Aelindra timed a strike to a Ragnar exchange that demanded Kaelira's full attention. The blade dancer slipped past in a blur of dark-infused speed, and her blades came for Sera's throat in a scissor cut that would have taken her head.
Quinlan broke spacing. Ice erupted between Aelindra and Sera to buy a fraction of a second and wind hurled him across the gap to put [Soul Reaper] between the elf's blades and Sera's neck, and the parry sent Aelindra spinning clear, but the gap he'd left behind was what Ragnar had been waiting for.
The fist connected with Quinlan's side and [Synchra] screamed as the reserve energies the anima-grade armor possessed surged into the plates along his ribs, the plating fracturing in a web that spread from the point of impact across half his torso.
Just as Nyxara had claimed, a single good punch could be deadly, despite the tankiness Quinlan now sported.
The blow drove him sideways and Sera's hands were already moving, golden light flooding through her palms and into his body before he finished sliding, mending what it could while the fractures in [Synchra]'s plates stabilized but refused to close.
The armor's reserves were burning down, and that was not something her heals could restore.
She'd been watching them for every second of the fight, Quinlan's elements cycling with that dark intensity she'd never seen from him, Kaelira's barriers arriving in his blind spots with a precision that had no right existing after only minutes of fighting together.
They moved in tandem and neither of them seemed to notice they were doing it, the shy smith and the furious Primordial locked into a rhythm that Sera couldn't find the entrance to.
She stood in the backline with her bow drawn and the knowledge settling into her that she was the reason they were bleeding.
Fire was the only element missing from the family, and Sera had been certain it was hers since the moment she noticed the gap. She was a Dawnbringer. She carried divine light. Fire was in her nature.
She reached through the brand on her womb and called for it with all of herself. The Reservoir answered warm and open and willing, and fire did not e. She pushed harder, watched Kaelira's barriers crack for the twelfth time and [Synchra]'s fractures widen, and the silence was total.
'I'm not Ayame,' she thought. 'I wasn't born with a blade in my hand. I unlocked this class mere months ago and started fighting up close even more recently, and against opponents where a single mistake means dying and taking my friends down with me...'
She steeled her heart, tried to channel what fire meant, Quinlan's pride, his refusal to bow to others, his absolute certainty, and reached one more time. The bond stayed warm. Fire stayed absent. It had never been hers.
Sera's fingers tightened on the bowstring, and the denial that rose died before it reached her lips.
The word carried something close to warmth.
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