Robin O'Sullivan forced herself to unclench her fists for the fourth time that hour. Stakeouts always stressed her out, but the tension involved with long hours spent watching very little happen wasn’t what was getting to her. Two weeks ago, a member of her squad was sent into this city. Contact had been totally normal until Lord Red reported he was acting strangely. Talking like something was wrong.

Specifically, using “sir”.

Robin and her squad of Vengeants had been dispatched to see what was going on, and at the last known point of contact, she discovered Hound’s blade, shattered and devoid of enchantment, in the middle of a crater deeper than Robin was tall.

The protocols were clear. No Vengeant would ever abandon their blade, especially at the site of a battle, unless they were no longer in any state to wield it. She’d feared the worst, discovering that scene. Hound was rough around the edges, and there wasn’t a member of her five-man cell that he hadn’t offended at one point or another with his careless speech, but he was one of them. Family. 

Then, five days ago, one of the sensors had picked up on something that none of them had thought to look for. Hound’s magic signature, albeit faint and distorted, was detected in Haden’s warehouse district. Remote observation had seen no movement in or out of the seedy, rundown building for nearly three days, but then one black-robed figure emerged from a back-alley doorway late last evening. They’d hit every mark on the suspicious person checklist. Head turning constantly, as though worried they’d be seen, a quick, furtive shuffle, and a tendency to check corners and wait until the coast was clear left Robin with no doubt in her mind.

This was the one who took Hound, or at least one of a group that did. Her subordinate, her friend, was in that building, and Robin was going to get him back.

She stepped down from the lip of the roof they’d chosen, one just across the street and four stories higher than the rooftop of the building she was watching. Her squad watched her as she approached, concern and anticipation mingling on their faces.

Blackout and Exel had more anticipation than concern. They were usually more on the gung-ho side, and they relied on the support that her husband could provide in tandem with their own natural talents to surmount any obstacles they might encounter. Blackout had the slim, athletic build of a sprinter, while Exel had more bulk to him, intentionally gained to help him withstand the effects of his power, and both wore their hair buzzed short and their uniforms clean and orderly, in accordance with the Cabal of Vengeance’s regulations. Robin didn’t care for their attitude, a self-confidence that occasionally eclipsed the renegade, but they never failed to get results, and she wouldn’t ask for any other pair to fill out her squad.

As a contrast to these two, Vence was always worried. To be fair, it was a part of his job and a part of his magic, but Robin was convinced that if her husband had a different magic and a different profession, he would still be balding not far into his middle age, still have a face lined with stress. She could tell from his body language that he was worried about her, from the way he held both arms across his chest as if to keep himself from embracing her, from the restlessness with which he stood in line with his fellow soldiers. Robin smiled at him, which he returned, though it seemed a touch forced.

They were all on edge. Hound’s capture had shaken everyone in their group, and people didn’t join the Cabal of Vengeance because they were forgiving. Exel and Blackout had argued at length over not being the spearhead for the operation, and Robin couldn’t rule out the chance that they might choose to follow her and Vence into the building once they breached it.

“Hound is in there,” Robin said, lowering her voice despite the distance between them and their quarry. “He’s holding out, waiting for us. That is the mission. We’re going to retrieve Hound, and eliminate any threats to the city or the Rainbow Nations.”

All three of her subordinates snapped to attention.

“Who holds that ground?” Robin asked, calling back to an old battlefield tradition from the war.

The response was immediate, and simultaneous.

“Corpses!”

“Why do we wear red?”

“The blood of the fallen and the vanquished!”

“Why are we here?” Robin cried, turning to the edge of the roof once more, raising her voice beyond a careful volume. She heard the answer ring out behind her, and she felt anticipation and pride and anger roiling about inside her chest.

“VENGEANCE!”

Flames ignited along Robin’s shoulders, covering her back like a cape. The fire was less like natural flame and more like the propulsion from a hover transport’s turbine, a constant directed burn. As she concentrated on the magic, she felt the secondary effect beginning to take hold. Her body’s weight lessened, to around half its normal amount in a matter of moments, and then to the point where a stiff breeze would carry her away. She kept herself in a relative equilibrium with small bursts of flame, nudging herself back into position when the burn from one direction was too strong. 

She drifted up to the rooftop’s lip, and Vence stepped up beside her. He met her eyes, the concern still evident but hidden behind a layer of tempered discipline. She gave him a tight nod, and he turned his gaze forward. To the mission.

Robin felt a light touch in the small of her back, as Exel prepared to use his magic.

“Blackout, give us a three count,” she said.

Without warning, her body launched forward as if shot out of a cannon. The fifty feet or so that separated her from the high row of windows in the warehouse across the street disappeared instantly, and Robin had to squeeze her eyes shut against the rush of cold air. She trusted Exel’s aim, but she couldn’t help but remember the few times near the beginning of the big man’s career, when his control over his power had been slightly less than accurate.

Robin brought both of her arms up to shield her face, relying on her body armor and a burst of flame to protect her from the worst of the impact as she crashed through the window. As soon as she felt the shattering glass, she went on full burn in the opposite direction, cancelling her momentum and pushing her back and into the air as she took the room in at a glance.

It was small, smaller than she’d like considering she was about to fill it with fire, and the only furniture in the room was a wide table that was currently dominated by a map of the city. There were pins stuck in it, and she couldn’t make heads or tails of their placement. Most of them were concentrated on the downtown area, but an odd number of them were in buildings near the city’s outskirts, Haden’s roughly circular boundaries emphasized by the regular placement of the little spherical pins. 

Two men were up against the room’s opposite wall, one standing and the other on his back like her entry had knocked him over or surprised him enough to cause him to stagger away. They both wore black robes with hoods, though the one on the ground had his down, revealing olive skin, a shorn head, and a surprised, panicked expression. The standing man drew a short knife, and Robin marked his position as Vence came flying into the room via the window she’d just entered through. 

Her husband bounced off the thin carpet, nimbly twisting to his feet before he hit the ground again. He wasn’t injured, never was, but Robin couldn’t help but look him over anyway, just to make sure. Vence glanced around the room as the prone man made his way to his feet, and the man with the knife started forward with a snarl. Vence turned and headed for the room’s only door, showing his back to the approaching man.

Everything went black.

Robin heard the surprised yelps from the two men as their sight abandoned them. Years of working with Blackout had all but banished the instinctual panic that she’d once felt at the sudden blindness, but the surprised reactions her subordinate’s magic always evoked from their enemies was one of the reasons this breaching tactic worked so well. Even if she hadn’t already mentally stored the rough layout of the room and its inhabitants, the clamor they made as they staggered around would have guided her aim surely enough.

As soon as she heard the click of the door closing behind Vence, Robin went on the offensive. Her pyromancy was less about control and more about sheer volume and force, so rather than try to pick off either enemy with concentrated blasts, she filled that side of the room with a constant roiling mass of flames. Outputting such a large amount of fire would inevitably knock her away from her targets as her magic drained her weight, so four smaller jets of flame erupted from her back to counter the force.

Robin stopped emitting flames after just a few seconds, right as the blackness in the room scattered. She’d been aiming higher than either of her opponents, mostly to save the map in case any extra information could be gleaned from the operation, but it resulted in neither of her opponents being more than seriously burned. That was somewhat uncommon.

The man who’d drawn the knife was unconscious, but his companion was mewling on the ground, two burned hands held to his face. The door to Robin’s right opened again, and she leveled a hand at it just in case, though there wasn’t much doubt in her mind that it would be Vence, returning from scoping out the next few rooms.

Her husband entered the room, slipping in quickly and closing the door behind him before putting his back to it.

“This is gonna be rough,” he said.

Robin crossed the room and bound the hands of the two burned men, slapping aside the conscious one’s feeble attempts to ward her off. She doubted they would be able to interfere with the rest of the operation, but there was no sense in risking a knife in the back.

“What’s the situation?”

Vence frowned. “We’re in the only separate room in the building, on a catwalk that runs the rim of the warehouse. There’s about fifteen of them down there, and they’re all looking at us.”

Fifteen, huh. Hound was a dangerous person, a career soldier, but that was probably more guards than he required. Which meant there was something more going on than just a simple ransom.

Robin crossed the room, motioning for Vence to move away from the door.

“Weapons?” she asked, but Vence just shook his head.

“Knives or nothing,” he answered.

That was bad news. If you were Mundane, and you were holding a wizard, you’d probably overestimate the level of protection you’d need to keep him contained. But if you were possessed by that level of ignorance and paranoia, you’d definitely keep more in weaponry than a few knives. No, these men knew who Hound was, they were keeping him for a reason, and they didn’t feel worried about being unarmed in his presence. They were wizards.

Which meant they were in the worst-case scenario. Robin tapped her communicator, opening the connection to Blackout and Exel. Her squad went on assignment with only local communicators, because the magic required to perform cross-world Connections was incredibly loud to the people who could listen for it, and they didn’t need anything alerting their targets when they were coming.

“Blackout, this is Robin,” she said after the initial burst of static.

“Loud and clear, Rob,” came the response.

“Things are looking pretty grim. I need you to get outside of operation range, and call in to the Citadel.”

There were a few moments of silence during which Robin could practically hear Blackout’s anger boiling up.

“All due respect, boss,” he replied, his tone slow and careful, like he was afraid that speaking too quickly might cause him to lose his self-control. “I really don’t wanna run out on this.”

“It’s a Code White,” Robin said firmly, and a different kind of silence fell on the other side of the call. There wasn’t a wizard in the Rainbow Nations hot-blooded enough to ignore their highest priority situation code.

“Shit,” was Blackout’s eventual response. “Shit. Alright, I’m going.”

That took care of the most pressing matter. They had to inform the Council, had to get ahead of this. If these people truly were bloodmages, things could go from bad to worse in a heartbeat.

“What am I doing, then?” Exel asked, jumping in as Blackout terminated his connection.

“Knock on the front door,” Robin said, a smile touching her face despite the situation. “See if they’ll let you in.”

Robin closed the connection and turned to her husband. “Did you see Hound down there?”

“I saw someone tied to a chair with a bag over their head,” Vence replied. “Could be a trap, though. What do you want me looking out for?”

Robin thought for a moment. “Do projectiles or ranged disabling magic. I’ll handle myself once the melee starts.”

He scowled. “I can only prevent one thing at a time, Robin. You know that.”

She shrugged, sighing airily.

“Guess I’ll die,” she said, giving him a mocking smile. With that, she opened the door and flew out into the warehouse proper with a short burst of flame.

The door exited onto a catwalk barely four feet wide. The stairs to the ground floor were twenty feet away from her, halfway between the door she’d just exited and the opposite wall of the warehouse. There was already a black-robed man standing at the head of the stairs, his hand raised toward her, palm-first, in the universal gesture for “I’m about to shoot something at you.”

Rather than face the attacker, Robin angled her flame downward and to the right, banking up and off of the catwalk toward the rest of the warehouse. From her position near the building’s high ceiling, she took in the situation.

It looked like the bloodmages had cleared out most of the contents of the warehouse, sliding shelves and pallets loaded with crates to the edges of the room, with a majority of them placed in front of the building’s massive main door, a sliding steel monstrosity nearly fifteen feet square. A large empty space had been created at the center of the warehouse, in which Robin could see most of the enemy was clustered. They were taking cover behind crates that had been close enough to drag into the clearing and a few tables whose original contents were scattered on the ground in their users’ haste to flip them over into defensive shields. At the rear of the clearing, furthest from where she floated, there was a man tied to a chair, with a burlap sack over his head. Half of the men stayed clustered around him.

As she watched, one of the men stood up, gripping his knife by the blade. Robin’s lip curled in disgust as he slid his hand along the length of the knife, cutting the palm of his hand and his fingers wide open.

Blood magic, she thought. Barbaric.

The blood from the wounds flowed through the man’s closed fist, but the crimson liquid didn’t hit the floor. Instead, the blood orbited the wounded hand, collecting and combining to form globes, each no larger than an apple. Robin didn’t need a Knowledge power to guess what would happen next.

One of the globes of blood shot towards her, at a speed that left her just barely able to track its movement through the air. She remained where she was, keeping herself aloft without moving in any particular direction, and the projectile missed her by a few inches, punching a hole through the sheet metal ceiling of the warehouse as it exited. From behind her, a bolt of crimson lightning passed just under her feet and impacted on the far wall with a crash.

Robin didn’t turn to look at the man attacking her from the catwalk, didn’t spare him a glance even as the sound of metal clashing against metal rang out when Vence closed the distance to engage him. She trusted her husband, both to handle himself in combat and to maintain the protective magic she would rely on to close the distance with the men below.

The bloodmage shooting the globes at her kept up his barrage, but he grew more and more uncertain with each missed shot. Her weight steadily returned as long as she wasn’t actively emitting flames so Robin had to keep a lazy forward momentum going in order to stay aloft, but she wasn’t moving nearly as fast as the man’s inaccuracy seemed to indicate. She saw a couple more knives appearing in the hands of the men below, and as she couldn’t be sure what sort of magic they had available as a group, Robin decided it was time to stop scoping out the situation.

With a burst of fire sent towards the floor, Robin tucked her knees to her chest and flipped upside down, ending with her feet against the warehouse’s ceiling. A tap on the inside of her wrist summoned her longblade to her hand. She saw the realization crash through the enemy forces like a wave, saw them begin to scatter from their fearful little cluster.

Too late.

Robin released her maximum output, leaving a superheated patch of orange metal in the roof where she kicked off. They had managed to spread out enough to prevent her from taking them all out at once, but one of the bloodmages was a little slower than the rest, a little less lucky. The force of her impact flattened him, her sword running through his back and two feet deep into the concrete floor of the warehouse.

She felt him starting to struggle against the blade so she channeled her flames along its length, relying on the runes embedded in the metal to carry her magic. The result burned a hole around the stab wound large enough for her to fit her entire arm through, and the man fell limp.

Robin felt the magic growing behind her as the surrounding enemies began their attack. She leapt up and backwards, giving herself speed and lift with flames at her feet and shoulders, and passed over the enemy behind her so closely that she felt her hair brush him. She decapitated him with a backhand stroke as she righted herself in the air, still three feet off the ground.

Hound was only about twelve feet away from her now, and he had begun struggling once the sounds of combat had reached his ears. Robin couldn’t rule out the chance that the bloodmages might try to kill him if the situation turned south, so time was of the essence. She rushed forward to meet an approaching pair, either unable or unwilling to draw on their magic at that moment.

Robin parried a clumsy thrust, sending the man flying into the shelves at the clearing’s edge with a shove and a burst of flame. The next man’s knife was moving too slowly to even require deflecting it, so she severed the man’s hand at the wrist before running him through.

She went to withdraw her weapon, but found it held fast. At first she thought the dying man was gripping it with his remaining hand, but upon closer inspection there was a network of crimson tendrils extending from the stab wound, winding themselves tightly around her blade. Robin flew up into the air, leveraging her flight’s strength rather than her arms to try to haul her weapon free, but with each passing moment the tendrils became thicker, the binding magic growing more powerful as the man’s lifeblood continued to flow. Not even her focused flames seemed able to burn them away.

With no other choice, Robin let go of her sword. She would retreat, give the man time to bleed out, and retrieve her weapon after-

She jerked to a halt, stopped short by a tangle of bloody threads that wrapped around her midsection. There wasn’t any blood extending from the handle of her sword, she saw, but the man had his severed wrist extended forward, and the flow of blood from out of it was far stronger than the small, clean chest wound. In next to no time, Robin found she couldn’t move her arms, and as the cords wound tighter and tighter, even her magic stopped obeying her commands. Instead, a deep chill spread through her chest and exhaustion overtook her.

Robin sank slowly toward the floor as her weight returned to her. The men gathered in a small circle around where she landed, closing in further when the magical draining made her fall to her knees. Her initial hope was that the man currently binding her would die of his blood loss eventually, but that was dashed quickly as another bloodmage stepped up and began doing something repugnant, as was their wont.

The blood from the two men she’d already slain flowed along the ground, moving as if it had a will of its own. It leapt from the concrete to the hand of the new bloodmage, and flowed around his hand and arm like a second layer of skin. As Robin watched, it made the journey up his outstretched hand, around his shoulders, and down the other arm where it was planted on the back of the man who was binding her. The blood flowed into the wounded man, even as his own blood spurted out from his chest and wrist.

So much for that. Robin knew this one. The Cabals had given him the name Transfusion, and he was typically only sent out for operations of pivotal importance. His ability to manipulate blood made him unusually well suited for supporting the more suicidal bloodmages, and it made him horrifyingly dangerous in combat. The Cabal of Peace file on this guy was as thick as her clenched fist.

“It was foolish of you to come here,” Transfusion said, breaking off from the binding bloodmage to approach her where she knelt. Half of his left arm was still wrapped in a layer of blood. “Your interference amounts to nothing more than-”

He was interrupted by a loud clanging, like something pounding on metal. It was coming from the building’s large main door.

The noise rang out again, three beats this time, evenly spaced. Transfusion exchanged glances with a bloodmage next to him, before jerking his head towards the door. The indicated man tapped one of his comrades on the shoulder, and the two of them began weaving their way through the materials towards a smaller side door set next to the main one.

Robin smiled.

The next impact on the door was cacophonous compared with the previous ones. The entire door tore out of its housing and rocketed across the room, leveling crates and shelves and bloodmages wherever they stood in its path. Some of the crates were apparently filled with sand or concrete powder, as a thick cloud of dust was raised around the clearing. The haphazard missile passed close enough to where she knelt that she felt the air around her face stir, but with Vence watching from the catwalk there wasn’t a chance that such an obvious fate could befall her.

The man with the binding magic was not as lucky. The massive door rolled over him and Robin felt the exact moment that the man’s life was snuffed out, as it coincided with the collapse of the bloody cords that were binding her. Strength and warmth flooded back into her, and she double-checked her magic by burning away the now-liquid blood that coated her armor.

“No one answered, boss!”

Exel’s voice rang out over the clatter of collapsing shelves and the cries of the grievously wounded. Through the dust that hung in the air, Robin could just make out his bulky form clambering over the debris left in the path of the door’s flight. Periodically, he would stoop to pick up a chunk of wood or a bent piece of metal, holding it up in the air before tapping it with his opposite hand and sending it careening off into the warehouse. More often than not, this was accompanied by a grunt and the wet thud of an impact.

“Rude of them,” she commented as he reached her, and offered her a hand. She gripped him by the forearm, wrist to wrist, and he hauled her to her feet.

Robin saw movement over Exel’s shoulder, and he tensed at the shift in her expression. One of the surviving bloodmages was extricating himself from the rubble, one hand raised towards the ceiling, drawing in a staggering amount of blood.

Then again, there was a lot of it scattered around.

“Pat on the back,” Robin said quickly, already taking to the air.

Exel used his lingering grip on her arm to add extra momentum to her flight as she passed him. As she drew even with him, he spun on his heel and slapped her between the shoulderblades.

Robin felt his magic take hold of her, as she had countless times before. With just a touch, Exel could send things flying like they’d been shot out of a cannon. What was more, the effect didn’t cause any damage to the affected object or person when they accelerated. He’d once described it, not as a shooting or a launching, but rather a sort of convincing. Convincing the universe itself that the target was, in fact, not at rest at all, but rather rocketing through the air at speeds ranging from fast to holy shit.

She was on the second setting.

Once she’d moved far enough past Exel to avoid hurting him with her flames, Robin added her own propulsion to her flight, though the acceleration was negligible when compared to the raw thrust provided by her subordinate’s magic. Regardless, she closed the gap with the bloodmage before he’d had enough time to fully formulate a surprised expression, decapitating him with her sword held out at her side. She was moving too quickly to even need to swing it. All of the gathered blood fell to the floor in a resounding crash, the sound of a waterfall for just a split second.

Robin spun about in midair, going on full blast in the opposite direction to slow her momentum just before she crashed into the warehouse’s opposite wall. Exel’s magic offered no easy solutions as to how to stop moving, which meant that she and Vence were the only members of the team that could safely use it for mobility.

Looking back the way she’d come, she was able to fully appreciate the level of destruction Exel’s entrance had caused. The swath of shattered wood and scattered materials was a little wider than the door that created it, widened as the closely packed detritus had been flung out of the path of the projectile. Every few feet, she could see signs of the men buried beneath the rubble, the edge of a black robe here and a bloody limb there. On the opposite edge of the warehouse, where she and Vence had originally entered, Robin could see the still struggling form of a bloodmage hanging off of the catwalk, bound in her husband’s nullifying chain.

“Go for Hound,” Robin told Exel as she floated back towards him. She didn’t sheathe her sword, but she let herself relax a bit as she verified that any of the bloodmages who were still alive were in no shape to fight.

Vence was making his way through the rubble, climbing atop a series of shelves where the passage of the door had tipped them into each other, leaving the already narrow aisles impassable. She smiled as he cautiously made his way over the precarious path. Even now, with their opponents scattered, maimed, or worse, he was a worrier. Robin watched as he tentatively tested the balance of a shelf he was about to step onto, carefully putting weight onto it with his lead foot. Apparently satisfied, he continued onward, and several things happened all at once.

First, the shelving unit he had just tested slipped out from under his feet, collapsing beneath his weight. The sudden loss of footing made him pitch sideways and forward. At nearly the same time as he started to fall, a cut appeared on his face, wide and deep, running from the tip of his chin all the way to a point just above his ear. She saw his eyes widen in shock as he fell, leaving a trail of crimson as blood flowed from the awful wound.

Robin flew forward, panic and confusion muddling her instincts. She dropped her sword as she flew, reaching out with both hands to catch her husband before he fell into the rubble below. She cradled him in one arm as she eased him to the ground, tearing a wide strip of cloth from his uniform with her other hand.

“Muh-” he mumbled, turning his head sideways to spit out a mouthful of blood. Robin could see where the cut had split his skin open to the bone of his jaw, where it had punctured through his cheek into his mouth. She shushed him, trying to hold his head still as she pressed the balled up cloth to the side of his face. Vence struggled weakly in her grip, one hand questing upward to her face.

There was too much blood. The crimson cloth bundle was soaked through in moments, stained a darker red.

“Exel!” Robin called over her shoulder, fear distorting her normally controlled tone. She saw him approaching, having extricated Hound from the rubble. In ordinary circumstances, she’d have celebrated the sight of her liberated subordinate, but there was another life at risk now.

“Muh...Muh magic…” Vence said, the words almost too weak to hear. Robin was about to shush him again when he continued. “Watching for...shadows…”

Vence’s magic was among the most powerful protective magic that the Rainbow Cabals had on file, but was also nearly impossible to consistently observe. His was a preventative sort of protection, guarding against outcomes, and always the one that Vence was currently expecting to occur. If he expected Robin to be barraged by ranged magic, the attacks would miss, either curving wide or pushed off target by faulty aim. If he expected to be injured crashing into the floor of a room he’d just been catapulted into from fifty feet higher in the air, his body would turn in just the right way to absorb the shock and let him recover from the landing. To the uninformed, it seemed like Vence’s magic was just amplified luck, but Robin knew better. It was worrying magic, and her husband wielded it with a skill that only enhanced its innate strengths. So if he expected to be ambushed by a wizard with some type of subtlety magic, especially if they were immune to being interfered with by Vence’s own, then it made sense that her husband’s power would have no recourse than to try to shift Vence, by destabilizing his footing or shifting the surface he was walking on.

She pictured the scene as Vence had been struck, an image that would probably be burned into her memory for quite a while. Imagining an invisible blade following the path of the strike, Robin was fairly certain that her husband would have been decapitated if he hadn’t stumbled.

Exel had left Hound leaning against a crate near the entrance to the warehouse and was approaching Robin warily, his head swiveling about as he scanned the area for the assailant. He stooped and picked up a hefty chunk of wood, holding it in front of his body with his free hand poised behind it, panning around with it at the ready. There was a heavy pressure on the air as Robin strained her ears, listening for any sign of the wizard who had attacked Vence, but the only sounds in the warehouse were the groans of the injured bloodmages and her husband’s pained breathing.

She heard a sound behind her, the clattering of shifting rubble. On instinct, Robin whirled to face it, both hands coming up in preparation for a burst of flame, but she almost immediately cursed her jumpiness. No operative that was willing to try to assassinate a wizard, alone, surrounded by enemies would be foolish enough to make such an obvious noise. Spinning about, Robin’s first instinct was to protect Vence, but he wasn’t the target. The assassin was only interested in incapacitating their defensive magic before moving to the real target.

A figure in black robes perched atop the crate where Hound was still leaning. A gleaming machete was held high in the air, its tip already crimson with blood, and it didn’t seem like Hound was aware of the bloodmage’s presence. Robin swore, taking to the air toward them, though she knew before she’d even started to fly that she wouldn’t make it in time. Her subordinate tiredly lifted his head, his eyes widening as he finally noticed the descending weapon.

Suddenly, darkness billowed up from the ground, filling a ten foot area centered on Hound with a constantly rolling, oily black smoke. Robin pulled up short, hovering just outside the roughly spherical mass of shadow. She looked toward the door, where Blackout was just cresting the beginning of the field of rubble, then back to the darkness, her eyes vainly searching the featureless black for some sign of what was going on within.

A hand signal from Robin saw the rest of her squad gathered around Blackout’s magic. She was worried about Vence, but he had a fresh bundle of cloth ripped from his robe, and was conscious enough to keep pressure on it himself. He had pulled himself up into a half-upright position, keeping an eye on the situation just in case. Exel handed Robin her longblade as he knelt in front of the darkness, the rubble propped up on his knee in preparation for launching.

Robin signaled again, and the darkness fell away, dissipating into the air like smoke. Once enough had cleared to allow her to see what had happened inside, she let out an explosive sigh of relief.

The assassin was planted firmly on the ground, and Hound was sitting on top of them. Both of the bloodmage’s arms were twisted around their back, and her subordinate was in the process of applying his binding chain. Robin was honestly surprised he’d managed to turn the situation around, considering the state he’d been in, but Hound was tough as nails, and his magic interacted favorably with Blackout’s. Once the assassin’s hands were bound, he reached down and grasped the back of the captive bloodmage’s hood, drawing it back.

Robin gasped sharply.

Then blinked.

Hound was crouched low to the ground, and the remainder of her team minus the injured Vence were arrayed around him. They all looked around confusedly, as though uncertain as to what was going on, and Robin was in the same boat. She felt something in her mind slipping away, like trying to remember a dream upon waking, but try as she might there wasn’t anything concrete coming to mind. She’d been worried, anxious, on alert.

Robin opened her mouth, as though going through the motions preceding speech would call out the appropriate words, but nothing emerged. Opposite the hole in the front of the building where Exel had torn the door from its track, a smaller single door slammed open with enough force that it banged against the wall on the outside of the warehouse, retaining enough momentum to slam itself shut again. Her squad oriented on the doorway, watching, but relaxed after a few moments proved nothing was forthcoming.

With a flick of her wrist, Robin banished her longblade, a sign that her squad could stand down, which they did with grateful sighs of relief.

“Call in a medical retrieval,” Robin said, crossing the warehouse to check on her husband. He was pale and trembling, but still conscious. She took one of his hands and he squeezed it, offering her a weak smile.

Behind her, Exel and Blackout were helping Hound limp out of the building, one on each side of the larger man, as Exel opened the connection to the Rainbow Cabals.

Robin turned back to Vence, her eyes drawn to the nasty cut that ran the length of his face.

"Mission accomplished,” she said, still unable to shake the feeling that something shocking, something important had slipped from her mind.