Chapter 834: A child soldier 1

An old man walked home with quick, even steps, a canvas bag hooked over one shoulder, and lifted a hand to nearly every person he passed.

"Evening, Marta."

"Master Anng! Good to see you as always."

"Good crop this week, Desmond?"

The vendor grinned and waved him off with a laugh, already turning to serve the next customer in line.

This was Anng. Martial arts instructor at Academy Twelve, and one of the last handful of people alive who still taught his particular discipline properly, not the watered-down version most schools settled for when nobody wanted to put in the years it actually took. He carried seventy-some years on him, and none of it showed in how he moved through the market crowd, weaving between stalls and shoulders with a lightness that made younger men look clumsy by comparison.

His kimono hung loose and simple, faded at the hems from years of wear, sleeves wide enough to hide his hands when he wanted them hidden. But anyone who looked closely, really looked, past the plain fabric and the unassuming walk, could see it in his forearms when he reached for something, in the set of his shoulders, in the way his weight never seemed to fully commit to any single step until the last possible moment. A body built the old way. Decades of discipline stacked one careful year on top of another, rather than a single hard season of gym work chasing a look.

He stopped at a fruit stall near the end of the row.

"The greens still fresh, or should I come back tomorrow."

"Fresh this morning, Master Anng. Picked them myself."

"Good man."

He paid in full, tucked the goods nto his bag alongside a few root vegetables he’d already picked up further back, and kept walking, past a noodle stand where the owner called out a greeting without looking up from his wok, past a pair of children racing each other down the middle of the street who nearly barreled straight into him and got nothing worse than a raised eyebrow and a small step aside.

He turned down a narrower street eventually, buildings growing a little more tired here, paint a little more faded, laundry lines strung between windows overhead. This part of the Eastern Cardinal wasn’t where most people expected to find a decorated instructor, a name that still opened certain doors, a man who’d served long enough in uniform that plenty of active officers still called him sir out of old habit. He could have lived somewhere nicer. He’d been offered housing closer to the academy more than once over the years, newer buildings, better plumbing, quieter neighbors, all of it subsidized without him having to ask twice.

He’d turned it down every time.

A group of boys kicked a worn ball against a wall further down the block, and he raised a hand as he passed.

"Mind the window, Toma."

"Sorry, Master Anng!"

He didn’t slow to scold further. The apology was enough. It usually was, with that one.

His building sat at the end of the street, three stories, nothing remarkable about it from the outside, and he climbed the stairs without his breathing changing at all, not even slightly, the kind of ease that came from a body that had simply never been allowed to grow soft.

His apartment held exactly what he used, and nothing beyond that. A training mat rolled against one wall. A kettle. Two chairs at a small table, because he occasionally had guests, though rarely more than one at a time. No decorations beyond a single worn scroll hung near the window, characters faded from age rather than framed for display.

The bag on his shoulder held mostly vegetables. Greens, a few roots, one small wrapped cut of meat he allowed himself once a week and never more, regardless of what his pension or his teaching salary could have afforded him otherwise.

He lived simply because he’d spent most of his life learning to need less, and a man who’d mastered that particular discipline didn’t suddenly abandon it the moment his circumstances improved.

Wealth changed what a person could buy. It rarely changed what they actually needed.

He set the bag down on the kitchen counter.

The window was open. He noted it immediately, the way he noted everything, filed it away without any outward reaction at all.

He filled the kettle at the sink, set it on the stove, and turned to the small fridge tucked in the corner, bending to place the greens on the bottom shelf where they’d keep longest.

Then all of a sudden he turned swiftly and pulled a knife on the counter near him.

He threw the knife without turning around.

It left his hand backward, blind, no windup, no glance to aim it, and stopped dead three feet behind him, hovering there, trembling faintly at the edges where something unseen held it fast in open air.

"Old man." Lila’s voice came from the doorway, arms crossed loosely, entirely unbothered by the blade suspended a hand’s width from her own face. "Still got it, I see."

Anng straightened slowly, closed the fridge door with his hip, and turned to face her without any particular hurry, like a guest arriving mid-afternoon rather than an intruder who’d let herself in.

"I felt your energy the moment you crossed the threshold," he said. "You are not subtle, girl. You never were, even back when you still pretended to be one of us."

"I wasn’t trying to be subtle." She let the knife drop, catching it out of the air with her own hand this time, and set it gently on the counter, almost polite about it. "Figured sneaking around an old master would just insult you."

"What are you doing in my home."

"Visiting an old teacher."

"You were never my student." His voice hardened, though his posture stayed loose, unthreatening, hands still empty at his sides. "And you have some nerve showing your face anywhere near this academy, after what you did to it. After what your parents did, standing beside the Purge while good people died at the Nexus arena."

Lila’s mouth curved into something easy, unbothered by the accusation sitting heavy in the room between them.

"Come on, old man. How is that all on me? Minister Reign was in on it. Commander Albright, your own vice headmaster, orchestrated half of it from the inside, and many more who probably still sleep just fine. Funny how nobody wants to call them the villains in this story."

"People died that day," Anng said, quiet, even, more dangerous for how calm it stayed. "Children. Soldiers. People who trusted the walls of that academy to keep them safe, and you helped tear that trust apart from the inside, same as the rest of them."

Lila clicked her tongue, slow, three times.

"Tsk. Tsk. Tsk." She tilted her head. "Old man."

Anng moved.

No warning, no telegraph, simply gone from where he’d been standing and reappearing a stride closer, fingers folding down into a tight two-point configuration, and he drove them forward into open air between them.

THOOOM!!

A wave of white chi tore loose from the strike, compressed and violent, cracking through the space toward her, and Lila twisted aside from it at the last possible second, the edge of it still catching her sleeve and shredding the fabric clean off her forearm.

"Oh, he’s serious," she muttered, already backpedaling as a second strike followed the first.

THOOOM!!

Another two-fingered thrust, precise, surgical, and this one she caught with a flash of red-white energy thrown up between them, dark chi meeting white in a concussive burst that threw both of them back a full step, the kitchen table splitting down the middle from the shockwave alone.

Anng didn’t stop moving. He closed the distance again immediately, this time a full palm strike aimed for her sternum, and Lila caught his wrist with pure telekinetic pressure, no contact at all, redirecting the strike a few inches wide of its mark, close enough that she still felt the wind of it cut past her ribs.

"Geez old man, have you gotten faster?" she said, breathless despite herself.

"You’ve gotten sloppy," Anng said, and spun low into a sweep meant to take her legs clean out from under her.

Lila lifted herself half a foot off the ground with a sharp telekinetic pulse, clearing the sweep by a margin so thin it nearly clipped her heel anyway, and Anng was already rising out of the motion with another strike loaded, fingers folded again, and this time the wave of chi didn’t travel straight. It curved, bending unnaturally around an overturned chair he’d clearly used as deliberate cover, and caught her from an angle she hadn’t accounted for at all.

The impact threw her into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind her, dust and fragments raining down around her shoulders.

Lila coughed, wiped her mouth, and came off the wall laughing, genuine and unbothered.

"Okay. Okay, that one actually hurt."

"It was meant to."

He advanced again, weight dropping lower this time, both hands folding into that same tight configuration, and he began striking the air in rapid succession, a blur of compressed, controlled motion, each strike releasing a fraction of the same destructive wave, stacking faster than she could track any single one individually.

THOOOM! THOOOM! THOOOM!

Lila threw up a localized field of distortion between them, chronokinesis bending the space just enough to slow anything passing through it, and the incoming waves staggered against that barrier, losing momentum, arriving a half beat slower than they should have. She used that stolen half beat to slip sideways and close the remaining distance herself, driving a palm strike wrapped in red-white chi straight at his chest.

Anng caught her wrist an inch from contact.

For a moment they stood locked there, her strike straining hard against his grip, his stance utterly still despite the visible pressure building along his forearm, tendons standing out sharp beneath weathered skin.

"You’ve been practicing something forbidden," he said, low, something genuinely disturbed moving behind the words now. "I can feel it, in what you’re throwing. That is not chi. That is a corruption of it, wearing chi’s shape to hide what it actually is."

"Dark chi," Lila said, smiling despite the visible strain in her arm. "Yeah. Picked it up a long time ago. Taught someone else you might know how to use it, actually. Left a little souvenir behind before I disappeared."

Something in Anng’s expression shifted then, fast and sharp, real anger surfacing clean through his usual composure for the first time all fight.

"You taught a child that."

"He wasn’t exactly a child by the time I got around to him."

Anng released her wrist and struck with his other hand instead, faster than she expected given how close they already stood, and the blow caught her shoulder dead center, a burst of white chi detonating against her on contact and throwing her clean across the room into the kitchen counter, dishes rattling loose and shattering in a scatter across the floor.

She slid down against the cabinets, breathing hard now, a thin line of blood at the corner of her mouth.

Anng closed the distance methodically, no rush in it at all, the calm of a man who had already decided, some time ago, exactly how this particular conversation was going to end.

"I see you on the stream with Noah. And out of respect, I looked away from all of it. But now I am going to make a call," he said, reaching for the small communicator clipped at his hip, "and have you put away for the rest of your natural life, girl. For everything you’ve already done. And for whatever it is you’re planning to do next."

His hand stopped an inch from the device.

His whole body stopped with it, mid-motion, one arm half raised, every muscle locked rigid in place, and something like genuine, unguarded surprise flickered behind his eyes for the first time in the entire fight.

Lila pushed herself up off the floor slowly, wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of one hand, and looked at him with something almost gentle in her expression, the anger from a moment ago already gone from her voice entirely.

"You’re realistically one of the strongest people I know," she said. "I mean that. Genuinely. Whatever they’re paying you at that academy, it’s nowhere near enough." She stepped closer, unhurried, watching him strain uselessly against whatever held him locked in place. "But there’s a gap. Between people like you, and people like me."

She tilted her head, studying him the way someone studied a puzzle they’d already worked out days ago.

"I just happen to be too strong."