Artemis

  Frost steamed off his skin in lazy curls as he lowered his arms. His eyes locked on mine – and for the first time, I thought I seen anger behind them.

  The ground answered him before he moved.

  A tremor.

  Then a spike of earth erupted at my left side.

  I reacted on instinct. Ice swept along my forearm in a rapid crystalline bloom, locking into a shield an instant before the spike slammed into me. The impact rang through my arm like a hammer strike. The spike shattered, but the force bruised deep beneath my ribs and knocked me a half-step back.

  The soldier’s eyes tracked only me: the frost on my arm, the shards of Ice scattered at my feet. Yet, they never spared the Magister a second glance.

  They already knew what he was.

  A murmur rose, thin and disbelieving.

  “Three—?”

  “Impossible.”

  Even the conscripts stood frozen.

  Aeris looked stricken, Jarl wide-eyed. The others edged back without meaning to, awe sliding quickly into fear.

  Viola’s eyes moved between us, lingering on the ice still steaming from my arm, and the frost clinging to the Magister’s skin. The fear in her expression twisted something in my chest.

  A quiet voice cut through the rising panic.

  The Magister.

  He stepped forward, bare feet grounded in the dirt as though the whole forest were a weapon waiting for his hand.

  “So that’s the truth of you.” His gaze traced the frost at my feet. “That’s why the Stone couldn’t drain you.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  But the real truth struck harder than anything he’d thrown at me yet: I wasn’t going to win this.

  I couldn’t take an Aberration and eight trained Casters on a half-starved core. Even at my best, it would have been a fight measured in blood.

  Not here. Not like this.

  Tonight, it would be suicide.

  I shifted my stance, breath tightening. I needed an opening—fast.

  The Magister’s eyes narrowed, reading the change instantly. His gaze flicked to the soldiers.

  “Collapse the ring. Full engagement”

  The command hadn’t even finished leaving his mouth before the clearing erupted in motion.

  The clearing surged. Soldier’s shifted, lines breaking away from me.

  I felt it before I saw it, and then a crack split the air.

  Lightning.

  It tore toward me in a jagged white line, bright enough to bleach the world around it. I hurled Wind sideways on instinct, the Cast snapping from my palm and nudging the bolt just enough to spoil its line. I twisted with it, boots skidding as the Lightning seared past my shoulder and detonated behind me.

  Close.

  Too close.

  But Lightning Casters only ruled open space. In a tightening ring of bodies, every shot risked turning friendly fire into a massacre.

  I was already moving, closing the distance with the nearest soldier. An Ice shard formed in my grip, cold biting into my palm before I sent it flying.

  It cut through the air in a clean, lethal arc—

  —and shattered harmlessly against a wall of earth.

  The Magister had raised it between us with a single shift of his stance, the ground responding quick to his summons.

  I slid back a fraction, eyes tracking the distance between us and the new wall. Earth Casters couldn’t usually project that far. His control stretched well beyond a standard Caster’s radius.

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  The dirt beneath my feet vibrated.

  I threw myself backward.

  A spike of Earth tore up from the ground exactly where I’d been standing, jagged enough to skewer me if I hesitated.

  Before my boots even cleared the soil, a shard of Ice whistled in from the right – and heat bloomed at my back. Another soldier, Fire this time, the Cast roaring toward me.

  I drew a breath in midair.

  Wind erupted from my palms in a concussive blast, a wide-force Cast that cracked through the clearing like a sudden storm. The shockwave struck both projectiles at once—ice splintering midair, flame scattering into a hiss of dying embers.

  I hit the ground a moment later.

  And sank.

  The instant my boots touched soil again, the ground didn’t just soften, it failed.

  My feet plunged half a shin down in an instant, the earth liquefying around my legs like a trap snapping shut. This wasn’t the sluggish drag I’d fought free of before.

  This was fast.

  The Magister was no longer striking. He was claiming the ground beneath me.

  I drove Wind downward, trying to rip free, but the soil tightened immediately, climbing my calves before my heels had even cleared. Suction wrenched at my joints, grinding bone against packed earth.

  I mixed Wind and Water, forcing the dirt to loosen, and burst upward in a violent spray of mud and stone.

  A thin whistle cut across the clearing.

  A Wind blade sliced toward me from the right. I caught it midair with a sharp sweep of my hand, my own Wind splitting it apart in a spiraling gust that scattered the technique into harmless ribbons.

  My boots hit the ground again—

  —and the earth immediately gave way.

  I sank deeper this time. Nearly to the knee. The soil didn’t just soften; it dragged, pulling with the strength of a drowning current.

  A sharp crack split the air.

  An Ice shard screamed toward my face.

  I flared Fire on instinct.

  The blast melted the shard in an instant, spraying steam across my arm, but another formed behind it.

  Shards hammered the space in front of me in a relentless stream, each one condensing from frozen air and firing point-blank toward my chest. I hurled Fire once more, heat roaring from my palm, but every time the flame burned one apart, another cut through its wake.

  The earth tightened.

  My legs were pinned to the shin, boots swallowed so deep I could no longer feel their weight.

  Another whistle cut the air.

  A Wind blade tore in from the left.

  If I blocked the Ice, the blade would take me.

  If I stopped the flame, the next shard would.

  I gathered everything – Fire in one hand, Wind coiling hard in the other – and then deeper, down through my legs, where the earth still grappled my boots.

  And I pushed.

  Wind detonated downward from the soles of my feet. The force ripped through the mud like an explosion. My boots tore free as I surged upward, the ground swallowing them whole.

  The Wind blade passed beneath me.

  The next Ice shard shattered against the fire still roaring from my raised hand.

  I cleared the storm of projectiles in a single upward arc, the world flashing blue and white underneath.

  Then gravity caught me and I hit the ground barefoot.

  The shock of cold earth against my skin sharpened everything. The ground shifted below me.

  Across the clearing, the Magister’s eyes narrowed.

  I felt him move before he had.

  The soil at my feet softened with a predatory speed.

  Wind burst from the soles of my feet in a sharp lateral blast, launching me sideways before the Earth could claim so much as a toe. The momentum carried me in a long, low arc across the clearing, Wind shaping itself beneath each bare step, accelerating me faster.

  The Lightning Caster’s eyes widened as I closed the distance.

  He hadn’t fired since the opening shot, not with half the company standing around us. He’d been waiting for a clean line.

  And I was about to take it away.

  His hands sparked. Too slow.

  I drove my fist forward, Wind coiling tight around the strike. A focused hammer slammed into his sternum.

  The Lightning Caster vanished from in front of me, launched so violently his body became a streak of flailing limbs and whipping cloak. He cleared the ring and the tree line behind.

  Then he was simply gone.

  I landed light, bare feet gripping the dirt.

  The Magister was running toward me now, barefoot strides pounding the ground with a speed that would’ve flattened most men.

  Too slow, I realized.

  For all his reach, all his precision, the Magister needed proximity.

  Distance was his weakness. And he meant to erase it.

  He swept a hand low as he ran. The ground answering instantly.

  Chunks of earth ripped free and hurtled toward me. A second later came Fire from the left, Ice from the right, Wind screaming straight ahead – Casters unleashing in unison.

  I pivoted hard, already shaping what I needed.

  Moisture prickled against my skin as I dragged Water from the air, weaving it into thin, invisible strands. The lattice formed under my hands, slower this time. My core tugged sharply in warning.

  I didn’t have time to care.

  The net snapped into place and froze solid as Ice surged from both my hands, racing along the web I’d built and locking it hard. A wall rose tall and thick in front of me.

  The first barrage hit.

  The impact shook the clearing.

  Stone shattered. Fire guttered out in a hiss of steam. Ice broke like glass against the frozen barrier. Wind howled and dispersed.

  But every strike cost me.

  The wall trembled under the repeated blows, strain running straight through my arms into the hollow of my chest. Fatigue clawed at the center of my core, pulling more than I meant to give.

  I planted my feet, breath jagged, my hands shaking from the effort of holding the Ice together.

  The wall held.

  Barely.

  A moment later, the ground beneath it convulsed.

  Cracks spiderwebbed across the Ice, thin at first, then splitting wide as something surged upward from below.

  A spiked pillar of earth burst straight through the center of the wall, splitting it like hammer through glass. Ice exploded outward in a sheet of shattering blue-white fragments, the structure shattering in a cascade of frozen shards.

  The wall collapsed.

  Soldiers surged through the falling ice, Casts already forming in their hands.

  And through the chaos – between the blur of bodies and drifting frost – I saw her.

  Viola.

  She stood just behind the second line of soldiers, eyes wide and locked on me.

  Something deep twisted hard in my chest. Her lips parted as if to call out—

  —and the Magister stepped into our line of sight, closing the distance with every step.

  Wind surged from the soles of my feet. I hurled myself backward as the ground rumbled again beneath me, then broke into a sprint, blurring into the dark ahead with everything I had left.

  My core screamed.

  I didn’t stop.

  Behind me, the Magister barked an order.

  The hunt began.