Luke stared at Shimmer’s eyes, and the perfect pair glared back, her visage a perfect tale of ice and fire as the blaze in that glare contrasted the frost from the rest of her features.

Impossible, was what he’d thought after seeing her unmarred left eye, but the sight of the object in her left hand made him think otherwise. She played with it, rubbing the veiny, now pinkish ball between her left hand’s first and second digits absentmindedly, its fleshy tail twirling between them. It was an eye. Although it now lacked the luster of life, there was no mistaking whose eye it had been, given the pattern of visible flecks on the pupil.

It’s definitely hers, did she…, he trailed off, gasping at the likely answer. Shimmer grinned in response to his realization, tracing a path down to his family jewels with her eyes before squashing the eyeball viciously. The macabre overtones lent to her message being clear as day to Luke; she’d pegged his slight as the price she’d had to pay to get her sight back, and she was intent on paying him back in kind.

And with interest, if that’s what she intends to charge in response.

He thought it unfair of her to blame him for her own actions, given she could’ve waited until she was at the healer’s to address the entrenched shard as opposed to ripping out her own eye, as she’d chosen to.

It was you guys who forced me into the position to attack like this, after all.

Although he posited these arguments in his head, he avoided verbalizing them, for he knew nothing good could ever come of it. He’d only enrage the already volatile woman further, when just a nudge would be enough to push her over the edge, if she wasn’t already there.

A confirmation of the latter came almost immediately, as the woman emptied a vial of red liquid onto a knife before brandishing it in her free hand, towards castrative efforts. She twisted towards his crotch, but a hand forestalled the brutal action, managing to clamp on her wrists before she could make good of her intentions.

“Foxtrot!” came Shimmer’s hiss, providing the last name to the team whilst communicating her anger at their leader’s interference. An alarmed Foxtrot threw a glare at the hovering Echo, who understood his leader’s expression upon seeing it. Echo invoked that sound skill from earlier in response, effectively silencing their surroundings.

Foxtrot snapped his fingers once as a test while observing Luke’s expression, nodding his approval to Echo a second later, as if he’d received the confirmation he’d needed. From this, Luke could guess the skill didn’t affect allies, which suggested the test might have been a check whether Luke could circumvent it. Is it paranoia on his part, or an understanding of some of my abilities, Luke wondered, becoming wary at the implications if it were the latter.

Either they had a way of discovering some of his less visible skills, like the perceptive ones, or they’d received that information from someone who knew more than a bit about him. And I can only think of one such person, which doesn’t bode well for my future, Luke thought, gloomily.

Foxtrot took his position behind the tree Luke was pressed onto, placing him outside of Luke’s view. Although Luke couldn’t see it, he could tell from Shimmer’s reactions that Foxtrot was delivering orders and Shimmer brought out her kerchief in response to one of them, obscuring most of her face from visual inspection before continuing her conversation with their leader, her dancing eyes and impassioned gestures the tell-tales of when she was the one speaking.

Although Luke couldn’t catch her side of the conversation, he could still see Foxtrot’s face reflected in Shimmer’s eyes, so he latched onto this, pushing his buffed perception to its limits, and welcoming the drop in combat ability that came with it. It was a considerable debuff but his current predicament made it inconsequential, seeing as he wouldn’t need to attack in the next few moments. He had no need to, after all.

“… -ress wants him in one piece. That includes his balls, I would think,” was what Luke saw him say, giving him questions and answers in equal measure. Whoever ‘Ress’ was, Luke was sure it wasn’t the mayor, since he knew what alias the man chose for his shady dealings, and that wasn’t it; and even if the man had wanted him alive, he wouldn’t have minded a missing limb, or four. This meant another player, and he hoped it wouldn’t be a ‘she’.

◆◆◆

+--------------+

|Personal Alert|

+---------+----+

|”Thrifty”|

+---------+-------------------+

|Class: Sub-skill Notification|

+--------------------------+--+

|Source: Advanced Appraisal|

+-----------+--------------+

|Limitations|

+-----------+---------+

|Distance: 500m (base)|

|---------------------|--------+

|Detail gradation (unspecified)|

+-----------+------------------+

|Description|

+-----------+---------------------+

|”Use reflective surfaces as a - -|

|- second-hand point-of-view for -|

|- - - - your appraisals” - - - - |

+---------------------------------+

Though brief, the conversation had continued, giving him enough time for his minor regenerative abilities to make a dent on his healing backlog. He’d kept the appraisal on Shimmer’s eyes going as long as he could, and though he hadn’t gotten anything in the way of information during this time, he’d gotten a sub-skill reveal from this ‘listening in’.

Just in time, and well-deserved, he thought, since his previous efforts hadn’t come cheap. The inconsequential combat debuff notwithstanding, he’d weathered the migraine brought on by these efforts until he could take them no more, getting the relieving notification moments before burning out.

The benefits were immediate, and he managed the subsequent thrifty appraisals with no more than a slight tingle at activation, and nothing after. He’d been passively going through the information he was getting from the appraisal when a single sentence in that thread caught his attention. “Blink twice if you can read this,” he read, and blink twice he did, soliciting a triumphant grin on Foxtrot’s face.

◆◆◆

His thrifty appraisal had caught the invocation of a charm by Shimmer, but not fast enough for him to react to it. Weak to the first suggestion to come his way, he’d reacted to Foxtrot’s command, giving up the advantage of his skill under the charm’s effects. The charm had lapsed soon after, but this hadn’t been soon enough as Shimmer increased the pressure on the knife to his throat slightly. A warning for him not to try anything rash.

Seconds later, sound came back into being as Echo dropped his invocations, swooping down for a landing. His chosen spot had him flanking Foxtrot to the right, his figure quite the mismatch to the imposing mass that was Stampede, who’d lumbered to Foxtrot’s left-hand.

“What’s the point of such a prop you’re going to poke holes into it?” came the question from Foxtrot. He’d kept his eyes on Luke, making him wonder what the man was talking about for a second, but the answer to that came soon enough, when Echo responded. It had all been physical, but the reaction had been too loud to miss, with Echo jerking his face away in haste while simultaneously trying to disappear into himself.

Stampede laughed in response to these efforts and Shimmer added a prolonged chuckle to the mix, and surprisingly, his neck suffered no extra scraps from it. Her knife hand had somehow remained steady, despite the laughter that racked her chest and shoulders.

Echo threw them both a withering glare, providing Luke a closer look of the blindfold, whose thinness betrayed the reason for Luke’s light attack working on him. Echo, having resigned to being caught; removed the blindfold, trading it for beer-bottle-bottom-thick lenses whose color suggested a past life just as that.

This elicited chuckles from Shimmer and Stampede, despite it being the one-and-only pair they’d known him to wear. Shimmer took this opportunity to deliberately nick his neck, following it up with an ‘oops’ that on top of sounding disingenuous, dripped of the pleasure she’d derived from the action.

Luke held back a wince that he was sure would bring him further harm otherwise, and he attempted to calm his bubbling anger but another entity took up that anger for him, leaving his thoughts clear to plot as it made to rectify the offense on his behalf.

◆◆◆

# Smack!

-Was the sound that followed a moment later as the now free Eleven brought her tail to bare, delivering a stinging slap to Shimmer’s hand. His familiar had cancelled the meld, immediately materializing from his right shoulder to deliver the blow. Although it lacked the -gob- of Johnny’s familiar, it’d managed to smack the knife away, the force from it being heavy enough to numb its target for half a minute.

With multiple attackers, this wasn’t enough time for Luke to take up the counterattack, so he immediately retrieved his point instead, blocking Foxtrots glancing blow with it. A second light attack had been on his mind from the jump, so he’d retrieved two flash bombs after his sword, removing the pin on the first whilst keeping both in his left sleeve. The timer ticked down as the assailants adjusted their positions, lapsing just as the sting on Shimmer’s right hand faded.

He designated her as the main target once again, releasing the vial at pointblank range before blinking out of phase to avoid the light and incoming attacks. Unfortunately for him though, the leader had his number, and his next commands doomed any prospects of taking this round by surprise.

“Check! Lights! Ground!”

No names were mentioned, but the team knew which orders belonged to whom, and they executed them without question or hesitation. Stampede forewent the grounding effect of his previous attack, increasing his own acceleration at the risk of his prey dodging. He ignored that risk though and assumed his commander had either planned for this, or believed the prey wouldn’t be able to react in time.

The target had managed to ‘disappear’ again just as another explosion of light came into being, forcing Stampede to avert his eyes as he continued to barrel forward shoulder-first, a passenger to his momentum. An unexpected impact a split-second later affirmed his trust in his leader’s plans, and so did the disappearance of the glare as Shimmer made short work of the lightshow.

Shimmer had spread her hands as if to catch the light from the flash bomb, momentarily being swallowed by the light before the space around her warped, bending the light at impossible angles in turn. She’d taken in a deep breath and the light had been drawn to her, disappearing into the specks that had appeared in her otherwise black garbs.

She stood there, grinning at Luke, who stared back, wide-eyed in disbelief at the feat she’d just pulled. Too busy being knocked back into phase, he hadn’t had the opportunity to appraise her as she’d nullified the flash, but he could manage a guess or two now.

Since her previous skill had been one of radiance, it was easy for him to assume this to be the case for this one as well, with the same peculiarity as the previous one. An external light source. It did satisfy the intensity threshold though, so this, coupled with the fine control she’d displayed with such an intense light qualified her as quite the expert with the affinity.

He wondered how she’d act to ground him and prepared to intercept either her or Stampede before realizing two of the three subordinates had executed their orders, making it highly likely the third would be for the remaining assailant, Echo.

He did not have to guess for long though as a low-pitched sound preceded the violent force that accelerated his descent. From his perspective, the ground was fast shifting up to meet his battered form, but he didn’t have to worry about this since a blink could save him from the impact.

To spite that thought, Foxtrot blew past his general vicinity, managing to graze his ribs in the process. The damage from the attack was minimal, but Luke knew this hadn’t been the man’s target, since materializing meant he was now vulnerable to other attacks.

The oppressive wave behind him found his form again, finishing the job it had started by slamming him into the ground before he could blink out of phase again. A dagger soon found his flattened palm and it pierced through skin, flesh, and bone effortlessly, sinking all the way to the hilt to effectively pin him in place. A feminine form found its seat on his lower back before leaning-in to whisper in his ear. The words matched his thoughts, with the gloom in his own tone replaced by Shimmer’s triumphant chuckle, “… and there’s the groundi-”

◆◆◆

Thoughts were faster than words, so Luke had managed to finish the statement in his head, but Shimmer hadn’t finished verbalizing hers. She’d been interrupted by the sight of a sudden flash 3 meters away, reflexively hopping to action to intercept and nullify it, but a second unexpected thing happened. The flash’s propagation just stopped abruptly.

The suspended flash quickly rose into the air to hover a head above Stampede’s height. It shrunk by the second to reveal a bloated fish-like form that seemed to be swallowing the light, its iridescent insides increasing in intensity as the light around it shrunk. A red dot materialized at the center of its open mouth, growing exponentially in size to the size of a pea within the second.

A beeping sound followed as the red ball began spinning, increasing in frequency as the ball spun faster and faster. The area around them was plunged into a momentary darkness as the entity searched for a target and as it inspected Luke’s assailants, three of them turned to the fourth for directions. A shake of Foxtrot’s head told them all they needed to know; orders wouldn’t be forthcoming, and it would be up to each of them to maneuver their way through this novel event.

A red dot materialized at the center of its open mouth, growing...