had won or lost.