Xiao Che's return was never meant to be a soft reappearance. There were drums in his camp, cries, a muster like iron meeting iron. Lin Wei's ignorance held a moment of stubborn hope: she wanted him to lay down arms and choose the quieter life. For someone who had spent years training as a physician in a modern hospital, the complex calculus of leading a restoration was abstract and forbidding. For him, the calculus was blood and family.
When the camps met, the battlefield was less a field than a theater. Shen arrived with the Crown's troops, armor gleaming under the indifferent sun. Words that might have been negotiation skidded into violence; choices slid to edges and were executed. Xiao Che fought with a desperate nobility that seemed to belong more to a novel than to history. He spoke about obligations and debts, about restoring what he believed had been stolen from his people.
The campaign ended in slaughter and in small acts that looked like mercy. When Xiao Che fell, it felt both by the inevitable hand of a man refusing to soften his heart and by the tragedy of someone who loved deeply and thus chose a path that would not bend. His death was quick, a blade, a fall, the last breath given to a woman who once refused to be a queen yet remained the axis of his hunger.