Her eyes were like that of an animal, wild and intense. She was dressed to match, wearing a shredded red garb that might have once been finery. It was the same thing she wore the last time that they fought, but her once braided hair had come loose and had matted behind her. She was an animal, and they had her surrounded.

“Now!”

The three of them unleashed their talents on her at once. Mattias flung ice daggers at her just as Mathew grabbed her legs with the wild foliage at her feet while Baelic set it ablaze. It was a new tactic, going in at once like this, but they needed to change their methods or else they would continue to fail in their mission.

“Baelic! That you!” Mattias’ voice came around the blaze, guiding the eldest brother’s gaze toward the phenomenon growing above it.

“No! Douse her!”

The air had begun to ripple, which they came to understand was a sort of precursor to the strange power that she had. It was so similar to the visual effect of heat that Baelic concluded that she was able to control fire much like he could. This meant that his youngest brother would be be able to keep her in check - or so he thought.

Mattias made a gesture that caused the water from the nearby creek to surge against it’s banks and flood the ground at their prey’s feet. Another gesture and it rose against her to drown out the energies that would allow her to burn them.

The air still rippled.

As they watched, it began pulling at the shadows in the afternoon sunlight, disconnecting them from their casters and into a visible mass just above her head. Her wild, glowing eyes, darted back and forth between her attackers before they settled on the one thwarting her ability to breathe.

“No!” Baelic shouted as he rushed toward Mattias, who barely had time to stagger backwards as his shadow was snatched by the void and then released as a flash of silver shot past his shoulder.

“What was that?” Mathew shouted before being cut off by an unnatural scream from the center of the field.

The three of them turned to see a well aimed javelin protruding out of the back of the girl that had very nearly brought an end to their brotherhood. As she collapsed a voice echoed to them from the tree line. “Damn, I’m good!”

The expression both of his brothers wore as Baelic helped Mattias back to standing, indicated that they did not know who this black and white stranger before them was. “Indeed it was.” Mathew complimented before inquiring “what are you doing here?”

The two-toned man glided past them and walked over to the tiny heap of a woman whose heart he had pierced. “I’m here to collect my payment for bringing her in.” He pulled the spear out as he turned to face them, “It was I who felled her, after all.”

“We’ll see about that.” Mattias muttered from behind the back of their middle brother.

Baelic scowled and took a step toward the javelinier. “We were hired to deliver her to the Orianna, by the oracle herself. You can’t —”

The stranger waved a finger at him before turned the bloodied spear in his direction. “I think not. You see, I was hired by the Orianna for that reason. You three merely assisted in the tracking of — Gah!”

The shift in shadows had returned to swallow the small woman that should have bled out into the dirt. As they closed in on her, they closed in on the javelinier’s foot, taking it with them when they vanished.

“As I suspected.” Mattias breathed as he walked over to the man and offered him his canteen. The stranger did not notice the nice gesture for he was on his back, screaming about the surprise lost of limb. Vines snaked along the ground and restrained him from flailing. Baelic knelt to cauterize the wound only to find that there was not one.

Where a bleeding stump should have been, there was nothing. Literally nothing. A hole into infinity that, when he poked at it, allowed his finger to pass into without resistance. After a moments perplexion, Baelic realized that the cocky stranger might very well be bleeding out into it. “Mattias, we need to amputate this!”

Silently, the youngest brother knelt by the javelinier and placed a drenched hand just above where the leg unexpectedly ended. Before he did anything, he nodded to Mathew. “Make him comfortable, if you can.”

The middle brother reached into his seed pouch and produced a small bulb that sprung to life as he moved it closer to the reeling stranger. Pollinating unnaturally, it flowered and then produced a bulb that exploded in the man’s face. He lost consciousness shortly after inhaling the powdery seeds that it produced. “Go.”

Mattias nodded and dripped the water in his hand above where the man’s ankle should have been. When he pulled back and made a fist, the water shifted into a hairline thin sheet of ice that shored through the javelinier’s leg. As the thin sliver of flesh with the hole fell away, Baelic reached in and continued his previous objective of closing up the wound.

“How long do you think he’ll be out for?” He asked when finished, flinching away from the smell.

Mathew shrugged “Not terribly long. The seeds are only good until their coating dissolves. He’ll wake up with a terrible cough when that happens.”

“I think he was telling the truth about the Orianna.” Matias interjected as he made himself comfortable on the grass. “It would make sense to set up a bounty hunt for this situation.”

Baelic frowned. “While I agree, I’m quite frustrated that we weren’t simply told this up front. We would have been more careful about sending out whispers to collect information.”

“Not that the information is doing us a lot of good.” Mathew thew in. “We keep losing her every time we find her.

The corners of Matias’ mouth almost twitched upward into something that resembled a smile. “We might had had her if he hadn’t removed his pole arm.”

Mathew smiled for his younger brother. “I almost warned him against that, but then he said that thing about payment.”

A hardy laugh escaped Baelic at that. “Who’d believe you? If it weren’t for our previous run-ins with her, I wouldn’t believe the words of someone claiming that she couldn’t die.” His mirth ran out then. “I didn’t know that she could teleport like that. That’s a new problem.”

“She’s a monster.” Mathew sighed. “Can’t die. Can teleport. Can also do that thing with the shadows…” He trailed off as he pointed at the flesh-backed hole on the ground next to them.

“Yeah.” Baelic glanced at the stump he cauterized just as it’s owner started spasming at the coughs wracking his body. “Maybe we should just let the other hunters go after this impossible task. There’s no way anyone can catch her.”

Matias, who had been analyzing the clean cut that he had made with the water spoke up. “Actually, I think I might know a way.”