The villain was not finished.
She should have been. By any reasonable measure, she was finished—thrown into a wall by Xue Lian, her hair pinned under her own weight, her white dress in tatters, and the red mark from the monitor still fresh on her face. Finished.
She got up anyway.
Slowly, with the grim determination of someone who had invested too much to stop, she pushed herself upright and swept her hair back over her shoulders. Beside Zhao Wei on the floor, Xue Lian had not moved. She watched the villain rise with steady, unwavering attention.
"You have the nerve," Xue Lian said, "to fearlessly steal a demon family's heirloom."
The villain's chin lifted slightly.
"Semani," Xue Lian continued, "is not something that can be possessed by a bug like you."
A flash of emotion crossed the villain's face—not hurt, exactly, but the sharp reaction of someone who had just been correctly identified and placed in the exact category she belonged to. Her hair rose slightly around her, like the hackles of a large beast.
Xue Lian's eyes did not change. "Give it back."
The silence between them carried weight. Zhao Wei lay at the edge of it, watching them the way he always did—calculating distances, reading what was about to happen before it happened. He had grown very good at that. It was how he had survived the parts of his life that were supposed to be unsurvivable.
The villain's mouth curved.
"That witch-like confidence," she said, with something that might have been admiration if it were not so clearly a prelude to violence. "As expected from the demon family…"
She moved.
Her hair came first—BAM! BAM!—two fast strikes aimed at Xue Lian's centre. Xue Lian stepped through both attacks with small, precise movements. The blade appeared in her hand, cutting twice—CUT! CUT!—and the hair fell in clean sections, the severed ends blackening where the blade had passed. The villain circled. Xue Lian turned with her. SWISH. SWISH.
Then the villain threw Semani.
Not at Xue Lian—upward, hard—sending the small stone spinning toward the ceiling of the stairwell. It bounced off the upper wall and clattered onto a ledge somewhere above them, out of reach.
"If you can take it back," the villain said, dropping into a fighting stance, "why don't you try?" Her eyes gleamed. "But I'm telling you, it won't be easy!"
She launched herself upward.
Xue Lian watched her go. Then she raised one hand, palm outward. The disc reformed between her fingers, larger now and spinning faster. The light intensified until the entire stairwell was washed in cold white.
"Ignorant thing," Xue Lian said.
She fired.
The sound was not an explosion. It was more like a door closing—contained, final, absolute. The energy left her hand in a concentrated ring that expanded as it travelled, filling the stairwell from wall to wall in a spaceless, omnidirectional barrier that left the villain with nowhere to go.
"SPACELESS OMNIDIRECTIONAL DEFENSE?!" The villain's voice shot up several registers. "To cast a high-level magic so easily—?!"
Xue Lian was already moving.
GRAB.
Her hand closed around the villain's wrist with the same calm certainty with which she did everything—unhurried, unavoidable, the way natural laws are unavoidable. She looked at the villain from a distance of three inches.
"Die."
The attack that followed was not complicated. It was simply Xue Lian deciding that something was over—and then it was. In a single motion, her blade moved in a dark arc that carried everything behind it, connecting completely.
SLICE.
The villain came apart at the edges. Not destroyed—transformed. She shrank inward, losing her human shape and collapsing into something smaller and bestial. Strange sounds filled the stairwell for a brief moment before cutting off. The Semani stone fell from wherever it had lodged and bounced down the stairs—Ting. Ting. Ting. Ting.—each small sound sharp and clear in the sudden quiet.
Zhao Wei watched it bounce past his face and come to rest against the skirting board.
In that moment, he was painfully aware that he had been lying on the floor of this stairwell for some time, that his legs were still not working, and that he had just watched his Master—a word that still sat badly in his chest, regardless of its accuracy—end the fight in moments.
Bai Feng appeared from somewhere—outside, from the air, it was impossible to say—landing in the stairwell with the soft sound of feet on concrete. He looked at the scene with the expression of someone who had seen this before and had not entirely grown used to it.
"That was great, as usual, Miss."
Xue Lian picked up the Semani stone from the skirting board without looking at Zhao Wei. "Should we check which family it belongs to?"
Bai Feng examined what remained of the villain—a large, exhausted creature crouched against the wall, panting, reduced to its base form. "Here it is." He retrieved something from the creature: a small crest-stone, separate from Semani itself. He held it up, drooling slightly the way he did when concentrating.
Xue Lian looked at the stone. "This kind of crest is a first."
She dropped it to the floor. "Bai Feng. Which family?"
Bai Feng transformed back with a POOF of displaced air, rubbed his chin, and examined the crest with professional attention. "Looking at the colour and shape… It's the crest of Zrrad. A low-class family."
Xue Lian said nothing for a moment. Her eyes moved to the far wall of the stairwell, fixing on something that was not there.
Then, quietly, in the tone she used for things she had already decided were important: "A low-class family wouldn't be able to break through a demon family's trap on their own. Something else is definitely behind this."
The stairwell fell quiet, except for the distant sound of Beijing traffic through the walls, the faint mechanical tick of the heartbeat in Zhao Wei's chest, and the exhausted breathing of whatever the villain had become.
Zhao Wei pressed his palm against the floor and tried his legs again.
Still nothing.
He thought about Zhao Ming at home, probably asleep by now. He thought about the hospital bill due on Friday. He thought about being undead, being a target, and lying on the floor of a PC café stairwell while his Master had just destroyed someone in moments and was now calmly discussing demonic family crests with her companion—without having looked at him once.
He put his forehead down on his arm.
"Can someone," he said to no one in particular, "explain what is happening to my legs?"