The image shattered into pixelated blocks, tearing and bleeding colour before stabilising into a greyscale smear.
“Magnetic interference?” Dane asked, leaning in.
“Magical bleed,” I corrected, staring at the screen. “Look at the timecode. It’s skipping.”
When the image cleared, Talia wasn’t alone.
A figure stood behind her—tall, impossibly still—but the camera couldn’t resolve him. He was rendered as a distortion, edges blurred and features smudged into a shivering silhouette that didn’t belong tothe geometry of the street. The sensor failed, registering a patch of dead pixels where a man should be.
Talia spun, stumbling back. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as she hit the corrugated wall, shoulder crumpling.
The figure moved.
He bridged the gap between one frame and the next. He struck her—a single blow to the temple that dropped Talia like a stone.
“Gods,” Dane muttered. “He moved like a blur.”
“Wait,” Mira said. “Watch the lift.”
The figure scooped Talia up—a full-grown woman in sodden winter clothes—as easily as a doll, slinging her over his shoulder with one smooth motion.
The streetlights died completely. Five seconds of total darkness followed, and when the feed flickered back, the bus stop was empty.
“We picked him up again here,” Mira said, switching feeds. “Side street, near the warehouse entrance. Timestamp 01:03.”
The distortion was back. The fractured figure carried her towards the side door, Talia’s blonde hair hanging limp, swaying with each step, before they vanished into the building we were currently standing in.
I stared at the screen, my pulse hammering a frantic tempo. “That distortion… that’s not just concealment.”
“Magical bleed,” Mira repeated. “Whatever he used to subdue her, it destabilised the feed.” She tapped the laptop’s edge. “Umbrakynn concealment magic sometimes causes artefacting like this.”
“That’s not Umbrakynn,” Dane said, leaving no room for doubt.
TWO
Mira frowned at the laptop screen, her brow furrowing as the distorted figure vanished into the warehouse on the loop.
“How can you be sure? Umbrakynn signatures vary. If he was shielding himself?—“
“Because I’ve seen concealment magic. I’ve hunted it.” Dane leaned closer to the screen, broad back rigid with tension. “Umbrakynn suppress visual signatures, not magical ones. They bend light; they don’t create dead zones that eat electricity.”
He jabbed a thick finger at the glitching silhouette. “That’s erasing. The camera is failing because the magic in the area was sucked into a vacuum.”
“Engineered extraction,” I whispered. The term tasted foul and metallic against my teeth.
“And the strength? You saw how he handled her. He tossed a full-grown woman over his shoulder with the ease of a man lifting a coat. He bypassed the physics of leverage entirely; that was raw, clinical power.”
Mira paled, looking from the screen to the sheet covering thebody. “If someone is refining the method to the point where they can walk down a street and wipe the sensors just by existing…”
“Then nowhere is safe,” I finished.
The silence was oppressive, filled only by the hum of work lights and the steady heat in my shoulder. We weren’t looking at a crime of passion or a ritual gone wrong; we were looking at a manipulation of magical power on a scale we hadn’t seen before. A predator that didn’t just kill, but consumed the environment around it.
“We need this footage,” I said, reaching for the laptop. “If this is what I think it is, we can’t leave it on a local server.”
“I’ve already queued the shard’s spectral analysis for upload to the secure cloud,” Mira said, fingers flying across the keys. “It should be accessible at HQ by the time you get back. But the video file is huge. I’m trying to mirror it, but it’s going to take a?—“
Footsteps echoed from the warehouse entrance—brisk, purposeful, and multiple sets.
