Chapter 26: Captured
Talon moved first.
"Plan B," he said. "Now. Before she—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
The space where Sylvia had been standing was empty.
A streak of blue tore through the air with a sound like the sky being split apart and then she was there, right in front of Talon, point blank, close enough that he could see his own reflection in her eyes for the single fraction of a second before the lightning hit him.
It didn’t feel like being struck. It felt like the world ending in one very specific location.
The impact launched him backward with a force that had no interest in being gradual about it. His body tore through the air and hit the tree behind him and the trunk cracked on impact, debris exploding outward, the forest floor shaking from the collision.
Silence.
"Brother!" both Kine and Ley were shouting his name.
Talon coughed. Pushed himself up against the ruined trunk with one arm, his breath ragged and uneven. His other hand moved to the corner of his mouth. He looked at it.
"I’m fine," he said, and his voice had lost some of its smoothness but none of its edge. "Both of you — eyes on her. Don’t look away. Not even for a second." He spat once and straightened. "And don’t delay the plan any longer."
Sylvia hadn’t waited for the conversation to finish.
The lightning along her arm was already moving. not outward but inward, condensing, shaping, answering something she was building deliberately.
It solidified into a staff of crackling blue energy that hummed in her grip with the specific sound of something that wanted to be used.
She moved.
Kine and Ley reacted instantly, flames wrapping tight around their arms and legs like armor, the heat rolling off them in waves as they braced. It was the right call. It wasn’t enough.
Sylvia’s first strike came in a wide arc at Kine and the moment the staff connected with his guard the lightning didn’t just push — it detonated on contact, sparks and embers exploding outward, driving him back a full step despite everything he’d done to plant himself.
She was already pivoting before he finished sliding, the staff reversing direction in one fluid motion and coming down on Ley.
Ley raised his arm. Fire surged to reinforce the block.
The staff hit and the lightning burst across his armor like it was looking for cracks, crackling over the flame and forcing him to slide backward under pressure that kept increasing, the weight of it building with each second she maintained contact.
He felt it in his legs first — that particular heaviness that wasn’t just physical force but something in the air itself pressing down, the ground beneath his boots cracking, his stance breaking degree by degree.
"Too much—" The words came through his teeth rather than out of his mouth.
He was losing ground and he knew it and he couldn’t stop it.
Which was when Kine moved.
Sylvia’s full attention was on Ley. Her back was to him. The opening was real and Kine took it — closing the distance fast, flames trailing low along his arms, angling to hit her blind spot and end the momentum she’d built.
He entered her range. Lightning snapped.
It didn’t touch him directly. No strike, no physical impact— just a surge of blue energy that reached out and locked him in place a meter from her back, the current threading through his body and seizing everything. He couldn’t move his arms. Couldn’t move his legs. Could barely breathe.
"ARRGGHH—" The sound that came out of him wasn’t really a word.
Sylvia didn’t look at him.
She turned back to Ley.
He was dragging himself forward inch by inch against the pressure crushing him downward, arms barely keeping him off the ground, his breathing reduced to something strained and shallow. The forest floor around him was fractured from the weight of it.
She stepped in front of him.
He looked up at her.
She raised the staff.
"First I finish you," she said quietly, energy gathering along the length of it, building toward something decisive. "Then—"
"NOW!" Ley’s shout wasn’t a battle cry. It was a signal.
She sensed Talon the moment he stepped into range and her body was already preparing — lightning flaring, weight shifting, calculating whether to dodge or counter, reading the angle of his approach—
"Ironhart Forbidden Arts: Butterfly Mist."
The words arrived at the same time as the dust.
Golden particles spread into the air between them, shimmering softly, and they moved wrong — too fast, too deliberate, slipping past the lightning before it could respond to something it didn’t recognize as a threat. Sylvia raised her arm on instinct to cover her face.
Too late. The particles had already reached her.
She felt it immediately. Not pain — something worse than pain. A heaviness arriving at the edges of her thoughts, softening the sharp clarity she’d been running on, her vision tilting slightly on an axis that shouldn’t exist.
’What is this.’
She tried to hold onto the staff. Felt her grip going somewhere she couldn’t follow it.
’This dust — it’s not an attack, it’s—’
Her eyelids were doing something she hadn’t told them to do.
’Stay awake. Don’t lose focus. Sylvia, just — hold on — just—’
The thoughts thinned.
Darkness arrived quietly, the way sleep arrives when you’ve been fighting it too long and your body has simply decided to stop asking permission.
Her legs gave.
Talon caught her before she hit the ground. One arm, clean and effortless, adjusting her weight without ceremony. He looked at her for a moment — the lightning gone from her hands, the storm that had been tearing up the clearing reduced to nothing, just a girl who had pushed three people harder than they had expected and was paying for it now.
"She’s stronger than I calculated," he said, his voice quieter than before. The performed smoothness was gone, replaced with something more honest. "To push all three of us like that simultaneously... She’s a monster alright."
Ley let himself drop to one knee for a second, one hand on the ground, breathing properly for the first time in several minutes. "Yeah," he said. That was all he had.
Kine shook the last of the current out of his limbs and stepped forward, the frustration rushing back in to fill the space the fear had been occupying. "Doesn’t matter now," he said, eyes burning as he looked at Sylvia. "We’ve got this bitch now. Let’s make sure she remembers this properly—"
"Later." Talon’s voice closed that conversation. He adjusted Sylvia in his grip and turned toward the trees. "First we move before—"
A streak of green light, fast and precise, whistled through the air and all three of them jumped backward on instinct as it passed through the space they’d been occupying and kept going, severing a thick branch cleanly on the far side of the clearing.
The branch hit the ground heavy and final, leaves scattering across the forest floor.
Nobody moved.
Ley’s eyes tracked back to the direction of the shot, narrowing. "Who’s there," he said sharply. "Show yourself."
The shadows between the trees were still for a moment.
Then a figure stepped through them.
"I hope I made it in time." He said walking forward into the clearing with twin blades in his hands, the faint green trails still dissolving in the air behind the shot he’d just fired, his white hair catching the last thin light coming through the canopy.