The circle had not moved yet.Twelve men in black cloaks standing in a tight ring around the two of them, close enough that Asta could see the heat shimmer coming off their hands in the cold night air. Nobody had launched anything. Nobody had spoken since the whistle. They were doing what people do when they want the numbers to do the talking before anyone has to move a foot, just standing there, letting the math of twelve against two settle into the space between them like a wall.Mira looked around at all of them slowly.One side. The other side. All the way around.Then she looked at Asta.The smirk hadn't left her face since the moment they appeared. If anything it had gotten a little wider."There's twelve of them." She said, the same tone she would use to comment on the temperature."Yeah." Asta said. "I can see that.""Just twelve." She said again."I counted them.""Right." She rolled one saber slowly in her right wrist, the flame blade turning lazy circles in the dark.

Mira looked at the ash one more time. Then forward.Beatrice crouched slightly, looking at the grey on the ground. "They were clones." She said. "All of them."Caius crouched beside her, touched the ash, rubbed it between two fingers. "Flame clones. Yeah." He stood up. "Which means the real one is somewhere nearby.""So where is he?" The defence captain said, looking around the clearing."Had to be watching." Asta said. "Staying back. Keeping himself out of it."Everyone went quiet for a moment.The tree line. The undergrowth. The spaces between the roots where the dark was thickest.Then, from the right side, maybe twenty feet into the bushes, the sound of something moving. Low and careful and almost quiet. Almost."There.” Beatrice said.Her bow was up before anyone else had turned all the way.“"Flame Arc Technique — Binding Web."”The arrow left the string and fanned, splitting into a wide net of burning threads, spreading fast and dropping over the area of movement in o

The man in the chair had his head hanging forward when the water hit him.Egries didn't pour it gently. She tilted the bucket and let it go,a full, cold, committed pour that hit the top of his head and ran down his face and neck and soaked the front of his cloak in one go.His head snapped up."HEY…" He sputtered, shaking his head like a wet dog, water flying off his hair. "I'm up! I'm UP! What the…""Shut up.” Mira said.He turned and looked at her. Water was still dripping off his chin. His eyes moved from her face down to her folded arms and back up again, and something in his expression settled into the specific look of a man who had decided, while still half-unconscious and soaking wet, that he was not going to be spoken to that way."Make me." He said.Mira uncrossed her arms.She stood up from where she had been leaning against the tent pole and took one step forward and the expression on her face was the expression of someone who had been looking for a reason and had just

He answered the way a person answers when the lock on everything has been removed, not carefully, not around the edges, just straight through. He told them about the flame aura extraction. How children carried purer, stronger reserves of untapped flame energy than adults,how that energy, extracted in the right way through the right technique, could be condensed and sent directly to the Grand Master. How the Grand Master had been diminished,reduced to a fraction of his true power through something that had happened long ago and how the only way to restore what had been lost was through a specific and sustained intake of purified flame energy. How the children were chosen because they were available, because nobody would look in the right place, because the villages in this region were isolated enough to lose fifty children before the wider world noticed.The tent was very quiet while he spoke.Wabash listened to every word with his hands still at his sides and his jaw set in that wa

Nine feet.That was all the space between them. Nine feet of cold open ground and a silence that had been sitting there long enough to start feeling like a physical thing, something you could put your hand against and feel pushing back. The kind of silence that forms between two groups of people who have already decided what is going to happen and are just waiting for someone to start it.Web stood at the front of his three hundred with his hands loose at his sides, eyes moving across the camp formation with the calm, unhurried attention of someone reading a document. Kyx to his left. Gull to his right, standing with the particular energy of a man who had made several decisions that led him here and was in the quiet process of accepting all of them.Roderick stood on the other side. Yuki at his shoulder. The four of Wabash's high-ranking commanders spread along the line. The unit captains at the flanks.Nobody moved.The nine feet held.Then Mira leaned slightly toward Roderick, dro