Eleyn's fingers curled tightly around her wand, trying to steady her trembling hand. The pendant at her throat pulsed with a faint, golden hue, casting dancing reflections on her cloak and illuminating the growing tension in her eyes.
Her eyes were not focused on anything in particular — just a single meter in front of her. A hush had settled around her, the kind that makes you hold your breath without realizing it.
Slowly, deliberately, she raised her wand. The tip began to glow with a soft, golden light, not unlike a candle flame, warm and fluid. She moved her hand in careful arcs and spirals, and the air responded. The light trailed behind like ink in water — thick, luminous strokes suspended in the air.
A low hum began to fill the forest, not a sound, but a pressure — a thrum beneath the skin, in the bones, behind the eyes. The masked figures faltered for the briefest second, instincts warning them of something detrimental approaching. Seraphis, in contrast, slowed her movement and took a single step back.
Eleyn's lips barely moved. "Exuro."
The word wasn't shouted. It wasn't needed. The invocation was just to ease her psyche, just like the previous ones. Even the tiniest of differences could make a victor in battle, and Eleyn didn't underestimate her enemies.
The golden strokes she'd etched in the air erupted into motion.
What had seemed like formless calligraphy surged forward, twisting midair into serpentine loops before slamming into the masked fighters with a roarless detonation. There was no sound — only implosion, like air collapsing in on itself.
The fox-mask tried to shield themselves. Their arms turned black as they attempted to erect an ether barrier. Too slow. The spell tore through it like silk. Their mask cracked straight down the middle, revealing a flicker of shocked brown eyes before they were blasted out of sight.
The cat and pig masks tried to retreat behind cover. The cat was faster — they jumped behind a collapsed wall, rolling and darting like a thief through alleyways. The pig was not so nimble. Ether carved lines into their skin, shallow, burning. They screamed.
Another stroke, more fluid than the first, spiraled above her wand, and this time, the light split into five strands, each curving toward a different target. Seraphis darted aside instinctively. Not from fear — Eleyn had control — but from habit. This was not a normal spell, and it didn't distinguish between friendly and foe until the caster chose it to.
Considering their history, Seraphis had multiple great experiences of being on the receiving end.
The rabbit-mask, the clever one, leapt up.
"Witch's Mirror." They cast a mirrored shield midair, trying to reflect the light back. A bold move.
Eleyn whispered something under her breath, inaudible, probably a curse. The light shifted unnaturally, bending just as it neared the rabbit's mirror shield.
For a heartbeat, it hung there. Then, right when it mattered, it moved.
Like a river diverting around a rock, the beam curled, slipping around the edges of the shield with unnatural grace. It swept in low from behind, making the angle awkward and harder to defend against.
The rabbit reacted fast, just fast enough. They pivoted, swinging the shield back to intercept the redirected blast. But that moment of instinctive defense was exactly what Eleyn had planned for.
From behind, a massive boulder came hurtling through the air like a cannonball.
There was no time to dodge. The stone collided with the rabbit in a bone-jarring impact, slamming them into the ground with a sharp, echoing crack. Limbs twisted in painful directions, not fatal, but enough to end the fight then and there.
That left only the cat mask. It was elusive and quiet.
Seraphis moved like a gust — the sheath of her sword flickering in a blend of black and crimson now. She still had not unsheathed it.
The cat saw it, spun, and threw down a smoke pellet. But Seraphis didn't charge in.
She breathed out. "Enough of this."
She flipped the sword in her hand, stabbed it into the earth, and whispered, "Rotten chains."
Red veins of light erupted from where her blade pierced the ground. Like molten blood, they branched out through the earth, seeping under stone, curling around roots and bark.
The moment one vein touched the base of the wall, the cat was hiding behind—
Not an explosion. A force. A pulse. The wall didn't break — it crumbled outward as if its cohesion simply ceased to exist. The cat-mask coughed violently, staggering through the dust, only to see Seraphis already mid-air, falling toward them like a falling star.
Their blades met once.
Then Seraphis vanished.
Manipulating ether to enhance her body, red lines crackled in the air as she repositioned in a blink, behind the cat, her sheathed sword already drawn back. One clean slash.
The mask fell before the body did — split diagonally in two. The cat slumped to the ground, unconscious but breathing, barely. Seraphis hadn't killed them.
But they would wish she had by the time they woke up.
Eleyn exhaled, letting the last of the glowing spirals in the air dissolve. Her eyes were bloodshot now. Her limbs quivered faintly.
"You went too hard again," Seraphis muttered as she walked over, flicking crimson ether off her blade like it was just water.
Eleyn gave her a dry look. "They aimed for my back. That's not a strategy. That's impudence."
Seraphis raised an eyebrow. "You just shattered five masked assassins and almost flash-fried a forest over impudence?"
"They made me bleed." Eleyn spat again. It was mostly clear, but the bitterness was evident. "That's more than most people manage these days."
The two women stood amid broken stone, scorched bark, and the unmoving forms of five masked foes.
Silence returned to the ruined village — a different kind. A silence that followed devastation, not anticipation.
Seraphis crouched beside the rabbit-mask, tapping the side of their helmet. "Still breathing. Their pulse is weak. But their ether is… off."
She turned her gaze toward the treeline.
Her voice, low: "You feel that?"
Seraphis stood upright, eyes narrowing. "...Yeah. That wasn't all of them."