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It wasn't luck that sent Sylvite on the senshi's heels.

No. Every officer had a communicator pen, and there was a button on the side of it that was in easy reach, even when you were getting pummeled. Sylvite felt her own pen buzz, and when she opened it up into its tablet form, all she heard was a cough and then what she could only guess was the sound of someone getting punched in the face. A GPS map opened on her screen after that, and Sylvite took a little time to make out the little roads and names before teleported from her quiet night in the park to the street where that little flashing light was.

She was expecting to come face to face with a fight. Instead she found herself in an empty complex. All she could hear was the buzzing of streetlights. All she could feel was the aura of a basic senshi in the distance. She checked her map again. This was the right spot. She could see the little light right next to her now. Something went cold in her stomach, and she started after the aura.

It took about five steps before she found the body. The Information officer in her noticed the way his neck was at a ninety degree angle and that he wasn't breathing. People didn't just fall over in the middle of the street like this. Someone had done this to him.

The teenager in her just tried not to throw up. She'd seen people die at a distance, back in that battle in the Negaverse citadel, but it hadn't been like this. She'd been to a few funerals, too, but she'd never seen someone tossed into a heap with broken bones and empty eyes. The audio clip played over and over again in her mind.

She swallowed, and the cold thing in her stomach started getting hotter.

Then she followed the aura again, and when she rounded a corner of the warehouse and saw who it was, she froze.

"Of course it's you," she said through gritted teeth. "Mister 'really likes to kill things.'" There was no humor in her voice. It was weirdly flat and cold, and this time she didn't perk back up after a couple seconds. "And if you try to tell me he deserved it-" she began, then stopped and shook her head. "No. Even if you don't. I've already given you way to many chances."

There was the subtle sound of metal slicing air as she summoned her knives to her hands.

There was a moment of silence, or watching, even with the knives out. Sylvite's face was oddly blank, too. No matter how much you told yourself that you were a soldier, it didn't prepare you for seeing someone crumpled up on the asphalt.

Athalia's eyes were cold. He didn't even care, she realized. She'd probably be next up on his list, but that was okay. He looked drawn. Hopefully he was tired, and he might have burned out his magic. Even if he hadn't, even if he was at his best, he was weak compared to her.

She had every advantage here. No more reports. No more biding her time.

She shook her head, slowly. "No. I don't think I'm gonna leave," she said, just the slightest hint of that defiant smirk peeking through. It faded quickly, though. "Identities don't matter when you're dead!"

It turned out that even with all the magic in the world, that one was still final.

The anger might have crept into her voice, but her movements were the results of years of training, not rage. She was all soldier. She crossed the distance between them quickly but not too quickly, and she swiped out with a knife, aiming low. She didn't need him running.

Something inside of her had definitely shifted. Instead of trying to cut him off when he said something stupid about respecting the guy he had literally just killed, she just kept coming towards him without saying anything at all. There was something about seeing a dead person that just made violence seem like a better answer.

Athalia was such a stuck-up soldier type, too. She'd been dumb to think he was gonna listen to anything other than getting stabbed.

It was only the calling out of magic and the sudden golden shield that sent her skittering to a halt. So that was what he could do. Since he seemed busy holding it up, she took a second to look it over. She was aware that under other circumstances she would have thought that it was shimmery and cool, but right now she was just glad it wasn't anything that was exploding at her.

With the little reprieve, she met his eyes through the magical light. "Respect?" she asked, and shook her head, voice still flat. "Y'know, I know what he wanted. He called for help. He wanted someone to stop you."

She was still looking more at the magic than at him. It would probably go away on its own eventually. Senshi magic always did, but she wasn't gonna give Athalia that much time, or that much security. She gripped her knives tighter.

"So that's what I'm gonna do."

She brought the knife down handle first with her full body weight behind it, like she was smashing a window.

Sylvite hadn't looked too hard at the other bodies that were laid out behind the senshi. It had only taken a quick glance to tell that they weren't as broken as the dead guy, though, and as she spared the another, she was pretty sure she saw one of them start to shift.

"They're breathing," she shot back, her voice just as cold as his. That was the moment the shield broke, though, which might've made it hard to hear. It didn't make as much noise as she'd been expecting, but it was hard to miss the way it cracked and then drifted away, almost like a youma. She didn't really care if he was listening, though. They were way past that.

Also, they were face to face.

His attack came quick. Sylvite should've been quicker, but he was sneaky, too. She barely made it out of the way of a hand coming at her neck only to not see the one coming for her hand at all. It hit. She hissed at the pain. Her fingers opened despite her best efforts. The knife went flying, eventually crashing into the asphalt and skittering to a halt near one of the not-dead bodies. Her eyes went wide for the first time that night. He was good. He had some kind of training she hadn't expected.

Luckily, she had two knives.

The first knife got shoved at his chest. It wasn't quite a feint, it would be great if it hit, but she wasn't putting all her eggs in that basket. Squinting, she summoned her other knife back to her hand and slashed out a little lower.

Two could play at that game.

Sylvite grimaced as she tugged the bloody knife free. She hated when stuff got messy. She hated it, and if Athalia had been the tiniest bit more of a decent person, it wouldn't have had to come to this.

Her other wrist, the one that he'd hit before, stung sharply just from the impact of the block, but that was okay. It didn't take much to see that she was getting more and more of an advantage here. His magic had busted after barely doing anything for him, and now he had a giant hole in his hand. He wasn't gonna be able to protect himself for much longer.

No, Sylvite didn't like this, but that didn't mean she couldn't deal with it. She was a soldier. She gritted her teeth and readjusted her grip on her knives.

When he tried to step back, she made sure to stay right up in his face. She didn't have to waste any teleports, not when she was faster than him. She slashed out again.

"Hunter's Strike!"

With everything that was going on, Sylvite hadn't noticed the aura coming towards them, even with how strong it was. She'd barely even noticed someone calling out an attack, but she definitely noticed when several magic arrows thudded into her back.

The breath left her body in something between a cough and a gasp. She sputtered and glanced backwards, and found out that she could at least still move, but ow.

At the corner where Sylvite had come out from earlier stood a senshi with silver antlers in her hair and something dark and angry in her purple eyes.

"Get away from him," said Cybele. "Now."

Sylvite sucked in a breath. Okay, she could still kind of breathe. That was a start.

Athalia stumbled away, and everything seemed to slow down for a second, at least for long enough for Sylvite to really look at the woman who had attacked her.

The Negaverse Database was Sylvite's thing, her pet project. She'd read it cover to cover multiple times, and because of that, even though she'd never seen this senshi before, she had a pretty good idea who she was looking at. Green hair. Antlers. Hunt magic. Cybele. Umber had said she fought to kill, and classified her as a high level threat. Umber, who had ended up as kind of a nightmare in his own right.

Looking at her now, Sylvite could see it. She was an Eternal, too. If Cybele had been the one she'd found by the corpse, she might have tried sometime, but right now she was cornered against another guy who definitely had no qualms about killing her.

Nope. She wasn't about to die tonight. She squeezed her eyes shut and used her last teleport to bring her to the Negaverse castle.

She was gonna have to report some stuff.

Threats didn't tend to work, but this time must have been different. With a strange, dark flash, they were alone.

Cybele moved quickly even once the Captain had vanished. She tugged hard on the tails of her waist bow, tearing them off neatly as she crossed the distance between them. While she was nearly as far as one could get from being a doctor, she could see blood did know that bleeding was generally bad.

"I try to keep an eye out," she said, holding the makeshift bandages out to him. "I could have been faster. How bad is it?" Her tone was even if somewhat cool. Her gaze did not soften as she took a longer moment to glance at his hand. This was still an active situation, and she was treating it as such. "Do you need an ambulance? A taxi?"

That was when she caught sight of the figures behind him, and her brow furrowed a bit. She'd seen the dead civillian as she'd made her way over, of course, but bodies didn't matter so much when there was still fighting. Athalia was still her first priority, but there was a deeper concern there as she asked, "What happened?" That was a lot of damage for one agent.