The hard leather soles of her boots pressed into the soft earth, crushing a clump of wild grass underfoot.
Straight out of the city gates, heading northeast, and you'd find a wolf den — a Moonlight Wolf colony barely two miles from Loxibrook. The city's garrison could have wiped it out without breaking a sweat, but they'd deliberately left it standing: a proving ground where the young hopefuls of the War Academy could taste their first blood.
Just over half an hour after leaving the city, Li Fei spotted a lopsided wooden signpost nailed crookedly to the roadside.
"Check your weapons. Watch your surroundings at all times. Unless you plan on feeding the wolves your arms."
Li Fei couldn't read a word of it, of course — but she didn't need to. Not far away, a pale grey skeleton lay in the grass. From the shape of the bones, it had once been a Moonlight Wolf.
Nearby, several tall, densely leafed trees stood watch over the path. Through the gaps in the canopy, she could just make out a figure resting against the treetop — a green-haired elf in green clothing, her bare feet lightly smudged with soil, her slender silhouette half-hidden among the leaves.
"So any wolf that dares cross the signpost gets an arrow between the eyes…"
Li Fei made her guess, set down her shield, and drove the blade into the dirt. She rolled her aching wrists for a moment, then unclipped the canteen at her hip and drank down a good half of it in long, greedy gulps. She wiped the corner of her mouth, narrowed her eyes, and stared straight ahead.
The iron blade weighed about two jin — picking it up was easy enough. But carrying it on foot for three kilometers was a different matter entirely. Without money for a proper scabbard, Li Fei had been forced to lug both sword and shield the whole way by hand.
If not for a month of morning jogs that had nudged her Constitution from 3 to 4, a certain young lady would probably have been gasping for breath by now.
Still, it wasn't the physical strain that truly troubled her. For a high school girl who had never so much as wrung a chicken's neck, the thought of fighting a Moonlight Wolf to the death carried its own private terror.
She ran through her battle plan in her head several more times, raised her weapons again, breathed deep — and found it absolutely useless. So she gritted her teeth, planted her foot, and crossed past the signpost.
"If I don't put my life on the line now, I'll end up as some noble's decorative little plaything! Besides — I'm a certified transmigrator, the destined protagonist. This is literally a beginner-village enemy. Nothing to be scared of…"
Li Fei kept pumping herself up internally. Her feet, however, had considerably slowed.
Up in the branches, the elf sat in silence, watching the figure below — grip wrong, footwork nonexistent — and gave a quiet shake of her head.
She had kept watch here for many years. She had seen too many of them: restless young men and women who refused to stay ordinary, who wanted to live like the heroes in the biographies, who thought battle and bloodshed could change their fate. Most of them did not go peacefully. In the end, their families couldn't even piece together a whole body to bury.
What a waste of a face like that.
...
Whether by luck or misfortune, Li Fei had barely slowed her pace before — not even fifteen minutes later — she caught sight of a Moonlight Wolf crouched at a stream, drinking.
Grey-white fur. Powerful, well-proportioned limbs. Not bad looking, honestly, by her standards. She had observed a few tamed Moonlight Wolves up close inside the city — aside from being larger, with those signature silver-moonlight eyes, they looked no different from the wolves she'd seen at the zoo in her past life.
That thing could probably eat me over several days.
Not that it mattered!
A fight to the death doesn't require honorable conduct. I can strike while it's distracted — hit it in a vital spot.
And it's daytime.
Sequence 9 was the threshold of the Transcendent path, and even the weakest Sequence 9 entities — cannon fodder like Moonlight Wolves — still possessed a measure of the supernatural. Bathed in moonlight, a Moonlight Wolf's speed, strength, and recovery all received a significant boost.
Which meant, by simple inversion: a Moonlight Wolf in broad daylight was the weakest of the weak.
With a weapon in hand, the will to kill rose naturally. The solid grip of the hilt gave Li Fei a thread of confidence — enough to push down the thought of "maybe I should run and try again when I'm more prepared" — and she crouched low, slowly circling around behind the wolf.
She focused on every step, on making no sound at all.
Ten meters… five meters…
Sweat dripped from her chin. Thank god she'd tied her hair back into a ponytail — if it had fallen across her face now, it would have blinded her completely.
Three meters…
Li Fei forced down the sudden surge of excitement. Her knuckles had gone white around the hilt.
You've got this, Li Fei!
The advantage is overwhelming right now!
Just a few more steps, and this stupid, oblivious wolf is going to learn exactly what pain feels like.
Kill the wolf, get EXP. EXP means getting stronger. Stronger means more EXP, faster. And then — House Mettis. Heh.
At that exact moment, the Moonlight Wolf's ears snapped upright. It turned its head with sudden alertness — and its wild, untamed gaze landed directly on Li Fei.
Moonlight Wolf: ?
Li Fei: …
In almost the same instant, the wolf swung its entire body to face her. Its haunches arched slightly, tail raised high, and a low, threatening rumble rolled up from deep in its chest.
Those green eyes — feral, frenzied — hit Li Fei like a blank wall. For one suspended moment, her mind went completely empty.
Then something ancient clawed its way up from the depths of her instincts — the hunting drive buried in the genes of every upright-walking primate — and it swept away every trace of fear in a single wave.
Hesitate and you lose.
Without a single warning sign, Li Fei let out a sharp, ringing battle cry and charged straight at it.
Come on then!
Her heart hammered wildly, driving blood to every corner of her body, and she moved faster than she ever had before.
The blade shrieked through the air, parted fur and flesh, and buried itself in bone.
The Moonlight Wolf let out a series of sharp, short screams — then the pain ignited its savagery. Instead of retreating, it launched forward. Its hind legs kicked off the ground and it lunged.
Li Fei had planned for this. She raised her shield to protect her upper body and vital points —
But the impact was far harder than she'd imagined. When the wolf's skull slammed into the shield, the dull crack knocked her completely off balance, and she toppled backward.
Bad. Very bad.
Every alarm in Li Fei's head went off at once. She swung the blade wildly, trying to drive the wolf back — but it didn't work.
The maddened Moonlight Wolf gave the fallen girl no quarter. It lunged down and bit into her thigh. Its powerful jaw drove those sharp, reeking fangs through the fabric of her trousers and deep into flesh and muscle.
From the very first exchange, everything had gone completely wrong.
"I—"
Li Fei lost any hope of staying calm. Her face twisted. Her eyes burned red.
Adrenaline flooded her system, numbing the pain, and she threw every carefully planned battle scenario — "if the wolf lunges I dodge to the side and chop its head off" — straight out of her mind. She let out a string of choice expletives in her mother tongue, slammed the shield against the wolf's skull over and over with one hand, and with the other swung the iron blade in a frenzied, relentless torrent of wild, savage hacks that fell across the wolf's back like a storm — splitting it open, soaking the grass in blood within seconds!
But the wolf's savagery in a critical moment exceeded everything Li Fei had anticipated. Ten slashes, then twenty — its back was a ruin of raw meat and exposed white bone — and still it refused to let go. Still it snarled and gnawed at her thigh, thrashing its head back and forth, trying to tear the whole chunk of flesh free.
Hot blood ran in streams, soaking through her trouser leg.
The situation had spiraled so badly that Li Fei understood, with sickening clarity: even if she killed this thing right now, she might not make it back to Loxibrook alive. Even if she didn't bleed out, that leg was almost certainly finished.
A single low-level nobody from the beginner zone… and it's done this to me…
Her thoughts had gone completely haywire. Healing magic. The potions in the Shop Panel. She had forgotten all of it. She didn't even have words left for cursing. With a hysterical scream, she flung the shield aside entirely and seized the hilt with both hands.
Kill it. Kill it. Kill it.
Thwack.
The blade punched through the wolf's left eye and out the other side of its skull.
The Moonlight Wolf finally released her. It let out one last raw, piercing wail, rolled and convulsed against the ground a few times, and went still. Its blood soaked the grass and seeped into the dark earth.
The wildflowers here would probably bloom thicker come spring.
[You have killed a Moonlight Wolf. +11 EXP]
"I think I might still be salvageable."
Li Fei collapsed to the ground. She'd barely drawn two ragged breaths before the raw, surging will to survive forced her to drag herself upright — she didn't even stop to check the system panel.
Tears brimmed in her eyes. Without a word, she tore off her outer jacket and, biting down against the screaming pain, tried to tourniquet the wound at the top of her thigh.
A few seconds later, her hands froze.
A second Moonlight Wolf — belly hollow with hunger — had followed the scent of blood and materialized silently at the edge of her vision.
She glanced at her shield, lying a few meters away. She tried to move her injured leg. Nothing but white-hot agony answered her.
Well… so this is where I get eaten. What a ridiculous way to go. If Kenneth ever finds out I was actually planning to take revenge on House Mettis, he'll be laughing in his sleep.
Something settled in her chest. Li Fei let out a broken, wretched laugh — and the tears finally spilled over.
If I beg for my life right now, will it at least leave me in one piece?
Probably not.
Well then. Nothing left to be afraid of.
Li Fei wiped her tears. She let go of every last scrap of fear she was holding. The tear-tracks stayed on her bloodied, mud-streaked face — and she met the wolf's cold, hungry gaze with stubborn, unflinching eyes.
The Moonlight Wolf prowled at the edge of the distance, inching closer.
Li Fei stared it down in silence, shedding the very last flicker of wishful thinking.
After a breathless, suffocating standoff, the wolf finally ran out of patience. It snarled and launched itself forward.
Li Fei's face was blank.
Shield's gone. I still have my arms.
She raised one arm high. The bloody maw snapped shut around her forearm.
Li Fei used the momentum to roll, shot out her other hand, and clamped it around the wolf's throat. Close to forty kilograms of bodyweight — combined with the grip strength a human body could summon at the edge of death — was more than enough to choke the life out of the creature.
Before her left hand went numb entirely, Li Fei drove her fist deep into the wolf's slick, warm throat.
The fangs kept working — snapping, tearing — shredding the soft skin of her arm to ribbons. Blood soaked into the wolf's fur, dripping from its jaws. But Li Fei just wept soundlessly, and held on.
Sharp claws raked jagged, horrifying gashes across her body. She didn't flinch. Tears and sweat fell in streams. The world in front of her eyes had gone a blurry, deep red.①
...
Sometime later — she had no idea how long — Li Fei lay on the grass, which reeked of iron and blood.
Beside her: two dead wolves.
Going to be sick.
So cold.
The blood loss was making her drowsy. She understood, distantly, that she probably wasn't going to make it back to Loxibrook.
She hadn't killed Kenneth yet. Hadn't taken revenge on House Mettis.
She hadn't deleted those files on her laptop.
I don't want to die…
…Oh well. At least make myself presentable.
Her left hand and right leg had gone completely numb. With great effort, she unclipped the canteen from her hip and poured the water over her face, trying to clean herself up — at least not look too terrible at the end.
A loud, imperious roar shattered that plan entirely.
Something about it reminded her of the tiger roars she'd heard as a child watching nature documentaries.
This is supposed to be a wolf den. Why is there a tiger?
If I could still move, I'd slide-tackle whatever you are…
Li Fei's mind was beginning to drift. Memories from more than a decade of her life flashed past like a slideshow, one after another, and in her dazed state she found herself laughing at nothing at all.
The laughter dissolved, and warm liquid ran from the corners of her eyes down to her temples.
Crying again? How embarrassing…
Li Fei gave herself a self-deprecating twist of the lips, arranged herself into something marginally more comfortable, and lay flat to wait for the end. The slideshow in her head was almost over. It settled, finally, on a memory from just before she'd crossed over: a date.
She'd finally gotten somewhere with the music teacher from the neighboring school — had been planning to bring her home that weekend, to mark that particular milestone with the beautiful, elegant older woman. She'd even worn her school uniform on purpose, because she'd figured out exactly what that woman liked… If only she hadn't been so picky about it all. Her very first girlfriend would have been perfectly fine too…
Her thoughts were dissolving now. Li Fei let her eyes fall closed. Only three final thoughts remained:
If I get another chance — I'll enjoy every moment while I have it.
If I survive this — I will plan carefully before I act. Every single time.
If I somehow don't die today — I will absolutely use this lesson in the next one…
The sky went dark.
A powerful creature with a wingspan of over ten meters — eagle's head, lion's haunches — circled overhead, blotting out the sun, and descended to land beside Li Fei.
A woman stood atop its back: a pipe in her hand, a bearing both graceful and commanding. She wore a purple veil over her face and a form-fitting purple gown that traced the full, mature curves of her figure.
The woman glanced down at the two dead wolves on the ground, then at the girl below — pupils slowly losing focus, breath growing thinner by the second — and the corner of her brow lifted. A smile of genuine, amused interest spread across her lips.
"Oh my, oh my. Look what we have here — a mysterious young lady in distress."
She exhaled a slow curl of smoke, the line of her lips tilting upward.
"I thought storylines like 'step out the door and stumble upon a heavily wounded foreign beauty' only happened in pulp novels…"
Magic rippled through the air as the woman drifted down from the Griffin's back to crouch beside Li Fei. She studied that small, wet, pretty face with a long, meaningful smile.
"As it happens, my establishment is still missing a hostess of Eastern descent… A black-haired, dark-eyed beauty like this one ought to be quite popular."
____
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