Page 64 of Property of Scar

One second, I’m moving, and the next, something rakes across my side hard enough to jerk the air from my lungs.

Pain flashes hot and immediate. Fabric tears, and my skin goes with it. The rogue’s sharp claws carve a line through my flank and keeps going, fast and clean, leaving a burst of heat in its wake that tells me exactly how deep it got.

My body reacts before my brain catches up. Every instinct I have tries to curl around the injury, protecting and shielding it.

But I force that reaction down and keep moving.

The only problem is that I can feel it now. The wet slide of blood spreading beneath my shirt, and the sting every time my torso twists.

The warmth running down my side registers.

Shit.

Blood.

Mine.

I can smell it immediately, and it sharpens everything. The world narrows, edges pulling into focus, every movement around me cutting clearer, the space tightening into something I can control.

The second closes in again, expecting hesitation.

Expecting weakness.

I give him neither.

Instead, I turn into it. Stepping forward instead of back, forcing the distance to collapse before he can use it, my injured side protesting with a sharp pull that I ignore as I drive my shoulder into his centerline, disrupting the angle he’s built.

Cali moves behind me, repositioning, and one of them breaks from the formation without hesitation, tracking her path with the same measured precision, not chasing, not reacting, but predicting, stepping into the line she’s about to take rather than the one she’s already on.

There’s no wasted motion.

No overlap.

No chaos.

Every angle is covered, and every exit is accounted for.

Every movement is answered before it finishes.

This isn’t how rogues fight.

Rogues are hunger, instinct, and destruction.

This is something that was trained to do precisely what they are doing.

And that realization lands as the first one comes at me again, faster this time, cleaner, more precise… and I understand, too late, that we are not the only ones who came here prepared.

Whatever Mordain put in those vials, some of it went into the things he kept in those cages.

There is no gap between the thought and the movement. I go for the closest, intercept it before it closes the distance to Cali, meet its charge with a momentum redirect that uses its own speed to drive it into the metal workbench hard enough to collapse the frame. Cali is already at my four o’clock, crossbow up, bolt through a rogue’s shoulder before it clears the doorway, and she follows it with her stake in a single fluid motion that leaves her hand without her eyes leaving me.

We move the way hunters who have fought beside each other for years move.

No orders or discussion, just instinct and violence.

I put the second rogue down hard, and I’m already moving before the body hits the floor, every sense keyed up and hunting for the next threat.

Something shifts behind me.