​Hana didn’t move the baton. If anything, she pressed it a fraction closer to the Elder’s throat. She looked at the Chief, seeing exactly the kind of man Raiden had described—a traditionalist who hid behind ’sacred’ laws to mask his own cowardice.

​"I don’t care about your family drama or your Ravine," Hana said, her voice clinical and cold. "And I’m not the one being used. Raiden is mine, which means your tribe has a debt to me for how you treated him. You’re going to open the Iron Cave, or I’m going to let my dragon turn this ’sacred’ forest into a charcoal pit while I test just how much voltage a nine-tailed Chief can actually take."

"Are you threatening me?" He asked with a growl, his tails fanning out and Hana noticed an unusual mist erupting from their tips.

"If it’s a threat that’ll get you to push your ass off my way then yes, it’s a threat." But sooner had she said that when the mist from his tail spread out and was aimed at her throat, like a single extension of his tail.

But Raiden stepped in front, with a slice of his hand, he cut through the threat and the mist disintegrated like it had never been harmless but Hana had felt the bloodlust so it couldn’t have all been a fake.

"I see the tribe hasn’t changed from its ways of attacking females first," Raiden hissed, his jaws locked and his veins popping at his neck. "How dare you use illusion arts on my mate?"

The Chief’s gaze remained icy as Raiden’s intervention shattered the shimmering mist.

For a moment, he said nothing and hair stared with that cold gaze.

​"Illusion arts?" Hana muttered to herself, her eyes narrowing as she re-evaluated the man in front of her.

She had survived a world where threats were tangible—radiation, starvation, and the rotting teeth of the undead. But this intangible, psychological warfare was a variable she hadn’t accounted for in her tactical assessment.

She should’ve realized that while Kulu has his feathers spikes, and Caspian has his fire, Raiden must have one special power of his own.

But she never sought to find out.

My miscalculation. She thought and lowered her gaze. You won’t catch me off guard again.

​"You are not qualified to threaten me, female," the Chief finally said, his emerald eyes flickering with a cold light as he completely ignored Raiden even after all that silence.

"Hah!" Raiden scoffed in disbelief. "So you’re ignoring me now, you old man? Typical! Truly typical."

"Once again, I will ask you to leave this place. Next time, my attack will not be so slow." He threatened but this time, it wasn’t just Raiden who stood on the front line.

Caspian and Kulu stepped up and Caspian’s mouth was smoking.

"You wanna hurt my mate, is that it?" He asked, his voice rumbling with a lethal threat. "You’ve got some guts."

"In less than a second, I can pierce the hearts of every fox-kin in my line of sight." Kulu stated, his tone steady but not any less lethal. "Make one more move against Hana and consider your tribe extinct."

The three of them stood like a wall of protection in front of Hana, and Hana didn’t mind. In fact, it gave her time to strategize how to go about this without falling prey to that illusion art.

But if it’s an illusion, how can it hurt me? She wondered. Illusions are definitely harmless, but with the way Raiden reacted, it definitely wouldn’t have been harmless had it touched her.

"Hana," she sighed and the three of them looked back at her to see what mood she was in. Depending on her mood, the forest and its inhabitants would all go up in flames.

"Seriously, there’s still so much about this world that I don’t know." She muttered and then looked up, a little exhausting. She looked at her mates and then at the chief.

Without thinking much about it, she swept the old elder off his feet with a single whack of the baton and his muscles seized, the electricity coursing through him like a lightning bolt.

She did this with her eyes locked on the chief and noticed how he didn’t flinch one bit.

"Raiden, since they’re being uncooperative, let’s take a walk around the places you were never allowed to go near in the past." She said and then her eyes turned dead cold as she gave her final orders. "Caspain, Kulu, destroy the forest."

"What are you—?" Elder Meira felt her heart stop but Hana had already made her decision.

"Try not to kill anyone but if anyone stands in your way, you can get rid of them. And the ones who survive the fire, they can come find settlement near our cave. I’ll make sure to find the most suitable work for them." She grinned.

The Chief’s stoic face finally twitched, a ripple of genuine shock breaking through his icy exterior as the smell of ozone from the twitching Elder filled the air.

He looked at the smoking mouth of the Dragon King and the deadly focus of the Red Falcon, then back to the small female who had just ordered the annihilation of his ancestral home with the casual tone of someone requesting a coffee.

​"You would burn the Ravine for a stupid cave?" the Chief asked, his voice low and vibrating with a suppressed urgency. His fanned tails wavered, the mist at the tips thinning as his concentration wavered. "This is madness, female. You are destroying a sacred ecosystem and hundreds of lives for relics you do not even understand. Stop this insanity before you become the monster you claim to fight."

​Hana didn’t even blink. She adjusted the strap of her tactical harness, her expression as flat and clinical as a surgeon’s.

​"Madness?" she repeated, a small, dark chuckle escaping her lips. She looked up at him, her eyes devoid of any warmth. "I survived the end of my world by making the choices no one else would. I never said I was sane, Chief. I said I wanted the bunker."

​She gestured toward the trees where the first sparks were already beginning to catch on the bone-white bark.

​"I gave you the option of cooperation," she continued, her voice cutting through the rising heat. "You chose to attack me with your illusion. Now, you can choose to watch your history turn to ash, or you can start walking toward the waterfall. My mates are very good at their jobs—if I don’t tell them to stop, there won’t be a single white leaf left in this Ravine by sunset."