The bind wouldn’t hold forever.

Arthur felt it already. The shoulder was bleeding steady and every pulse of aetheric blood feeding the shadow cost him. The edges of the anchor were starting to soften. Not breaking. But softening.

"Now means now!" he snapped.

Kreasial was already moving.

She crossed the frozen bank in four steps, both arms back, and drove an ice-coated fist into the broad man’s jaw before he finished processing that he couldn’t run. His head cracked sideways into the trunk. His knees went.

She grabbed his collar before he hit the ground. Found his relic stone in his front pocket. Pressed his thumb to it.

The broad man disappeared in a quiet flash.

Theodore came across behind her. Slower. One arm held against his chest, the right side of his uniform still dark and smoking at the edges. But his eyes were focused. He found the black-haired woman already pulling at her own feet, trying to wrench free of the shadow, her fire building at her palms.

Theodore raised his free hand.

The wind came out thin and invisible and hit her wrist and snapped it sideways. Not broken. But the fire died. She gasped and grabbed her own arm.

Theodore stepped up. Found her relic stone. Pressed it against her palm.

She disappeared.

Two down.

Arthur crossed the bank.

The green-haired man was still pulling at his feet. Both hands clawing at the shadow around his ankles, aetheric blood pulsing green through his fingers, trying to force it open. His jaw was set. His eyes were sharp and furious.

"Let me go." Low and tight. "Right now."

Arthur stopped in front of him.

The man’s bellus was on his shoulder. Up close it looked wrong. Too still. Hunched inward on itself, fur flattened, eyes darting between its owner and Arthur with the specific panic of something that had learned to stay small.

The green-haired man looked at his bellus.

"Heal me." His voice shifted. Something that was almost a command but came out like a demand. "Now. Do it now."

The bellus flinched.

It pressed itself smaller against his neck. Its eyes were wide and wet. It didn’t move.

"I said heal me—"

"She’s scared of you," Arthur said.

The man snapped his head up.

"Shut your—"

Arthur fired.

The water marble hit him square in the stomach. Not large. Not the performance from before. Just a clean dense shot at close range and the man folded forward with all the air leaving his body at once. His hands came off his ankles and went to his stomach. The shadow hold didn’t matter anymore. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Arthur crouched.

He found the relic stone in the man’s coat pocket. Pulled it out. Looked at it once.

Then he took the man’s hand, pressed his thumb to the stone, and held it there.

The green-haired man looked up at him. Eyes watering. Still trying to get air back. His mouth moved.

Arthur pressed the thumb harder.

The flash came.

And he was gone.

The bellus dropped from the empty air where his shoulder had been. It hit the ground and stood there. Looked around. Then looked up at Arthur.

Arthur looked back at it.

It took one careful step toward him. Then stopped. Ears still flat but the wide panic in its eyes going down slightly.

"You’re okay," Arthur said. "He’s gone."

The bellus looked at the empty space where the man had been.

Then it sat down.

Roz watched it from Arthur’s shoulder with the expression of something forming an opinion it hadn’t decided to share yet.

Theodore appeared beside Arthur. He was breathing carefully. His hand still pressed against his ribs. He looked at the bellus on the ground.

Then he reached into his bag and pulled out a small piece of dried meat and set it on the ground.

The bellus looked at it. Looked at Theodore. Ate it in one motion.

Kreasial walked up behind them. She looked at the three empty spaces where the other students had been. Then she cracked her knuckles and looked at Arthur.

"You held that bind with a spike in your shoulder."

"Yeah."

"Hm." She turned and walked back toward the trees.

Arthur looked down at his shoulder.

The spike was still in there. He grabbed the base of it. Took a breath.

Pulled it out in one motion.

The sound he made was not dignified. Roz did not comment. Vexis winced. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Blood came faster now. He pressed his palm over it.

"We need to move," Theodore said. He was already writing something in his notes, pen moving fast, one-handed. "That fight had noise. If any other triads are in range they’ll have heard it."

"Credits first." Kreasial was already crouching near where the three had stood. She pulled a containment pouch off the broad man’s abandoned equipment. Opened it.

Four markers inside. A ring. A carved stone. Two pendants.

She held it up.

The cloud appeared.

[+400 credits]

[Class F Triad: Misfits total — 700 credits]

"Seven hundred," Theodore said.

Arthur stood up. Pressed his shoulder harder. The bleeding was slowing.

Kreasial looked at the number. Then at Arthur’s shoulder.

"What’s up with your little crazy man performance." She tilted her head. "What actually is wrong with you. Goldie?

"Nothing really," Arthur said.

Vexis hovered next to him. ’Yeah you went nuts.. we’re you secretly a lunatic?’

Arthur ignored him.

"That’s the concerning part."

Theodore wrote something in his notes. He didn’t show either of them what was it.

2300 more. Roughly 23 markers at 100 each. Less than forty minutes left.

He looked into the forest ahead.

The canopy was thick. The shade ran deep and unbroken between the trunks, long strips of permanent dark across the ground where the light never reached. His kind of terrain.

He pushed the shadow network out.

Slow. Low. Threading anchor by anchor through every dark space between the roots. The island fed back to him in pieces — weight, texture, stillness, movement. His range spread further than it had near the academy walls. No stone corridors limiting the path. Just open ground and dark and trees.

He found four markers in the first two hundred meters. Dense objects underground. Cold and still.

One near a cluster of black moss. One wedged under a flat rock near a dry creek bed. Two more buried shallow at the base of a split trunk.

He opened his eyes.

"That way." He pointed. "And we’re not stopping."

Kreasial rolled her shoulder.

Theodore capped his pen.

The Misfits moved into the forest and the dark closed around them and Arthur’s shadow network spread through all of it, threading further and further ahead, mapping what his eyes couldn’t see.

The Class C triad hit the ground in under a minute.

No dramatic finish. No extended exchange. Xavier had moved through all three of them the way water moved through gaps — efficient, quiet, leaving nothing standing.

He looked at them.

Not with satisfaction. Not with anything, really. Just the assessment of someone checking that the work was done.

Calver stepped up beside him, brushing dust from his sleeve, blue hair pushed back from his forehead. Auros stood a few paces back with his arms crossed and the relaxed expression of someone who hadn’t needed to do much.

"That’s two triads already," Calver said. He reached down and collected the credit markers from the three downed students. "We’re sitting at four thousand and change. We could pace ourselves from here."

Xavier didn’t answer.

He was looking north.

Through the trees. Past the section of island they’d already cleared. His eyes fixed on a specific point in the distance with the focused stillness of someone listening for something no one else could hear.

Calver followed his gaze. Saw nothing.

"Xavier."

Nothing.

Calver put a hand on his shoulder.

Xavier blinked. Came back. Looked at Calver’s hand.

"We should move," Xavier said.

Calver frowned. "We just came from that direction. There’s nothing north but dense canopy and whatever’s been making noise over there for the last ten minutes. Probably a fight."

"I know."

"We don’t need the credits—"

"I’m not going for the credits."

Calver looked at him. Auros looked up from where he’d been checking his own equipment.

Xavier’s expression hadn’t changed. It had the specific quality it got sometimes, the one that had nothing to do with the current moment and everything to do with something Calver couldn’t see and had stopped asking about.

"Then what are we going for?" Calver asked.

Xavier looked north. His voice came out flat and certain and quiet.

"There’s someone I need to meet."

Calver stared at him. "We were literally just—"

"We’re moving."

Xavier walked.

Calver stood there for one second. Looked at Auros. Auros shrugged with the expression of a man who had accepted this a long time ago.

They followed.

The forest swallowed all three of them.

And somewhere north, deeper in the dark, Arthur’s shadow network spread further across the island floor, silent, invisible, patient , reaching through every shadow it could find.