Volume One: In the Prime of Youth Chapter Three: I Have a Dream

Flames were the manifestation of Huo Ye’s supernatural power. With every breath he took, the wall of fire seemed to breathe as well, rising and falling in rhythm. Yet with each breath, the wall of fire weakened, slowly descending, approaching its inevitable end. The leader of the Frostfang Wolves stamped out the last flickering flame before him with a single paw, then threw back his head and let out a long, thunderous howl—a command to his pack and a declaration of his power to the humans.

But he had not expected that just as his howl faded, he would witness the descent of the God of Thunder!

The darkness split with a surge of thunder, crackling with a sinister violet light. The air was rent by piercing sound, and the constant sizzle of electricity filled the space. Amidst the thunder and lightning, before the disasters could make out the figure darting within the storm, a mysterious force had already carved a deep wound in their ranks.

Huo Ye had no need to cleave these Frostfang Wolves in two as he had done on the train. He only needed to inflict grave wounds; that would force the disasters’ true essence to shift to the injury to heal, and then—at that moment—he could deal the fatal blow.

“Not enough!” Huo Ye thought grimly. He had underestimated the resilience of these beasts’ hides; every time he wounded a wolf, he spent far more energy than he’d expected. Especially the head wolf—Huo Ye realized its power was nearly that of an A-class disaster.

Within two seconds, the thunderstorm passed. Huo Ye’s afterimage solidified into form and he dropped to one knee, gasping heavily. His power was nearly spent, but now everything was ready.

“Now! Fire!” Klaus shouted, seeing Huo Ye halt.

The five soldiers, usually lax in their training, gritted their teeth and fired. Their faces were contorted with tension, terrified of making a mistake. Five handguns rang out in unison—not enough to create a hail of bullets, but enough to strike the disasters at their core. The Frostfang Wolves howled in death throes, their bodies dissolving into black smoke, vanishing without a trace.

The battle was a resounding success. The six of them had killed nearly twenty Frostfang Wolves, but there was no time to relax—they had left the head wolf alive.

It wasn’t that their bullets had missed; Huo Ye simply hadn’t managed to wound the head wolf with his swift, glancing attacks. In those brief two seconds, Huo Ye had circled the battlefield five times; yet when his first strike landed on the head wolf’s neck, his blade was notched. The head wolf had reacted instantly, conjuring an icy armor with its supernatural power to shield its throat.

Huo Ye immediately abandoned the assault on the head wolf, focusing instead on thinning the pack.

Soon, with nineteen Frostfang Wolves eradicated, only the head wolf remained, standing alone on the blood-red wasteland. Though disasters had nerves and bones, they lacked organs and blood. Yet the ground beneath the head wolf was stained as though drenched in the blood of its fallen kin.

He looked at the gasping Huo Ye. The human was clearly spent. True, the human was powerful—powerful enough that, in a one-on-one fight, the head wolf would have been easily slain. But the man had reached his limit.

The head wolf eyed the five humans, too timid to approach. They were not even a match for a finger of the youth who’d felled his pack.

With a snarl at the humans, the head wolf turned to leave. The grudge of this day was marked; these humans would pay, with interest, in time.

“Hey!” Huo Ye shouted, his voice slicing through the air. Before the head wolf could turn, Huo Ye lunged forward, twin blades raised, even pressed behind his back. His eyes were bloodshot, his teeth clenched in rage. “Who the hell said you could leave? Die!”

The head wolf recoiled in shock, hastily conjuring an ice armor to shield his neck again. But Huo Ye was no madman. He widened the distance between his two blades—so wide the ice armor could not possibly cover both. One blade shattered the ice armor instantly; with the other, he drove the sword deep into the wolf’s flesh.

His power nearly exhausted, Huo Ye’s blade wedged itself between bone and muscle, but he refused to relent. He raised the broken sword and, with all his might, hammered its short, jagged edge against the back of the other blade—once, twice, three times…

The head wolf could not fight back. To his astonishment, the human’s strength was so great that the first blow shattered the bones in all four of his legs. Had it not been for his supernatural protection, the wolf would have been severed in two.

Huo Ye lost count of the blows. At last, when the blade was about to cut the head wolf’s body in two, the long sword finally broke under the strain. Huo Ye lifted the broken blade and drove it into the wound. After torment and agony, the head wolf was slain on the spot!

The black smoke choked him, making him cough uncontrollably. At last, Huo Ye released his grip and collapsed to the ground, lying on his back, gazing up at the sky. To bear the brunt of killing twenty disasters alone was almost unbearable.

The five agents from the Railway Security Bureau stared in disbelief. They were astounded by the youth’s strength and courage; he had risked his life to save them, refused to let the head wolf escape even when drained, and fought on with sheer physical strength when his supernatural power failed.

Most affected was Klaus, who had always tried to keep Huo Ye from facing battle directly. He had believed his judgment sound, for most officers’ children were indeed here for show. But he had forgotten—whose son was this young man, after all?

His adoptive father was the Black Reaper—Eddie Horst! The son personally trained by the Black Reaper himself—how could he be anything but extraordinary?

Soon after, Railway Security reinforcements arrived, only to find the battle over. All they could do was collect the body of the fallen passenger and inject Huo Ye with a rapid recovery serum.

A transport truck would soon carry the survivors along the railway to their destination, but Huo Ye explained that his sister was still waiting for him at the Bancroft station, and he wanted to go on ahead. However, his hovercycle had been destroyed in the midst of breaking through the disaster’s siege—he had no means of transportation.

The five, whose lives he had saved, volunteered to accompany him to the Academy. The higher-ups approved, and Huo Ye saw no reason to refuse.

Engines rumbled to life again, and Huo Ye found himself quickly at ease among these grizzled veterans.

“Hey, Huo, I never expected you to be so strong. Are all the students at Bancroft Academy as powerful as you?”

“Not really. In fact, my scores were way above Bancroft’s cut-off, but my dad insisted I follow his path. He studied in the slums’ rundown college until sophomore year, and only then did Bancroft recruit him. So I had to wait until my second year to transfer too.”

“So you attended the same school as Captain Horst from grade school to college?”

“That’s right! While other families got a civilian education, ours was a poverty education. My childhood was nothing like what you’d imagine for a general’s child.”

Everyone knew Captain Horst came from the slums—a legend who had clawed his way up from the very bottom of society.

“It’s good for young people to suffer a bit. Without hardship, you wouldn’t have this strength. That fight earlier scared even me!”

“Yeah… though honestly, I don’t think it was all that hard.” Huo Ye replied with a helpless smile.

He sat on the back of Klaus’s hovercycle, leaning against the older man’s back. Klaus didn’t mind being used as a human cushion. Like a kindly uncle, he asked, “So, Huo, what are your plans after you graduate?”

Huo Ye ran his fingers through his wind-tousled hair, sighing. “For someone like me, my fate was pretty much decided at birth. After graduation, I’ll join the Reaper’s Hunting Corps and step by step inherit my father’s legacy—either die on the battlefield, or keep fighting until I’m too old to lift a blade, and then retire in peace. Maybe then I’ll write a book, to record my life.”

“A book? Have you thought of a title?”

“I have. There’s a book called ‘Dawn, Dusk, Gathered Memories,’ but I won’t be so sentimental. Mine will be ‘Chronicles of the Past’—to record unforgettable tales and the people I’ve lost.” As he spoke of the departed, Huo Ye’s eyes shimmered with tears. He sniffed, wiped them away, and drew a deep breath.

Then he continued, “You know, uncle, even though I just slaughtered those Frostfang Wolves as if they were enemies, the animal I admire most is actually the wolf. Wolves are greedy, savage, wild, and fierce—yet they never abandon a single member of their pack. In life or in work, one should embody the wolf’s creed: greed that never gives up until the goal is reached; savagery that breaks through every obstacle; wildness that dares to blaze new trails; and the fierceness that never admits defeat in adversity. That’s the law of the wolf.”

Klaus, his back to Huo Ye, felt a chill run down his spine at those words. He hurriedly changed the subject. “So, Huo, with all this talk about the wolf’s creed, do you have some sort of ambition?”

“Nothing you’d call ambition.” Huo Ye gazed up at the sky—vast, cloudless—smiling softly. “I have a dream: to carve out a land free of war in this disaster-ravaged world.”

Such lofty aspirations belong to the young, for only those with ambition can carry the weight of their dreams.