Androgynous Beauty, Nan Jue

Mo Fan chose a direction at random and set off, only to walk straight into another male corpse.

Same story — blood soaked into every inch of the body, the flesh savaged by bites that had torn but not consumed. No attempt at eating; this had been pure torment, inflicted while the man still lived. The terror locked into his expression needed no elaboration.

So many mages had given their lives out in the wild, chasing resources and treasure. Yet without Hunter-mages willing to risk death to wrest those resources from Demon-Beast territory, humanity would have fallen behind by untold degrees. Mo Fan was a Hunter-mage himself. He understood that particular grief.

He summoned a flame and burned the body, sparing it the indignity of being picked apart by scavengers.

"Magic Vine — Binding!"

A cold female voice rang out from the trees. Mo Fan had just finished burning the corpse when the ambush hit. He was no green recruit, though — the instant he felt magical elements rippling through the air, his hands were already tracing the Shadow Element Star Chart.

Cyan vines erupted from the ground beneath his feet, writhing and coiling upward as if alive, shooting toward him at terrifying speed, ready to lock his entire body in place.

At the same moment, Mo Fan's body slowly dissolved into the shadows of the nearby trees. To any observer, he simply ceased to exist — all that remained was a flat, dark silhouette pressed against the bark.

"Who's there? Get out here!"

Mo Fan materialized again beside the trunk. His palm blazed with arcing threads of lightning that crackled and hissed.

"I was about to say that." Not far away, a tall, upright woman stepped out from the undergrowth — shoulder-length yellow hair, a face chiseled into cold lines, sharp eyes fixed on Mo Fan.

Mo Fan looked over the eagle-nosed woman with military medals pinned to her chest and laughed. "Did the military run out of funding for real operations? Coming all the way out here to scrape for gold?"

"A washed-up hunter like you has no business criticizing the military." Nan Jue made no second move against him. Mo Fan wasn't wearing a Hunter-mage identification medal, but the hunter's bearing was written all over him.

"Quite a few of your people are dead," Mo Fan said. "The way I see it, you're going to get nothing out of this — and the rest of you are going to die here too."

Nan Jue said nothing. She pressed her lips together.

He wasn't wrong. They had lost far too many people in this place. Fire Cloud Forest had proven incomparably more terrifying than any of them had anticipated. Right now, all they could do was cling to one safe patch of ground and hide, just to avoid being wiped out entirely.

"You've been wandering this forest alone without anything happening to you," she said, suspicion edging into her voice. "Your strength doesn't look like it's anywhere near enough to handle what lives here. How?"

Mo Fan's gaze traveled slowly over the female officer — a woman one could only describe as *devastatingly* striking — sweeping from her hairstyle all the way down to those straight, full, endlessly long legs beneath her military trousers.

*Those legs. Good lord, they're long.* Her thighs were so full that even loose military trousers couldn't contain the shape of them, yet her calves tapered into slender, perfect lines. Not a heel in sight — and still that tall. Truly exceptional.

Her height was something else. Mo Fan wasn't short by any male standard, yet she couldn't have been more than a centimeter or two below him. Paired with that cold, strikingly handsome face, the effect when she looked down at shorter men was effortless — a natural authority and magnetism that invited surrender without trying. When she turned that same gaze on other women, it was a different kind of devastation entirely: they found themselves questioning things they'd never thought to question.

Her nose was a rare, elegantly architectural hook, set beneath narrow, glittering single-fold eyes that seemed permanently narrowed in cool appraisal. Mo Fan had no interest in the overly delicate or the aggressively tomboyish — but this woman's androgynous beauty was something else entirely: a magnetic, swaggering handsomeness wrapped in cold, imperious elegance.

*Well. Delicate or tomboyish — honestly, who cares, as long as they look like that.* In this world, beauty was its own kind of power.

Nan Jue caught the direction of that shameless gaze. Her eyes went a degree colder. She mentally stamped him "lecherous scoundrel" and bumped her guard up a notch.

"If you're willing to abandon the mission," Mo Fan said, "call your people together and come with me. I can get you out of here safely."

"We haven't obtained the Fire Calamity Fruit yet—"

She hadn't finished before Mo Fan laughed, waving her off. "Save the speeches. You can't even make it through Fire Cloud Forest — forget getting your hands on the Fire Calamity Fruit. I know where it is, and the thing guarding it isn't something any of us can deal with. She'd kill every last one of us like we weren't even worth stepping on. Stop throwing your people's lives away. Get out while you can, or drop down to the lower levels and collect whatever Spirit Seeds and Spirit Seed Fragments you can find to justify the trip."

Nan Jue's brow tightened. She didn't like his tone. But she couldn't deny it — something had been systematically hunting her group, the numbers kept dropping, and even now she had no idea what creature was responsible.

Seeing her waver, Mo Fan pressed on. "Whatever's been hunting your group — it's the Three-Skull Evil Python. Apex predator of this entire Fire Cloud Forest."

He'd checked the bodies along the way. They showed several different causes of death — venom, fire, shattered bone. Only one thing he'd crossed paths with could deal out all three: the Three-Skull Evil Python that had once tried to come for him as well.

"How could you possibly know that?" she asked, still guarded.

"I'll ask you once more," Mo Fan said, dropping any pretense of patience. "Give up — or stay here and wait to die." He wouldn't normally stick his nose into other people's problems. The only reasons he'd bothered at all were that they were military, and that it would be a genuine waste for someone who looked like this to end up dead in a forest.

The Three-Skull Evil Python had apparently been warned off by the Flame Enchantress. It wouldn't come near Mo Fan in this forest. Everyone else was fair game.

Nan Jue hesitated for a long moment, studying him with those sharp eyes, searching for hidden motives.

But every extra minute her companions spent out here was another minute of danger. In the end, she relented.

"You can actually get us out safely?"

"Should be able to. But I need to find my companion first — then we all leave together," Mo Fan said.

He didn't like half-measures. After witnessing what the Flame Enchantress was truly capable of, he'd already quietly let go of any thought about the Fire Calamity Fruit.

"Fine. Don't you dare deceive me," Nan Jue said.

"Pure goodwill," Mo Fan said, with just a hint of a tease in his voice. "That, and your face."

The military really did have a gift for producing beauties of a rare caliber. Ah Li Man. And now this one. That queen's authority — the commanding presence that could send young men into a stupor — wasn't something the type of woman who spent her days agonizing over which luxury moisturizer or designer handbag to buy could ever fake.

"Scoundrel," Nan Jue muttered, shooting him a glare. No one in the military had ever dared talk to her like that.