My heart stalled.
Shit.
I hadn’t even thought about everyone hearing me and Slater, but I had gotten loud again. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t have the ability to muffle my noises when pleasure overtook me. And I’dneverfelt pleasure like Zuko and Slater could give me.
“Don’t be jealous, Dimitri,” Slater scolded him.
“Jealous?” Dimitri let in a sharp breath of air before his gaze collided with mine.
“Seriously,” Zuko muttered. “It’s obviouswhyher noises are getting to you.”
Lorian, Eleanor, and Aura giggled while Hawk just looked confused.
“I—”
“Step inside, and we’ll get started,” Professor Hunting interrupted Dimitri, pulling our attention away from each other.
We filed into the simulator behind her, and she programmed it toTactical Debrief Reconstruction: Destroyed Bat Shifter Village.
Bat shifters had been extinct for well over two hundred years. That fact alone made me wonder how exactly this simulation was supposed to work. History didn’t leave room for much advancement in investigations, but they would probably modernize the simulation to further test our abilities, I was sure.
Professor Hunting faced us with a stern expression. “You will be reconstructing a tactical debrief for the destroyed Bat Shifter village. Thinktactically. You are the assigned squad sent to determine what happened here. Best of luck.”
The simulator beeped, and Hunting dissolved in a rush of magic and tech.
Around us was indisputable devastation.
Ash drifted through the air in heavy flakes, clinging to my hair and lashes like gray snow. I rubbed my burning eyes, but it did little to help.
The village lay gutted as the smoldering ruins billowed heat. Timber beams jutted out of collapsed houses, glowing faintly red at the edges where fire had kissed them. Those reminded me of Koa’s eyes, but this scene wasn’t nearly as beautiful.
The acrid stink of burned wood and charred flesh bit at the back of my throat. The silence pressed in, thick and unnatural, broken only by the faint crackle of something still burning beneath the rubble. The surrounding forest was now a barren wasteland. Trees were warped, burnt by the fire, and stripped of branches. Their bark flaked into ash.
The soil underneath my feet glowed faintly, seared into hardened glassy ridges by the heat. Charred skeletons were littered underneath the smoking rubble, and it made my stomach churn at the sheer brutality.
“This is insane,” Koa breathed, his voice tight with disbelief. His brown eyes swept over the destruction, wide and unblinking. “The amount of firepower it would take to do this…”
He wasn’t wrong.
The scene reeked of immorality. Sparks of red and orange clung to stone walls like fireflies, but it was just residual magical essence from whatever—whoever—did this.
I had zero knowledge of any bat shifter village being burned to the ground, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with their extinction. But maybe it had. There must’ve been a reason it was a classified mission.
The fire’s burn pattern was too clean, too deliberate. So were the talon marks. They embedded deep into the ground, gouged out of the dirt as though something as massive as a firedrake had torn its way through the village.
In the center of it all was a child.
The only survivor we could see, crouched in the fetal position among the ruins, his thin frame trembling. His clothes were scorched. He was streaked with soot, and his small shoulders quaked with sobs.
Beside him, half-buried in ash, lay a single feather. It was bright, fiery red and gold, gleaming as though untouched by the flames.
It was a phoenix feather.
A loud pop cracked through the simulator before words popped up in front of all of us:
Koa Ashbourne’s magical signature is detected all over the village.
The words burned brighter than the embers of the ruined village.
