Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 97 – Back Again (2)

‘He’s no common thug, I have to give him that much,’ Eve thought.

A faint sliver of the morning light cut through the narrow street. She’d followed the guard through the main streets, keeping a safe distance, until he turned into a lesser-used side street—probably where his home was.

Pressing herself against the stone wall, which was damp with morning dew, she took an inhale of the musty air, bathed in the gentle golden hues of the rising sun.

Luckily, they were still in the hushed hours of early morning—a perfect time for an ambush.

She sighed. ‘I’ve been doing this a lot lately.’

Back in the elven territories, she’d rarely had to resort to such tactics. There, she could openly wield the Emperor’s authority and was more often directly sent to exterminate demons and root out traitors.

In the human territories, though, she had no such luxury.

Flexing the fingers of her right hand, she breathed in again.

‘Shit…’ she thought to herself, feeling a faint ghost pain in her missing left arm. ‘Focus…’

If she didn’t act soon, she’d lose her chance.

The steady blow glow of nearby mana lanterns tried and failed to overpower the steadily growing light of the sun.

‘What is he going to be?’ she wondered. ‘A warrior-type? A scout? I doubt he’s a mage. He has too much armor for that.’

She didn’t see a weapon at the man’s waist to indicate how he usually fought, but that didn’t mean he was defenseless—he likely just had it stored in an item bag or could even have been a martial arts user.

Heat swirled around her. It was a curse sometimes, but it was also a blessing.

‘Would it have been better to be just another common pawn?’

She consoled herself with the thought that she was at least special, as shunned as she was by other elves for her ‘cursed’ status. If she’d been an Awakener, she would have been nothing.

A strong Pull brought more heat to herself, ready to be used at a moment’s notice.

The man, armored in reflective plating and shiny leather, was already a few dozen steps down the street. There was simply no way to take him down without alerting him first.

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Anticipating the upcoming battle, adrenaline surged through Eve’s body.

‘I almost feel sorry for you…’ she thought. She’d have to silence the man when she was done, but there were more important things at stake than her conscience.

Finally, before the guard could trudge his way to whichever door along the small street’s stone huts was his, she sprinted toward him as quietly as she could.

There were no bystanders, passersby, or observers in sight like there had been on the main streets, so as long as she acted quickly, things would stay in her favor.

Warmth surged through her arms and stopped at her fingertips, begging for release.

‘I can’t kill him outright.’ If that were her goal, a simple beam of concentrated fire could’ve taken him down in mere moments. No, instead, she needed to be precise.

The guard started to turn, sensing something was amiss. His Awakener-enhanced ears had probably heard her the moment she started running.

It was just her luck that he wasn’t expecting to be openly attacked so close to his home.

‘A man of few enemies, it seems.’

She lunged forward and spun, Pushing the heat from her right foot to amplify her momentum and bring her heel smashing into the side of the guard’s unarmored head in a reverse spin kick.

Even with time to react, he’d been slow on the uptake, perhaps wondering what she was running from without comprehending that he was her target.

Having completed his turn, the man fell back onto the ground and barely caught himself, concussed but still conscious.

Showing no mercy, she leaped over the man and used a large portion of her retained warmth to Push herself downward, driving her knees into his armored chest and knocking his back flat into the stone street.

Her hand leaked heat as she raised it to the man’s throat and Pushed enough to sear the skin.

“Don’t scream.” She said, staring down into the man’s confused and panicked eyes. “I’m going to ask y—”

That’s when she felt something cold pierce her left thigh.

She rolled off of the man’s chest and forced herself to stand while the man lowered his hand, which trailed cold vapor in the air.

A brief glance down at her leg was enough to confirm the damage—an ice dagger stuck in the muscle of her leg.

She pulled it out and Pushed heat out to cauterize the wound before she lost too much blood, biting the inside of her lip at the sharp pain, which was soon accompanied by the odor of charred flesh.

‘Of fucking course it had to be ice,’ she cursed inwardly. Her hope of ending things quickly went out the window.

‘I have to end this as fast as possible.’ Before the city guard could be called or a random Awakener joined, she had to get her answers. Things had already gone too far for her to run. Not that she even could, with her injured leg.

The guard had conjured the ice dagger so quickly that she hadn’t even noticed it appear. Naturally, ice was the worst possible matchup against her fire.

The guard held one hand to his slightly burned throat and struggled to his feet.

Meanwhile, the street remained still, the hush of the early morning not yet broken.

At least the guard wasn’t completely unharmed. His breaths came out in rough pants, making it clear that he was having difficulty breathing.

‘Did I manage to crack his ribs?’ Armor was better off against sharp impacts, after all.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing…” the man croaked out, “but you’ve chosen the wrong target.”

He probably thought she was an Awakener like him. If he’d known the truth—that she needed to Pull warmth and pool it before unleashing her strongest attacks—he wouldn’t have given her room to breathe.

Eve didn’t bother to reply. Talking would only enable the man to recover, and she had no illusions he’d keep quiet if she allowed him to survive.

It was a fight to the death, and perhaps her eyes betrayed her intentions.

Lethal force was necessary, but she still had to keep him alive for at least a few moments to get her answers.

He made the first move while she was still Pulling as much warmth as she could from the cool morning air. Had it been midday, the fight would’ve already been over.

A dagger appeared in the guard’s hand and launched toward her.

Diving out of the way, she shot a beam of concentrated fire straight through the man’s right knee. Pain shot through her leg from the exertion.

The guard let out a grunt of pain and collapsed again, his entire lower leg missing, having been disintegrated by the blast in a puff of ash and smoke.

Before she could Pull more warmth and push the advantage, the guard brought himself to his knees and clasped both of his hands together as he scrunched his eyebrows in concentration for a moment.

‘Shit, he’s casting his keystone technique, isn’t he?’ Most Awakeners gained a keystone technique at around level 5 that served as a sort of ‘ultimate’ ability.

In the guard’s case, cold air surged around him and swirled into a ball of churning ice within the span of mere seconds. It then exploded outward toward her in a cone, sending countless small spikes of ice cutting through the air.

‘That means he’s desperate.’

From what she knew, most keystone techniques came with an intense cost. Since the guard had already summoned two ice daggers, he was probably already nearing the end of his mana pool after the keystone ability.

She swung her arm in a horizontal arc ahead of her and Pushed as much heat as she could in a curtain of fire as she turned to the side to expose as little of her body as possible to the incoming ice.

The fiery wall met the hail of ice in a clash of vapor and swirling color. Still, it wasn’t quite enough. With nothing but the air to pull Warmth from, her power came to her slower than it otherwise would have.

Splinters of ice forced their way through and barraged her body with countless pinpricks and cuts. None were large enough at that point to cause lethal damage.

Still, it was enough to send pain shooting through her body and for blood to slowly drip from the multitude of cuts over her body and face, leaving little holes and cuts all along her clothes.

‘Shit!’ she cursed inwardly.

The veil of flame dissipated, and she saw the guard panting in place, looking pale in the face.

Just as she’d guessed, he looked to be out of mana.

With all the time in the world, she limped over to him as he watched and kicked him from a kneeling position back onto the ground with little resistance.

The street remained as empty as ever—only a couple of minutes had passed since the start of their battle—but it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

“Why was the city lord visiting in the dead of the night?” she asked, getting straight to the point and ignoring the slowly seeping cuts over her body for the moment that dyed her clothes red.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“…I’m just a guard,” the man pleaded.

“Tell me who that elf was.”

“I… I’m just a guard, they don’t tell me anything!” he spat out, his voice tinged with desperation.

“You have to know something, even a rumor.” She leaned in closer, grimacing at the pain in her leg. “Tell me.”

“The city lord is after a dragon, and I don’t know much about the elf! They say he’s leaving the city soon. Please, I swear I won’t tell a soul.”

At least he’d correctly guessed that she wouldn’t want to be outed.

She sighed and debated inwardly for a moment. It was one thing to kill bandits on the road, it was another to ambush a man and kill him in cold blood.

‘If only he reeked of the same demonic corruption as Gregor, I wouldn’t spare it a second thought…’

The man was clean, though—just a human trying to get by in the world.

She knew he wouldn’t keep quiet, but she would be leaving the city before word could get out anyway. It wasn’t like she had an established identity in the human territories they could hunt her down with.

‘Maybe it could even serve as a warning,’ she thought.

She’d learned of a dragon hunt and of an elf leaving the city. It was more than she’d known before, at least.

The guard was crippled but alive; she left him in the middle of the street and limped toward the city gates.

‘I already need another cloak.’