The fear came in half a step behind the confusion.
Ant watched it move across both boys' faces at once, the stocky one's grin catching somewhere between his mouth and his eyes and going nowhere, his stare sliding from the small red animal planted on the path to the empty ground around it, hunting for whatever was supposed to explain what he was looking at. A wild Kithren. Standing its ground on a public path in broad daylight. Not fleeing. Looking straight at them.
"That's not his." The lean one said it low, more thinking aloud than talking to anyone. "We scanned him. Came back nothing."
"I know what it scanned." The stocky one didn't take his eyes off Mahkir to say it.
Their own Kithren had stopped pretending otherwise. The starling had frozen mid-circuit, wings beating in short, uneven strokes that kept it in the air without carrying it anywhere, whatever aggression it had started with turned to open panic. The hawk had backed clean off the lean one's forearm and hung a few feet out, head tilted low, weight shifted back, more ready to flee than to hunt.
That seemed to bother the stocky one worse than anything Mahkir had actually done yet. Ant watched his eyes go to his own bird, then back to Mahkir, then back again, some private calculation running behind them that he clearly didn't like the answer to.
His gaze swept the path, the treeline, the open stretch behind them, hunting for an owner. Further down, a girl walked a broad-shouldered ape Kithren on a loose lead, paying none of them any mind. An old man sat near the shallow lake off the path's edge, watching something serpentine and green cut slow rings through the water. Neither of them so much as glanced over.
"Wild," the lean one said, the word coming out reluctant.
"Wild Kithren run." The stocky one didn't want to believe what he'd just watched. "They don't stand there. They don't do this," he said, with a short, sharp gesture at Mahkir, taking in the whole wrongness of the last half-minute.
Above them, the starling had gone quiet too, no longer even trying to hold its circling pattern, just hovering with short, useless wingbeats. Ant noticed it clearly now that the adrenaline had room to notice anything: the birds weren't just spooked. They were waiting for permission to leave and not getting it.
Dust hung warm in the afternoon air between them, and somewhere off the path a bird Ant couldn't name kept up its call, oblivious to everything except the scorched patch of ground still smoking faintly by his boot.
"We're two of the best in the academy." The stocky one said it to himself as much as to his friend, straightening up as though it might help. "Doesn't matter what it is. It's still one Kithren. We can handle one wild Kithren."
"And if it's not wild?" The lean one hadn't moved his eyes off Mahkir since the birds had gone still. "What if it belongs to him and the scan's just wrong?"
"Scans don't come back wrong. You know that."
"I know what I was taught. I'm just saying, look at it. It's not acting wild."
The stocky one didn't answer that one directly. He straightened up again instead, the exact same motion as before, as though doing it twice might make the confidence behind it more real.
The lean one didn't look convinced, not from where Ant was standing. He nodded anyway, and the hawk climbed back onto his forearm with visible reluctance, wings held too tight against its own body.
While the two of them worked through whatever silent agreement passed between them, Ant moved.
Soul Render lay a few feet off the path, exactly where his own hand had lost it. His coat sat folded at the edge, empty now that Mahkir had abandoned it for open ground. He crossed to both quickly, closed his fingers around the grip, and felt the small, strange confirmation of the sword still humming faintly warm in his palm, the same low current it had carried since the cave, unbroken by the minutes it had spent lying in the dirt. Whatever bond the system had drawn between blade and owner didn't need his hand on it to hold. He'd have to lose the sword outright, he suspected, or have it taken from him for good, before that changed. He swept the coat up and dragged it on one-armed without taking his eyes fully off either boy. Neither of them looked over, too occupied deciding, between themselves, how two years of academy sparring was supposed to handle something their own Kithren clearly wanted no part of.
He came up with the sword in one hand, the coat settled crooked across his shoulders, and felt, if nothing else, a little less like a man standing there with nothing.
You could just let me finish it, Mahkir said, from somewhere against his ribs. Faster that way.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
"You've done enough."
I haven't started.
"Try not to enjoy it too much. And whatever you do, don't kill them." The memory of the Dark Elemental fight still burned into his mind.
No promises.
He half expected to have to argue him down further. Mahkir hadn't so much as glanced at the wild bunny in the scrub earlier; one look and gone, dignity intact, no interest in a fight he had nothing to lose by skipping. This felt different. Whatever had made him stand his ground here instead of folding back into the coat, it wasn't caution. Ant didn't understand it yet, and kept his grip on the sword anyway.
They came at him together.
"Flashdraft!" The starling blurred into speed.
"Irontalon!" The hawk followed a half-beat behind, dropping into a controlled dive.
Mahkir wasn't where either strike landed. He was never where either strike landed, a low dodge, then high, then sideways in a direction that had no business being available to something his size, both attacks tearing into empty air where he'd stood a fraction of a second before.
"Splitrun!" The starling forked into two mirrored birds converging from opposite angles, the same pincer that had knocked Soul Render clean out of Ant's hand ten minutes earlier.
"Snatchwrench!" The hawk's talons closed on nothing, the bird forced to wrench itself upward hard before it slammed the dirt.
They fell back and came again. Same pattern, same result, feathers scattering loose across the path with every failed pass.
Ant caught it on the third exchange, clearer than the boys seemed to. The starling's split came a fraction slower than the one before it. The hawk lost more height on the dive than it should have, wingbeats working harder for less lift. Three skills each, back to back, no room to breathe between them, and whatever mana either bird carried, it wasn't bottomless. Every failed strike drained something real out of them. Every dodge asked nothing of Mahkir at all: he hadn't spent a single skill of his own, hadn't so much as raised his voice about it, just kept moving on raw ability while the two Kithren in front of him burned through everything they had trying to force an opening that didn't exist.
He was wearing them down, and worse, there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
"Flashdraft!" The starling's answer came slower this time. The lean one's Irontalon landed with none of the weight the first strike had carried, more a controlled fall than a dive.
Both boys were breathing harder than a fight they weren't in should have made them.
Ant looked down at the sword still in his own hand, remembered it was there, tightened his grip on it because it felt better held than not. His forearm still throbbed where the earlier hit had opened it, a dull insistent ache under the fresh adrenaline, but his feet held steady under him in a way they hadn't a week ago.
"Mahkir." His voice carried more than he expected it to. "Time to show them what you're capable of."
The amber eyes cut toward him, acknowledgment, half a second, nothing more, and then Mahkir opened his mouth and the fire started building. Stronger than it had been in the cave, the heat of it climbing before the release even came, close enough now that Ant felt it prickle across the back of his own hand. It pulled at Soul Render, taut and insistent, though he had no idea yet what exactly he'd just felt happen.
"Move!" the lean one shouted. "It's an elemental..."
"That's not possible." The stocky one was already stumbling backward when he said it. Neither of them got clear in time.
The fire swallowed both Kithren whole, an orange wash lighting up the underside of the boys' own stricken faces. The starling dropped out of the air and lay still, out cold before it hit the ground. The hawk cleared the worst of the blast but not cleanly, coming down hard several feet off, one wing dragging as it tried to push itself back upright.
The smell of it reached him a second later, scorched feather and hot dust, sharp enough to catch in the back of his throat. Down by the lake, the old man had come half up off his seat, one hand shading his eyes against the glare. Further along the path, the girl with the ape Kithren had stopped walking entirely, watching the smoke rise with open curiosity instead of alarm.
Mahkir crossed the distance before either boy could think to move. One swipe of a paw, almost bored about it, and the hawk went down too, out cold beside the starling.
Then he turned and walked back at an easy pace, the burning red bleeding out of his eyes and back to amber on the way, and climbed Ant's leg without ceremony to vanish into the coat.
Both boys stood frozen on the path. Two Kithren grounded. Two level-five academy students with every scrap of confidence gone out of them at once.
It had taken less than a minute.
The stocky one moved first, scrambling to his starling and scooping it up with hands that weren't steady. The lean one did the same with the hawk, cradling it with none of the ease he'd carried it with an hour ago.
"This isn't over." The stocky one's voice cracked on the edge of it, already backing away. "Wait till my father hears about this. You'll be sorry."
He looked at Ant a second longer, something more he clearly wanted to say and couldn't find the words for.
He didn't find it. He turned and went, the lean one already several strides ahead of him, both of them moving up the path at a pace that had stopped pretending to be anything but a retreat.
Ant stood alone, sword still in hand, the ringing in his ears finally starting to fade. He looked at the scuffed dirt where the fight had happened, the scorch mark still smoking faintly at its edge, and felt none of the triumph he'd have expected given exactly what these two owed him. Instead, he just felt steady. This was a path he used to only ever fall on. This time he was still standing on it.
"They'll come back," he said, mostly to the coat.
Let them. I could use the practice.
"You didn't break a sweat."
I don't sweat. I'm perfect.
"You're insufferable."
Insufferable and correct. Rare combination.
He didn't sheathe the sword, because there was nothing built to take it. He lowered it to his side instead and stood there a moment longer than the moment called for, looking up the empty stretch of path in the direction the boys had gone. Somewhere past the treeline the bird he still couldn't name started up again, indifferent to all of it.