Recognition explodes inside Valasca. She slows and carefully draws both her charged blade and another, concealing them behind her back. She’s met this high-ranking fiend before during her diplomatic work as the head of the Queen’s Guard.

Sylus Bane.

Sylus pauses in the tendriling mist, his grin widening. He raises his arm and calmly levels his wand at Valasca as she grips her favored blade and murmurs a spell, her fingers sliding over the charged blade’s undimmed runes.

Gray spear-shapes blink into existence around Sylus, hovering in the air, his wand’s tip emitting threads of Shadow. Quick as an asp, he thrusts his wand forward.

On reflex, Valasca crosses her blades in an X before her as the Shadow spears streak in. As soon as the blades make contact with each other, the deadened runes on the charge-stripped blade burst to magical life, the runes of both blades now flashing emerald. A puff of green light bursts into being in front of her weapons, rapidly morphing into a glassy green shield before her.

Sylus’s spears slam into the shield-pane with reverberating clangs. The impacts send shock waves of pain through Valasca’s wrists, arms, and shoulders, each strike setting off gray-fire explosions that morph into the rising forms of spiky gray trees, pitchforking toward the sky.

Valasca catches Sylus’s flash of surprise.

Ah, she vengefully thinks. You thought you rendered all of us powerless, didn’t you?

A bloodthirsty amusement rises inside her this time.

“Oh, you picked the wrong Amaz to come after, you absolute piece of shit,” Valasca snarls as she slides her fingers over her blade’s runes once more, the green-paned barrier whisked away. Before Sylus can murmur a new spell, she lunges toward him, pressing her fingers along a new runic combination on her favored blade, then hurls the knife.

Her blade slams into his throat, a flash of furious surprise crossing Sylus’s expression that Valasca relishes as he rasps out a gurgling cry and falls backward.

Valasca pounces as he writhes on the ground, kicking his wand from his grasp. She lifts her rune-marked palm, and her blade tears from his bloodied neck, flying back into her grip. Then she thrusts the blade forward once more to impale Sylus’s wand hand.

The blade’s runes detonate in a satisfying blast of green fire, his hand instantly rendered to mangled flesh as he twitches then stills.

“Rot in hell, Mage filth,” Valasca snarls as she leans over his corpse and retrieves her bloodied blade, wipes it clean on Sylus’s black uniform, then rises and turns.

The Alfsigr teen emerges from the surrounding rubble a few paces away, the whimpering child grasped in her slender arms, the teen’s fierce look returned.

Good, Valasca thinks as the Shadow tide curls around them both. You’re going to need that ferocity. “What’s your name?” she calls to the girl as she strides toward her.