With every heavy jolt, Hei's heroic blue tunic, the one he had painstakingly saved up for three months to buy, was torn to further shreds on the black rocks.
The stone steps bruised his ribs, scraped his back, and battered his sharply defined jawline until it was covered in dark bruises and smeared with mountain dirt.
Every single bump, every scrape, every humiliating thud against the stairs chipped away at the cinematic narrative he had so carefully constructed in his head.
"Unhand me, you corporate lackeys!" Hei attempted to yell, trying to twist his body around. But his chest was heavily bruised from the fall, his lungs ached, and the defiant words came out as nothing more than a pathetic wheeze. "You cannot bind... you cannot bind the spirit of a tiger…"
One of the guards, nursing a throbbing headache, stopped. He turned around and kicked Hei in the ribs with a steel boot. He kicked him hard enough to steal all the breath from Hei's lungs.
