**There’s no too explicit details so I’m not marking the chapter M, but there are mentions and slight descriptions of blood. It’s quite near to the end, so just a warning if any of you are sensitive to stuff like that.***

“Did you take martial art classes?”

Jongin looked up at me. There was a streak of something across his cheek, no doubt with the fight he’d just had with Seunghwan. .

“No. Why?”

“Jinyoung used to take hapkido, but he said he still got beat up in high school before. Choi Seunghwan attacked you today, and you got away without getting hit.”

“Then… I don’t know?”

Chapter 14

My first reaction was to laugh at the roll of toilet paper, because by then, I was too shell-shocked and confused to react properly. I should’ve ran when I had the chance, but for some reason, my body remained immobile. I froze up even more when Song Jaeyeon walked out of the stall.

The strength she had applied to send Joo Yunseo flying must’ve been a lot, since Yunseo had barely reacted when I had whacked her across the face. It hadn’t been enough, apparently, because apart from the crash when Yunseo had slammed into the wall (and the soft thwack of the roll of toilet paper Jaeyeon had decided to include in her attack), she shot back up again. I could swear that the wall was dented.

I stared at Song Jaeyeon a little while longer. She had her arms folded over her chest, narrowed in the direction of Joo Yunseo. “Definitely not human,” she said, “she might’ve died from that if she were.”

Jaeyeon had been reading a book the last time I saw her, so needless to say, I was more than a little surprised. Was she another supernatural creature? If she were, how could Kai have not sensed both her and Yunseo? Besides, she’d been in the same class as me for at least two years. Kai should’ve been able to know that she was abnormal.

“You,” Yunseo snarled, and I took a step back, rubbing my wrist where she had grabbed it. It was turning purple, littered with bruises in the shape of her fingerprints. “What are you doing? How come I didn’t sense another one of you here?”

Another one of you? Jaeyeon was an Athanatos?

“Look who’s talking,” she muttered. “What are you?”

Yunseo snarled -- actually snarled. Her eyes looked different now; they seemed to reflect flames. I could still see the original brown of her iris, but there was somehow fire reflected in it. “Get away,” she growled at Jaeyeon, “run home, little girl. You can’t deal with this by yourself. Even Kim Jongin wasn’t able to sense me, so don’t think you’ll be able to defeat me. I’ll let you live this time if you just go.”

I could see Jaeyeon’s hands clenched into fists at her side. She’d hidden them behind the folds of her skirt, but even with her hands clenched, I could see the obvious tremble in her arms. However, when she spoke, her voice was calmer than I felt, and surprisingly collected. “You’re the one who should leave.” Her voice didn’t waver. “There’s two other of us in this school, and even if you don’t believe I can take you on alone, there’s still other people.”

Two others… Kai and Jimin? But Jaeyeon didn’t know of Jimin’s existence, did she? He’d just come today. Unless she’d witnessed that run in I had had with Jimin in the morning, but even then…

The thought struck me. Jaemin, who’d been laughing so easily with the boys of Hanseong school, who’d been in my class even longer than Jaeyeon had, was also an Athanatos. He and his sister were twins. He had to be the other one.

Looking at Jaeyeon again, it was obvious she was bluffing. Jimin probably left for home the moment school ended (did I want him to save me, even? He’d probably “accidentally” miss throwing his blade and stab me instead of Yunseo), and unless there was a definite warning that something supernatural was happening, Kai wouldn’t go into the girl’s washroom to check up on me just because I’d been missing for ten minutes.

“I’ll have to kill you then,” Yunseo told Jaeyeon. As she spoke, flames engulfed her body, swallowing her up from head to toe. For a moment, I was too confused to act, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jaeyeon, who was in fighting pose. She looked professional, while I shifted my weight awkwardly from side to side. The only thing suitable as a weapon was the paper towel dispenser, and that was connected to the wall. The urge to chuck it at Yunseo was, however, undeniably overwhelming.

Yunseo, sadly, did not burn to death from her own flames. They died down as suddenly as they came, and around her, blackened ashes drifted to the ground slowly. She was no longer wearing the school uniform -- God, what was she? Her skin held a reddish tint, and her eyes no longer reflected flames; they were flames. She wasn’t exactly -- in replacement of clothes, it seemed to shimmer.

“Fire elemental,” Jaeyeon breathed beside me, and I racked my brain for any information about what she was talking about. There was none.

“What?”

“Like a Summoner,” Jaeyeon explained, sounding a lot too patient for me to understand. How did she manage to sound so patient when there was that thing blocking the only exit out of the washroom, I didn’t know. “But she doesn’t use aura energy and she can’t cast spells. Some other kind of creature must’ve cast that glamour spell on her, because elementals can’t cast spells. She was bluffing when she said she did it herself.”

Yunseo inspected a finger, which was more of a claw now. Her once-perfectly manicured nail was jagged, black and sharp. “One of you did studying,” she said lazily. “I can sense the other Athanatoi in this school, Song Jaeyeon. And your brother Jaemin isn’t coming to help you anytime soon. Neither is Kim Jongin for the matter. They’re both at the opposite ends of the school, and I’m not the only one here. You’re not powerful, I can sense it. Your aura’s not even strong. And Mira here… she’s useless without her boyfriend. There’s traps cast around the washroom. You Athanatoi aren’t the only ones out there capable of spellcasting. It’ll take an actual Spellcaster to take down those traps, and unfortunately for you two, none of the other Athanatoi are Spellcasters. , doesn’t it?”

“Move!” Jaeyeon’s warning wasn’t a second too early, because a moment later, the box of paper towels behind us had burst into flame, followed not long after by the roll of toilet paper that Jaeyeon had somehow decided to throw at Yunseo. In fact, every flammable thing in the room seemed to be on fire. Fire elemental, Jaeyeon had said. I tried to swallow the lump of fear in my throat.

“Kai’s perfectly capable of defeating someone more powerful than you,” I said instead, but unlike Jaeyeon, I hadn’t mastered the art of being calm.

She glanced at me. “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s Kai, right? Little boy who can’t even face his past.”

Something about that statement made me mad. I didn’t know his reasons behind his insistence to Kai, but it also wasn’t right for Yunseo to blurt such nonsense about him. Kyungsoo had said most Athanatoi whom hadn’t been born in Ignis had suffered. And knowing Kai, there was a legitimate reason.

Jaeyeon was smarter than me apparently, because she didn’t stand in one place and do nothing. Faster than I could catch, she had taken the roll of toilet paper (same one, I supposed, though it was now flaming) and threw it and Yunseo at an alarming speed, like the fire hadn’t bothered her at all. It rebounded off her and fell to her feet, still burning. 

“You can’t fight fire with fire.” Her laugh was manianic. “It just makes the fire burn stronger.”

Even Jaeyeon didn’t seem to have been suspecting it when Yunseo leapt towards her faster than I could catch, one arm lashing out for her leg. In the blink of an eye, Jaeyeon had been slammed against the stall door, an arm pressed to , held up from the ground. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Jaeyeon’s laugh was weak when she spoke, words detached and shaky. “You fight fire with water.”

“You what?”

Yunseo’s expression was priceless when the faucet behind her exploded, and she couldn’t help but release the other girl, who dropped to the ground, clutching her neck and gasping for breath. Around her, a green-blue color glowed, and water steadily poured out of the now-busted faucets. My uniform felt wet, and hair stuck to my face. Jaeyeon was the only one in the room who wasn’t wet, somehow -- all the fires that Yunseo had previously spread had been distinguished.

Joo Yunseo, who was looking even less human than before, stared at Jaeyeon with what was a look of shock mixed with disbelief. The water around her sizzled, though her skin darkened at every drop that touched her. “You,” she started. “You little--”

Expecting her to finish her sentence was too much, apparently, because before she did, she leapt again.

This time in my direction.

I wasn’t prepared for the sudden attack, mostly because Jaeyeon was holding out a lot better than I had been on my own (the one time I tried to fight back, it hadn’t worked and I’d been thrown against a stall. And with only two lessons from Kai and one and a half from Luhan, I barely grasped the basics of being an Athanatos) and Yunseo seemed, in some way, affected by the water.

Maybe it was pure Athanatoi instinct that I did so, or maybe some of the training with Kai had managed to sink in, but just as she was about arm’s length away, I managed to twist around, away from her, and bring both arms down onto her back.

A normal person might’ve had their back broken. A normal person would’ve cracked their skull when Jaeyeon landed a kick on the back of their head. A normal person might’ve been dead after all Yunseo went through (It might’ve been malicious of me, but some part of me was hoping that that one kick from Jaeyeon had been enough to kill her, or at least knock her out for the time being while we figured out how to leave).

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