The Flame-Tailed Tiger was fast. Bai Xiaochun had known this intellectually, but intellectual knowledge was very different from the experience of having a burning tiger tail fly past his face at fifty miles per hour.

He dodged. Barely. The tail singed his eyebrows and set the left sleeve of his robe on fire, but the actual strike missed. His Iron Skin, trained to the second stage now, absorbed the heat without blistering.

'It's too fast!' Hou Xiaomei shouted from the front. Her spirit blade had scored a hit on the tiger's shoulder, but the beast hardly seemed to notice.

'It's going to adapt to our patterns,' Du Lingfei called from the left. 'Twenty seconds, then we switch strategies.'

Bai Xiaochun didn't have twenty seconds of strategy. He had exactly one idea, and it was a bad one. But bad ideas were still ideas, and right now he didn't have any good ones.

He stopped dodging. He stopped retreating. He stood still in the path of the Flame-Tailed Tiger's charge, arms wide, Iron Skin flared to maximum, and waited for the tiger to hit him.

The impact felt like being hit by a burning mountain. Bai Xiaochun's Iron Skin cracked in three places, his ribs complained in a language of pure agony, and his body was driven three inches into the dirt. But he didn't die. And more importantly, his arms, wrapped around the tiger's neck, held on.

The tiger thrashed. He held on. The tiger tried to burn him. He held on. The tiger rolled, crushing him into the ash-covered earth. He held on.

Du Lingfei and Hou Xiaomei needed six seconds to realize what had happened and twelve more to drive their blades into the tiger's vulnerable points. The beast collapsed. Bai Xiaochun, still clinging to its neck, collapsed with it.

'You,' Hou Xiaomei said, staring at him, 'are the craziest person I've ever met.'

'I'm not crazy,' Bai Xiaochun wheezed. 'I'm just really, really afraid of dying, and the math said this was my best chance.'