Page 20 of The Last Tiger

Eunji

One Year Later

The Dragon Empire

They’ve got me surrounded.

A bead of sweat trickles down my forehead and loops around my chin. I raise my hands in preparation to fight, eyeing my opponents warily as they close in. The others step forward cautiously, fists up, their bare feet shuffling in the sand of the training box.

I count one , two , three , four of them remaining.

Should be easy enough.

A ring of torches surrounds the outdoor training dojo, casting the sandbox in a red light. It’s impossible to see beyond that ring; this arena might as well be the entire world for now. The air smells of dust and sweat and smoke. I grimace, tightening my fists.

My instructor, Drill Captain Nari, has limited me to a maximum of ten strikes to complete this evaluation. I’ve already used four strikes to knock the first three opponents out of the ring, which means I have six blows remaining. Six hits to clear out four students.

But I bet I can do it in less.

I close my eyes and inhale deeply—before springing into action.

The bravest of the bunch—Akiri—lurches toward me first. I feint, darting left to throw her off, then rush forward and grab her by the arms, swinging upward and outward.

Dragon ki surges through my muscles, giving me the strength to send my opponent flying.

Akiri grunts as she falls back through the air, feet clearing the sand—straight into one of my other opponents, who breaks her fall and tumbles out of the ring instead.

Not quite my intended target, but hey—that’s still one down, three to go.

Akiri dusts herself off and springs back to her feet.

In the meantime, I intercept a punch from Bomi, a shorter girl with her hair in a braid, stopping her fist in midair with an open palm; I grit my teeth from the force of absorbing her punch, then twist, flipping my classmate off her balance.

Right as someone else—Taehyun, I suspect—rushes at me from behind.

Just in time, I whip around, gathering strength in my legs—

And leap into the air.

The others try to back up in time, but they’re too slow. My roundhouse kick sends them both sprawling to the outer edges of the sandbox and over the ring.

I land on my feet, brushing myself clean. Then I smile. With three hits, I’ve brought this fight down to one last opponent. And I have three more left to knock her out of the ring. Should be plenty.

Akiri doesn’t hesitate. She rushes forward at me; I quickly block her first punch, then another, before taking the opportunity to push her back with a precise jab.

She manages to block it just in time, but I have the momentum now.

I continue pushing her back, landing a powerful kick, throwing her backward steadily toward the edge of the sandbox.

I’m about to finish her off with one final kick when I look up—

Just as a pale pink flower petal spins in the wind, passing between us—

In that second, I see someone else’s face in place of Akiri’s—

“Eunji…,” Seung says. “Forget about me.”

I stop in my tracks. My opponent takes advantage of the slip to lunge forward, landing a fist straight into my unprotected stomach.

Oof. That one hurt.

I stagger back, the air sucked clean out of me.

I shake my head. Now’s not the time for distractions. I leap forward, throwing myself back into the fight, but my game is off now. I can’t seem to land a solid blow. Finally, frustrated, I just grab her and shove . It’s unartful, maybe, but it gets the job done.

Akiri staggers back, flipping over the edge of the training sandbox and onto the floor of the dojo.

GONGGG!

The cymbal crash announces that the fight is over.

I wipe the sweat pouring down from my brow with the back of my hand. Just beyond the outer ring, my classmates applaud my victory, bowing. Then they sit and tend to their injuries.

Akiri closes her eyes as a long scrape along her leg fades and heals. I do the same, closing my eyes and channeling ki to the bruise forming in the area around my stomach. The pain eases gradually, then disappears.

It’s hard to believe how much I’ve changed in just a year.

When I first arrived at Adachi Academy last fall, I couldn’t even finish the daily exercise regimen.

But Adachi’s instructors are used to taking kids who haven’t worked a day in their life and turning them into real fighters. That’s what the premier military academy in the Dragon Empire is for, after all: turning pampered rich kids like us into capable warriors.

And I desperately needed it—the vigorous training, the brutal drills, and, more than anything, my instructor Nari’s guidance (and her fists) to knock some purpose back into me.

After my engagement to Kenzo was officially announced last year, it caused quite a stir in the press, leading to a new flow of attention that Father deemed “wonderful for business, but unhealthy for a young bride.” That’s when my family took away my outdoor privileges altogether.

I lost everything—trapped inside for the summer, I couldn’t leave the compound at all, even with a chaperone.

For months, I barely spoke to anyone but Moonhee, who, despite her gentle touch and pleasant smile, is a woman of few words.

I spent every evening that summer staring out the window into the star-dotted sky, mentally reviewing my last night with Seung at the ancient Tiger palace.

After my bruised ego cooled, I stopped blaming him for pushing me away that night.

I admitted that it was my mistake to confuse his tender voice and that yearning look as an invitation.

Between the sudden shock of failing the Exam and the anguishing weight of his father’s death, a future between us must have been the last possible thing on his mind.

Still, through every broken bone and black eye that I’ve garnered over the last year, nothing has marked me quite as deeply as Seung’s words have…

That’s the privilege the powerful have: to live life on their terms.

He was right. We were trapped. I couldn’t escape my engagement. I was powerless to say no to my parents. Neither could he escape the forces that condemned him to the gold mines and a life of poverty. We couldn’t be together—not as we were then.

But Seung was wrong about one thing.

Neither you nor I have anything close to that kind of power, and we never will.

While that could be true for Seung, with the countless forces arrayed against him, it might not be true for us as a team.

Now I’ve got ki, the admiration of my drill instructor, the grudging respect of my fellow students.

If Seung lacked the power to change our fates alone—to continue to imagine a world where we could have what we want, possibly even a world where we could be together—that doesn’t mean that I can’t do it for the both of us.

Call me naive, gullible, foolhardy even, but I believe that power can be acquired—no— earned . More than a year ago, Seung encouraged me to explore that notion for the first time. And although he may have long since abandoned the idea, I’m still willing to give it a shot.

Because I have to. If I were to give up after tasting the world outside my home and the thrill of building up my own strength—to submit until I was nothing but a shell of a woman, shuffling silently around the house, obeying someone else’s orders…

No. I can’t go back to that. Not now. Not ever.

So I made a choice.

I decided to try to prove Seung wrong.

Adachi Academy began just in time. The day I received my ki from Adachi’s red dragon, something changed within me.

With the power of the Dragon spirit coursing through my veins, I realized that this was my chance.

Father may have betrothed me to Adachi’s golden boy, a famed Dragon Army recruit, in order to secure our family’s connection to the empire.

But if I myself could rise to the esteem that Kenzo had achieved—if I could earn an offer from the military with the same level of prestige—then maybe, just maybe, my parents would reconsider how useful I could be on my own terms. Maybe I could bring them the power and connections they needed, without having to marry into it.

And maybe then they would finally treat me just like they treat Eunsoo.

So, after arriving in the Dragon Empire and enrolling at Adachi Academy, I made a vow. Not just to learn Dragon ki.

I vowed to make it to the top of my class.

It certainly didn’t happen immediately.

During cardio sessions, I pushed myself till my very last breath.

When weight training, I summoned every last drop of might as my muscles trembled, tore, and regrew.

My yangban classmates simply carried out the exercises with reluctant discipline, hoping to secure a good enough grade to pass. But my life was on the line.

I’d taken to arriving at the training dojo five minutes early every morning to check the class rankings list. Every time my name rose up a ranking, I shivered with excitement. By December, I’d made it to seventeenth in our class of five hundred students. But then I plateaued.

So, in the late evenings and on the weekends, I took to the library.

There, I devoured every single piece of literature that I could find on Dragon ki.

I read through historical accounts of the discovery of the Dragon spirits’ power, personal biographies on the greatest ki masters in the empire’s history, textbooks on the forms. I pored over historical accounts of battles between humans and monsters, learning about creatures that reside in the spirit world and sometimes pass through into our own.

I practiced what I learned into the late hours.

Every night, when I finally returned to the barracks, I would lie in bed staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the life I’d lead once I acquired the power to do whatever I pleased. Live wherever I wanted. Marry whomever I chose.