Chapter 71: Silas on a mission.
Silas had been watching Raventown since before dawn.
He lay flat behind the mound of bushes, his grey fur blending into the shadow and undergrowth, his eyes fixed on the distant edge of the town where Ren had told him to keep watch. The instruction had been simple. Watch for any major movements. Royal knights preparing to march toward the forest. Anything that suggested they were coming for Ren.
For days, nothing had moved worth reporting.
This morning was different.
As the sun cleared the horizon, figures began moving at the town’s edge. Knights in full armor, cleaning blades in the early light, a few running sword drills with the unhurried discipline of soldiers with time to fill. Silas watched them without moving, reading the patterns, counting the numbers, cataloguing.
Then two separated from the group.
They moved toward the forest, talking as they walked, their voices carrying clearly in the quiet morning air.
"This whole mission might be a waste," the first one said.
"Why do you think that?" the second replied.
"There might be no dragon. This might be one big farce."
"Farce." The second knight’s voice carried mild disbelief. "This was a mission given to us by Lady Ezra. Someone of her position does not send royal knights out on nothing."
"Fair point," the first conceded. "Still. It has been ages since anyone actually saw the thing. One sighting and suddenly we are all out here. I just hope this is not some sort of wild goose chase."
They kept walking, voices fading slightly as the distance closed between them and the treeline. Silas tracked their approach and stayed completely still.
They stopped a few meters from the forest edge.
Both of them looked around once, satisfied with the privacy, and moved into the bushes to relieve themselves.
Silas began retreating slowly, putting more ground between himself and them, each movement deliberate and silent.
Then one of them stiffened.
His head came up. He looked at his partner.
"There’s something there," he said quietly.
His partner glanced over and shrugged. "Probably a small animal."
"No." The first knight’s voice had dropped further. "The size is not small. Something large is moving."
He pulled himself together and turned fully toward the bush, hand moving to his sword. His partner sighed but followed.
Silas assessed the situation in the space of a breath.
These were royal knights. Trained by to the kingdom’s standards , which meant they were not ordinary soldiers. Running was the obvious choice. With his wind he could be deep in the forest before they could follow.
But they were here to find his master. To move against his master’s territory, he wanted to attest kill one of them and drag the other to meet Ren.
The idea took shape in his head.
He launched forward.
The first knight never saw him coming. Silas hit him at full speed, shoulder driving into his chest, and the impact sent him through the bushes and into the dirt beyond in a crash of armor and snapping branches. Before the second knight could draw his blade, Silas was already moving, circling fast and low, using his speed to deny an angle.
The second knight got his sword out and the flame came with it immediately, covering yje blade in tight controlled flame. He swung in a wide horizontal arc and a crescent of fire followed the blade’s path through the air, forcing Silas to drop low and feel the heat pass over his back.
The first knight was already on his feet.
The ground moved.
It was subtle at first, just a ripple beneath the surface, but the stone under Silas’s feet lurched upward without warning, a sudden spike of earth that caught him on the underside and threw him off balance. He twisted in the air, landed awkwardly, and had to scramble sideways to avoid the flame crescent that came in from the other direction immediately after.
They were coordinating without speaking.
The earth knight kept the ground unpredictable, ripples and sudden rises forcing Silas to commit his attention downward at the exact moments the flame knight attacked from above and ahead. A fireball came in fast and low, Silas tucked and rolled under it, came up into a rising column of earth that hit him across the shoulder and staggered him right into the path of another fire crescent.
The edge of it caught him across his side.
He snarled and broke away, creating distance, putting a tree between himself and the flame knight while he reassessed.
They were skilled. Both of them, genuinely skilled, the kind that had been forged through real training and real experience, not the bloated confidence of soldiers who had only ever fought things weaker than themselves. The double team was working exactly as it was designed to work, each one covering the gap the other left, neither giving him a window that the other wasn’t already watching.
He could not win this on open ground.
He bolted into the forest.
They followed immediately, the earth knight calling out to the others at the town’s edge as they ran, his voice carrying the sharp authority of someone reporting a contact. Time was now a factor.
The forest changed things.
The moment the treeline closed around them the dynamic shifted, the ground beneath his feet his territory now, the shadows and the undergrowth and the canopy overhead familiar in a way no knight in full armor could match. He poured on his speed and felt the gap between himself and his pursuers widen, and then he began to work.
He drove his speed up until the wind around him became something visible, a disturbance that moved with him through the trees, and he directed it outward, channeling it into the leaves and branches around them, pulling a vortex of debris into the air between himself and the knights that thickened and swirled and turned the visibility around them to nothing.
He heard them curse behind him.
The earth knight was not done. He couldn’t see clearly but he felt through the ground instead, his ability reading what his eyes couldn’t, and a wall of earth erupted ahead of Silas in a solid barrier six feet thick, timed perfectly to where he was heading.
Silas read it coming and adjusted, banking hard left, feeling the wall rise in his peripheral vision as he cleared it by a margin that he felt more than measured.
The flame knight had gone wide during the debris storm, circling through the trees to cut off the left angle, and he emerged from the forest to Silas’s left with his blade already swinging, a column of fire riding the arc.
Silas hit the ground, let the fire go overhead, scrambled upright, and kept moving.
They were pushing him. Both of them, relentlessly, forcing him to react rather than act, denying him the space to set anything up.
The earth knight called another wall ahead of him.
Silas drove straight at it.
The wall came up, solid and thick, and the earth knight dropped into a ready stance behind it, clearly expecting Silas to either crash into it or try to go around, either of which would put him in range of whatever came next.
Silas changed direction at the last possible moment.
He broke left, abandoning the earth knight entirely, and took everything he had and pointed it at the flame knight who had been watching the wall and not quite watching him.
The flame knight’s head came up a half second too late.
Silas unleashed the wind claws, three rapid slashes that caught the knight across the arm, the chest, and the side of his helm in sequence, each one drawing blood through the gaps in the armor, the force behind them staggering the knight back a step and then another, his footing going.
Silas didn’t stop.
He hit the flame knight with his full body weight, shoulder driving in low, and the knight went down hard, armor crashing against the forest floor. Silas was on him before he stopped moving, one massive paw driving the sword arm into the ground, and then he drove his head down repeatedly, fast and controlled, three impacts that took the fight out of the knight’s eyes and then the consciousness with it.
The knight went still.
Behind him the earth wall was already coming down, the earth knight realizing what had happened and pulling the stone back to free himself to move.
Silas grabbed the unconscious knight by the ankle with his teeth, bit down hard, and dragged the knight immediately into the forest, running so fast that he vanished in seconds.